by John French
He slammed forwards into the second blade slave before its sword could find its mark. A reek of burning flesh and hot iron filled his mouth. He gripped the neck beneath the jaw of the blade slave’s helm. He felt his fingers burn as they dug into the warp-filled flesh. He lifted and twisted, momentum and strength flowing through him and sending the blade slave tumbling through the air towards its twin. Ash and orange fire scattered from it. The other blade slave dodged aside and lunged forwards, but Abaddon was already on Layak. He read the warding blow of the Word Bearer’s staff and took its force on his shoulder guard. Layak staggered. Ghost-light crawled over the staff. The priest’s mask was snarling, iron fangs chewing air. Abaddon looped his arms around Layak, reversed his grip on the gladius, and brought the point of his blade to the priest’s side.
Layak went very still. Both blade slaves froze where they were.
From a distance it would have looked almost like an embrace, but it was nothing so kind. Any movement and Abaddon would pull the blade into Layak’s chest, puncturing each and every rib, heart and lung with a single trust. On Cthonia they called it the murderer’s greeting. The two were so close now that Abaddon could smell the incense reek of the Word Bearers priest.
‘Brotherhood is not about what misguided craft went into both our making,’ hissed Abaddon. ‘It is about the choices we make.’ He turned his head slowly to look at the two statue-still blade slaves. ‘I look at you and see a thing that has made those who were his brothers his creatures. And in that I see all I need to know of you.’
Abaddon tensed for a second and let the power-sheathed tip of the gladius burn the side of Layak’s chest-plate. Then he let go, and stepped back. The blade slaves snapped forwards, but Layak raised a hand as he straightened.
‘And I see in you all that the gods have spoken of,’ said Layak. ‘My thanks.’
‘For what?’ growled Abaddon.
‘For illumination, and for giving me my life, Ezekyle Abaddon. Such an act creates a bond between souls, and a bond is a gift.’ He bowed his head briefly, turned and began to walk away, staff tapping. The two blade slaves shrank to their normal size and sheathed their weapons. Abaddon watched them as they walked to one of the doors out of the atrium.
‘The gods see you, Abaddon. They see you walk alone even amongst those you choose to call brothers.’
Incremented destruction
Cascade
Send this word
Battleship Iron Blood, Trans-Uranic Gulf
The flames of battle stretched from the Elysian Gate towards the orbits of Uranus like the arm of a jewelled god. The Daughter of Woe hung over the gate itself, a new and ugly false moon amongst the planet’s true children. Uranus’ defences fired on it without cease. Explosions burst on the space hulk’s surface. Shreds of its substance puffed into the void like dust exploding from raindrops. It had no guns to fire back on its tormentors, but the ships that orbited it spoke in its stead. Rolling barrages of missiles and macro shells streamed from them. And behind it, shielded by its bulk, more and more ships dropped through the hole in reality.
In the three days since the first ship had breached the Elysian Gate, the battle for Uranus had spread across its orbit. The outer circles of the planet’s defences had fallen within eighteen hours of the first shots being fired, but since then the assault had slowed. Now the fight was for the hundreds of stations, moons and habitats – from the Mechanicum outpost Tau-16-1, which hung like a black needle in low orbit, to the ancient Cadum Station, its geodesic sphere pitted by millennia of dust impacts. Each of the planet’s seven moons held small clouds of their own void-stations, and untold billions of humans lived in these scattered islands of life and air.
Assault groups waded through fire to hack and burn their way into stations and habitats. Torpedoes and munitions shot into orbit to plough hours-long paths into their targets. So far, the defenders had retained their dominance, but day by day the attacking forces grew. Stations died or fell, and the sphere of Uranus bled flames without cease. Defence forces counter-attacked, taking back stations while they were still burning with the fires of their first defeat. The vast bronze-and-plasteel star of the Sinderfell dynastic enclave had changed hands three times in as many days.
