by John French
‘Who are you?’ snapped the woman in the blue and gold-braid uniform.
‘You’re the captain of this ship?’ asked Mersadie.
‘This is smelling more wrong by the second,’ snarled the uniformed woman at the heavyset man.
‘Please,’ said Mersadie. ‘I need to speak to your captain.’
The very tall woman raised a hand. She had barely moved since Mersadie had exited the shuttle. The woman’s face was old, but there was a strength to it and a sharpness to her gaze that reminded Mersadie of a sword’s edge.
‘That shuttle is a Corona-class lander,’ said the tall woman, carefully, without looking away from them. ‘Well-maintained and armed, but with no markings. Military or paramilitary, but look at her clothing.’ The woman pointed a long finger at Mersadie. ‘Worn, utilitarian, nothing metallic even on the fastenings, alphanumerics stitched into collar and cuffs – prison garb.’ The tall woman turned and looked at the man with the opal studded brow. ‘Sir, you own this ship, what do you wish done?’
The man stepped forwards. He looked exhausted, thought Mersadie, as though the universe had already piled more onto his shoulders than he ever thought he would be able to bear.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, looking just at Mersadie.
‘My name is Mersadie Oliton,’ she said.
‘Why were you a prisoner, Mersadie Oliton?’
She looked at him, thinking of what the truth would do in this moment, and then gave the only answer that came to mind.
‘I can’t say.’
‘Then you must remain a prisoner on this ship,’ he said, and nodded to the tall woman. The troopers moved forwards.
‘Please,’ said Mersadie, sudden panic rising as they gripped her arms. ‘I need to reach Terra, I need to reach the Praetorian.’
The officer in blue and gold-braid laughed, and then turned away as the troopers shoved Mersadie down to her knees and bound her hands behind her back.
Bhab Bastion, The Imperial Palace, Terra
Su-Kassen heard the door lock behind her, and closed her eyes. The smell of her chambers grew as she drew her breath. Relief crept into her for a moment as the quiet inside replaced the pulse of the sirens outside the Palace. She remained still, letting the moment stretch as she held the familiar scents in her nose: the tinge of hulkar smoke, cold stone and old fabric.
As senior officer of the Solar Defence command, she rated a mansion complex amongst the Imperial Palace’s tangle of towers and halls. She had avoided having to refuse such an offer by requesting a billet in the Bhab Bastion itself. Rogal Dorn himself had asked her why.
‘I learnt my craft on warships,’ she had replied. ‘I rest where I fight.’
He had nodded but not smiled, but an hour later she had been granted her request.
The Bhab Bastion stuck up from the mass of the Imperial Palace like the stump of a felled tree. Half a kilometre wide at its base, it was a cliff-sided block of undressed stone. It had been built when the land around it was a wasteland. For decades it had sat inviolate as the Palace had grown around it, replacing the desolation it had guarded with colonnades, domes and statue-capped spires. There had been rumours that it had defied multiple attempts to level it with increasingly apocalyptic quantities of explosives, until the Sigillite himself had ordered the mason-armies to leave it standing. Now, with gun nests crowding the Palace roofs, and void shields sparking above the armour-coated towers, the Bhab Bastion’s defiance seemed less of an ugly reminder of the past and more a warning of the future. When Rogal Dorn had begun to fortify the Palace in the wake of Horus’ treachery, he had made the Bhab Bastion the seat of his command. And for half a decade, a cluster of three small rooms set one-third of the way up its northern face had been Su-Kassen’s home.
Sleep. By all of Jupiter’s storms, she needed sleep.
A static crackle ran over her skin, and a smell of burnt dust and storm-charge replaced the taste of smoke. They were test-firing the bastion’s tertiary void shields again.
She opened her eyes, and was met by the gloom of the main chamber. She blinked and hung her uniform jacket from the iron hook on the wall without needing to look. A pair of round eyes lit at the other end of the room as Kelik woke. A clicking caw disturbed the quiet. She smiled and went forwards, picking up the falconer’s gauntlet from a low table.
