Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  ‘You Primaris Marines are over-confident,’ said Sicarius. He didn’t look at either primarch or tetrarch as he spoke, but stared out at the sickened plains. ‘Theoreticals of certain victory preclude the formulation of practicals that will counter defeat.’

  ‘I simply state what any man can see. We have the more powerful army. We will beat him,’ said Felix.

  ‘My own experience has taught me that certainties cannot be relied on,’ said Sicarius.

  The servants of the warp are unpredictable. Do not judge them by normal standards, signed Bellas. Sorcery poisons this world.

  ‘Then we are lucky to have you on our side,’ said Colquan.

  ‘Our victory would be my assessment,’ said Guilliman. ‘But the theoretical here begs a simple practical, and that makes me suspicious. According to our information, Mortarion cannot win this battle, but though his plays in the theatre of open war remain the same as they ever were, he has become devious. He never had any subtlety before he fell, but his strategies in this war, the subversion of the populace, and this reliance on pandemic to circumvent the cleanliness of honest battle, are tricks learned from his new master. I expect surprises. We must be ready for them, and be able to counter. The casualties we will take from his unclean weaponry will be high whether he folds at the first blow or fights on to the bitter end. Listen to Sicarius. This will not be an easy fight, Tetrarch Felix.’

  ‘It will not,’ agreed Felix. ‘I do not think it will be. But I have no doubt that we will win.’ He rested his hand on the parapet. The wind switched round to the west, bringing with it the smell of more wholesome lands, and driving out the last of the noxious stink of the plains. The hills on the Keleton side of the sea were a mottling of green and brown and early evening shadow, clean of disease. ‘The swamp is retreating,’ said Felix.

  ‘Without the warp nexus to sustain it, it will not last long,’ said Guilliman. ‘Some taints are more persistent than others, but this Plague God’s sickness waxes and wanes as surely as any normal disease, and will die back now its nourishment is cut off. A fact I am thankful for.’

  Felix looked out over the seas of sucking mud beyond the port boundary. Though the pools were drying to curdled slime, and the fogs had gone, clinging on only over the most noxious hollows, venturing onto the plains would be a sure death sentence to an unprotected mortal, perhaps even to a Space Marine.

  ‘The traitor has done a lot of damage,’ said Sicarius. ‘Never did I think to see worse harm inflicted upon Ultramar than that done by Hive Fleet Behemoth. I am sorry to have been proven wrong.’

  ‘The Emperor made us to be good at breaking worlds. Some of my weaker brothers never rose above this purpose,’ said Guilliman. His bitterness left Felix uneasy. ‘If we dwell on what has been lost here, we will lose for despair. This evil can be reversed, you will see. We shall face Mortarion, and I will kill him for what he has done to Ultramar. Then we shall begin the long work of repair.’ Guilliman’s mouth set. ‘What was undone in minutes will take decades to put right, but put right it shall be. Now,’ he said, ‘time runs onwards. We must turn to this other matter. That of the girl.’

  ‘You should kill her,’ said Colquan bluntly. ‘She is a risk.’

  ‘I cannot do that, and well you know it,’ said Guilliman. ‘Imagine if I slew the girl that saved a city. These people are in shock. There are those even here who believe my intentions to be impure. Killing a purported saint would prove to them all that my aim is to usurp my father’s throne.’

  ‘Mathieu’s involvement makes this much more difficult,’ said Sicarius.

  ‘It is unfortunate, yes,’ said Guilliman. The measured way Guilliman said this made his anger clear to all. ‘He and I shall be discussing this matter closely.’

  ‘I’ll drag him out of the cathedral myself, if you want,’ said Colquan.

  ‘Let him preach,’ said Guilliman. ‘His sermons are good for the city’s morale. It is too late to stop him, and I will not make any move that suggests an opinion either way on the veracity of this girl’s claims.’

  ‘She is quietly under guard in the fortress,’ said Felix. ‘I have assigned a security detail. All Primaris Marines, all Mars born.’ He looked sidelong at Sicarius, realising his tactlessness. The older Space Marine looked pointedly away. ‘None with any roots in Ultramar. None whose local connections might sway them.’

