by Dan Abnett
'Madorthene,' I said, recognising him at once.
We shook hands. It had been a few years since I'd seen Olm Madorthene - Lord Procurator Madorthene, as he was now. We'd first met
at Gudrun during the Necroteuch affair when he had been a mid-ranking officer in the Battlefleet Disciplinary Detachment, the navy's military police. Now he ran that detachment. He'd been a useful and reliable ally over the years.
'Quite an event/ he said, with a reserved smile. Outside, the horns of the immense Titans blared again and the noise from the crowd swelled.
'I find myself sufficiently humbled,' I said. The Warmaster must be loving it.'
He nodded. 'Uplifting, good for public morale.'
I agreed, but in truth my heart was not in it. It wasn't just the overwhelming cacophony of it, or my deep-seated reluctance to be here at all. Since Ravenor and I had stepped out to take our place in the Triumph, I had nursed a sense of foreboding that was growing with each passing minute. Was that what had made me pause here, under the great arch?
There's a look on your face,' said Madorthene. This isn't really your thing, is it?'
'I suppose not.'
"What is it, old friend?'
I paused. Something...
I strode back to the south arch of the Spatian Gate and looked back down the huge river of the Triumph. Madorthene was with me. The War-master's retinue was just then beginning to pass under the Gate. Cymbals and horns clashed and blared. The noise of the crowd boomed in like a tidal wave surging down.
There were petals in the air. I remember that clearly. A blizzard of loose petals gusting up from the flowers the crowd was strewing.
A formation of twelve Lightnings was swooping in low from the south, coming down the length of the Triumph parade, following the Avenue of the Victor Bellum. Coming towards the Gate. They were in line abreast, the tips of their forward-swept wings almost touching. A display of perfect formation flying from the Battlefleet's best pilots. Sunlight glinted on their canopies and on the raked double-vanes of their tailplanes.
The sense of foreboding I had felt now became oppressively real. It was like heavy clouds had passed in front of the sun.
'Olm, I-'
'Emperor's mercy! He's in trouble, look!' Madorthene cried.
The fighters were half a kilometre from the Gate, moving at a high cruising speed. The left hand wingman suddenly wobbled, bucked...
...and veered.
The flier directly inside of him pulled hard to avoid a collision, and his starboard wing clipped the wingtip of the next Lightning in line. There was a bright puff of impact debris.
One by one, like pearls coming off a necklace, each aircraft was knocked out of the formation. The once-sleek line broke in utter disarray
Madorthene hurled me to the ground as the jets shrieked overhead, rattling the world with their afterburners.
The two that I had seen strike each other were spinning in the air, somersaulting like discarded toys, splintering trails of metal scrap behind them. In the confusion, it seemed to me as if several others had also accidentally collided.
One Lightning, over ten tonnes of almost supersonic metal, cartwheeled down and went into the crowd on the west side of the Avenue. It bounced at least once, showering human debris into the air. At its final impact, it became a massive fireball that belched up a blazing mushroom cloud a hundred metres into the air. Shock and berserk panic filled the crowd. The stench of flame and heat and promethium washed over me.
There was a flash and the ground shook as a second stricken Lightning spiralled in under the shadow the Gate. Then, almost simultaneously, a third and louder blast came as a third aircraft, sent lurching out of control, sheared off a wing on the top corner of the Spatian Gate itself, right above us, and began tumbling down, end over end.
In the face of this calamitous accident, the soldiers in the Triumph were scattering in all directions. I dragged Mador-thene back in under the arch as shattered chunks of the stricken aircraft avalanched down.
A catastrophe. A terrible, terrible catastrophe.
And it was just beginning.
SIX
Doom comes to Thracian.
Chaos unslipped.
Headshot.
Even at that stage, gripped by horror and outrage, I knew that a great hollow part of me deep in my soul could not, would not believe that this had simply been a tragic accident.
There were fire and explosions all around, mass panic, screaming.
And another sound. An extraordinary low moaning, a swelling, surging susurration that I realised was the sound two billion people make when they are panicking and in fear for their lives.
