by John French
‘How much did we lose?’
Forrix licked his lips. The Lord of Iron knew the answer to the question already. No scrap or thread of data escaped him in the battle sphere.
‘Thirty-six hours, lord,’ replied Forrix.
‘By such things are our deeds now weighed,’ said Perturabo. ‘By the slow slice of time, and not the blood that turns its wheel…’
Forrix shifted uncomfortably.
‘It is likely that this is Dorn’s strategy. If he knows that Guilliman is coming…’
‘He knows,’ said Perturabo, ‘or suspects, and that is more than enough for him to make time a weapon against us. Bleed us. Slow us. Cut by cut, minute by minute. We come to the cradle of all war and find that its craft is what we always knew it to be. Not a flash of blades or the fire of heroism, but the slow grinding of bloody inches. It can’t be escaped.’
Forrix thought of all they had given, of the legionaries that had died to slow the coming of the Ultramarines and those they had left to try to slow the inevitable.
Silence fell again.
‘The losses in our core fleet strength have been compensated for,’ said Forrix at last. ‘The ships that are not battle ready will remain and oversee the consolidation. The rest…’
‘Stand at ninety-eight-point-seven-five combat effectiveness,’ said Perturabo softly, and moved to the viewports on the other side of the tower.
Forrix began to reply then stopped himself. Time passed in the slow, buzzing pulse of Perturabo’s armour. Out beyond the armourglass hung the orb of Uranus, its face dark against the stars.
‘The strategic timetable still holds, lord. If we launch now we will still be within your margin of error.’
Perturabo did not reply. From the edge of the disc of Uranus a light began to gleam. Thin rays reached out and slid past the drifts of debris and the schools of ships. The sun…
Forrix blinked.
‘So many battlefields,’ said Perturabo, staring directly at the distant dot of brilliance. ‘So much blood and iron poured down into the earth to earn our place here…’ The Lord of Iron’s eyes seemed black in the pale glare, his armour slick with cold shadow. ‘We are coming, my brother. We are coming, my father. We have returned…’ He turned to Forrix. The coldness had gone from his eyes. Fire caught in their depths, and the edges of his exo-plates gleamed in the distant sunlight and made him seem skinned in blades and shadow. ‘Give the order. Launch for Jupiter.’
Shrine
Songs of fear, dreams of war
My father’s side
Comet shrine, Inner System Gulf
The comet was not undefended. Eight gun platforms ringed it, tracking its flight through the heavens with batteries of turbo lasers and rockets. Their auspex and targeting systems had enough power to see far beyond the reach of their guns. Once they detected and locked on to a target, they could coordinate fire with enough precision to equal the kill output of a star fort. It was enough that anything less than multiple battleships would be ill-advised to approach uninvited.
The servitors wired into the weapon platform’s auspex twitched in their cradles. Somewhere, out on the edge of their machine sight, something was moving, something large.
All weapon batteries cycled to ready. Vox signals flickered between each gun platform. The servitors looked deeper, focusing all their systems on the approaching ship. None of them noticed the frost forming on their skin and wiring.
Fingers of thought brushed their lobotomised minds, pulling them deeper into their focus, drawing their sight away from everything that was not that distant glimmer of a ship getting nearer. They did not see the gunships sliding towards them out of the dark. Unmarked by engine heat, the small craft had begun their flight beyond the limit of the platform’s sight. Minds inside the gunships reached out, focusing down and down into the root meat of the servitors’ minds.
The gunships’ engines fired. The servitor-governed systems saw nothing. They were still seeing nothing as missiles blew holes in the skin of each platform. Now alarms did begin to sound. Weapon servitors jerked to life, but too late. Crimson-armoured warriors were already inside the corridors. Waves of telekinesis blew in bulkheads, and bolter fire shredded servitors and systems. The gun platforms were silent as the lone ship closing on the comet became twelve.
