by John French
He shivered, and lowered his thoughts into the lesser enumerations.
‘You do not… like this,’ said Ignis from behind him. Somehow his thoughts had been disturbed enough that he had not noticed his Legion brother at his shoulder.
‘No,’ replied Ahriman, still tasting ashes in his mouth as he spoke. ‘No, I do not like it.’
‘I know,’ said Ignis, looking at him with an utterly unchanged expression. ‘I have already made and stated that observation.’
Ahriman turned away.
‘The question that attends the observation is why you perceive our circumstances as you do?’ asked Ignis.
Ahriman let out a breath and looked back at the Master of the Order of Ruin.
‘I do not like what we are doing for every reason,’ he said. ‘For every reason, brother.’
Freighter ship Antius, Jovian Gulf
Door slamming open.
There was a metallic taste in Mersadie’s mouth.
Heavy metal-on-metal footsteps.
Vengeful Spirit…
She was on the Vengeful Spirit. There were… there were bodies heaped on the deck. Limbs tangled. Flesh ripped. Blood pooling. Something rose from the gore. Slicked fur. Red muzzle. Dripping-fang grin.
‘Mersadie…’
She knew it was a Space Marine even before the impossibly huge shadow fell over her.
‘Mersadie, wake up…’
A moon high in the winter sky. Its face a curve of silver, now a dividing line of light and dark.
‘Mersadie, wake up! Wake up now!’
She turned to see a shadow form behind her.
The Warmaster’s equerry…
Maloghurst was known as ‘the Twisted’, as much for his labyrinthine mind as the horrible injuries that had broken his body and left him grotesquely malformed.
‘Loken,’ he said, ‘these are civilians.’
‘I can vouch for them,’ said Loken.
Maloghurst turned his eyes to her. A hand fell on her shoulder.
‘Wake up now!’
The hand on her shoulder shook her.
She opened her eyes.
The smell of blood and split organs filled her mouth and nose. Her head arched up and she vomited. Red light was flicking through the passage.
On. Off.
On. Off.
For a moment the walls and decking swam and warped.
Vengeful Spirit… She was on the…
She was on the Antius.
‘Mersadie.’ She looked up. Nilus was crouching beside her, his long fingers just withdrawing from where they had shaken her shoulder. The Navigator’s skin was white, the shadows soaking up the red blinking light. His eyes were wide. He looked as though he was about to be sick himself. Or about to run.
‘Where…’ she began, but then she remembered Koln, saw the flicker-skip of movement, the bodies of the crimson troopers torn to shreds, and then the flare and kick of the pistol and Koln’s head coming apart. No, that was the dream… the dream…
She twisted, eyes going to the gore on the walls and floor, the heaps of meat and cloth, the gun lying next to her on the deck. Fresh bile surged up her throat, and splattered the deck. Nilus flinched back.
‘Where are the children?’ she gasped, pushing herself up.
Nilus jerked his head to where two small shapes lay slumped against the wall. Further down the corridor Aksinya lay beside the open door hatch. Her weapons were still in her hands beside her. Blood had soaked her clothes black. A last additional gunshot wound had ripped a hole in her neck. Her eyes were open, but they would see nothing any more.
Mersadie lunged for the children, found warmth in their hands.
‘Catatonic,’ said Nilus. ‘Whatever happened here…’
But Mersadie was shaking the girl and boy, not listening to the Navigator.
‘Mori, Noon! Listen to me! You have to wake up!’
‘We have to get to the shuttle,’ said Nilus, his voice rising from cold to shrill. ‘I didn’t see anyone alive coming here and the engines are still on. I think all the crew are dead. We are rudderless…’
‘We’re not going to the shuttle.’
‘If they killed the crew then this is a tomb.’
‘No!’ Mersadie snarled. Her head snapped up to look at the Navigator. He took a step back. ‘There are hundreds of people on this ship, and I am not leaving them to die while I run.’
‘That did not stop you before.’