The crowds had spilled over onto the Avenue, quite beyond the measure of the arbites to contain them, fleeing both the dreadful crash sites and the fires, and also the imagined risk that to stand still somehow invited more Imperial warcraft to fall upon their heads.
The crowd moved as one, a fluid thing, like water. There was no decision making process, no ringleader. Mass instinct simply compelled the people who swamped the vast street, in awful, trampling tides, overwhelming the ranks of the Triumph, much of which was already breaking up in shocked dismay. There was no sound of music any more, no cheering, no drums or sirens. Just a braying insanity, a world turned on its head.
I saw people die in their hundreds, trampled underfoot or crushed in the sheer press of bodies. In some cases, the dead were so squeezed by their neighbours, they were carried along for many metres before being freed to slither to the ground.
I saw troopers from the retinues, and arbites, firing into the crowd in terror before they were run down. Barricades collapsed. Standards swayed and toppled. Walkways over the drain canals alongside the Avenue cracked and fell in, spilling hundreds down into the rockcrete trenches.
I'd lost sight of Madorthene in the pandemonium. I tried to push out from the arch into the sunlight, but fleeing bodies slammed into me. The entire approach to the Spatian Gate was a mass of twisted wreckage and fire from the impact high above. Several dozen guardsmen lay twisted and dead amid the wreckage, killed by falling metal and stone, their dress uniforms dusted white with powdered aethercite or scorched by fire.
Through the sea of screaming humanity, I could see several of the massive aurochotheres stampeding out of control, rearing up, shaking their riders from their backs, trampling into the multitude. Lifeless bodies were tossed high into the air by their swishing tails.
I managed to slide along the outer edge of the gate until I could look north, towards the distant Monument of the Ecclesiarch. Right along the wide Avenue, the scene was repeated. The procession of the Triumph was overrun by the sheer numbers of the terrified public.
There was fire too, great plumes of it, rising from the crowd spaces on either side of the road in three places and on the Avenue of the Victor Bel-lum itself, about seven hundred metres beyond the Gate. It also seemed to me that fire also rose from other open areas beyond the next spire, off the roadway into the artisans' quarter. By my estimation, at least five more of the stricken Lightnings had fallen from the sky, ripping into the mass of the citizenry teeming in panic on the Avenue.
Soot and ash fogged the air. Distantly, above the milling nightmare of bodies, I could see the vast shapes of the Titans, turning on their metal hips, hesitant, as if utterly confused.
I doubt I saw the other Lightnings before anyone else. But I was transfixed. They were all I could see. There were four more of them, presumably the only survivors of the disastrous flyby. They had turned, and were sweeping back down the Avenue. Their formation was nothing like as precise or pretty as it had been just before the accident.
But they were much lower. And much faster.
And I knew what that meant, for I had seen it before.
An attack run.
Emperor spare me, my heart almost stopped as I saw the insane intention taking shape before me.
I screamed out something, but it was futile. One voice again
st two billion.
Streams of tracer rounds spat from the heavy cannons under their noses. Wing-mounted lascannons sparkled soundlessly.
Two went low over the crowd, slaughtering thousands. The other two followed the Avenue itself, raking the Great Triumph.
The destruction was extraordinary, as if invisible, white-hot ploughs had been set into the sea of bodies, slicing long, straight, explosive furrows out
of the Imperial citizenry below. Or as if some fast-moving, burrowing force was scattering them from below. Stippled lines of explosions sawed through the populace, casting up both human and mechanical wreckage. There was an actual fog of liquefied tissue in the air. I saw tanks struck on the highway, detonating in the mob. Hundreds of Guarsdmen and Space Marines in the rained cavalcade opened fire into the air, chasing the planes, churning the sky with bright, criss-crossed lines.
A Lightning swept by almost overhead, cutting to the left of the Spatian Gate. Its strafing firepower explosively mangled hundreds of people perilously close to me, showering me and the white stone of the Gate's side face with cooked blood.
