by John French
‘Update display – primary fleet force readiness,’ she said. She had repeated the command every fifteen minutes for the last six hours.
‘Compliance,’ droned a servitor, and the display stripped itself down to a few markers haloed with green data. The largest fleets held station beside Pluto, Uranus, Jupiter, Mars and Terra. These were the five Sphere commands. Signals took hours to pass from the Throneworld to the system edge, too long for the second-by-second control of battle. A lord castellan of the Imperial Fists commanded each layer of defence: Sigismund, Halbract, Effried, Camba Diaz. Rogal Dorn commanded the fifth, final sphere around Terra. Other commands deferred to the lord of the closest Sphere. Troop concentrations were marked with coloured dots. The size of a force and its strength flickered around them in abbreviated code. The few Legion units beyond the bounds of Terra glowed like hot coals, the other forces cold motes of fire. Amber specks marked fixed defences around planets or hanging in the gulfs between them. These were everything from void-fortresses to shoals of gun platforms and space stations. Clouds of tiny blue spots folded through the spaces between the larger defences, indicating the vast clouds of mines, deadfall torpedoes and proximity drones that had been cast amongst the dark like dust from a hand. Once the battle was done, the approaches to the inner system would be laced with death until the star itself died.
Once the battle was done… If there was anything left besides ashes.
Su-Kassen shook herself. The first wall of any fortress was the mind, and doubt could burn it from within before the enemy had even raised a blade.
She scanned the data again. It had not changed, of course. Out there in the heavens above, the fires of battle were already burning, but here the reality of that truth had yet to arrive.
‘Report update,’ called a signal officer, from behind a bank of machines.
‘Show me,’ she said.
‘By your will,’ said the officer, and she could hear the forced control in the man’s voice.
Machines clattered and whirred, stitching the silence as it stretched. The holo-display fuzzed, flickered and then came into focus. She looked at the image and blinked. Crimson flecked the edge of the turning display. Her mind began to parse the marker runes and data abstractions. Strategic logic-conditioning shunted aside thoughts as she absorbed the updated defence data. It was an odd sensation, one that she had never got used to in all the decades of her life and service. Every now and again her thoughts and understanding would jump, like a needle on a data cylinder, and she would find herself understanding something she had not an instant before.
Bit by bit the mass of runes and symbols resolved into meaning.
The Khthonic Gate… she thought. So, it begins, just as we predicted and feared.
Starships had to translate from the warp at the edge of a system, beyond the Mandeville point, that arcane and invisible line that marked the boundary between safety and suicide. Arrive inside that point, and the competing forces of reality and paradox would rip a vessel apart. ‘Rebirth death’ the Navigators called it, when they talked of such things. Most established systems had navigation buoys and well-trodden points where it was safest to drop from the warp back into reality. Once back in the cold embrace of the void, ships then had to move in-system under the power of their real space engines. The journey from system edge to the planets of the core took even the fastest ships days.
The Solar System, though, was older than any colonised by humanity. Star travel and warp navigation had been birthed here, and over tens of thousands of years more secrets, wonders and terrors had been raised and lost within its bounds than existed in all the galaxy beyond. Two such relics of the past were the Twin Gates: stable points in space and the warp where ships could translate safely. Both tracked the orbits of planets as they orbited Sol. The Khthonic Gate lay off Pluto, and the Elysian Gate lay close to Uranus. The latter offered a further layer of paradox, as it gave ships a way to re-enter deeper in the system far beyond the point where they would be wrecked if they chanced it normally.
Anyone who planned to attack Terra in force would want to secure the Twin Gates to move their forces into the Solar System quickly. That Horus would pour everything he could into taking them was a certainty.
‘That cannot be correct…’ croaked Kazzim-Aleph-1 from where he hovered at her shoulder. The magos-emissary had only been attached to the command cadre for a week, and Su-Kassen was still trying to understand him. He seemed logical and emphatic but also hesitant, a combination she had never thought to see in someone who was so much more machine than flesh. His cranium whirred, cogs flipping around in slots that ran the length of his skull as the projection and screens updated. ‘There is an error. This data indicates a warp-reality translation via the Khthonic Path of over a thousand ships…’
‘More,’ she said quietly. ‘A lot more.’
