by Guy Haley
There would be plenty of opportunity for revenge, he thought, for Iax was poisoned to the point of death, and much of it was in the hands of the enemy. The ship quivered to the impact of guns on its void shield. The atmosphere was tropically thick, too warm, choking in its density, and full of a sulphurous stench that coated the back of the throat. Towards the front a few of his congregation coughed, and their songs faltered.
‘Brothers!’ he called. ‘Sisters! Be of brave heart, the Emperor walks with us! He watches us! Sing for Him! Sing!’
He pushed his way through them, making to the ramp himself. He had no battle pulpit or armoured preach-tank as his rank would permit, but wore a soldier’s flak armour over his simple robe. He did not even have a helmet. He carried his chainsword and laspistol; they were oiled, primed, blessed and sanctified with fresh purity seals, but otherwise battered by long use.
His only concession to the dangers of Iax were the three armoured warriors bearing shields and swords that accompanied him, the mysterious warrior-ascetics of the Order of the Crimson Cardinals. They were his protectors, but nothing shielded him so effectively as his faith. As he approached the front of the hold, the fumes seemed to recoil, and the air become purer. Fervour gleaming in his eyes, Mathieu shouted over the singing of his people.
‘Fear not the pestilence of the false gods!’ Mathieu shouted. ‘It has no dominion over we, the faithful servants of the Emperor. Do not be afraid to breathe the tainted air of this world, for the Emperor protects, and will make it pure as the winds of paradise! We know, for we have witnessed Him at His work, and He is with us now!’
The ramp continued to clank downward, revealing more of Iax’s polluted skies. Clouds tinged green blew on fever-damp winds. The view opened out, showing them the wide port grounds on the other side of the void shield shimmer: broad roads running between the knife-edges of the karst, warehouses clustered in huddled flocks, transit buildings, rail terminals, all the necessaries for interplanetary trade. Iax had been a beautiful world, but here was utility and hard grey rockcrete. At the port a subsidiary run of peaks had been truncated, topped with ugly artifice: scores of landing pads of various sizes set at varying heights. In concession to the planet’s nature, the sides sported terraced gardens, but where vibrant colours should display, there were only drab browns and slime greens. The stagnant smell of dying plants joined the stench of sulphur.
The ramp touched down, its last decorations unfurling to display the Emperor’s glory. Wan light glinted off gilt symbols of His divinity, and shone a little brighter for the touch.
Mathieu raised his voice further.
‘In the name of the Emperor! In the name of His son, forward! Let us bring light back to this wounded planet, and succour to all His loyal servants who languish here in unholy sickness!’
The hymn swelled. In a huge mob, Mathieu’s crusaders spilled down the stair-ramp to the pad the ship occupied, then down the grand stairway to the void port roadways. They were drawn from every world Guilliman’s fleets had visited. They came from every ship within the fleets. Men and women who had slipped free of their mortal masters to better serve their divine lord. There were menials, ship’s crew, bureaucrats and soldiers, even lords and ladies – deserters by some laws, but the officers who would call them so walked beside them, and more were coming to swell their numbers every day.
Singing hosannas to the dominion of man, the battle congregation walked fearlessly down the ramp, through the void shield and into enemy weapons fire. Dozens of them fell singing, but the rest stepped over the corpses, their faith making them fearless. Those that had ranged weapons opened fire, filling the air with las-shot and bullets. Still they died, still they marched, unstoppable, a tide of belief. They had total confidence in victory, yet the battle congregation was not the greatest of Mathieu’s weapons.
As the throng poured down the steps of the lander, a piercing organ blast sounded in the darkness of the hold behind them, shaking the guts of all before it. Lights snapped on, yellow search beams fierce as the holy light of the Astronomican. There came the sound of engaged plasma generators, and the rumble of water tanks flash-boiling.