Ahriman did not watch any of the last stages of the assault play out. In the dark of his gunship, as it burned towards its target, he focused his mind on the growing pattern surrounding it in the ether. He had been preparing, body, mind and spirit, for days, locking patterns of thought and symbolism into his subconscious. The roots of the Colchisian symbol sets and the Word Bearers’ pseudo-occult rites had required a great deal of refinement and integration into the Prosperine system. It was like trying to mix oil and water, or gold and iron slag. He had done it, though. Few others could have, he fancied.
There is a failsafe in the comet shrine itself,+ came Ignis’ thought voice, cutting into Ahriman’s reflections. +A detection system slaved to a series of kill charges.+
Disable it,+ replied Ahriman.
That is in progress, but the detection system also has an etheric monitor grafted to its core. Our remote viewing of the outer halls almost triggered it. I have sent in Credence to remove the detection system’s core.+
Ahriman thought of the automaton that now followed the Master of Ruin like a looming shadow.
It is a machine, brother. To give it a name is to try to call a soul into something that has neither the spirit nor the will to make choices.+
Silence fell between their minds.
Around Ahriman the minds of his brothers whirled on, patterning the ether with their thoughts. Each of them was looping a set of symbols and words through his subconscious. Those of greater power and ability spun more complex weaves of thought, all overlapping and meshing with one another. Together, their minds were like the cogs of a single colossal machine. At the pattern’s core was Ahriman, subsections of his own thoughts meshing with those of his brothers. This feat alone was beyond the bounds of comprehension of even the most able of adepts, but it was only the beginning. One part of the key to turn a greater lock.
It had taken days for Ahriman to comprehend the details of what they were doing, and then he had shivered. Even Magnus had fallen silent when it had been laid before them. For this… thing that they were doing was not their design. It was something higher and darker and greater, the design of a creature who had never been human and now stood between mortality and godhood. It was Horus’ act, and they were the tools that did his work.
Why do we do this?+ he had asked Magnus the Red.
You know why, my son…+ Magnus had replied. +Because everything we want, everything we need lies beyond the fall of my father.+ Ahriman had nodded, but not tried to hide the doubt in his mind. The image of Magnus in the scrying mirror had given a sad smile. +Besides, Ahzek, do you not wish to see the Towers of Leth again, or to walk the Scribe Vaults? Do you not wish to go home?+
They burned our home.+
The image had shimmered in the haze of cedar smoke.
To all of humanity, Terra is home. That is why it must fall, my son.+
The detection and trigger device has been disabled on the comet,+ came Ignis’ thought voice, cutting through the memory. +You may proceed.+
Ahriman’s gunship shot on towards the comet. With it came flights of others, trailing out behind it like the wings of a great bird. The Word Bearers fell into place amongst them. The wings of their craft gleamed a deeper crimson in the sunlight. Lines of script covered them from nose to tail, each word an exultation of the powers of the warp. The minds of the warriors in each craft hissed and echoed with prayers. For them this was not just an act of occult war; it was a sacred devotion. Ahriman felt a wave of revulsion and pulled his senses away from them.
The surface of the comet loomed before them. Pl
ugs of plasteel and raw iron covered old wounds from boarding torpedoes and weapons fire. These were the scars from when the Imperial Fists had purged the shrine in the early years of the war.
The whole comet had been hollowed out two centuries before and become a resting place for the bones of the greatest heroes from the War of Unification and the Great Crusade. The skull of Skand, first of the Thunder Lords to fall in battle, had been laid here beside that of Maxilla, Barkeria Vu and thousands more. It had been a shrine to unity and heroism, and the Word Bearers had guarded its halls since the time before they had borne that name. They were still there when their treachery had been revealed, and so Rogal Dorn had sent his sons to slay them. They had done that. But, with the limited insight typical of the VII Legion, they had not thought to ask a deeper question: why had the Word Bearers remained at all?
Rockets loosed from the wings of the gunships. Fire erupted across the sealed breaches in the comet’s skin. Shreds of metal and stone erupted into the vacuum. The gunships slid through the reopened wounds into the comet’s interior.