‘That cannot be. It is an error. There is a Falcon fleet that can reach Pluto in five hours. They can–’
‘No,’ she said, dropping her voice under the buzz of the machines. ‘All other forces are to hold position, magos-emissary.’
Even as she spoke she felt the words pull against her instincts.
‘Admiral,’ said the magos, ‘my calculations show that the Plutonic defences can hold if reinforced. If the enemy has committed its main force strength to take Pluto as a bridgehead and then can be held there–’
‘They cannot be held,’ said a voice from across the chamber. ‘Not at a cost we can afford to pay.’
Blast doors withdrew into the walls. Warriors in yellow armour and black cloaks poured in. Light caught the edges of ready weapons and sheened from armour plates. Threat radiated from them, sharper than their blades, roaring from their silence.
And with them came the one who had spoken. Cold illumination struck the burnished gold of Rogal Dorn’s armour and lit fire in jewels clasped in the claws of eagles. Control radiated from him, vibrating through air and through light, the lightning promise at the edge of a storm. To the billions that lived on Terra, he was the wall against which the coming enemy would break, defiance and strength embodied. But in person he was not the idea that the desperate clung to as they thought of what was to come; he was a force of nature that moved and spoke, a lightning bolt pulled from the sky and chained to flesh to fight until the universe broke him.
The Imperial Fists standing vigil at the chamber edges brought their clenched fists to their chests, but only Su-Kassen bowed to the Praetorian as he advanced. The officers and adepts who served in the Bhab Bastion were human for the most part. They were the finest war staff Su-Kassen had ever seen, drawn from the old Solar military elite. War-savants of the Saturnine Ordos, warriors of the Jovian Void Clans like her, tacticians from the Terran war-courts: every man and woman in the chamber knew their craft well enough to rival even the command skill of the Legions, and all of them knew that when Rogal Dorn, primarch of the VII Legion and Praetorian of Terra, entered they had a duty to continue in their tasks, rather than to bow. It had been Dorn’s first order when he had created this command cadre. Su-Kassen saluted for all of them.
But as the blast doors sealed again, she knew the presence of the three who walked with Dorn would test their obedience.
Jaghatai, Great Khan of the White Scars, walked on Dorn’s left, his eyes dancing with the turning light of the holo-displays. On Dorn’s other side came an angel armoured in gold, white wings furled at his back. Sanguinius, primarch of the IX Legion, looked across the humans at their stations and then at Su-Kassen. He smiled. Last of all came an old man in the grey robes of the Administratum, leaning on an eagle-topped staff. Wrinkled skin hung from his face, but his eyes were cold and bright. Malcador the Sigillite seemed older and weaker than Su-Kassen had ever seen him, but it was he as much as the three primarchs that made her hold her head bowed. The silence in the chamber deepened, seeming to press closer as the three loyal sons of the Emperor a
nd His Regent halted beneath the turning holo-display.
‘The First Sphere forces cannot hold,’ said Dorn, his dark eyes fixed on Kazzim-Aleph-1. ‘And it will not be reinforced.’
The magos-emissary was still, the cogs protruding from his skull rotating slowly. For a second Su-Kassen thought he was going to argue. For a second, she hoped that he would.
‘Lord Dorn, there are options–’ began Su-Kassen, before she could stop herself.
‘No,’ said Dorn, and the word and his glance fell on her like a blow.
‘As is your will, Lord Praetorian,’ said Kazzim-Aleph-1 at last.
Out of the corner of her eye, Su-Kassen saw the Khan flick a look at Sanguinius. The Angel’s face remained impassive.
Rogal Dorn came forwards, eyes moving from the magos to Su-Kassen.
‘The initial battle data indicates that your projections were incorrect, admiral.’
She nodded and opened her mouth to reply.