Hundreds of batteries in the procession were now firing into the sky, the Hydras blitzing the air. Even tanks were firing - out of anger, I suppose, for they hadn't a hope in hell of hitting the fast-moving aircraft.
Yet something must have struck. A second Lightning tilted as it passed over the Gate, tiny explosions shredding its left wing and tail section. It dove straight down into the Avenue itself. It hit what seemed to me to be the heart of the Warmaster's section of the Triumph. The blast wake blew out across the wide roadway, killing as many with its concussive effects as with the impact fireball itself.
The three remaining Lightnings banked again down over the far end of the Avenue and made for a third pass. I was struck by the way they didn't turn as a pack. They flew individually, as if divorced from the world. Were their pilots possessed, insane? My mind span. Two of them banked into each other and almost hit. One didn't veer, and carried on up the Avenue, hungry for more carnage. The other was forced to swing wide, corrected, and turned over the wailing crowd mass to the west of the Avenue.
The third overshot and almost disappeared. I saw it loop faraway, out over the river haze, its wings glinting in the sun. Then it too came back for us. Like the others, straight back heedlessly into the teeth of the firestorms that the tanks, Hydras and infantry were throwing up at them.
Several hundreds more died in that final ran. Loyal citizens whose exciting day out had turned to horror; proud Guardsmen back from the war, thinking only to enjoy this special hour of praise; mysterious Space Marines, who were there only because they had been invited to be there, as an expression of honour, who perhaps greeted this death as just an alternative to their expected fate. Imperial nobles and dignitaries died in their hundreds. Several noble households never recovered from the losses at the Triumph of Thracian.
The last three Lightnings fell in this manner.
One, crossing the Spatian Gate and beyond, was blown apart in an air-burst by tracking Hydras on the chaotic street.
A second flew the gauntlet of anti-air salvos without adjusting its height and then, struck by one of the guns almost as an afterthought, turned upside down in a lazy yaw. Streaming smoke, it tilted down towards the ground but exploded against the Monument of the Ecclesiarch.
The third came in, guns chattering, and actually flew under the arch of the Spatian Gate. By then, the Titans themselves had turned to engage, and my guts convulsed with the subsonic roar of their weapons. I could see them, three kilometres away, weapon mounts pumping and flashing, high above the crowd.
Excekis Gaude, one of the Warlord Titans, caught it dead on, and killed it in the air, but not cleanly enough. The tumbling Lightning, ablaze from end to end, hit the immense Warlord Titan square on and decapitated the colossus as it exploded.
I was lost. I was stupefied. I was speechless.
I felt as if I should fall to my knees amid the tumult and beg the God-Emperor of Mankind for salvation.
But my part in this was only just beginning.
Pellucid blue flame, like a searing wall of acid, suddenly washed through the churning mob behind the Gate. Men, women, soldiers, civilians, were caught in it and shuddered, melting, resolving into skeletons that turned to dust and blew away.
I felt the pain in my sinuses, the throb in my spine. I knew what it was.
Psyker-evil. Raw Chaos, loosed on this world.
The prisoners were loose.
The warriors did not matter. A vast pitched battle was already raging across the Avenue behind Spatian's broken Gate. The Thracian Guard, the Aurora Marines and the arbites were striving to contain the outbreak of enemy prisoners, many of whom had taken the opportunity to break free and grab weapons. A ferocious, point-blank war had seized the great approach.
But what concerned me were the psykers. The captured heretics. The thirty-three. They had broken free.
I drew my power sword and my boltgun, plunging into the milling bodies, crunching over the calcified bones of those slaughtered by the psychic wave.
An inhuman thing, a Chaos prisoner, leapt at me, and I struck its head off with my blade. I leapt over a dead Marine, who was leaking blood onto the rockcrete from splits in his imperator armour, and pushed through the howling civilians.
Four Thracian Guardsmen were directly ahead of me, using the charred corpse of a fallen aurochothere for cover as they blasted into the press.
I was a few steps away from them when the gigantic dead animal reanimated, a psychic puppet, killing them all.
