'The discussion is that involved already?'
'Yes.'
Theoreticals without practicals, Hierax thought. The insight struck him as important, but he could not see what to do with it. No practical for me either.
What he could see was an immediate danger. Resentment bred mistakes. 'The talk,' he said. 'How widespread is it? Does it reach beyond the company?'
Kletos nodded. 'I was speaking to some brothers in the 223rd. They're no happier. I've heard rumblings from other companies too.'
The more Kletos spoke, the more Hierax's personal anger was mixed with concern. He had been thinking of the long-term transformation of the Chapter when he had spoken with Sirras. That long term was clearly troubling the rank and file too. But it was the short term that worried him now. Resentment over the time ahead could jeopardise the present.
'Reassure our brothers,' Hierax told Kletos. 'We will always be who we are.'
'Oh? How?'
'Are you doubting my word, legionary?'
'Just curious. As they will be.'
He dodged the question. 'If an identity can be altered so easily, it isn't worth preserving in the first place.'
'Of course,' said Kletos. The corner of his mouth twitched down even further.
'That will be all,' Hierax said.
Kletos saluted and left the strategium. Hierax turned back to the oculus, and the display of the great plain on Thoas. Engine flares and the heat streaks of drop pods burned through the atmosphere. Already the first mobilisations would be occurring in the western reaches of the plain. And in the east, the orks would be stirring. He did not need any augur readings to tell him that. He could read the patterns of the war's birth without seeing them.
The thoughts of the Nemesis Chapter's morale ate at him. His hope, in observing the war, was to find the opportunity to prove to Guilliman the need for the Destroyers. Deployment and vindication - they would create the path out of his festering resentment. They would be the salvation for a Chapter that he did not believe needed to be saved from itself by an outsider.
Now, though, his hope receded before the dread his talk with Kletos had fed. The risk did not lie with the Destroyers, held far from combat. It lay with the rest of the Chapter, no less bitter but deployed in the field. Where the mistakes could happen.
Theoretical...' he murmured. Resentment in troops is a force multiplier for errors. 'Practical...' Deploy them to see what happens.
With an effort of will, he went no further down that mental path. The speculation was unproductive. It was also, he knew, unnecessary. The theoretical's truth or falsity would be manifest soon enough.
He turned his attention from the oculus to the pict screens in the strategium. He watched the lengthening columns of company runes and landing coordinates. He tried to focus on the expanding minutiae of the landings, to fill his mind with the effort of visualising the countless vectors of the action below.
Despite his efforts, the questions he wanted to avoid rose, dragged to the surface by the very chain of logic the primarch had instilled in his sons. If Hierax wanted Guilliman to see how vital the Destroyers were, it followed that Guilliman was blind to that truth. Was he then blind to the consequences of Iasus' appointment?
If so, what else might he not be seeing?
This is your anger speaking, Hierax tried to tell himself.
He had never been good at lying to himself.
War was thunder, and there were as many forms of warfare as there were kinds of thunder. Guilliman knew them well. He could tell, from the rhythm, timbre and beat of the roar, the nature of the combatants and the state of the clash. What he heard was not cacophony. He heard the language of battle, the world-shaking argument and counter-argument of a debate drenched in blood, embraced by flame. He knew all the articulations of strike and retaliation. Most of all, he knew the thunder of his Legion.
Guilliman stood in the open hatch of Land Raider Proteus Flame of Illyrium. Inside the hull, the Invictarii honour guard waited to be unleashed. Guilliman drank in the thunder of the gathering strength of the Ultramarines. This was the thunder of preparation, of a potential building up until it must be unleashed, a fist that could topple mountains.
