by John French
After three nights of dreams the riots began. Fires lit the Arctic fringe hives and hab-warrens. Crowds poured through breached curfew zones. Arson flames blazed across hundreds of kilometres. Pacification cohorts were deployed. The death count rose, and the nightmares galloped on with the turning of the heavens.
Edge of survival
Wolf of the new moon
Monsters
Freighter ship Antius, Jovian Gulf
Mersadie found Vek on the bridge. She had sent the children back to their cabin, and the mass of refugee volunteers seemed to follow her commands with the intensity of the desperate. They had held back when she told them she wanted to go to the bridge alone. They had not questioned why.
Part of her had known. There had been no sign of Vek in the rest of the ship and she could not believe he would not have tried to find Mori and Noon.
She had known. But knowing was different to seeing what was left of him lying on the deck of the bridge. There were others, scattered on each level and gantry. No one had been left alive. The boarding force had been efficient. She noticed that a lone figure in crimson armour lay amongst the dead. It looked as though he had been hacked in half. For a tiny, sickening instant she wondered what had done that. She looked back at Vek. Once, maybe, she would have felt the need to weep. Now she just felt cold, as though ice had poured into the space where grief could once have lived inside her.
‘They didn’t damage the systems,’ Nilus called down from the helm platform. She looked up. The Navigator looked down over the brass rail. ‘I presume they were just going to scuttle the ship once they were done.’
‘It’s still working, though?’ she called.
‘As far as I can tell.’
A tremor shook the deck. Lights blinked across the console.
‘If the engines are still working then what is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nilus. ‘Maybe from whatever they punched into the hull to get inside.’
Mersadie looked back down at Vek’s remains. It felt as though she should stop, as though time should stand still and mark this moment. The deck shuddered again. Nilus said something she only half heard. She shook herself, lifted a fallen officer’s cloak and draped it over Vek. Nilus shouted something that was lost under another rumble of metal.
‘What is it?’ she asked, turning away and mounting the stairs up to the helm platform.
Behind her, she could hear the sounds of people coming down the corridor to the open bridge doors. Nilus was bent over on the deck, looking at a slick of blood and oil on the brass-and-iron floor.
‘I said that I hadn’t seen any sign of the ship’s enginseer amongst the dead.’
‘Chi-32-Beta,’ said Mersadie. The deck pitched for a moment.
‘What?’ said Nilus.
‘That was her name, the ship’s tech-priest. Her name was Chi-32-Beta.’
Nilus shrugged the irrelevance away.
‘We need her. Even with a crew, we can’t control the ship’s systems without a tech-priest…’ He moved forwards, eyes on the smeared liquid. Mersadie heard cries from the lower level of the bridge as the refugees saw the slaughter. Nilus reached a section of wall lined with thick seams and rivets. A crack ran from floor to ceiling between two plates, like a door left just ajar. The smear of oil and blood vanished into the wall.
Nilus was looking at it, his skin somehow even paler than normal. He had stopped and was staring at the crack running down the wall. The sound of voices and footsteps was coming up the stairs to the platform. Nilus was backing away now. The ship shook, and Mersadie noticed that a fresh dribble of black fluid seeped out from the crack onto the floor.
‘Nilus,’ said Mersadie. ‘What is wrong?’ But the Navigator was backing away still, glancing at the other set of stairs leading down to the prow section of the bridge. He began to move towards them.
‘The shuttle is still there,’ he hissed, as though to himself. ‘I will make sure it’s still there. Yes, just in case…’
He made for the forward stairs, loping down them just as the first of the refugees came up the aft stairs. Mersadie was about to call after him, but he was already out of sight.
‘Everyone’s dead,’ said one of them. It was the big man who had come forwards first; Gade, he had said his name was. His eyes were wide, sweat sheening his skin. ‘Everyone…’
Mersadie looked back at the crack running down the wall. She stepped forwards, put her hand into the opening and pulled a section of the wall wide.
A figure lay coiled in the tangle of wires in the niche behind the hidden door. Motes of light and worms of static were running up and down some of the cables. Blood and oil matted the red robes of the figure, and trickled down through the knots of wires. Its hooded head twitched up, and the ship trembled again. Static breathed out through a hiss of noise that might have been speech.
Mersadie moved forwards, but the figure raised a brass hand, and now she could see that the cables ran into the mass of its body beneath the robes.
‘We…’ wheezed Chi-32-Beta. ‘We need to run. They are… Their ship… They are still out there.’
The Imperial Palace, Terra
The grey warrior came to the Regent on the fifth day of the dream riots. No guards or doors barred his passing. The lone sigil on his shoulder and the clearance codes transmitted by his armour let him move like a ghost through the Palace, unquestioned and unseen. Only when he reached the last door of the Regent’s sanctuary did a lowered guardian spear halt his progress.