‘They were inaccurate by a factor of at least thirty per cent,’ cut in Kazzim-Aleph-1, ‘maybe more. We cannot yet be precise, of course, but if the core data is correct, the enemy has brought a force numbering many thousands of vessels from the immaterium.’
‘Thank you for your clarification, magos-emissary,’ said Dorn. Su-Kassen almost flinched at the ice in the words. Kazzim-Aleph-1 seemed oblivious to it.
‘I am charged by the Fabricator General to aid your command in addition to representing the positions of Mars. I am…’ he paused, as cogs turned and buzzed, ‘…pleased that my function is of utility to you, Lord Praetorian.’
Su-Kassen thought she heard Malcador stifle a cough that might have been a laugh. For a giddy moment she found herself almost wanting to smile herself, and then clamped down on the feeling. It was tension and the truth of what was happening finding a way of bleeding out, of breaking the silence. She wondered for a second if somewhere out there, under the blanket drone of alert sirens, there were people laughing as they felt the seconds tick by and future come closer.
It was Sanguinius who broke the silence, walking forwards and raising a hand to dip his fingers into a turning sphere of light.
‘It will be Uranus next,’ he said. ‘And if the attack is not already under way, it will be soon.’
Su-Kassen let out a breath she had not realised she was holding. Around her she felt the command staff relax and refocus. That had been deliberate, she thought. With but a few words the Angel had bent them all in a direction of his choosing.
‘Signal relay to the outer spheres is still clear, lord,’ said Su-Kassen, ‘but there has been no word from Lord Halbract at Uranus yet.’
‘You are still sure this is the path?’ asked the Khan. He had held back, close to the doors and, apart from his glance at Sanguinius, he had remained utterly still. There was something in that stillness that was like the flash of lightning frozen in the eye. ‘There are other ways – Horus could be scattering his might out in the depths beyond, and then circle them in, closing from all sides, strangling us as he cuts us.’
Dorn looked at the Khan.
‘This is Horus. Do you still think he will be anything but himself?’
‘He is not himself,’ said Sanguinius without turning from where the holo-light played over his hand. Su-Kassen felt the tension snap back into place in the room. She felt as though she and the rest of her staff had intruded on a conversation that these demigods had brought with them. ‘You have not seen him, Rogal,’ continued Sanguinius. ‘You have not seen the face of what has taken our brother.’
‘He may have changed,’ growled Dorn, now as still as the Khan, the low light of the displays setting his face in cold lines and hollows of night. ‘But the constraints he faces have not. Time. He does not have time. Guilliman breathes at his back. Horus has to come for us with everything he has as quickly as he can, or he will have nothing.’ Dorn shook his head, a smile that was a ghost passing across his face. ‘Besides, it is not his way.’
The silence flowed back in.
‘So, we let him take the gates?’ said the Khan, his voice soft but edged. ‘We wall ourselves up and wait, and hope that those walls will prove strong enough?’
Dorn did not answer, his gaze locked with his brothers.
‘We hold every wall and we make them pay in time and blood for every step forwards.’
‘Just so,’ said Sanguinius, lowering his hand and gaze from the holo-display, and turning to look at his siblings. ‘And a price in blood it shall be.’
Malcador’s staff struck the floor. The blow was not powerful, but Su-Kassen felt the air leave her lungs.
‘There,’ he said, looking around, his eyes bright and hard. Everyone in the chamber, primarch and human alike, was looking at him. Su-Kassen watched a sad smile form on his face. ‘You see? Peace is possible, if only for a moment and amongst ourselves.’
The Khan laughed, and the frozen tension in the chamber vanished.
‘Quite so, quite so. We forget our place and company.’ The primarch of the V Legion unfolded from his stillness and came forwards, his movements fluid and relaxed. He circled the display, glancing up at it and around. ‘This is fine work.’ He looked at Su-Kassen and nodded. ‘Your cadre is to be commended, admiral.’ She bowed her head. For a second, she had felt as though the Khan had looked right through her.