‘It does now.’ She looked down at the children. ‘And in all those people there might be some who might be able to get us to safety.’
‘You are serious, aren’t you?’
She nodded. ‘Go if you want.’
Nilus swore, looked around, and then swore again.
‘I’ll go to the bridge,’ he said. ‘I know something about ships.’
Mersadie heard him move away down the corridor. She bent over the still girl.
‘Mori…’ she said, and shook her. The girl’s head twitched. ‘Mori!’ The girl’s eyes flickered and opened and her shriek split the air. ‘Mori, look at me! Look at me!’ Mersadie held tight to the girl’s hands. Mori’s eyes steadied. She was breathing hard, face flecked with drying red. ‘Mori, I need you to listen to me. We are going to be fine, but your brother needs you. He needs you to help him stay safe. You can help him, can’t you.’
The girl nodded once and then again, faster, her eyes twitching but not moving from Mersadie’s.
‘Noon,’ she whispered. ‘Noon… Is he?’
‘He is asleep, just like you were. He will wake up, but we need to get out of here.’
‘Father…?’
Mersadie blinked. She thought of what Nilus had said about the crew being dead, about the crimson troopers, about the shadow creature that had been Sub-mistress Koln.
Daemon… an old word but one that was true nonetheless.
‘Your father would want you safe,’ said Mersadie, ‘so I am going to make sure you are.’
Mori nodded.
‘All right,’ said Mersadie. ‘I need you to stand up and keep hold of your brother’s hand.’
Mersadie lifted the boy, his sister gripping his dangling hand. He was heavy, and her muscles ached as she took the first step towards the open door hatch. Mori’s eyes found the still shape of Aksinya, and she heard the girl draw breath to cry. Thick fluid was still dripping from the ceiling.
‘Look at your brother,’ said Mersadie. ‘That’s it, look at your brother. Keep walking.’
They reached the hatch.
Down, thought Mersadie. They needed to go down to the cargo decks. She thought she could remember the route from when Aksinya had taken her to see the refugees. The image of angry eyes in cold faces rose from out of memory. She paused halfway through the door hatch.
‘Hold your brother,’ she said to Mori. The girl took the boy, hugging him. Mersadie stepped back through the door, bent down and took the pistol from out of Aksinya’s hand, and the fresh clips from the bandolier beneath the bodyguard’s cloak. She tried not to look at the woman’s face.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Mori.
‘Making sure I don’t fail her,’ said Mersadie. She tucked the pistol and ammo under her clothes, stepped back through the door and took the still unwaking boy from Mori. ‘Remember, keep hold of his hand.’
The Phalanx, Terran high orbit
Brother Massak, former Librarian of the Imperial Fists Legion, knew he was dreaming. He had spent the last seven years in the same chamber he knelt in now. He and his three brothers had seen almost no one else in that time. Their armour, their weapons and the silence of their minds were their only concern. Time had become divisions of equipment maintenance, combat practice and meditation, repeated over and over again.
The clash of axe and
sword, the circle of lapping powder over yellow-and-blue ceramite, the slow exchange of breath…
On and on.
This was their duty now: to wait for a day that might never come, and to keep their minds locked from the powers that had been their craft of war.
In other Legions, the Emperor’s ban on the use of psykers had seen Librarians returned to other duties, trusted to abstain from using their powers. But that was in other Legions. The VII did not adhere to rules in spirit alone. So Massak and his brothers had remained in this chamber on the Phalanx, wrapped in silence within and without.
But still he dreamed.
They always came back, sliding into his moments of rest. And recently, the dream images had shaken his meditation even when he was awake.
He walked through caves of stone and through the darkness of forests he had never seen. Stars wheeled and turned. He saw the faces of creatures that were neither human nor beast but both. He saw a woman walking through the passages of a ship he did not recognise. He saw a door open…
His eyes opened. He was sweating, moisture beading his skin beneath his robe. His brothers’ eyes opened a second later, looking at him from across the meditation circle. Cadus, the youngest and lowest in rank, was swaying where he knelt. His left pupil was grossly dilated, the right a pinprick.
