Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  Mathieu abased himself on the floor.

  ‘I seek only to serve you, my lord.’

  ‘We are done here.’ The primarch’s rage turned off. The heat left the room. He seemed smaller again.

  ‘Watch your step, priest,’ said Colquan. ‘The Lord Guilliman might not move against you, but there is nothing stopping me.’

  ‘Colquan,’ said Guilliman. ‘Enough.’

  Colquan pointed at Mathieu.

  ‘I am watching you.’

  ‘Colquan!’ Guilliman went to the door. ‘Guard, I am finished.’ His voice was hoarse with rage.

  The doors opened. Mathieu got up off the floor and called after him.

  ‘One day,’ Mathieu said. ‘One day you will see, my lord! You will see the truth! That day will be a glorious day, a thankful day. I shall not relent in my attempts to save you! I cannot! It is your father’s purpose for me!’

  Captain Sicarius stood to attention and saluted as Guilliman walked out, then he and his Victrix Guard fell into line behind Colquan. The balance of Primaris Marines to Space Marines had shifted in the guard. Those that had fallen in battle had been replaced by the newer breed.

  ‘You will see!’ Mathieu called. The doors slid closed, leaving him alone.

  ‘The Emperor watches us all,’ he said.

  He clasped his hands and closed his eyes in prayer.

  ‘Glory, glory,’ he whispered. ‘Guilliman sees! He begins to see! Glory, glory.’

  Night and day aboard a vessel are arbitrary things. Turn down the lights, and lo! it is night. Flick a switch again, and so it is day. Power like that was once the province of gods.

  Roboute Guilliman sat alone in a night of his choosing. The scriptorium was empty. The ship’s life went on beyond the sealed doors, but within, in the silence, Guilliman could fool himself that he was alone in the small hours and the stars outside shone for him alone.

  He was at his desk. Nothing much had seemed to change since the last time he had had a few minutes to sit and think. Datascreed continued its endless scrolling down his displays, but where usually he would take it in as he worked, and act upon the most urgent items in the middle of whatever else he was doing, this time the primarch spared none of his mind for it. Lines of data were born into green text, pushed down the display and died in the dark of the screen’s bottom without him seeing them.

  Guilliman’s every thought was directed towards the stasis unit given to him by Yassilli Sulymanya and the book that it contained. For now, the container was closed, nothing more sinister than a wooden box decorated by a plain pattern on the lid. But it dominated his desk. He was reminded of the box of woes from an ancient legend no one in the current age remembered.

  He debated opening it and reading the book inside.

  ‘There will be no hope beneath it,’ he warned himself.

  Guilliman had never read the book in the box. He had refused at the time it was published. Having never made the same decision about any other book, he had made a public point of ignoring this one. Back in the Age of Enlightenment, Guilliman had always thought of himself as one of the more reasoned of the primarchs. He had been a man of learning, rationality was his first and last resort, and yet he had ostentatiously condemned this work. Why? He had done so to please the Emperor, as he did everything back then, but that was not the only reason. He should have made his own mind up. He should have read the arguments and addressed them, not dismissed them. The creed of the Imperial Truth he stuck to so hard was just that, a creed. It was flawed, and in large part based on a lie.

  His refusal was a calculated insult. Lorgar and he had never seen eye to eye. Guilliman was a rationalist, Lorgar was a quester after metaphysical truths. Faith was his mode of thought, and Guilliman had disdained it. The Word Bearers’ way of war had annoyed him. How petty of him. He knew by spurning his brother’s beliefs so bluntly he had hastened the end of everything the Emperor believed in.

  Professed to believe in, Guilliman corrected himself. He had never had chance to speak with the Emperor about the truth. The war prevented it, and when it was over, the Emperor was gone beyond communication. Only that one time upon his return to Terra had Guilliman been in His presence and received something more from his creator other than silence.

  He thought back on the meeting, as he often did, still unable to reconcile what he thought he had seen with what should have been possible.

  Maybe, he thought, I did not read it because I was afraid that Lorgar was right.

  How can I know without reading it? He did not care that he had wronged Lorgar, but that he had abandoned his own intellectual rigour. He had been a fanatic as much as Lorgar was, after his own fashion.

  Theoretical: I must set this right. Practical: I must read it.

  Guilliman flipped open the lid of the box. The book was slender and rested inside a shallow compartment bathed in the still light of the stasis field. It was so old, almost as old as him. Together they were relics of another age, time-lost things.

  In appearance the book had nothing that suggested the power it possessed. But it was powerful, and so disruptive that Guilliman himself had banned it after Horus’ betrayal. Every copy that could be found was burned, its words deemed tainted with a traitor’s lies. It was expunged from history, scraped out of the record. People had died to protect it. The faithful called them martyrs, but the Imperial Cult had been small and ridiculous and he had ignored it. By then, the damage had been done. The thoughts were out, a memetic virus spread from mind to mind. It had no cure. The writings in this book, the thoughts and beliefs of an arch-traitor, were the foundation of the Imperial Cult.

  He speculated if the high priests of the Ecclesiarchy were aware of this fact.

