by John French
The conference ended an hour later, the gathered masters of the Imperium leaving without formality.
‘Admiral,’ said Malcador, as Su-Kassen made to go, ‘a moment of your time.’
Behind her, Andromeda-17 was just leaving. Su-Kassen caught the gene-witch’s eye, and saw that there was sorrow in her look – sorrow, or perhaps pity.
Then the door to the chamber closed, and it was just her and the old man who was the Regent of the Imperium, alone in a long moment of silence. A thin sheet of parchment sat on the table in front of him, she noticed. It was a spool from an auto-scribe, one of the types used for archive reports. A section of the words on its face had been underlined in red.
‘There is something that you should know,’ he said. ‘Please, sit down, admiral.’
Fortress Moon Kerberos, Pluto
‘Breaching charge,’ called Saduran, and one of his brothers charged forwards. Saduran came around the corner and fired up into the cluster of rotor cannons set in the ceiling above the blast doors. Target runes went red in his helm. His brother with the breaching charge was past him. Saduran fired. Bolt shells breathed from the barrel of his gun. Explosions burst amongst the rotor cannons.
The rest of his squad was with him now, firing up at the defence weapons. The cannons fired back. A deluge of hard rounds hit the warrior to Saduran’s right and punched him back off his feet. Ceramite splintered. The warrior with the breaching charge was halfway to the door. Ten paces, a second’s sprint. One of the rotor cannons spun around. Targeting beams reached through the smoke. The cowled statue beside the blast doors trembled. Hidden seams in the bronze split wide with a boom of pistons.
The ground shook again as a battle-automaton stepped out from where it had stood behind the shell of the statues. Fuel cables snapped free of gun pods and limbs. Weapons rose with a melody of gears and a chuckle of building energy.
Saduran felt the moment blur as his hearts kicked, and stimulants flooded his veins.
It had taken them hours to reach this point. They were deep in the core of the Kerberos fortress-moon. The unbreakable heart of Pluto’s defences had proved to be quite breakable in reality. It was just a question of the cost. With the Imperial Fists in flight towards the inner system, it had only been a matter of time before Kerberos’ surface defences had failed. Then Iron Warriors bombardment barques had torn a kilometre-wide chunk from its face with mass drivers, and waves of assault craft had poured into the breach even as debris was still spinning outwards from the wound. Half of the first wave had died in seconds. Those that did reach the crater ripped in the moon’s flesh found the guns of battle-servitors waiting for them.
Half a million dead.
That was the cost of the first wave. Half a million human soldiers pressed from mongrel clans of void pirates and ship wreckers. They served their purpose, though.
A cohort of Iron Warriors Terminators had teleported into the main battery still functioning close to the breach. It had cost two strike cruisers, but the Iron Warriors had paid without hesitation. The crews manning the mountain-sized guns were still loading and firing as the Terminators cut them down. The fire from the wounded side of the moon dwindled, and fell silent. Ships slipped forwards, landing craft buzzing from their flight decks.
Companies of Sons of Horus and battalions of Iron Warriors entered the battle as the first wave foundered. Masters of signal had analysed the casualty and engagement data and chose targets as the gunships and torpedoes were in flight. Where the defenders were weak, where they had retreated, where their guns were stammering, there the Legions struck like knives plunged into already-open wounds. Saduran and his brothers had been in that second wave. Almost all were newborn, Legion warriors of years or months. These last days of battle, though, had made veterans of them all. Those that had survived.
It was murder in the tunnels of the moon. Most of the defending troops that had not fled with the Imperial Fists were of Mechanicum stock, weapon servitors and modified machine helots. Individually they were no match for a legionary, but they had numbers and time to prepare. Endless gun nests and traps met the assaulting troops, and the resistance increased the deeper they went. There was no retreat amongst the defenders. Either through programmed control, or desperation, or hate, they fought to the last.
The floor and walls of the fortress-moon shook and shook without cease. Its remaining gun batteries were still firing even as the attackers bored into its heart. Across the orbits of Pluto, Kerberos’ siblings were already falling, aflame, ringed by ships, their innards burning as the IV and XVI Legions cored them out, passage by passage. Pluto belonged to the Warmaster. It was just a matter of crushing the last fingers of resistance that still clung on in the face of the inevitable.
Looking up at the automaton striding out to defend Kerberos’ heart, Saduran realised that he would not see that victory.
He dived aside as the weapon on its shoulder fired. Blue light scored a line across the decking. He rolled. The beam struck two of his squad brothers. They vanished into dust and ash. Saduran came up firing.
‘Use the charge,’ he shouted into the vox as he fired. He could see his squad mate with the breaching charge running for the automaton’s right leg.
Bolt-rounds splashed across the automaton’s chest. Its gun mount rotated towards Saduran. Energies lit within the barrel. An explosion enveloped the automaton’s side. Saduran staggered as the blast wave rolled through the air and floor. The automaton listed like a punch-drunk brawler. Smoke and flame snaked up its side. Pipes vented burning oil from beneath torn armour. Sparks crawled across its body. But it did not fall.
It straightened, gun mount swivelling to aim. Saduran felt a snarl of laughter and rage come to his lips. He raised his bolter to fire a last shot of defiance.