It would be easy to believe the sound alone could flatten all before it. The sky trembled, battered by the constant roar of descending transports, heavy lifters and gunships. As above, so below, and the ground trembled too. It shook beneath the treads of tanks, armoured carriers, and the march of thousands of ceramite boots. Guilliman looked up. The stars wavered, their light distorted by the contrails of arriving ships and the roil of dissipating promethium.This far west of the cordillera, Thoas was dark with eternal night, cold with eternal winter. The plain was barren, its rocky protuberances worn down to smooth ripples as the superheated air of Thoas' day side rushed with unceasing monotony to the frigid night. There was heat in the winter now. The bones of the world were blasted by the flame of retro-firing engines. There was light too. It was the harsh gaze of landing lights and the targeting beams of tanks.
The tremors of the deployment travelled up the hull of Flame of Illyrium. Guilliman felt them through his gauntlets when he clutched the edge of the hatch. He breathed deeply of the sharp burn of spent fuel. And he listened to the thunder. It was the strength of his sons. It was the sound of the great machine of flesh and will, of discipline and steel, that was unfolding across the plain. It was the tectonic rumble of Thoas' reclamation. A force whose destructive power was unlimited, but whose purpose was, in the end, to purify and to build.
Your strength acts through me, Father, Guilliman thought. Your will is mine. Let this world be part of the human supremacy once more.
'...odd choice', a voice was saying over the vox. It was Habron, in the driver's compartment of Illyrium.
'What is?' Guilliman asked the Techmarine.
'Thoas,' Habron repeated. 'The conditions of this world do not invite initial colonisation. Even less a full civilisation. How would it be sustained?'
'Temperatures are still above freezing at the base of the mountains,' Guilliman said. The eastern end of the plain was within the terminator zone, held with the mountains in a permanent limbo, neither dawn nor twilight.
'A narrow region,' Habron objected. 'Hardly large enough to sustain a planetary population.’
'Are you thinking of what was or what is to come?' Guilliman asked.
'What is to come can be supplied', said Habron. 'What is past was isolated'.
'Then we should look for answers in the ruins,' Guilliman said. 'Time, I think, that we reclaimed them.'
'The Chapter Masters have signalled readiness'.
'And the orks? Are they ready? Are they coming to greet us?'
He knew the answer. His choice of site for the deployment had been the result of rigorous calculation. It had to be close enough to the mountains for the orks to see the signs of descending ships. It had to be far enough away to give the Ultramarines the time and space to mobilise. The operating hypothesis was the orks would mobilise the instant they realised their hold on Thoas would be contested. The question was how quickly the orks would arrive.
'They are', Habron confirmed. 'A moment, primarch. Updating.' There was silence for a few seconds while Habron used the explorator augury web. The Proteus' auspex sensor suite was Guilliman's sight where no sight was possible. It could peer through the walls of a fortress, pinpointing structural weakness and enemy concentrations. The orks were still too far away for the system to come into play, but Habron had linked the Explorator to the augurs and cogitators of the Macragge's Honour. The ship looked beyond the mustering zone's horizon to the advancing greenskins. The Macragge's Honour fed what it learned back to the Flame of Illyrium.
‘They are closing rapidly,' Habron reported. 'They will be visible within the hour, assuming we hold position.'
Which we won't, Guilliman thought. 'Can you give me a target?' he asked.
'Large numbers of heat blooms. T
hey have many vehicles...' Habron was quiet again for a moment. Guilliman waited without prompting him. ‘Too many to make any determination at this stage! Habron said. "The heat signatures have formed a single mass. I'll know more when I can use the Explorator's sensors directly.'
'Then let us meet the foe.' Guilliman switched to the command channel of the vox to address the entire deployment. He climbed out of the hatch to stand on the roof of Flame of lllyrium. The Proteus was stationed at the easternmost edge of the landing zone.
'Warriors of the Thirteenth,' he called.
All eyes would be looking east now, towards the enemy, and towards the position where his legionaries knew he must be. He was visible to many, and even those too far away to catch sight of him would be gazing in this direction, sensing his presence with certainty. They were certain because of who he was, and how he had made himself known to them. Their genes were his. His being informed theirs. Their instincts flowed to the same purpose as his own. He was as his father had made him, and they were shaped to the same ends.