‘Hush,’ she said. ‘It’s still day, not time for you to hunt yet.’ The gyre-hawk gave another unimpressed call as Su-Kassen released the catch on the cage. Kelik eyed her for a moment and then hopped onto her arm, ignored the gauntlet and climbed up to her shoulder. His claws dug into the ballistic weave and she winced. He blinked once, slowly, giving the distinct air of contempt. Su-Kassen laughed and moved to light the water pipe. It began to bubble as she moved around the room.
A low table of ancient cedar sat at the centre of the room between two worn floor cushions. A Saturnian power sabre hung on the wall above a brass-framed box that held one of the twin shot-pistols she had taken from a drift pirate captain in her first ship action – long ago now.
She should sleep. She only had two hours before she was back on station, but she knew she would not be able to, and besides, she found more rest in these few moments of mundane reality than in the dreams that would come to her if she slept.
She was drawing a cup of spice tea when Kelik flinched on her shoulder, head suddenly raised, eyes open and fixed on the door. The knock came a second later. She froze for a second.
Who would come to find her here? If it was an alert or crisis there were procedures, signals, but the vox set into the chamber wall remained silent. She lifted the shot-pistol out of its box, loading and cocking it with practised smoothness. There were guards throughout the bastion, security screens, and warriors of Dorn’s Huscarl retinue. But something had sent ice prickling her skin, and she had nearly died enough times not to ignore that warning.
‘Identify yourself,’ she ordered, levelling the pistol at the closed door.
‘One who would have your counsel,’ came the reply. Su-Kassen felt the breath hiss from her lungs with surprise. Then she shook herself and released the door lock.
‘My apologies for disturbing your rest, admiral,’ said Jaghatai Khan.
‘My lord…’ she began, bowing her head.
‘Please,’ he said, smiling and bowing his own head. ‘The impoliteness of an unexpected visitor negates all need for formality.’
‘What has happened?’ she asked, mind still whirling.
‘Nothing,’ said the Khan. ‘At least nothing that requires you for the moment.’ His eyes were like shards of ice catching sunlight. His presence was like the touch of the wind blowing across a mountain. On her shoulder, Kelik gave a soft call, and shifted his perch. She shook herself and stepped aside.
‘Please,’ she said, pulling the Chogorian words of hospitality from memory, suddenly aware of the shot-pistol still in her hand. ‘Enter as a friend.’
The Khan’s smile broadened.
‘I am humbled. May fortune flow from your generosity.’
He bowed his head before stepping forwards to pass through the door. The movement was slow, she noticed, unhurried, like the padding of a snow leopard across a glacier. All of that inhuman, dazzling speed was absent, replaced by poise. He did not wear his armour, but a coat of soft, black leather, lined and edged with white fur over layers of silk. The jewelled pommels of knives gleamed at his waist, and silver rings circled his fingers with falcons and snakes. His hair gleamed with oil and clinked with beads of copper, lapis and moonstone. He looked, she thought, just what he was: a warlord untamed by time or place.
She motioned to the cushions on the floor, tapping more glow-globes to life. The Khan’s gaze moved across the room with a fleeting glance that she was sure had taken in every detail. His eyes paused as she unloaded the shot-pistol and replaced it in its box beside the empty space
left by the other half of the paired weapons.
‘A spoil of battle without its twin,’ he said, sitting on one of the cushions. Arrayed in half-plate and silks, he somehow looked utterly at ease in the small space despite his size.
‘I gave the other away,’ she said, offering him a glass of spice tea.
‘To another warrior?’ he said, accepting the glass and taking a sip.
‘To my daughter.’
‘Of course… Where does she serve?’
‘I think you know that, my lord.’
She held his gaze for a second. His smile dimmed, and he nodded.
‘Captain Khalia Su-Kassen Hon II, last recorded deployment as officer commanding the Thunder Break, attached to the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet under the command of the Sixteenth Legion… the Sons of Horus.’