Screeching steam-damp music from towering organ pipes, the war train lurched forward. Great tracks clattered along the decking, shaking even the venerable frame of the lander. The train followed the throng of the faithful, its giant engine, forty feet tall, dragging battle carriages whose gun casemates were already jerking into life, the targeting lenses set into the faces of angelic sculptures burning a baleful red. Pilgrims ran to the steps on the sides, swarming up to man the fighting decks. The locomotive was an immense, mobile altar glorifying the Emperor, its every surface covered with gilded sculpture. Three massive chimneys on the engine vented scented steam. Upon its prow was an immense ram, above which an angel stood, outstretched arms and wings projecting a protective energy field. Sheltered behind it, an organ of a hundred pipes played by ten men hardwired into their keyboards blared a mighty song. Behind that was an open command pulpit, but Mathieu eschewed it for now, wishing to put his sandalled feet upon the tainted soil, and claim it back by touch alone.
The engine dipped onto the landing ramp, and the congregation moved fearlessly around its crushing machinery. It ran down the stair-ramp, ground forward onto the landing pad, track units chewing up the ferrocrete surface; then it reached the stair leading to the roadways, and went into the enemy’s fire.
The prow angel’s shield sparked with a thousand impacts. The train struggled with the steep descent, and its brakes gave off a smell of burning metal. The carriages juddered as it picked its way down the stair, always, it seemed, on the brink of falling. Its tracks became red with the blood of the fallen. Traitor Guardsmen and civilians driven mad by Nurgle’s gifts infested the void port. Though disorganised, they were almost as fanatical as Mathieu’s followers, and more numerous. They turned their guns upon the train, hoping to cripple it while it was vulnerable, but potent warding technologies were installed within its cars, and their fury was turned aside, and all the while its holy, deafening music played.
The engine reached the road leading from the ziggurat, and the first car followed, then the second. When the third was on the level, the war train was no longer vulnerable, and it showed its worth. The faithful on the ground took shelter under its energy shields, and although some shots pierced the bubble, the slaughter ceased. On each carriage, armoured cowls rolled back. Racks of missiles elevated, each warhead painted with devotional scripts. The great guns mounted in the casemates opened fire, while the groups of crusading pilgrims manning the parapets added coherent beams of light to their shouted prayers.
Mathieu marched beside the train, his servo-skull dropping from the flocks above to buzz purposefully behind him. He had no strategy. He did not lead like a military commander, for who was he to plan when the Emperor would tell him what to do? But though he did not strategise, he did fight. He relied on the guidance of He of Terra to send Mathieu where he was needed, and when his target was ordained, he struck with righteous fury.
Now the whole of the landscape was revealed to him. Curiously flat plains studded with bladed mountains stretched towards the city of First Landing. The capital occupied the largest mountain, as proud as a fang, which thrust upward, a natural hive honeycombed with the warrens of mankind. Suburbs and satellite settlements clung to the sides of the peaks about. It too dripped with vegetation, and had been renowned as a place of great beauty before Nurgle’s diseases had reduced half to slime.
Though the city remained in Ultramarian hands, renegades occupied the port. They were dug into the gardens spilling down the sides, from where they could rain fire down upon the roads. Guns shot from galleries in First Landing’s lower-tier defences, targeting the larger concentrations of enemy. The gunfire of the loyalist forces mingled with the enemy’s, both a risk to the battle congregation, but they went into the storm bravely, for they had faith as their
shield.
There was little cohesion to the enemy forces; even Mathieu could see that. He set his sights on a heavy weapons nest three levels up on the nearest geoformed karst.
‘I go to battle as the Emperor commands! Onward!’ Mathieu shouted, and somehow he was heard over the great train’s music and the clamour of battle. A group of the faithful joined him, and together they broke from the cover of the train’s shields. His departure was marked by both sides; heavy stubber fire chased him across the road as he sprinted for the ziggurat’s side, cutting down two of the soldiers who ran with him. From the train, his pilgrims poured suppressive fire onto the enemy targeting their prophet. The train rumbled on, its parapets level with the enemy in the gardens, then was past, and occupied itself with other foes.
By then Mathieu and his crusaders had reached the karst tower’s base, and were racing up the stairs, his guardians angling their power shields to deflect incoming shots. More of his followers fell to lasguns wielded by once faithful men. A woman in a filthy blue uniform appeared over a terrace above and threw a chunk of rockcrete down. It bounced from one of the Crimson Cardinal’s shields. Mathieu shot her dead.