  ‘It is for the best,’ said Guilliman. ‘If this girl is not what she purports to be, she will twist any chink in a warrior’s soul into a grievous wound.’

  Obsidian Knight Asheera Voi waits with her, signed Bellas. The girl shall be safe while the attack on Mortarion’s army is underway. Bellas paused. Above the peak of her respirator grille her eyes flicked down then up. Afterwards we must decide what should be done with her.

  ‘We must,’ said Guilliman.

  She might be what she says she is, signed Bellas.

  ‘You might be biased by your faith,’ said Sicarius.

  Guilliman glanced at her. He still found the Sisters of Silence’s conversion hard to grasp.

  My duty is to the Emperor, signed Bellas.

  ‘Many a bad choice has been made in deciding how to perform one’s duty,’ said Sicarius. ‘Many practicals stem from one theoretical, they are not all equally valid.’

  ‘Do not squabble,’ warned Guilliman.

  As you command, I obey, signed Bellas. Your word is more dear to me than any other, except that of the Emperor Himself. You are His living son.

  ‘Do not put your faith in me in that manner,’ said Guilliman. ‘Your belief in my divinity is misplaced. I am not a god, Sister, and you will not treat me as one.’

  Bellas bowed her head.

  ‘Felix, what is your opinion of our young guest?’ said Guilliman.

  ‘Theoretical, she is as she says she is, a saint of the Emperor.’ Felix rapped his knuckles on the wall, as if testing the solidity of his own arguments.

  ‘True saints are rare,’ said Guilliman. ‘As far as my researches inform me, there have been a handful of genuine saints in a legion of pretenders. History is littered with false claimants. And I am not convinced those deemed real are vessels for the Emperor’s will.’

  ‘Then what are they?’ asked Colquan.

  ‘My brother Magnus could have answered that, before he erred,’ said Guilliman. ‘Although I accept what I once regarded as superstitions as occulted fact, my grasp of the esoteric is limited. My guess is that they are a type of psyker, whose empowerment is stabilised by their faith in the Emperor. I have heard the Sisters of Battle manifest odd psychic effects when sorely pressed, and these are brought on by their faith. It may be a saint is merely an extreme example of this phenomenon.’

  Bellas, the only one who might have disagreed with this reductionism, signed nothing.

  ‘One day perhaps I will have time to turn my mind to the matter,’ continued Guilliman. ‘Some of these saints are at least sincere, whatever the provenance of their ability. They can be powerful allies.’

  ‘Saint Celestine,’ said Sicarius. ‘She proved her worth.’

  ‘She is an asset to the Imperium,’ agreed Guilliman. ‘Many psykers are, but the numbers of those who are a risk dwarf those that are not.’

  ‘Further theoreticals,’ said Felix. ‘She is, as my lord suggests, a psyker of noble spirit. Or, she is a deception, a tool of the Change God, perhaps, set up to foil your brother Mortarion’s aims here. Magnus and Mortarion’s so-called deities are opposed. In either case, she is dangerous.’

  ‘She is dangerous under every circumstance,’ said Guilliman. ‘If not physically, then politically.’ He paused. ‘Could Magnus’ hand be in this? Scheming was more his preference than Mortarion’s, but he was rarely this obtuse. He enjoyed displaying his intellect, although the god he follows is another matter.’

  ‘Do we care? If they are at odds, we should be p
leased. It is so much better when the foes kill each other,’ said Colquan.

  ‘It does not make them our allies, even if Mortarion and Magnus fight to the death,’ said Guilliman. ‘What is the current status of the girl, Bellas?’

  The girl’s abilities are subdued by hexagrammatic chains. She is blanked by Obsidian Knight Voi. If she were a vessel of the Emperor’s will, neither of these things would affect her.

  ‘Magnus could defy those things,’ said Guilliman. ‘If she is the instrument of my brother or some other agency she may be shamming. You must be careful. You cannot rely on your arts to block his power.’

  So the legends suggest, her fingers flickered.