She nodded and held his gaze. Her thoughts had gone very still.
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Prior to the betrayal, of course,’ he added.
‘How may I serve, lord?’ she said, taking a seat opposite him.
He looked at her and then around the small room.
‘You have doubts about my brother’s method of fighting this war.’
‘I helped devise the battle plans, lord. I have no doubts.’ She paused.
The Khan smiled, but his eyes had moved to where Kelik still perched on her shoulder. The gyre-hawk gave a soft caw, unfolded his wings and glided to the Khan’s wrist. He grinned, eyes flashing as they met the bird’s gaze.
‘A Jovian void officer who speaks Chogorian, keeps a gyre-hawk and serves Terran spice tea on a table of cedar wood. You are a strange example of your kind, admiral.’
‘Perhaps, but are those things truly strange, my lord? I grew up in ships, in orbital shoal habitats, in corridors and spaces of metal where there was no sky, and trees lived only in tales.’
‘A cage,’ said the Khan, raising a finger and stroking Kelik’s crest. ‘You lived in a cage of ideas. You broke its bars and now find more comfort in reminders that life is more than iron and stone, and death in darkness.’
‘I like things that are different from what I knew.’ She shrugged.
‘But after this time is past, after your rest is done, you return them to their cage. You put back the ideas and oaths and become the warrior that you were made into. You go back to the small spaces you ran from.’
Su-Kassen felt herself frown. The thread of this conversation had flowed and turned in just a few moments in ways that made it difficult to follow. It was as though there were something that the Khan’s words were circling but not touching, some end which she could not see.
‘The first reports from Uranus arrived just after you left the command chamber,’ he said, and glanced at her, then looked back at the gyre-hawk. Kelik flicked his wings and opened his beak wide. Su-Kassen had the sudden impression that the bird was smiling.
‘A beautiful creature. Too beautiful to be in a cage. Keep one like this from the sky and it will go mad. You let him hunt, though, I can tell.’
‘When I can, I take him up to the parapets, and let him fly.’
‘And he always returns?’
‘Yes.’
The Khan smiled, then his face darkened, the expression like cloud passing over the sun.
‘The sirens sound outside, on and on. At Actinus Hive, an hour ago, ten thousand people took their own lives by sealing a zone of the hive and cutting off the air that kept them alive. The last message from inside the zone said that they could hear the howling of wolves when they dreamed and when they woke. There are others, too, smaller in scale but multiplying by the hour. Mars has fallen silent. Fire and fear spreads and spreads. Just before I knocked at your door, I was told that there have been pleas from Triton and the moon colonies of Neptune. They can see the battle-light from Pluto. They are asking for the ships taken from their orbits to be returned. They want help. They want the Praetorian of Terra to save them.’
Silence filled the moment.
‘Uranus holds?’ she asked at last. She thought of the ships, the hundreds of ships that had been redeployed from other planets to bolster the defence of the Elysian Gate. She thought of the resources pulled from Neptune to bolster Uranus’ defences. She thought of the cost paid by every enclave left undefended so that the traitors would have to fight and bleed to control Uranus and the gate it guarded.
‘I am called the Warhawk,’ said the Khan, ‘but maybe only because I was given a sky to fly in. My brother, Dorn, has only ever known cages – duty, honour, strength. And for every bar of every cage that has been placed around him by someone else he has made those bars stronger. He has made his cages smaller and stronger until to spread his wings would rip him apart.’
The Khan raised his arm and Kelik spread its wings and glided back to Su-Kassen’s shoulder.
‘You are right to question the way that this battle is being fought, admiral,’ he said. ‘You are right to allow your heart to doubt, and you are right to speak those doubts to my brother. He listens to you. He trusts you. And the way that he is choosing to fight this battle is maybe the last cage that he has made for himself.’
‘You think he is wrong?’
‘No, I think he is right, but that what he is having to do is breaking him. But he needs to hear the voice that tells him the price and lets him choose to do as he must. He needs to be allowed the moment of flight before he returns to the cage of necessity.’