Ahriman was on his feet before the gunship settled. His brothers followed, turning in perfect time as they moved to match him. Air misted into the cold dark as the hatch released. The space beyond was silent and still. Sunlight shone in through the holes to the void. Soot and scorch marks covered the visible floor and walls. Dry, broken bones lay at the base of walls of skulls. Ahriman’s eyes picked out names and deeds carved across the foreheads of each. Thousands of empty eye sockets returned his gaze. He let out a breath inside his helm. It tasted of dust.
He felt the ghosts of myriad wars whisper and rattle at the edge of his senses. Voices of ancient battles clung to the teeth of the skulls. The blood spilt by the Word Bearers before their purging filled his mouth with the taste of copper and iron. Around him the rest of the Thousand Sons spread out in rings, their eyes turned out, and their thoughts turning in harmony.
Beyond them, the hatches on three Word Bearers gunships opened. Bones and parchment covered the warriors that emerged. Half of them led thin humans in white robes. Unsuited, the mortals began to choke as they staggered down the ramp and knelt. The Word Bearers cut their throats before their hearts stopped. The prayers in each of the humans’ minds became a shriek as their death thrust the words deep into the ether. Blood splashed the scorched floor.
A last figure walked from the gunship, arms raised in blessing, black-and-red armour gleaming with the crude runes of the greater aspects of the warp. A helm of brushed bronze enclosed his head, eyeless and mouthless. Books hung from his waist on chains, and his hand held a sceptre of black iron topped by a rough stone star. A thin human in a skin-tight black pressure suit walked one step behind its master. Its eyes were lidless and pinned open behind fluid-filled goggles. A vox-amplifier filled the space where its mouth would have been. It was the voice-slave of its master, bound by crude telepathy to the warrior that it followed like a shadow. That master had no name. He was just the Apostle of the Unspeaking. The lack of a name would have struck Ahriman as typically ridiculous if it had not been for the fact that the Apostle’s mind was both shadowed and elusive, his thoughts and emotions dissolving from sight as soon as Ahriman’s senses turned towards them. That and the fact that he had never heard of this warrior before made him wonder. Much had changed in the years of the Thousand Sons’ exile, and even before then there were millions of legionaries divided between Legions spread across the galaxy. But there was something about the blankness of this Apostle that made Ahriman wonder what soul moved beneath the bronze mask.
The Apostle bent down, dipped his fingers in the blood of one of the sacrifices and scattered it into the void. A single jagged word echoed from the Apostle’s mind. Around him, all the Word Bearers knelt.
Ahriman felt the psychic resonance in the shrine alter, unbalancing for a moment. He held his will steady, felt the patterns in his thoughts compensate.
Do not do that again,+ he sent, edging the sending with flat command. The Apostle turned his blank helm towards Ahriman.
‘This is a sacred thing,’ rasped the voice-slave’s vox. ‘It must be marked. The rites and offerings must be observed.’
Do nothing that I do not command. I will not see your ignorance undo this work.+
‘We do the work of the gods here, sorcerer. It was us that seeded the ground for this act long before you even saw your place in the universe. Do not think that this is a matter of knowledge and power. The gods laugh at such arrogance, but bless those who submit to them.’
Ahriman felt anger spark within him, and cut it away with a flick of will. He drew a breath and his humours balanced again.
He turned from the Word Bearers as Ignis approached from where his gunship had settled behind the rest. The Master of Ruin’s Terminator armour was the orange of furnace flame, and threaded with lines that echoed the tattoos that marked his face. His remade automaton walked behind him, its weapon mounts tracking the Word Bearers as they moved through the chamber.
Faith and ignorance are so often alloyed that they might as well be called one,+ sent Ignis.
An observation we can agree on,+ replied Ahriman.
It is not an observation. It is an objective truth.+
Ahriman watched as the Word Bearers moved across the chamber. Occasionally one of them would stop, and Ahriman would hear the thought-echo of a canticle spill into the ether.
The artificial gravity is stable?+ he sent to Ignis, still watching the Apostle and the other Word Bearers.