My weapons were useless. I focussed my mind and blew the thing apart with a concussive mental wave.
An Aurora Marine flew through the air over me, ten metres up, his legs missing.
I ran on, scything my blade at the escaped prisoners who menaced me.
The road was covered with the dead. Humans, on fire from head to foot, stumbled past me and collapsed on their faces.
The Trojan tractor team was on fire, its massive trailer slewed around. Three of the enemy pyskers lay dead on the payload space, and four void shields remained intact, their occupants frantic within.
But the others...
Upwards of twenty-five alpha-level enemy psykers had escaped.
I saw the first, a stumbling, emaciated wretch of a man, near the end of the trailer. Corposant flickered around his head and he was trying to eat a screaming astropath novitiate.
My boltgun stopped his daemonic work.
I dropped to my knees, gasping and crying as the second found me. She was a stringy female, clad in a gauzy white veil, her fingernails like talons.
She cowered behind the end of the trailer, sobbing and lashing out at me with her foul power. She had no eyes.
I am not alpha-class. My brain was broiling and bubbling.
A Thracian guardsman ran at her from the left, and instinctively, she turned her attention to him. His head popped like a blister.
I shot her through the heart and knocked her flat on her back. Her limbs continued to thrash for over a minute.
Electrical discharge spat out at me from nearby in the crowd. People, screaming and burning, tumbled frantically back from a male psyker who was striding, head down, towards the hives. He was a dwarf, with stunted limbs and an enlarged cranium. Ball lightning crackled around his pudgy fingers.
I stabbed at him with my mind, just to get his attention and then exploded his face with a pin-point bolt.
Emperor save me, he kept coming. I had blown the front off his skull, but he kept coming. Blind, his features a gory mess. He stumbled across the ground towards me, his still-active mind boring into mine.
I fired again, almost panicking myself, and blew off one of his arms. Still he came on. My jacket, hair and eyelashes caught fire. My brain was about to explode out of my skull.
A Space Marine in the colours of the Aurora Chapter came at him from behind and shredded him into pulp with his boltgun.
; 'Inquisitor?' the Marine asked me, his voice distorted by his helmet mic. 'Are you all right?'
He helped me up.
'What insanity is this?' he rasped.
"You have a vox-channel, Marine? Alert Lord Orsini!'
'Already done, inquisitor,' he crackled.
Behind us, the tractors exploded en masse, flinging fire and debris high into the air.
A scalded child ran past us, shrieking.
The Marine grabbed the child in his massive arms.
This way, this way, out of danger...'
'No/ I said slowly. 'Don't... don't...'
His visored face swung up at me in confusion, the child cradled in his arms.
'Don't what?' he asked.
'Look at the brand! The mark there!' I yelled, pointing to the Malleus rune burned into the child's ankle. The hammer of witches. The brand-mark of the psyker.
The Chaos child looked up at me and grinned.
'What mark?' asked the Marine. What mark are you talking about?'
'1...I...'
I tried to fight it, please know that. I tried to repel the unholy power of the child's mind as it groped into my head. But this thing, this 'child', was far beyond my powers to contain.
Kill him, it said.
My hand was shaking, resisting, as I swung the boltgun around and shot the Marine through the head. A searing white agony flooded my horrified being.
Now kill yourself, it suggested, chortling.
I put the smoking muzzle of the boltgun against my own temple, my vision filled with the giggling face of the child, perched on the knee of the collapsed, headless Marine.
That's it... go on...
My finger tightened on the trigger.
'No... n-no...'
Yes, you stupid fool... yes...
Blood streamed out of my nose. I wanted to fall to my knees, but the monster wouldn't let me. It wanted me to do one thing, and one thing only. It implored me, ripping my consciousness apart.
It was strident and it was undeniable.
I pulled the trigger.
SEVEN
Voke, and speculations.
Esarhaddon.
Through the Void.
But I did not die.
The boltgun, that gift from Librarian Brytnoth, which had never failed me in ten decades of use, failed to fire.