The Khan stood and bowed. Su-Kassen rose to her feet, but he raised a hand to still her.
‘My thanks, admiral, for your hospitality, and for letting me speak as I will.’
She bowed her head, unsure what to say.
The Khan walked to the door, opened it, and then turned, looking back at her.
‘The enemy have come through the Elysian Path off Uranus in great force. The orbits of its moons are aflame. But Uranus holds.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘It holds.’
Lord of Summer Lightning
Inferno at the edge of light
Brotherhood
Battleship Lance of Heaven, Supra-Solar Gulf
The Falcon fleets turned in the abyss at the edge of the light. Quartets and trios of grey-white ships, they sailed alone in the dark, the orbital plain of the Solar System beneath them, the light of the sun a burning dot. They were ships of the V Legion, sleek and swift killers all. Having come to Terra, the Khan had broken his fleets into shards and cast them above and below the Solar System’s plane of orbit. There they circled the light of the sun like hawks around a falconer.
Some amongst the command hierarchy had wondered if the ships of the V should not have been added to the fleet strength around Luna and Terra, or sent to reinforce the Martian blockade, as had been done with the warships brought by Sanguinius. The Khan had said no. His warriors would stand on the soil of Terra, but his ships were not dogs to be chained to watch a hearth. Their strength was in movement, in swiftness and flight. Rogal Dorn agreed and that put an end to the dispute. The ships of the White Scars were scattered high and low above the circle of the planets, soaring free to watch the dark.
The inner limit at which ships could translate from the warp was, fundamentally, a sphere centred on the sun. Ships not using the navigational gates at Uranus or Pluto could translate at any point on the invisible skin of that sphere. And just because the Elysian and Khthonic Gates were primary beachheads that did not mean the traitors would not come from the plane above or below the system’s orbital disc. In fact, in some form, that seemed a certainty. So, the falcons of the V soared far from the sun’s light and watched and waited.
On the bridge of the Lance of Heaven, Jubal Khan knelt in armour, and let his thoughts circle. His guandao sat on the deck before him. Incense smoke rose from twin bowls set to either side of him. The Lance of Heaven had no command throne, just a raised platform of ebony and yellowed b
one. Around it the crew moved, near silent except for when an order was barked.
Through his slowed breathing, Jubal listened to the rise and fall of movements and the hum of machines. Always this moment before battle was the true storm, the building of silence and pressure before the flash and thunder. It was coming. Reports of death in the void had come from Pluto and Uranus, and the ship’s sensors had seen the light of battles burning. Here, looking down on the disc of the system, those lights might seem distant, remote, but Jubal knew that was a false perception. This would be a battle to end all battles, a cyclone that would envelop all and leave nothing untouched by its passing. He could hear the storm’s approach in the quiet.
Memories of the past fell into his thoughts like raindrops. He remembered duels fought for pride, and wars fought for ideals that now seemed like lies told to children. He remembered the faces of all those he had been close to: Sigismund, his soul chained to his oath and his sword; Boethius, frowning as he worked to master the guandao as the White Scars watched and laughed with derision and joy; Abaddon, bending to close the eyes of a dead brother in the red dust. He found himself unable to smile at the fragments of the past.
What would become of them?
What would become of them all in this storm that sought to wipe the truths of the past clean?
He heard the rhythm of the command deck change and opened his eyes.
‘What is seen?’ he asked.
The Lance of Heaven’s sensors saw one ship, then a second and then more, ship after ship descending like a sheaf of arrows. Auspex readers hit paradox as they tried to identify individual vessels. Data drowned the minds of sensor servitors. Enemy strength values became approximations within seconds: ten, twenty-five, one hundred and six, hundreds, thousands…
Out in the dark, at a distance so vast that the fires of their engines were lost against the arc of stars, an armada bore down on the Lance of Heaven and its three companion warships. The ships of the armada had begun their acceleration soon after they had materialised in the void and flew now in a dense mass.