But what the Ultramarines knew in their blood, Guilliman had ensured was also a direct, conscious, ever-present truth. The Legion's command structure was predicated on the powerful commander. From the squad level on up, the leader gave more than direction. He shaped the battle. He was the pole star for his men, the figure of inspiration and the sign of the eternal advance. Every squad, every company, every Chapter was a series of vectors, all moving towards their individual goals, and each goal one aspect of the unified mission of the Legion. A multiplicity forged into a perfection of order. Guilliman was the point of fusion. He was the fountainhead of command, and the confluence of goals. He was the leader who was as ultimate as he was necessary. On Macragge, before the coming of the Emperor, he had already embodied the role, but he did so as an unthinking part of his identity. It was only once he had taken command of the XIII, and undertaken to come to a full understanding of the connections between himself and his genetic sons, that he had articulated the theories of what he was and must be.
So now, at the dawn of another battle, he was the supreme commander, and he was the culminating symbol of command. He directed the movements of the Legion, and he was the ideal they looked to even when he was not physically present. Guilliman the symbol had a reality that surpassed Guilliman the physical being. That was as it should be. That was as he had designed. It was part of his great work.
His labour was far from done. There was another component to the integrity of command that was yet incomplete, and that he could not do alone. He needed Gage to face the realities of continuity. Gage was resistant. That was understandable. But he would do his duty, in time. They all would.
'Ultramarines!' Guilliman voxed. He raised the Gladius Incandor. The blade flashed silver, cold and pure as the stars of the Thoas night. 'The greenskins are approaching. March with me! We will meet them. We will purge them! We will return this planet to the human dominion!' He paused, and pointed Incandor at the horizon. 'The enemy's way of war is the way of the mob. Ours is the way of order. We fight with force, and we fight with reason, reason that is imbued in every decision and in every blow! We are the science and truth of war, and we will shatter the presumption of the foe! We are honour and courage!'
'Honour and courage!’ The shout came from every throat in the Legion, and from every vox-speaker. It was the greatest thunder, rising above those of the hundreds of engines. It was the incarnation of the sublime. In a less secular age, he knew, what he heard would have been experienced as the roar of the Legion's soul.
As it was, his blood soared when his sons answered. He dropped back into the hatch, still standing, and faced the east, his lips pulled back in a grin of ferocious pride as the rumble of Flame of Illyrium's engine became deafening. The tank surged forwards, a beast slipping its chain.
In the same moment, the Legion advanced. As the voices of his sons had taken up his war cry, now the gunships and transports and tanks answered the roar of Illyrium. The immense thunder that had shaken earth and sky as the Legion mustered now transcended itself. The individual warriors and vehicles joined together in a colossus of war. Guilliman did not like the concept of perfection. That was Fulgrim's obsession, and Guilliman doubted his brother would have seen fit to bestow that label on the Ultramarines advance. Guilliman had seen the look on Fulgrim's face during their joint operations. The approach of the XIII lacked finesse in his eyes. War for Fulgrim was an art. Strategy should be aesthetically pleasing as well as successful.
Guilliman thought it was enough for strategy to be sound. And for a Legion to be unstoppable.
The Ultramarines marched, and instead of perfection, there was precision. Guilliman prized that far above aesthetics. Precision and rigour. War was not an art. It was a science. It was the application of overwhelming force with the full consciousness of where and how and why. Art could come in the wake of war. Art belonged in the creation and reconstruction that were the true ends of war's means. Success in war was to bring it to a swift and complete end.
Behind Guilliman, stretching off as far as he could see to the left and right on the plain, the Legion's strength advanced so implacably, it was as if a tectonic plate were going to war. Guilliman breathed in the roiling smoke of hundreds of engines. He took in the flash and burst of vehicle lamps, and the glow of gunship engines. The Ultramarines had brought the light of the human galaxy to the surface of Thoas.
He turned his eyes to the horizon and voxed Habron. 'How fast is the enemy approaching?'
'Still accelerating', Habron said after a moment. 'And variable across the horde.' He read off a group of figures and the average speed of the leading edge of the greenskin army.