Mathieu spared her only a brief glance when her body toppled onto the stair. She was a member of the Ultramar Auxilia, corrupted by the Plague God’s influence and wandered far from the light. Yet Mathieu did not despise her. She had suffered, her hair was falling out, and her teeth were black.
‘Rest in peace, sister,’ he said, as he passed. ‘Your pain is over.’
More men came from a door leading into the peak’s insides. They were a mix of civilians and soldiers, much like Mathieu’s battle congregation, but followers of an altogether darker god. Their skin was pasty grey. Their mouths were caked in sores. Their eyes were red. They smelled like the dead. One was massively obese, his throat swollen by bursting glands, his left leg fat with elephantiasis. Another was so emaciated he appeared to be a living skeleton, and his eyes swivelled madly in their sockets as if they sought to escape his torment.
‘For the Emperor!’ Mathieu roared, and his cry was taken up by his followers. Furious melee erupted on the stairs. Mathieu’s chainsword roared. Blood and pulped flesh sprayed as he cut into the first traitor, casting him down. Mathieu shot the next through the head. Disruption fields crackled as the crusaders cut their way through the attackers. Mathieu’s soldiers attacked with bayonets, his civilian followers with crude mauls.
‘For the Emperor! For the Emperor!’ they shouted. Clubs crushed skulls. Point-blank las-shots set clothing on fire. Mathieu’s chainsword drenched him red. Flecks of diseased meat flew into his screaming mouth, but he had nothing to fear from the contagions of the enemy, for the Emperor was his healer and his guardian.
The flood of enemy pouring from the landing spire faltered, then reversed, and Mathieu’s crusaders were falling over each other to chase the fugitives down. Mathieu shot one in the back. Others fell to bludgeons swung from behind.
‘Forgive them!’ Mathieu screamed, exulted by battle. ‘You know nothing of their torments! Release them through death!’
Shouts receded into the ziggurat as the last few escaped. Mathieu had time to take one, blood-tainted breath before the tide of his little party dragged him up the stairs to the heavy weapons nest.
The Traitor Guardsmen manning the heavy stubber had not expected them, for they were still firing down into the press of the battle congregation. As Mathieu’s party emerged, they tried to pull the gun from its tripod to swing it about, but they were too slow.
The missiles on the train fired, roaring up in staggered lines of three from the back of each car, and raced off into the sky. Accompanied by the rockets’ deafening ascent, Mathieu’s followers fell on the crew. They were frenzied, driven to the heights of bloodlust by their zeal, and they tore the luckless men apart.
The last few traitors on the terrace fled, firing as they ran. Another of Mathieu’s men fell. His warriors followed, and Mathieu did nothing to stop them. They did the Emperor’s work.
There was a further weapon in Mathieu’s arsenal, and now it put in an appearance. The clouds parted around the drab-green hulls of Astra Militarum tank landers. Flights of Space Marine and Navis Astra strike craft dropped around them, their steep dives levelling out into strafing runs. Engines roared as the heavy transports set down on the summits all around the space port, their engine wash making the diseased gardens dance like the flags of a liberated people.
Colonel Odrameyer’s regiment had come.
Mathieu grinned, his teeth white in a mask of blood.
‘By the grace of His divine majesty, the God-Emperor of Terra, the void port of First Landing is ours!’ He held up his weapons, and tilted his face to the heavens. Already, the air smelled a little sweeter.
‘Praise the Emperor!’ he roared. ‘Praise the Emperor!’
Chapter Eleven
A HISTORITOR’S REQUEST
In the quieter hours, Marneus Calgar could almost imagine nothing was amiss. The defence laser batteries were silent while the Flotilla of Woe swung round the other side of the planet. There were no foes at the wall. If it were not for the smell of smoke, it could have been any day in Macragge’s sadly infrequent periods of peace.