Su-Kassen watched the grey-armoured warrior turn his head to look at the Custodian. The image from the Custodian’s helm-feed showed the set of his features in perfect clarity. It could have been a handsome face, but gene-craft had broadened and morphed it so that its humanity was lost beneath a hardness that made the hairs rise on Su-Kassen’s neck. There were the eyes, too, still and unblinking, and as cold as distant stars. She knew his name. As a member of the War Council of Terra she was aware of the existence of the Regent’s Knights Errant, although not the details of what they did or why. She also knew that the warrior looking directly up into the pict-capture had been a captain of the Luna Wolves Legion and a close confidant of Horus Lupercal himself. His name was Garviel Loken, and now he was a warrior whose grey armour marked him as a ghost trapped between loyalty and circumstance, fighting a war beyond the light of morality.
‘Do you wish me to leave, Lord Regent?’ she asked.
Malcador shook his head but did not look up from the screen set on his desk. The latest gathering of the council had broken up minutes before. It had been brief and grim.
Five days before, the horrors had begun to haunt the sleep of all those on the nightside of Terra. The dreams had no pattern or consistent element except one: terror. They were containing the unrest, but the dreams were fraying the already-thin threads of control. Only inside the Palace did the night pass without terrors. Renewed Lectitio Divinitatus cult activity had also been reported. It would have been difficult to deal with even under normal circumstances. With the outer spheres of the Solar System ablaze and the enemy closing with every hour, it was bordering on catastrophic.
‘Fate,’ Malcador said softly, looking at the face of the grey-armoured warrior and letting out a breath, ‘always manifests in the small things.’ Su-Kassen remained still, uncertain whether he had been talking to her. ‘Let him pass,’ he said. A second later the door to the tower chamber opened.
‘Captain Loken,’ said Malcador. Loken looked at the Regent and, despite the anger fuming from him, bowed his head for a second. ‘Something vexes you.’
‘You issued a kill order for the prisoners held on Titan,’ said Loken.
Malcador held the Space Marine’s gaze.
‘The high-risk prisoners held in the facility above Titan were moved. Some of them were being moved through Uranus orbital transfer when the assault
began. The ships holding them were hit. There were losses, and it appears that some of the prisoners were able to escape. The standing orders are for a hunt-and-kill protocol to be pursued without limit, and yes, those orders were mine.’
‘That is–’ began Loken.
‘That is what is needed in this war, captain,’ said Malcador, his voice suddenly hard. ‘Even now, at this hour, and with all that we face. Innocence proves nothing and can even be a weapon.’
‘You have no right,’ growled Loken, leaning forwards, gauntlets resting on the polished wood of the desk. Aggression was boiling off him. Su-Kassen felt her hand twitch towards the holster of the shot-pistol that she had surrendered at the chamber door.
Malcador stood, eyes bright, face hard, and the frailty that had clung to him fell away. He seemed taller, his shadow lengthening as the lights around the chamber dimmed.
‘I have a duty,’ he said. ‘A duty to see all that our enemy would destroy survive, and in holding to that duty I will do what others will not. We are all expendable. You, me, every adult and every child, every hope we held, every dream that we clung to. All of it. All of it, captain. That is my duty, and I will see it done, even if others do not like the price that they would not pay themselves.’
Loken had not moved, but the anger in his eyes seemed to have become something else, something colder.
‘I would pay that price, but not with the coin you offer.’
‘That is why I stand where I do. Because if we fail then there will be nothing left, not even the memory of what was lost. Would you rather that? Would you rather the future that your gene-sire Horus dreams for humanity? If you would, then honour your convictions and try to kill me now, because I will not stop, and I will not explain myself to you again.’
Loken rocked back. The shadow of Malcador drew upwards, spreading across the ceiling. Su-Kassen felt her nerves screaming to run, to get away from the cold rage that was flooding out as the light dimmed.
Then it was gone, and the old man standing with the help of his staff looked old and exhausted. Loken’s face was fixed, but pale. Malcador closed his eyes for a second, and then took an unsteady step forwards, and put a hand on Loken’s shoulder guard. Beneath the fingers, the emblem of an eye etched into the grey ceramite gleamed coldly for an instant.
‘I am sorry,’ said Malcador. ‘I understand, but these are necessities, captain. If it helps, it was not a specific order relating to Mistress Oliton. The hunt-and-termination protocols are general, a contingency put in place a long time ago.’
Loken shrugged free of the Regent’s touch, face still stone-like.
‘There was a signal picked up on the military channels around Uranus,’ he said.
Malcador nodded.
‘You knew?’ asked Loken.
‘Of course,’ said Malcador. ‘Although communications being what they are, I only learned of it very recently.’ He paused. ‘As did you.’
Loken nodded once, and then turned towards the door.
‘I am taking a ship. If you know of the signal, then you know that the last report from one of your hunter cadres had the ship she was suspected to be aboard heading for Jupiter. That is where I am going. Send a signal – call off the hunters.’
‘You know as well as I that may not be possible.’
‘Then you will have forfeited their lives, too,’ said Loken, and turned for the door.
‘If they have not found her, Loken, there is little hope that you will.’
‘Isn’t that why you chose us, Lord Regent? To do what others could not?’
Malcador did not reply. Loken moved to the door. It opened and Su-Kassen could see the Custodians standing beyond it. Loken paused, his foot across the threshold and turned his stare back on Malcador.
‘If you did know that she was being hunted, would you have countermanded the orders?’