  Often the book was poorly printed, dashed out of underground presses in furtive acts of samizdat. This one was finely made, the property of a rich man or woman. That could have explained why it had survived. The lonely title was emblazoned on the cover in flaking golden leaf stamped into light brown leather. There was no author’s credit. The skin oils of its owner stained the lower right-hand corner of the cover. The sole trace of a person ten millennia dead; the book had been read many times. Guilliman wondered what manner of person they had been. Imagining was a fruitless exercise that yielded an infinity of theoreticals with no resultant practicals. A waste of time. He cut dead the trains of thought.

  Imperial Gothic had evolved since the book was written; even the highest, most ossified form had been dragged out of shape by the tides of change. The script on the book was of the oldest kind. Reading it brought a sudden flush of memories to the primarch. They intensified Guilliman’s feelings of displacement, and he almost abandoned the idea in favour of destroying the book and its box.

  He did not. His finger depressed the hidden stud, shutting off the stasis field. He stared at the book some more.

  He picked it up. The leather was dry and flaking. The paper smelled as old paper does: a fusty sharpness, the smell of hidden wisdom and dying memories.

  Ten thousand years after Lorgar Aurelian set pen to paper to create this tract, Guilliman began to read it.

  Rejoice, for I bring you glorious news.

  God walks among us.

  So ran the first two lines of the Lectitio Divinitatus.

  About the Author

  Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novel Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire wit
h his wife and son.

  An extract from Blood of Iax.

  KASTOR

  The Fulminata had come to Shebat Alpha, and none could stand before them.

  Kastor, Chaplain of the Dioskuri, roared. It was an expression of pure rage, fuelled by piety and stoked by righteous hatred. The noise, amplified by his vox-vocaliser, made the bellows and grunts of the greenskins surrounding him sound pitiable by comparison.

  Salve Imperator shattered an ork’s skull. It then snapped the neck of a second, hurling the beast back into its kindred. Energy crackled around the skull-topped crozius arcanum, blackened blood evaporating from it with every searing strike of the power mace. Bones cracked and flesh was pulverised. The towering Primaris Chaplain was a whirlwind of furious judgement, his leather ­cassock and vestments snapping around him, his pitch-black power armour splattered with a patina of alien viscera.

  He had moved too far ahead. He was cut off. The realisation made him smile.

  An ork attempted to headbutt him. It rammed itself impotently against the stylised ribcage that encased his breastplate. Kastor snatched the beast by the throat with his free hand, hauling it from its feet so that its piggy eyes were level with the deep ruby lenses of his skull helm. The beast bellowed at him, spittle spraying from its maw, but the Chaplain silenced it with a headbutt of his own, bone cracking and tusks ­snapping as he caved in the alien’s face.

  He dropped the ork, his armour registering the strikes of crude cleavers and fists from all sides. None penetrated. He spun in a tight arc, vestment scrolls whipping around him, and cleared a semicircle of space with a single swing of Salve Imperator.

  ‘See how easily the alien falls before the weaponry of the righteous,’ the Chaplain boomed. ‘Praise the Emperor for giving us this chance to enact His will!’

  His slaughterous euphoria was interrupted by the familiar, battering thunder of bolter fire. Blood and sinew burst around him as a hail of mass-reactive bolts shredded the mob attacking him, their remains splattering his armour. Already the runtier greenskins at the rear of the melee had turned tail and were fleeing back up the street, perhaps unwilling to engage something that could bellow louder than one of their warbosses. Kastor let them go, the battle fury draining abruptly from his genhanced body.

  ‘Too far again, Salve,’ said Captain Demeter. The commander of the Fulminata was clad in his Gravis plate, the proud heraldry of the Ultramarines befouled by blood and grime. Behind him was Intercessor Squad Nerva and Ancient Mars Skyrus, who bore the lightning standard of Fulminata. Its blue-and-white silk rippled in the smoke shrouding the embattled street, the weak sunlight glinting from the wings of the golden bolt-and-aquila that tipped its crosspiece.

  ‘The xenos exist to be purged,’ Kastor responded. ‘And I exist to perform that purging.’

  The deafening report of a battle cannon interrupted Demeter before he could respond, the shell shrieking over the heads of the Primaris. It detonated further up the street in a great storm of broken masonry and ork remains. Kastor turned to survey the Imperial forces behind the Ultramarines – a squadron of Voitekan Leman Russ battle tanks grinding forwards in single file, supported by a platoon of Astra Militarum infantry from the same world. They paused, crouched on the pavement as they stared up in undisguised awe at the Primaris who had broken the ork mob. Kastor raised Salve Imperator, the crozius still wreathed with lightning.

  ‘See how the beasts run, soldiers of the Throne,’ he said, his voice booming over the growl of engines and rattle of nearby gunfire. ‘This is our city, the Emperor’s city, and we will reclaim it one step at a time. Press on. Crush these alien remains beneath your boots and the treads of your mighty tanks. The Emperor protects!’

  The advance continued.