Guilliman calculated the rate of advance of the two forces. He gazed hard into the east. The promise of dawn glimmered there. It would never arrive. One did not wait for dawn on Thoas. Ithad to be hunted. And the Legion was heading its way. The orks, though, were not as implacable as the unmoving sun, no matter how much they deluded themselves about their strength and power. They had already been dislodged from their high ground. They could be made to move. They were rushing to the night, and to their oblivion.
He would see them very soon.
Guilliman used the moments that remained to vox Gage.
'What do you see, Marius?' he asked.
'What do you want me to see?'
Gage wasn't fooled by the question. He knew Guilliman was not asking whether he had spotted the foe.
'I see our Legion,' Guilliman told him.
'As do I.'
'Do you see its shape? I don't mean the formations. I mean what they signify.'
A pause. 'The theoretical given practical form’, Gage said.
'Yes,' said Guilliman. 'And in this moment, the practical made theoretical. That's the paradox of the march to battle. Can you see it? We have lost nothing. The formations are flawless. Our strength is at its greatest potential. This is the perfection of the moment before battle.' He said perfection deliberately. The embodied potential was an ideal, one that would encounter reality and instantly transform. This was something he didn't think Fulgrim would ever understand. Guilliman had certainly never been able to make his brother see the impossibility of his quest. Fulgrim believed the ideal could exist in battle, and he pursued its manifestation. Guilliman knew what happened to ideals. 'We must never be blinded by the aesthetic magnificence of the purely theoretical,' he told Gage. 'Just like we cannot let ourselves be defined by the brute calculation of the solely practical. The practical grounds the dreams of the theoretical. The theoretical gives flight to the realities of the practical.'
'Always!' Gage said.
'Yes. Always.' Even in the heat of battle, and at the smallest level of the Legion's organisation. The possible and the actual worked in symbiosis, and in their fusion was victory. That was more valuable than the pursuit of the unattainable. Fulgrim performed wonders chasing that goal, but Guilliman wondered what satisfac
tion he found in that. All he could imagine was eternal frustration.
Observation. Analysis. Determination. Obsession. Execution. That cycle repeated until it led to a victory that had all the appearance of being inevitable. And perhaps it was: preordained by the XIII Legion's philosophical machine of war.
There was real satisfaction in that cycle. If Guilliman felt hunger, it was in the desire for the cycle's continued adaptation and adjustment. The endless lessons he learned assuaged that hunger, then pushed him towards its greater consideration, and a new implementation. He did not seek perfection. The process was its own fulfilment.
'Lord. Guilliman', Habron voxed.
'I know,' Guilliman answered. He saw the change at the horizon. The boundary between land and sky was visible as an uneven line of deeper black beneath the firmament. The glitter of the stars ended, cut off by contours of eroded rock. Now the line moved and blurred. A huge mass was coming into view. Then there was light. It was ugly, smoky, crude, the belched flame of burning fuel and exploding fumes. It was, Guilliman thought, not true light at all. Savagery could illuminate nothing. It was the fire of barbarism, and nothing more. But it revealed the enemy.
The clamour of the orks came on before them. Carried by the perpetual west wind, the howling came from hundreds of thousands of animalistic maws and from the grinding of engines so crude they should have already been destroyed by catastrophic malfunctions. Guilliman's ear separated the roar of the orks from the roar of the Ultramarines. It was the difference between destructive instinct and purpose-led order. The difference between the monstrosity of the past and the infinite hope of the future.
The armies raced towards each other. The brutish shrieking of the enemy became ecstatic as the orks caught sight of the Ultramarines.
'Someone should tell them they've lost their empire', Gage said.
'I doubt they even know what they had,' said Guilliman. The greenskins understood battle and the joy of pillage. He doubted their comprehension extended much beyond the frenzy of the moment. They were worthy foes if all one sought was the contest of strength. But they did not have true empires. They were infestations that spread across worlds. The Ultramarines had quarantined this particular multi-system disease. Now they were going to wipe out the final infection.
Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar Page 5