The automaton froze.
Saduran’s last bolts smacked into its torso. For a heartbeat it did not move. Then it folded to the ground with a sound of releasing pistons and unwinding gears. Saduran stared at the machine as it settled onto the ground, still burning.
On the ceiling, the rotor cannons stopped firing, their barrels spinning on momentum in the sudden silence.
‘What…’ began one of the other survivors from the squad, but the question vanished behind a rolling chorus of clanks and thuds. Every door leading off the chamber thumped open. The air began to stir and billow as wind blew through the space. The vox began to chatter with voices. Every system across the fortress-moon had just shut down, every door had unlocked, and all the batteries had fallen silent at once.
A clanking boom trembled the deck as the blast doors to Kerberos’ core started to open. Metre-thick layers of metal peeled back one after another. Saduran found himself rising, stepping forwards.
‘Brother?’ called one of his squad mates, but he ignored the word. Silent dark filled the space beyond. He stopped on the threshold, paused and removed his helm. The air smelled of burnt plastek and hot wiring. He could see small lights winking on banks of machines now, blue, red and green, stuttering in time with the pulse of the machines. The chamber was vast. He could feel it in the air even though his eyes could not reach to the edge of the shadows. He took another step, gun low but ready. Nothing moved.
A stutter of lightning split the dark, rolling up the side of a vast metal sphere at the heart of the chamber.
Saduran paused again. There was another note in the air, a high vibration that ached in his teeth. The vox chopped between the voices of Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus legionaries. The moon had gone dead, as though something vital had been cut…
Another arc of lightning flashed up the side of the metal sphere ahead. The ache in his teeth was a shrill call in his ears now.
He took another step.
Another flash, and he saw the servitors hanging from their cable links. He nudged one with the barrel of his bolter. It swung slackly. Its weapons clinked. As though somethi
ng vital had been cut…
Three flashes of lightning, and in the white glare he could see the tech-priests lying on control gantries high up on the sides of a forest of smaller metal spheres. Red lights were winking on control consoles.
Something cut… or something drawn back, like the backdraught of a fire, or the inhalation of a beast…
Cold lanced into his core. He turned and began to run for the doors that were open to the rest of the moon, the moon they had spent blood and time taking, the moon that now was ringed with warships and filled with troops. His squad mates shouted at him, but he was calling into the vox, shouting through the chop and hiss that was rising in time with the buzzing in his ears.
Behind him, lightning bolts flashed and flashed, bleaching the reactor chamber blinding white. And he knew it was too late, that these were the last stretched moments of his life, and that this war that had remade him had now come to claim him.
A flash…
Brighter than lightning, and a sound beyond hearing that filled him for the endless instant before there was nothing.
Strike Frigate Lachrymae, Pluto
Sigismund opened his eyes. The blade of his sword was cool against his forehead. He had waited in silence, his thoughts turned inwards. But now he needed to return to his purpose. The murmur of oath-words filled the bridge of the Lachrymae. He lowered the sword, but did not sheathe it. Boreas and Rann’s holo-projections met his gaze.
‘The moment is here, brother,’ said Rann.
Sigismund nodded, feeling the words he was about to speak gain weight on his tongue.
‘Turn the fleet,’ said Sigismund. ‘Cut them down.’
Kerberos detonated.
It was no small thing to destroy a moon. The agents of the Fabricator General had resisted. To them, such an act was a violation, the killing of machines – a tragic loss of function and knowledge. Rogal Dorn had not relented, and so it was done. Munitions had arrived on Pluto’s moons in vast numbers. Their magazines swelled with macro plasma cores, blocks of explosive and cylinders of accelerant. All of it had been done so that it would seem part of preparations for the coming war. The eyes of Horus amongst the defenders saw only stores arriving for a siege, and did not ask or think any more of it.
The tech-priests had done their work, layering in time-delayed overload routines into primary, secondary and tertiary reactor controls. Charges were set in the bloated munition stores, all synchronised to a single command that would make them all parts of a single, great act of destruction. The data-jinn that the tech-priests created to enact the design had needed to gestate for months in the data-looms of deep-void facilities, and when it was complete all those involved had the memories of what they had done removed. It was a thing of artistry and genius, a hymn to the limits of knowledge and machine-craft, but none of those who wrought it would ever wish to claim their due for their work. They gave it a name, though, a designation that wove its purpose with a whisper of forgotten dread.
They had named it Vanth-Primus-Nul.
As the Imperial Fists retreated, the data-jinn had begun its work. Incubated in the core data-reservoirs of each fortress-moon, it uncoiled into full being. Tentacles of code in a dozen machine languages reached through data-cables and photon lines and noospheric connections. From system to system it spread. It overwrote command codes and retasked servitors. Data altered, and cycles of unmaking began in the spirit of each machine it passed through. Even on the moons already in the attackers’ hands, Vanth-Primus-Nul carried on doing its work, increment by increment, silent and unseen. By the time the Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus had begun their assault on Kerberos in earnest, the process was already past the point where it could be undone.