The moon of Umbriel swung across the sunward edge of Uranus as the fourth day of battle began. Armoured hab-domes dotted its craters, and tethered gun bastions hung in its airless skies. A quartet of assault carriers detached from the Daughter of Woe and boosted towards the emerging moon. Layered in armour and void shields, their hulls groaned with troops suckled from the guts of the hulk. A pair of battle cruisers fell in beside the quartet of carriers and the IV Legion strike cruiser Aesculus dropped into the lead of the formation.
A group of six warships lay across their path. Smaller than the traitor cruisers and assault carriers, they were Legion ships, four of the Imperial Fists and two of the Blood Angels. Their troop complements had been stripped to garrison Terra, but their commanders were still some of the finest void warriors in the Imperium, their crews trained and drilled to Legion standards.
They began to fire, moving and rolling in the void as they closed with the oncoming enemy. Torpedoes surged from the prows of the attackers. Squadrons launched from the defenders’ ships to tear the warheads from the void. Lance beams danced over the assault group’s shields.
The six loyalist craft accelerated, their guns singling out an assault barque. The ship listed, its belly crawling with flame, skeins of oily energy stuttering around its hull as its shields failed to light. In its holds, a hundred thousand soldiers taken from the Grey Worlds of the Kayuas Belt became ash as plasma vented from cracked conduits.
Fire criss-crossed the void as Umbriel’s defence turrets targeted the oncoming torpedoes. Explosions ringed the small moon. Then the nova shell struck it. Fired from a bombardment cruiser far out of the battle sphere, it had been timed to strike just at this moment. Primed with a haywire generator and thousands of scrap-signal initiators, it burst on Umbriel’s surface. Clouds of distorting energy and ghost auspex signals fogged the defence sensors just as they locked on to incoming torpedoes. Graviton and haywire warheads struck Umbriel moments later. Crushing gravity fields yanked the moon’s tethered bastions out of alignment and cracked the shells of surface habitats.
The strike was not decisive, but it made Umbriel’s defences blink – and that was enough. A stutter in the deluge of fire from the guns, a split-second’s pause, and the assault carriers began to shed breaching pods like seeds from ripe corn-heads. Their warship escorts came about to meet the six defenders head-on.
Gunships cut through the void around growing thunderheads of burning gas. Their targets were the gun platforms tethered to the moon. Those craft that struck true poured troops into the guts of the moon’s bastions. Corridors lit with gunfire. One bastion detonated its magazines, and the fire-scattered night was dotted with a brief new star.
Forrix watched the data strand from the Umbriel assault for a single second more, then let it dissolve back into the tide of symbols and numerals that cascaded before his sight. Across the entire sphere of the battle, Umbriel was but one amongst dozens of assaults, amongst hundreds of engagements, where counting losses on either side in anything less than thousands was meaningless. As First Captain and chief logistician of the Iron Warriors, he had lived every second of this operation as simulations spooled through the Iron Blood’s cogitators. The reality, even seen in the cold flow of symbols and numerals, was breath-taking.
Nearly four thousand primary-grade warships had already exited the warp from the Elysian Gate, pouring into the Trans-Uranic Gulf. They had paid for every kilometre advanced, but they had the coin in ships and firepower. They had pushed and pushed forwards, spreading out and advancing on the defenders not at a burning charge, but slowly, inexorably, like the erosion of mountains by ice. And just as mountains inevitably became dust, so this victory was assured.
That was one of the things that made it beautiful.
Forrix’s current role was to control and marshal the forces still exiting the warp. That alone was a monumental task. For all the power they had brought to this battle already, there were still twice as many ships waiting in the immaterium. Normally, many of them would have been carried away in an etheric riptide or assaulted by neverborn creatures by now. But while storms were churning the warp, they had not touched the ships that came to make war under the light of the sun. The gods and their daemons – for even Forrix had begun to call them that – held back their hunger and spite from the warriors of the Warmaster.
Forrix heard the low click of pneumatics and looked to where Perturabo, primarch of the Iron Warriors, stood at the centre of the strategium. Pistons and layers of armour whirred as his gaze moved to a different cascade of hololithic symbols.