‘The tides of the warp… are… growing stronger…’ said Cadus.
‘Turn your minds inwards, my brothers,’ said Massak. ‘What passes beyond is not our concern. Our oaths are to endure and that is what we shall do.’
‘Do you feel that?’ said Sollon. The venerable Codicier moved his hand to the deck beside him. ‘The Phalanx is moving.’
Massak closed his eyes.
‘Return to the centre, brothers. Our eyes gaze inwards. Our thoughts are the foundations of our beings. Our duty the life we lead…’
Silence fell again, and Massak felt the patterns of meditative quieting spiral his awareness away, down and down to stillness. He would wait. But part of him – a part that had waited and listened while the storm rose in the spirit realm – knew that the dreams would come again.
Battle-barge Monarch of Fire, Uranus high orbit
The Monarch of Fire fired even as it burned. A fifty-metre-wide wound gleamed with the light of internal explosions from where a kinetic shot had punched through its skin. The shot had missed vital systems by a few metres, but left flames drawing through its decks.
Lines of plasma poured from its spine and port batteries. A scythe of light cut across the face of the closing Iron Warriors battleships. There were twelve of them, main force class all, skinned by metal and wrapped by dozens of void shields. Each of them could weather a point-blank broadside from a ship that was its equal. But the Monarch of Fire was not their equal. She was an empress of destruction and they mere lords.
The void shields on five of the Iron Warriors ships vanished, collapsing one after another, flashing as they overloaded. Plasma flooded across their hulls. Plasteel and stone flashed to gas, melted, scattered into the dark. White vapour fumed from the Monarch of Fire as coolant breathed through its guns and hull. Its remaining opponents did not hesitate. Beams of turbo laser fire raked its shields as they flickered.
On the Monarch of Fire’s bridge, Lord Castellan Halbract felt the ship judder as it drew breath to bellow again. Lights dimmed. The surge of vox-traffic chopped and quieted. Tactical displays faded to hololithic snow. A moment of quiet and stillness fell as the great vessel inhaled power from its systems to fire upon its foes.
They had pulled back to the volume around Oberon. Ships and supplies still streamed from the last moon in loyalist hands. It would not remain that way for long. A cascade of explosions had stripped it of most of its defences, but even if they had still been in place, its fate was sealed. The Iron Warriors had moved through the orbits of Uranus bit by bit, taking what they could and destroying what they could not. Where they met resistance they applied more force, brought more ships from the Elysian Gate, and replaced the ships and soldiers that fell with more.
At the star fort Phuran, unable to break its void shields, and with troops prevented from advancing beyond their beachheads, they had deployed two vast ships to overwhelm the defences. The pair had lost their names and become codes in the data-looms of the IV Legion: I-D-I and I-V-II. Both ships had been grain haulers taken from the Imperial supply lines. Their cargo gone to feed the forges supplying the Warmaster’s armies, their guts became city-sized barracks for tens of thousands of gang fighters harvested from the worlds around Ullanor. Kalma soporifics had been pumped through their holds to subdue the human cargo for transit. As they closed with the Phuran, the gas mix changed and frenzon and slaught fogged their holds. The tens of thousands of gangers began to wake, and kill each other.
Halbract’s ships had tried to cripple the two behemoths before they reached the star fort, but Iron Warriors warships cut them off. By the time the pair had reached the Phuran, they had lost ten thousand of their human cargo. More than enough remained. I-D-I and I-V-II docked at the Iron Warriors’ beachhead points, and opened their internal doors. Passages designed to drain billions of tonnes of grain now became exits for over a hundred thousand drug-fuelled killers. The troops defending the star fort held for six hours. After it was done, the Iron Warriors opened the station to the void and let the vacuum deal with the gangers.