It is. The primary systems of this facility were maintained to an adequate level. Power, gravity, atmosphere – it is all functioning.+
Ahriman nodded. In the churn and swell of the ether he felt something shift, something that cast a shadow across his thoughts and tugged at their patterns. For a second, he felt as though he had just stepped off the edge of a hidden precipice. He steadied himself, turning his will and sight inwards until the sensation of falling passed.
Breach the walls and bring them in.+
Ignis gave a small nod. Ahriman felt a pulse of thought pass out through the shrine walls to where the ships waited. A second later, a patch of the vaulted ceiling above began to glow with heat. Then it blew outwards. A new glowing hole over a hundred metres wide opened to reveal the sunlight and the hull of the Ankhtowe. Tugs and haulers swarmed forwards as more fresh holes appeared in the comet’s skin. Black, slab-shaped containers the size of battle tanks slid through the openings. Spider-limbed servitors detached from the tugs and began to unfasten the containers. Ahriman could feel the growling ache of psychic noise from within as the first layers of sedation faded from their cargo. The tugs pulled back until the solatarium hung in the void between the ship and comet.
Silver and plasteel sheathed the solatarium sphere. Rune-stamped chains had been welded to the casing and five tugs had dragged it from the guts of the Ankhtowe and into the vacuum. Worms of light played up and down the chains. It creaked and shivered as it moved, its dimensions seeming to flick between being close and far off even as you looked at it. Ahriman held his mind in a state of perfect balance as the sealed sphere was lowered through the hole like an eye being set back in its socket. The chains holding the solatarium broke before they were unfastened, their substance dissolving to light and smoke. It hung a metre above the floor of the chamber. Sparks of multicoloured light earthed into the void. Two of the Word Bearers were on their knees, tongueless mouths filling with blood as they thanked their gods.
Ahriman felt the storm winds rising in the realm beyond. He gave a single nod.
We begin.+
Battle-barge Monarch of Fire, Jovian Gulf
The Iron Blood gathered speed as it cut towards the glimmer of Jupiter. Beside it and around it, the main force of its daughters and cousins rode in formation. Together they formed a cylinder thousands of kilometres long, stretching behind the flagship like the shaft of an arrow. Its p
ath was direct, a line cut through the Jovian Gulf to cross the space between Uranus and Jupiter in the shortest time. It would pass through the orbit of Saturn, but the ringed planet was on the other side of the Solar disc. It was predictable to the defenders, but it was also swift, and Perturabo and his Legion had greater need of speed than they did subtlety. The timetable of war would bear nothing else.
Watching from above the path of the Iron Warriors fleet, Halbract found little comfort in what he saw. In the cold light of tactical displays there was one question that he found his mind returning to again and again. This force was behaving as Dorn and his senior commanders had predicted. The traitors were bloodied and had suffered great losses in taking Uranus. They had lost days and they would lose more strength and time as they made this passage. Even now the mines and dead-fall munitions strung along their route would be activating. The first ultra-long-range nova cannon shots from Halbract’s fleet were zeroed and ready for his command. They would accelerate down to intersect with the Iron Warriors’ predicted path. Once they had accelerated to maximum velocity, they would cut loose their rocket boosters and fall down towards their detonation points. Almost undetectable, they would strike amongst the enemy like arrows shot by an unseen archer.
Then Halbract’s ships would follow their path and engage the Iron Warriors as they advanced, forcing them to turn and fight or press on and die. But that would not stop the IV Legion. That bitter fact lingered in Halbract’s thoughts.
‘Loose,’ he said, without looking up from the displays. The nova cannons began to fire. He waited, feeling the silence ache under the dome of the Monarch of Fire’s bridge. He waited and watched. The fleet with him would have been enough to break a star kingdom. Hundreds of warships from the remains of the Imperial Fists fleet augmented by ships of the Blood Angels, and more from the fleets of Saturn and Jupiter. Most had been held back from the battle around Uranus, floating silently in the interplanetary gulf, waiting for this battle. But it still would only be enough to wound, not to kill. Not to make an end.