  ‘They are not legends. Magnus is more powerful than ever he was in the days of enlightenment,’ said Guilliman. ‘I have witnessed his ability. Beware of this girl.’

  At the first sign of impurity, I will see her dead, signed Bellas.

  ‘See that you do,’ said Guilliman. ‘Until then, tread warily. Tyros loves its so-called saint. I cannot afford to have my people turn against me through rash decisions. Both my brothers know this. I will move soon, before Mortarion is ready.’

  He lapsed into silence. A giant coffin came growling overhead, its grav-impellers thumping in preparation to take the load from the void engines. They watched it land, and the doors open. Sirens wailed as the loading bed extended, the hunched form of the Reaver upon it shaking as it was pushed out into the world.

  When the noise had died, the primarch looked to the sky, where the first stars blinked in competition with the lights of the fleet, and spoke again.

  ‘We await Galatan’s approach. When it is near, then we attack.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Assault on Galatan

  Tocsins blared out angry warnings all over Galatan. The star fortress’ real space engines remained constant in pitch, but the noise from the reactors changed substantially, ramping up to full power output. The noise was so distinctive that Justinian had come to recognise it quickly during his time aboard.

  ‘Prepare, prepare,’ said a machine-generated voice. ‘Enemy fleet inbound. Enemy fleet inbound. Prepare for engagement in twenty-two minutes, three seconds. Initial munitions launched. Stand by for impact in twenty-two minutes.’

  The alarms had been going for an hour. Shortly after they began, Justinian’s squad had been pulled from the muster intended to land upon Parmenio, and reassigned station defence duties at a crossway fort some distance away. They eschewed transport, leaving the deck trains free for less mighty warriors, and jogged along a corridor fifteen kilometres long towards their destination. The corridor was so long it lost itself to perspective before it curved around the station’s heart. It would take a mortal lifetime to get to know the whole of Galatan, but though massive, the corridor was thronged with people and crew trains rushing personnel to their stations.

  Justinian followed a cartolith projected by his helm. A faint directional rune indicated the way he should go. His squad was a pulsing green dot. If he zoomed in on the dot, it broke apart to show his troopers individually, with tags revealing their names: Drusus, Pimento, Achilleos, Brucellus, Kadrian, Dascene, Donasto, Michaelus, and his second, Maxentius-Drontio. On the cartolith his own icon was decorated by a skull, Maxentius-Drontio by a white dot in the centre of the green.

  Ten warriors, all until recently blue-clad members of the Unnumbered Sons of Guilliman. Now they were Novamarines, in name if not yet in heart.

  A double-decker crew train rushed past on the monorail. The last half was made up of freight cars bearing tonnes of ammunition boxes, and, on flatbeds behind that, Astra Militarum tanks. The larger halls of Galatan were large enough to accommodate armour war.

  The station was tense. They had been preparing for a landing action until this unforeseen fleet approached them halfway in system. The main plan was in disarray, supplanted by back-up strategies.

  Chapter Master Bardan Dovaro had reacted quickly. Galatan had never been taken in all the Imperial portion of its history. The warriors aboard were confident that it would not fall now. The question was not if they would lose, but how long they would be delayed in reaching Guilliman to play a decisive role in the battle of Parmenio, and what risks should be taken to shorten that time.

  Justinian pushed these thoughts away. He was a sergeant, not a captain. These concerns were not his. He was being presumptuous thinking on them.

  Mortal crewmen and Astra Militarum moved aside and cheered as the squad thumped past.

  They came to their destination, a crossway fort built around a junction where a radial corridor intersected the ringway. Although thousands of years of additions had distorted Galatan’s shape, it had originally been circular, and the interior was laid out as a series of concentric ring corridors pierced every three kilometres by routes leading to the periphery. Each intersection was defended by similar void-hardened fortifications.

  The junction expanded the crossroad into a large hexagon half a mile across. Four round towers stood free of the walls in a hollow square so that fire could be directed on all sides. Their positioning gave the illusion that the corridors formed a simple cross. Reinforcing the impression were the monotracks for the ship-trains that crossed in the middle of the courtyard. The ceiling was a thirty metres high at the centre. Two armoured murder corridors joined opposite towers to each other diagonally, crossing in the middle to make a large X over the rails. Four others joined the corners of the square together. Four more armoured bridges led from the towers into the main body of the station.