‘The condition update from the assault on Pluto is overdue,’ said the primarch.
‘Analysis of the battle-light from its orbits indicates an engagement on a larger scale than we predicted,’ said Forrix.
‘Than Aximand predicted,’ said Perturabo.
‘He still has enough main force to deploy that he should achieve domination within the required time.’ When Perturabo did not respond, Forrix said, ‘Something troubles you, my lord?’
The primarch turned his gaze on Forrix.
‘So far each of the strategic projections has held true. The intelligence from the Twentieth Legion has proven accurate, and where tactical reality is different, it is predictably so – the moving of main fleet forces from Neptune to Uranus, the lacing of the Plutonic Gulf with additional munitions. All of it is within a narrow band of cautiousness. We progress as we intended, and they respond as predicted. Everything is as predicted.’
‘You mean that there is something wrong with a plan that is executed as intended?’
Perturabo was silent for a long moment. The plan for the assault of the Solar System was many things, but chiefly it was the creation of Horus and Perturabo, bound with Magnus the Red’s semi-corporeal ghost of insight. It was a work of inhuman genius, a battle plan that existed not only in the four dimensions of time and space, but also in the realm of the warp. And Perturabo had been the architect of the opening moves. Even in abstract, to wield forces on the scale involved had taxed Forrix’s abilities, but the Lord of Iron had alloyed force and time and space into a strategy that would take the Khthonic and Elysian Gates in days. It was direct, incremental and irresistible: war as bloody art. But now, looking at the smooth fit between reality and theory, Forrix saw the flaw.
‘It should not be so clean,’ he said. ‘The defenders fight hard, and make us pay, but they do nothing that we have not anticipated.’
‘My brother,’ said Perturabo softly, his eyes still on the flow of data, ‘is many things, and his flaws were always hidden by the praise heaped on him. Call him steadfast, and that is merely a lacquer given to blunt unreason. Loyalty in him is merely a need to belong. Nobility is the gilding to base pride…’
Forrix held himself still. He had not heard Perturabo talk of Rogal Dorn directly in years.
‘But the one thing my brother is not, is a fool.’
Perturabo lapsed into silence. Forrix did not know what to say.
The Lord of Iron remained silent as the data of the battle danced on the black orbs of his eyes.
‘Continue as planned,’ he said at last. ‘Bring the lost sons through the gate.’
Freighter ship Antius, Uranus high orbit
‘Transmit again,’ said Vek. ‘Make it clear it is for the primary overseer.’
‘There is no response, sir,’ replied the signal officer. The woman glanced up at Vek and then down at her instruments.
‘Try again!’ snapped Vek, then caught himself and raised a placating hand. ‘Try again,’ he said, and turned away, running a hand over his face. He closed his eyes for a second, saw the bubbles of colour blossom briefly behind his eyelids. His hand was shaking. He should sleep, but for the love of all that was precious how would he be able to…?
His hand strayed to where the small pendant had hung around his neck for these last few years, hidden from other eyes. It stopped and dropped to his side. The pendant was not there. Somehow, in the panic to get off Cordelia, it must have broken and fallen to the floor. This was what? The tenth time in as many days that he had reached for the small golden aquila. He found himself trying to remember the words of the prayers that his wife had taught him. She had been the reason he had kept the pendant, just as she was the reason he had joined the quiet faith of the Lectitio Divinitatus. She had been the reason he had done a lot of things.
‘Transmitting on all available frequencies,’ said the signal officer. Vek nodded but did not look around. He should go and sleep… How long had it been? A day? Two? More? It had taken that long to drop over the arc of Uranus to its sunward side. Koln had danced them on a jinking path while the battle spread in silent flashes behind them. The destruction had yet to reach this hemisphere of the planet’s orbits. But chaos had run ahead of the fighting. Ships crowded towards every moon and habitat, clamouring for shelter, for help – for anything that they thought would shield them from harm.