Beside her, apparently oblivious to what had been occurring, Kazzim-Aleph-1 glanced up from where he had been fidgeting through the raw data-screed.
‘The customary astropathic communications from across the system are absent,’ he said. His eye-lenses rotated in a way that created the distinct impression of a frown. ‘At this time, and given the delay in other signals, delays inherent in the distances involved, it would be most advisable to make use of telepathic methods of communication. Also, the astropaths’ ability to sense warp displacement would be a significant advantage.’ He paused, looking up at the primarchs and command staff as though just seeing them. ‘Do you not concur?’
‘There will be no astrotelepathic messages from inside or outside the system, magos-emissary,’ said Malcador, his voice low and edged by a weariness. ‘Nor any warning of more ships or fleets exiting the immaterium.’
‘Why is that?’ asked the magos.
Malcador closed his eyes, and Su-Kassen saw him shift his weight to his staff. ‘Because all around us, the warp is howling.’
Battle-barge Monarch of Fire, Trans-Uranic Gulf
Clouds of dust filled the Elysian Gate. An open volume of space three thousand kilometres across, it glittered with folds of fine particles. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of void-ships translating to the warp at this point had seeded it with drifts of the soft, grey matter that formed in the wake of a closing breach. The Jovian clans and the Navigator houses had a name for it. Siren Ash, they called it. There were tales, they said, of prospectors who had tried to harvest the dust and could desire nothing else once they’d touched it. True or not, the dust remained, slowly coiling through the volume of the Elysian Gate, like smoke caught in a glass orb.
The gate had always been guarded. Things had come out of it during Old Night, things that the Uranus Habitats remembered in tales of star-vampires and iron men. They had built the first fortresses around the gate, watching it with guns and warriors. These stations were called the Eyes of the Old God, and they had kept their vigil as the rest of the Solar System slid into the depths of the Age of Strife.
Then the Great Crusade had risen from Old Earth and brought the Uranus Habitats and moons into the nascent Imperium. The watchful stations had grown, their hereditary warrior clans augmented by Martian weaponry. Ships had begun to pass through the gate into the immaterium, and others had returned. The Navigator houses re-established their fiefs amongst Uranus’ twenty-seven moons, and the volume of space between the gas giant and the Elysian Gate had become an ever-glittering stream of
light as ships looped from the warp to the profusion of orbiting habitats and void-stations.
Horus’ war had changed that. The flow of ships had become a sullen trickle, and the stations keeping the long watch had bloated with fresh armour and weaponry. Every foothold of humanity that could mount a macro cannon or host a fighter squadron had found itself made a fortress. Amongst this, facing the dark of the Elysian Gate, the ships of the Second Sphere hung motionless, crenellated and beweaponed, in the glittering abyss.
In the gate, the dust moved. A slow swirl gathered and coiled in on itself. Clouds hundreds of kilometres across flowed and folded. The dust began to spark. Tiny worms of lightning flicked between grey motes. The clouds began to glow, now green, now bruised violet, now bloodied ivory.
The waiting fleets of warships lit their drives. In their sanctums, astropaths began to weep. In the habitats and stations, the low howl of warning sirens woke millions from dreams of shadows swallowing the sun. On the bridge of the Monarch of Fire, Lord Castellan Halbract, commander of the Second Sphere of Sol’s defences, watched the reports blur across his sight as the helm of his Terminator armour locked in place.
‘Fleet- and defence-wide transmission,’ he said, the rich accent of the Nordafrik Conclaves weighting his words. He saw the thousands of units under his command come to readiness in his helm-display. The echoes of a hundred warships’ acknowledgements and salutes whispered across the vox. He breathed out and spoke.
‘For the light of Sol and the earth of Terra, we stand. For the oaths we made, we stand. For the blood in our veins, we stand.’
He heard it then, growing in the air outside his armour as the hundreds of crew on the Monarch of Fire’s bridge took up the words.
‘For the stones laid by our ancestors, we stand.’
And now the words were echoing across the vox, overlapping from thousands of mouths.