On and on, the brutal pragmatism of Perturabo had pushed the defenders back and back again. Now the remainder of the Second Sphere fleet was battered and wounded, circling the moon of Oberon. A hundred warships from three times that number, facing twenty times that strength – those were odds that made for stories to echo through the ages. But this would be no last stand, no final rest in death found in fire. The burning of Pluto’s moons was a ploy that could only be used once. Halbract had seen the enemy forces alter their tactics. There were no hidden charges or annihilating data-jinns laid before the Elysian Gate, but Perturabo did not know that.
Machine adepts scoured the moons and stations the traitors had already taken. Already careful, the enemy became even more cautious. Large ship strengths were held back from recently taken ground. Anything that held no worth was destroyed by distant bombardment. It slowed them, and in that it proved as effective a weapon as a fresh battlefleet. In the buzzing half-silence as the Monarch of Fire passed through its power cycle, Halbract reflected that, measured on the axis of time, this battle had gone in their favour. It was just on every other count that it tasted bitter on his tongue.
‘Begin to divert power to engines and shields,’ he said softly. ‘Give us one more cycle of the guns. Send the withdrawal signal to all other ships.’
The command crew answered with silent action. They all knew this moment was coming. They could not remain where they were. Ships closed on them from every plane of orbit, and soon the path out to the sunward gulf would close. But they would not fall back to the long night without claiming a final price from the traitors.
Power blinked back through the bridge. Holo-displays snapped into clarity. The red gleams of enemy craft lit across targeting consoles.
‘Fire,’ said Halbract, and the Monarch of Fire roared his word into the dark. Three warships died in a stuttering blink of destruction. Plasma bored through unshielded hulls. Reactors and munitions detonated in their bellies. They burst, showering brilliant light and gas out and out.
The lights on the Monarch of Fire dimmed, but deep in her hull, power had already been syphoned to her engines. She pushed loose of Oberon’s orbit. The rest of her fleet was already falling into formation, ships breaking off and turning their prows towards the distant light of the sun. Signals reached after them from Oberon, pleading and railing and cursing, carrying the rage of people who knew that their fate was sealed. Halbract listened to them all, hearing the bitter words as the Monarch of Fire made for the cold depths. As predicted, the enemy did not chase them. They w
ere cautious, and besides, they had won.
The signals from Oberon stopped as they reached the edge of deep sensor range. Halbract cut the link as the last whisper became static.
‘Signal Terra,’ he said, taking the helmet off his head. ‘Uranus belongs to the enemy.’
The officers around him bowed their heads at the words.
‘We are beyond the enemy’s likely interception range,’ said the senior tech-priest overseeing the ship’s signal and auspex systems. ‘Do you wish to send the rendezvous codes, lord castellan?’
Halbract nodded, his eyes on the damage and casualty reports from the rest of his fleet. It had taken Dorn’s personal word to convince him of this part of the strategy. It went against almost every instinct. Faced with an enemy, no matter how strong or numerous, one advanced, or stood and trusted to the strength of shield and sword and bolter. You did not yield ground that the enemy desired.
But that was what they were doing now, and what they had planned to do since before the ships of the traitors had breached the gates.
‘Now, in this moment, walls and strongholds are not our battlefield,’ Rogal Dorn had said, his voice strong even through the distortion-laced signal from Terra. ‘Our battlefield is time, and the battles we fight are to deny that to the enemy. They thirst for time, need it and cannot waste a second of it. And so we must deny it to them. Everything must be measured against that. We cannot stop them, my son, but we can make them bleed in time and strength before they reach the walls of the Palace. That is worth more than any fortress or line that is not on the soil of Terra.’
‘I will do what is needed,’ Halbract had replied and sent three hundred ships from the defence of Uranus into the night to wait.
He had bowed his head then, and he did so again now…
Over three hundred ships hanging in the lightless gulf between Uranus and the core of the system… Over three hundred guns that had not spoken to hold back the enemy from the Phuran, or Cordelia, or Oberon, or…
Would it have made a difference? Would it make a difference now? To an enemy not expecting a fresh and undamaged force waiting for it as it leaped deeper into the system… It might. It had to.