That high up in the Fortress of Hera, the smoke was thin, but it was persistent, and where the windows of the fortress-monastery were open, the scent of fire was ever-present. If he went from his office, crossed the balcony to the balustrade and looked down, well, then there was no avoiding the fact that Magna Macragge Civitas was ablaze.
It was from there that he and Tigurius watched their city burn.
The conflagration had consumed all the grounds outside the ancient inner walls of the Murus Prisces. The city had spread since Guilliman’s first life to cover over all the coastal plain, overcoming the great landing fields of the Heresy era and spreading out into the sea on artificial islands and flat strips of reclaimed land. Calgar had seen the maps; he had stood in this very spot with the primarch and heard him describe the way things had been when he was first alive. Not much of antiquity had survived the wars Macragge had seen. It seemed the same process of erasure was under way again.
Upon the Gulf of Lyceum, maritime habitats guttered like water lilies with fiery petals. Coastal arcology towers, their roots pushed deep into the seabed, were blackened, slumped skeletons of girders dipped into the water. The sea itself burned where promethium had spilled. There was the taint of rot on the air beneath the fires, hints of faecal matter and sickened bodies. Beyond the Murus Prisces a greater wall of fire climbed skyward, ever-dancing, angry red, eating at the heart of the Five Hundred Worlds. At night, it was reflected in the sky by the Great Rift.
‘They will be here soon,’ said Tigurius to Calgar.
‘They will,’ said Calgar.
He could see them out to sea: tankers, fishing vessels and cargo ships converted to troop carriers, bringing more of Mortarion’s pestilential hordes to crash against the shore. As on the ocean, so in orbit, where the Flotilla of Woe crowded the void, an endless stream of plague hulks crammed with deluded mortals desperate to have their moment of violence. They had already overwhelmed the orbital networks. No matter how many ships the Ultramarines blasted from the heavens, there seemed to be more. Successful landfall was only possible far from Magna Macragge Civitas’ formidable defences, and the hordes relocated to ocean ships for aquatic assault. They came in waves, regular, relentless and tiresomely predictable.
‘You will not give the order to fire upon them? They are within the range of the slope guns now,’ said Tigurius.
The two Space Marine lords stood side by side, looking out over the scene that was so neatly laid out before them it might have been a tactical hololith. The crowded plateau of the Fortress of Hera spread out from the mountainside to the great artificial cliffs of its walls. Beyond the rampart’s plunge lay the inner civitas, then the
outer ward and its burning buildings, and finally the sea.
‘Not yet, Varro. Unless you recommend it.’
Tigurius sighed, and his eyes unfocused as he gazed into unknown futures.
‘You are right to hold. Bombardment will make little difference as of yet. The hammer blow is yet to fall. This wave will not be the last. There is a greater danger ahead.’
‘So we will open fire when they are closer. If there is to be an assault from another direction, I do not wish to have to hastily retarget.’ Calgar spread the fingers of one of the Gauntlets of Ultramar across the marble rail. Blue ceramite rasped on stone. When fully open, the fingers of his gauntlets were big enough to cover the whole rail’s width.
‘We must be vigilant. Though the Librarius sense no impending daemonic infestation, and the warp is calm around Macragge, there are certain events in play.’
‘Might we expect the Death Guard?’ asked Calgar.
‘No. These dregs are all Mortarion has to offer. His plans lie on Iax with our gene-father. There is another with designs here. He hides himself well, he knows I can sense him, so I remain ignorant of his nature or his plans. But be warned, something is coming. One of Mortarion’s lieutenants, perhaps a daemon. Something with presence.’
‘Will it come soon?’
Tigurius shook his head. ‘I cannot see.’
‘There we have it then,’ said Calgar. ‘A horde of misguided mortals, no challenge for us at all. That is what Mortarion has for us, such is his contempt for our prowess. It offends me.’
‘Do not place too much stock in his assessment of us. These dregs are meant to keep us from our gene-father’s side. They have to be dealt with, so we stay to land the blow. It is an annoying strategy, but it is working,’ said Tigurius. ‘This is a tedious business. Mortarion has no chance of breaking the fortress.’