Malcador held Loken’s gaze for a long moment.
‘No,’ he said at last.
Loken gave a single nod, and then was gone. The door shut after him.
Malcador let out a breath and limped around his desk and lowered himself back into his chair.
‘Thank you, admiral,’ he said after a second.
‘For what?’ she asked.
‘If you had not been here, I have a suspicion he would have done what time and the blades of our enemies have so far failed to accomplish.’
‘I do not think so, lord, and if he had tried, I don’t think he would have succeeded.’
Malcador gave a tired smile.
‘Perhaps not…’
He picked up a data-slate from his desk and began to scan it.
‘We could stop him,’ said Su-Kassen after a moment. ‘He needs your authority to move through the Palace. Even if he reaches a ship, it could be halted before it breaks orbit.’
Malcador shook his head.
‘Let him go. Maybe he is right. In such times, perhaps the small acts of nobility matter more, not less.’
‘He did not say that, lord…’
‘Did he not?’ said Malcador, and looked up at her, eyes sharp. ‘Then maybe I am just succumbing to weakness and sentimentality. Does that sound more believable to you, admiral?’
‘No, lord. It does not.’
‘No…’ he said, nodding as though considering the point, before looking back to his work. ‘Perhaps not.’
Battleship Iron Blood, Uranus high orbit
Forrix closed his eyes for three seconds and then opened them again to the light of stars and war. Fatigue, long banished by ascension to the Legion, had begun to creep into his being over the years of conflict and the demands of this phase of the operation. He had begun to find that moments like these, when his eyes touched the vastness of reality rather than the coldness of data, were like a rudder holding him true. Here, on a squat tower set high on the spine of the Iron Blood, was one of the few places you could look out at space with the naked eye, and so it had become his haunt.
A ragged fleet poured from the Elysian Gate before his eyes. Craft after craft slid into being, lit their engines and powered away into the dark. Some of them had once been proud ships of war, their old colours lost under battle scars and heraldry that marked them as without lord or mistress. These were the wild swarms of mercenaries, pirates and reavers that had flourished in the age of Horus’ war, and now came hungry for the fruits of Sol. Most were human-led, their captains deserters from one cause or another. Others were fanatics, ships full of converts to the worship of old gods with new faces, come to make bloody pilgrimage on ancient ground. They came in converted haulers festooned with billions of scraps of parchment, others in sleek warships scorched black to remove the marks of their old allegiances.
There were Space Marines amongst the horde, too. Ships commanded by warriors that had taken new colours and new names: The Burnt Word, the Brotherhood of Set, the Twelfth Truth – oath breakers all. Forrix had felt a twinge of instinct tug at him as a battleship in the red and black colours of one of these mongrel bands turned across the Iron Blood’s sensor screens. With a word the craft could have been reduced to broken metal and molten stone, a fate worthy of such creatures.
Beside them were ships that still wore the colours of their Legion, even if those colours were only a mask. Midnight-hulled vessels of the Night Lords, and ships of the III Legion painted like carnival masks, their vox-channels babbling noise. In Forrix’s eyes, these were almost worse than the others, carrion-reavers, and self-appointed warlords, the mockery of their lineage painted with contempt.
They served a purpose though; they knew the art of mayhem as war. They had been held in the warp until Uranus was secured, wrapped in screams and nightmares, and now were loosed on the outer Solar System. They had no mission, only a direction. The rest was left to their nature. In days, they would fall on Neptune, and Jupiter. The slaughter and bloodshed would
begin. Without a specific mission, the reaver forces would kill and die, and inflict pain. Blood and screams would follow fire. Confusion and fear would spread. Those mortals that could flee would do so, and their flight would carry the terror with them.
Behind him he heard the doors release, and felt the aching buzz of Perturabo’s armour as the primarch entered the viewing cupola. He turned to kneel, but a twitch of Perturabo’s hands held Forrix standing. The weapon pods and pistons of the primarch’s armour hissed and breathed cold gas as they cycled. Forrix watched his lord out of the corner of his eye. Perturabo had suddenly become utterly still. That stillness had seized the primarch more and more in the time since they had gone to fetch Angron back to the war from the borders of Ultramar. It was unsettling in a way that Forrix did not want to think about. Perturabo watched the tide of monsters breach into being.
The Daughter of Woe hung above the murk of the Elysian Gate. Iron Warriors ships clustered around the space hulk, suckling from her scarred skin. A blackened cleft a kilometre long and two hundred metres deep had been carved into her face by the plasma fusillade of the Monarch of Fire. Forrix had thought, for a moment during the engagement, that the Imperial Fists ship was going to ram the Daughter of Woe, or try to board her in force. It would have been suicide, but the defiance of the Imperial Fists over the last days of the assault had seemed to drift to recklessness.
The pride finally surfacing from beneath the stone, Forrix had thought at the time. The sons of Dorn had pulled back from the assault, though.
‘How long?’ asked Perturabo, only his lips moving in the mask of his face. The ammo feeds linked to his arms cycled again. It reminded Forrix of a muscle twitching.
‘Our ships are ready,’ said Forrix.
Perturabo looked at him then and gave a single nod at the data projections.