  ‘Watch the manufactorum colonnades to the right,’ Demeter ordered over the vox, highlighting a series of towering industrial pillars on the shared tactical display. The huge rockcrete structures had once been testimony to Shebat’s productivity but now lay cast down in rubble and ruin, a metaphor for the city’s fall. It had been great once – the foremost manufactorum of Ikara IX’s Adamantium Belt, a refinery for the vast deposits of ore mined in the Tombstones, the mountain range within whose barren flanks the city nestled. Four millennia of industry had created a sprawling hive of smokestacks and smelter-scrapes, surrounded by a thicket of prefabricated habitation blocks and a further sprawl of slums and shack dwellings.

  Then the green menace had come to the Ikara System, and Shebat’s productivity had ended.

  Kastor blink-acknowledged Demeter’s directive via the visor display and drew his Absolver bolt pistol. Its heavy-calibre rounds made a mockery of even the tough hides and thick bones of the orks, each detonating shell bursting apart chests and skulls in gouts of blood and pulverised organs. He forced himself to check his pace so he didn’t begin to outdistance his battle-brothers once more.

  ‘With the support of the Astra Militarum, we’ve already succeeded in pushing the greenskins back,’ Demeter continued. ‘The xenos currently fester in a refinery square overlooked by the industrial plants’ ruins.’

  The map of Shebat overlaid on Kastor’s visor display showed that they were less than a mile from the day’s primary objective – the Excelsior Arch.

  It had been more than a Terran year since war had engulfed Shebat. For a while, when the port city of Melu burned and the greenskin forces had reached the outskirts of Ikara IX’s capital city, Kroten, it had seemed as though the planet would fall to the alien invasion.

  Then the Fulminata, a Primaris demi-company of the Ultra­marines Chapter, had been despatched, alongside the primary Imperial Navy subsector battlefleet, three Astra Militarum army groups and a conroi of Imperial Knights from House du Frain. Within five days, Kastor and his brothers had driven the xenos from the capital’s outskirts, then followed up by breaking the greenskin siege lines encircling Merkoro.

  Two weeks ago the brotherhood had arrived outside Shebat. The Astra Militarum’s Third Army, commanded by Field Marshal Stefan Klos, had secured the slum sprawl and established three beachheads into the city proper. Now the drive to the Gorgon was underway.

  ‘Maintain fire protocols,’ Demeter said over the vox, his voice as calm and measured as it was during the company’s firing rites on board the Spear of Macragge. Intercessor squad Nerva had secured the main ­thoroughfare leading into the square, laying down bolt rifle fire as the orks charged them from all four corners. The open space allowed the trio of Voitekan battle tanks to spread out, their heavy bolters and battle cannons hammering shells point-blank into the oncoming mobs.

  ‘See how the Emperor’s wrath cuts them down!’ Kastor bellowed to the Astra Militarum infantry squads advancing out between their tanks, adding their las-fire to the barrage. ‘Keep firing! Not a single greenskin is to leave this place alive!’

  ‘Kastor,’ Demeter said, his tone full of warning. The Chaplain had begun to advance again.

  ‘They will not stand, brother-captain,’ he said.

  ‘And you will not present them with an easy target,’ the captain responded. Return fire broke out from the ruins around the square’s edges, more mobs of greenskins armed with crude sidearms flocking to join the battle spreading through the refineries. Their shooting was worse than inaccurate, but there was enough of it for Kastor to take two hits to his breastplate and another to his left greave in quick succession.

  ‘Lieutenant, bring your weaponry to bear on the refineries,’ Demeter said, the order routed to the commander of the Voitekan armour. A clipped affirmation coincided with the whine of turret hydraulics as the battle tanks switched targets.

  They never got a chance to fire. The enhanced aural units of Kastor’s armour detected a high-pitched whistle, growing ­rapidly louder.

  ‘Incoming!’

  Sergeant Nerva was the first to shout the warning, issuing it over his external vocaliser for the be
nefit of the Guard infantry.

  The first shell hit the space between the leftmost and centre­most of the three Leman Russ battle tanks. The Voitekan infantry squad there simply vanished in a hail of metal and rubble that battered the sides of their tanks, spattering the vehicles with tattered human remains.

  Another five shells struck the square within three seconds of the first. Fire blossomed, the detonations ripping indiscriminately into greenskins and Imperial soldiers alike. One hit the ground barely a dozen yards to Kastor’s right. He felt his auto-stabilisers lock as the blast wave struck, accompanied by a storm of rubble and dirt. His armour blared with alarms, the auto-senses indicating shrapnel damage to his right pauldron and knee joint. When the smoke settled, however, he stood unmoved, his crozius ­shining bright with destructive energies amidst the haze.

  ‘Xenos artillery,’ Demeter voxed. ‘Coming from across the river. I’m routing the coordinates to Serxis, but it will be at least twenty minutes before the bombardment cannon is locked.’

  ‘Priscor and Quintillius have been hit,’ Sergeant Nerva added. ‘If we stay here, we die. We either go back or we go into them.’

  ‘Into them then,’ Kastor snarled, feeling his battle fury surging to life once more.

  ‘As the Brother-Chaplain says,’ Demeter responded calmly, as the air filled with the shriek of more incoming shells. ‘Primaris, advance.’