The Antius had made for Oberon and its girdle of refinery and ore-processing plants. Fewer ships had fled here; it was further out, and its pipes and industrial platforms offered less obvious sanctuary, compared with Titania’s city-warrens and belts of defence stations. But its approaches still swarmed with craft trying to get close, trying to dock, trying to get the attention of the moon’s rulers. The Antius had to correct its course minute by minute just to keep from colliding with other craft. Vek had connections on Oberon, good connections that had proved true even when things went wrong. It seemed now that those past alliances counted for little when the heavens were ablaze.
‘Still no response, sir,’ said the signal officer. ‘I can’t even tell if they are–’
The signal officer broke off. Lights had sparked across her consoles, and parchment had begun to spool from a data transcriber.
‘What is it?’ asked Vek.
‘Officer of the watch!’ she called. The alternate sub-master that Koln had left in charge started forwards, but Vek snapped out his question again.
‘What is it?’
The officer looked around at him, blinking. There was a fog in her half-focused eyes. Terra’s pact, but she is exhausted, realised Vek.
‘We are being hailed, Master Vek,’ said the officer. Her hands were shaking as she peered down into the flickering green screens in front of her.
‘By Oberon governance?’ asked Vek.
‘No, it’s a military transmission, from a warship…’ Her voice trailed off.
Vek went still.
‘What does–’ he began.
‘They are requesting confirmation of our report that we picked up a prisoner adrift in the void… They want us to confirm that she is alive.’
‘Where is the ship?’ asked Vek, before the duty officer could ask.
‘I don’t know. Close, I’d guess, to have picked us out.’
Vek rubbed his hands over his forehead. This could be a chance… They needed to dock at Oberon, unload the hundreds of souls in their holds. Maybe he could even use this to barter transport for him and the children to Saturn or the inner system.
‘Confirm and respond that we will hand the prisoner over in dock at Oberon. Ask them to follow us in.’
The signal officer blinked at him, then at the watch officer, who looked relieved that someone other than him had decided. The signaller began to key controls.
‘Stop!’ The call came from the doors to the bridge. Vek turned as Aksinya vaulted up the stairs onto the helm platform. His lifeward’s face was flushed, her eyes wide. ‘Do not transmit!’
‘What–’ began Vek.
�
�Don’t transmit that signal,’ called Aksinya, striding forwards, but the signal officer was keying her controls with fatigue-narrowed focus. Aksinya leapt towards the officer, but the distance was a fraction too far and the officer’s hand pulled the transmission lever a fraction of a second before Aksinya yanked the woman’s hand back. The officer let out a yelp of pain. Aksinya looked down at her for a moment, breathing hard, then she turned to Vek and grabbed his arm. ‘Sir, you have to come with me now,’ she hissed, just below the hearing of everyone but him. The bridge crew were looking around, puzzlement blending with the exhaustion on their faces.
‘Why?’ he said, trying to pull his arm free as Aksinya shoved him towards the bridge’s main exit.
‘Why would they want to confirm whether the prisoner is alive? Why in all that is happening would they seek us out to make sure?’
Vek felt the blood in his limbs become ice.
He could see the great bulk of another freighter through the pitted armourglass of the viewport, so close it appeared you could have jumped from one to the other.
He opened his mouth.
Macro shells struck the freighter beyond the viewport and tore it into shreds of metal and tatters of flame.
‘Listen to me!’ Mersadie shouted at the door. ‘I need to speak to your master. He needs to speak to me!’ The door remained shut.
‘They won’t listen,’ said Nilus. ‘Think about it. They have no reason to, and every reason to think that talking to an escaped prisoner might be a very bad idea.’
She did not reply but looked at the door. Nilus shifted from where he sat in the corner of the chamber and poked at the single bowl of broth the guard had brought.
‘There has to be a way to make them listen.’
‘To what?’ asked Nilus, looking up from the bowl. ‘What are you going to tell them? You haven’t even told me why you need to get Rogal Dorn, and we have the bond of mutual suffering, and now this rather inadequate cell, to share.’