The blast wave of Kerberos’ death killed two hundred and five ships. Void shields vanished. Armour melted. Chunks of wreckage the size of mountains tore through hulls. Static rolled through the vox-channels. Seconds later, Hydra and Charon followed their brother. The magazines and fuel of hundreds of warships added their fire to the inferno. Detonations leapt between the vessels manoeuvring too close to the moons. Explosions chained all the way back to the Khthonic Gate. Ships at the edge of the blast scrambled to get clear. Order vanished. Mayhem and death ringed the last planet of the Solar System, and Pluto shook in its orbit.
Out in the reach, towards the sun, the ships of the Imperial Fists turned. Thrusters flipped them back over in mid-flight. The Sons of Horus vessels pursuing them ploughed onwards even as the realisation of what had happened rippled through them. On the bridge of his ship, Horus Aximand saw the fleet that had been fleeing but a moment before turn and roar back directly towards him. At his back, the shouts of officers and servitors filled his ears. Behind his mask of flayed skin, understanding slid into him, cold and sharp.
The guns of his ships roared as the fleet of the First Sphere met them head-on.
Bhab Bastion, The Imperial Palace, Terra
‘Admiral…’
‘Yes?’ Su-Kassen blinked, not looking at where Archamus stood just inside the closed door out of her quarters. She could almost feel the Space Marine’s discomfort.
‘There is a signal,’ he said.
‘Of course there is.’ She was still staring into the open pistol case on the stone mantle. The weapon’s pepper-pot barrel gleamed blue-black in the low light of the single glow-globe she had lit.
Why had she come back here? She was needed in the command bastion. There were things that needed to be done. Time would not stop or slow for this instant. Why would it? Death was history, its tread and pulse. No one death would shake it from that course.
But here she was.
Archamus had gone with her when she left Malcador’s chamber. She had begun to walk, and the Imperial Fist had silently followed. She had not questioned why, but a part of her mind that felt like it belonged to someone else wondered if Dorn had asked him to go with her, to watch over her in this moment. She did not consider it for long – there was no space in her for thoughts, just the words of the recent past ringing in her ears. So she had let the Huscarl walk with her and did not think about why.
It was quiet. The last weeks had stripped the continent-city of its crowds and bustle. Nothing moved in its halls except the twitching guns of the weapon servitors that watched everything with crystal eyes. Stab-lights washed across the high windows of the Silesian Cloister as they crossed into the Northern Circuits.
It was night outside, she realised. The time had been drained of meaning over the last days. What did it matter if the sun was rising when your mind was focused on planets halfway across the system?
On she walked, not minding her path or steps. The places she passed through were empty. When she did see other humans they moved in clusters, flanked by soldiers. She recognised the green-and-silver cloaks of the Qui-Helic Guard, the crimson armour of the Inferalti Hussars, and the grey-and-ochre fatigues of the Cordesh Cavalry – the regiments of the Old Hundred deployed within the walls in what might be the last days of the Imperium they helped found. Nothing and no one moved unescorted within the Palace, except the Tenebrae. Malcador’s eyes and ears watched and listened from the shadows and passed like breaths of chilly wind as they hunted whispers.
Hundreds of millions lived in the Palace tending its functions, from those holding high bureaucratic office to the serfs performing the lowest menial tasks. Most remained, attending to the crucial duties that kept the Emperor’s seat of power working, but whatever solace their positions had given them before offered little comfort now. Every district and enclave had been locked down. Food, water and information had become rationed as the intra-system convoys halted, and the reality of war, often distant, had made its presence known. A black market had sprung up within days. Su-Kassen had read the reports: a senior supervisor of records caught crossing security lines with the water he had bought with the jewelled rings from his fingers; the high matriarch of a noble
scribe-clan who had refused to turn back from a containment line, striding past with a laugh, only to be gunned down; the northern records district that was still burning after a chemical stove had exploded. It would only get worse with time, and then…
‘Are you all right, admiral?’
She had blinked and looked up at Archamus.
The Huscarl had glanced down at her. ‘It is just that I am not certain as to your purpose in walking the Palace.’
They were crossing a stone bridge that spanned a ravine between two internal Palace walls. A chilly wind blew across her face. She blinked at the strangeness of the question and the double strangeness of who was asking it. She frowned, not certain how, or whether, to answer.
‘I apologise,’ said Archamus after a moment. ‘I should not have intruded.’
They lapsed back into silence.
They walked on, through passages narrow enough to brush Archamus’ shoulder guards, and others wide enough that a platoon of soldiers could have marched down them line abreast. Most were dark, lit by a scattering of lamps or not at all; fuel and power, like everything else, was a resource that now had to be hoarded and spent with care. All corridors and spaces were empty, echoing.
After half an hour, Su-Kassen realised that they had recrossed their path several times. A while after that she finally had to admit to herself that she had no idea where they were. As if in answer to that fact, they joined a spiral stair of brass and began to climb. Archamus had not tried to guide her, but just followed. At last she realised that her steps had taken them back to the Bhab Bastion – and so she had found herself staring down at the shot-pistol.
‘We always return to our cages…’ she said to herself. Across the room, Kelik stirred his feathers in reply.
‘Do you wish something?’ asked Archamus.