  As the Primaris Marines entered the courtyard the rune pulsed. Fresh info screed directed Justinian through the crossway fort’s square towards its command nexus.

  The squad moved in perfect formation with Justinian. Their double file curled round and came to a halt at the base of one of the towers. Remote weapons systems tracked the Primaris, while their machine-spirits requested the Space Marines’ full ident codings from their battleplate.

  Justinian halted his squad. ‘Wait here,’ he told them.

  The door read his genetic coding. It opened grudgingly, shutting as soon as he was inside.

  He found his way up to the fifth floor, whose entirety was occupied by a command station. Green-tinted armourglass windows angled down allowing views of the base of the tower. Firing slits pierced the metre-thick walls. Murder holes opened in the floor over the tower’s banked base.

  A Novamarine lieutenant was busy at the room’s hololithic table, which displayed the immensity of Galatan and the enemy fleet tens of thousands of kilometres out, coming in like an army of mosquitoes advancing on a carnosaur. A couple of Novamarines and a host of mortals gathered around the desk. Most of the humans were unmodified Astra Militarum officers. There were a few who looked to be station crew, servitors of the usual recording subtypes, and a sole Adeptus Mechanicus adept with four spindly metal arms.

  Justinian marched up to the gathering. They had evidently just concluded whatever business they had, and were dispersing when he presented himself.

  ‘Lieutenant Edermo! Sergeant Justinian Parris, sixth auxiliary squad reporting.’ He saluted, arm across his chest the Ultramarian way. It occurred to him then he had not seen the Novamarines formally saluting each other, and he had no idea how they did, or even if they did.

  The lieutenant gave him a long, calculating look. He wore his helmet, and so his expression was hidden, but his body language betrayed his suspicion.

  ‘I have been expecting you. You are attached to the Fifth Company?’

  ‘For the last three weeks, yes. You requested reinforcements, so we were sent here.’

  ‘I did,’ said Edermo. ‘You will not be aware, but the fleet that is bearing down on us is sizeable.’ He gestured at the icons inching towards the three-dimensional graphic of Galatan. ‘They are a match for the fleet in orbit around Parmenio. A new player has entered t
he fray. The lead ship is the Terminus Est. Do you recognise that name?’

  ‘Yes, my lord, it is the flagship of the Plague Lord Typhus.’

  ‘He is coming at us with all his followers. His involvement in this battle is unexpected, for he has been operating away from his fallen primarch. He will attempt to board us, and destroy Galatan. That is why you have been split from the landing parties and sent here.’

  ‘I understand, brother-lieutenant,’ said Justinian.

  ‘Do you have experience of battle?’ asked the lieutenant.

  The question irritated Justinian. The lieutenant looked formidable, but Justinian was sure if they sparred, he would win. This was not the first time he had encountered a cool welcome.

  ‘We have been fighting with the primarch on the Indomitus Crusade for the last century. My cohort was awoken shortly after he arrived on Terra. We have plenty of combat experience, lieutenant.’

  The lieutenant relaxed. ‘Good. There are stories about you Primaris Marines coming into battle straight out of stasis, and that has not always been successful. Even now, I hear of it happening. There appears to be a nearly endless supply of your type.’

  ‘I do not think that is so, sir,’ said Justinian. He hid his irritation at the man. It was easy to do. He had plenty of experience of that as well.

  ‘It seems that way,’ said the lieutenant. The rank was a new one to the Chapters, introduced in Guilliman’s Nova Codex Astartes. ‘I do not care how much training and hypnomat time you have had, nor for how long. In blood and fury is a warrior forged.’

  ‘We have seen plenty of both,’ said Justinian.

  ‘All right, all right. Forgive me. I have not yet fought by the Primaris Marines’ side. We are a Chapter with deep roots and an aversion to change.’ He pointed at Justinian’s bolt rifle. ‘But change can be good. I hear these things have a range advantage over boltguns.’