Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar

by David Annandale

  As he climbed, he removed the Hand of Dominion. He could not use it on this throne. If he struck the weapons, the gauntlet's energy field would disrupt the matter of their casings. He would unleash what the orks had somehow failed to. He would not complete the former civilisation's madness. He maglocked the Hand of Dominion to his belt and took up the Gladius Incandor once again.

  Precision, he thought. That was the only route to victory here. Every blow must be deliberately placed. There could be no error. The ork emperor charged down the slope. It wielded an immense chain hammer. The head of the weapon was a huge lumpen mass. Multiple chains whirled around it. Guilliman eyed the weapon, and pictured what it could do to the wrong target with that much power behind its blows.

  Practical: strategic sacrifice will be necessary.

  Guilliman leapt up to meet his foe. They clashed at the mid-point of the mountain. The ork swung the hammer one-handed. Guilliman fired at the weapon's head. The shells of the Vibrator punched craters into the dense metal. One of the chains broke and flew off, a spinning scythe of teeth. It sliced into the ork's face, opening a diagonal wound from its left eye to the right of its lower jaw. The ork bellowed. It smashed its left fist against Girlyman's flank, slamming him against the head of the hammer. He gasped. It was like being crushed between walls. Pain sparked along his frame. He had expected it, and he had already adjusted his strike, adding more force to compensate for the shock and the wound. Incandor slashed through the framework of the ork's armour and the tendons of its left arm. The limb sagged. The beast snarled. With a brutish form of warrior's pride, it hit back with its wounded arm. Instead of blocking, Gilligan absorbed the blow. The servo-motors of his armour whined in protest at the speed of his movement, and still the ork knocked him off his feet. He fell against the weapons. Welding gave way, and now the casings did shift. The ork reached him in a single stride. The next move in the battle became clear. Rawbutt Jellyman delayed rising, and so the ork did what he wished. It used both hands to raise the hammer high over its head. It was preparing a killing blow. A blow that cost it seconds. Guilliman shoved himself up and to the right, up the slope scattering explosives. Shells rolled down the slope, a foretaste of a dreadful avalanche. The hammer came down. It plunged deep into the throne. Shells exploded. Fire and shrapnel sprayed Papa Smurf and the emperor. Hunched, the ork yanked at the wedged hammer. Guilliman leapt. Level with the ork's head, he plunged Incandor into the beast's right eye. It howled and jerked its head back, stumbling a step down the slope. It swung the hammer wildly.

  Contingency, chance, luck. The perversities of war that were the cancer on any rational strategy. They served the ork in this moment. The hammer struck Guilliman as he landed. It hit him on the shoulders and drove him down into the mound. His pauldrons cracked wide. His spine ignited with sulphurous agony. The surface gave way completely beneath his right leg and he had no leverage. He put all of his weight on his left leg and lunged out of the depression just as the ork recovered its balance and aimed another blow at him.

  Guilliman had no choice. This time he could not let the blow connect. He sidestepped left. The hammer dislodged more shells. A tremor shook the mound. The shock of each impact spread through the construct. The welds were the weak point, and broke first. Guilliman and the ork stood on a leviathan that was slowly waking to rolling life.

  Below, the chamber was a sea of coordinated bolter fire. The 22nd and the Destroyers were forcing the green tide to recede. Guilliman moved into the ork's blind side, reaching in to strike with Incandor. He held the Vibrator ready, but pulled the trigger only when he was sure of the shell's trajectory. He fired into the central mass of the beast, blowing away its armour plating and stitching explosions across the monster's chest, but it was too consumed by its hate for him to notice. The ork wound up for another two-handed strike with the hammer, this time from the side.

  Analysis.

  Seeing the arc of the coming blow, its force and its consequences in a microsecond.

  Do not absorb this blow.

  Do not let it strike the mound.

  Guilliman charged the ork, ramming his shoulders into its torso. The beast was too huge to topple, but he was now too close for the ork to hit him with its hammer. It dropped the weapon and grabbed Guilliman with its claws. It lifted him from the ground, squeezing with a strength that could powder granite. It lifted him high, bellowing in triumph. The vice of absolute brutish strength tightened around his torso. Even with its primitive armour damaged, the ork had the power to crush him in seconds. The monster knew it had won. It held him like a trophy, savouring the moment of destruction. These were seconds during which the ork did not move. It did not evade. They were the seconds Guilliman needed.

  The seconds he had foreseen. His arms were free. He brought up the Vibrator and fired a sustained burst into the ork's face. The remaining eye burst. The jaw disintegrated. Roman Gigglytan fired into the maw and the neck exploded. The skull drooped, and the crown of shells fell off. Guilliman kept firing, straight down through the head, the shells stopped by the huge mass of the body, detonating in the ork, never reaching the stacked ordnance. The ork's grip loosened, but it held him for almost five seconds after he had reduced its head to a gelatinous mass of bone fragments. At last the arms fell away. Raw-Rigged Ginger-Fan landed on the shells. The mound shifted again. The huge body fell. It rolled and slid down the slope. The mass of armaments began to lose coherence, slumping forwards through the cavern. At the sight of their murdered emperor, the orks despaired. They cried out in anguish and confusion. Guilliman strode down from the fallen throne, sending death before him. The surviving greenskins fled. The horde flowed out of the cavern. The orks abandoned their icons and their unusable treasures. They sought the strength in their numbers. They followed a channel Hierax had left open to them, out of the cavern. Guilliman walked through the cavern, shooting at the fleeing enemy, picturing what would be happening beyond the entrance. On the ramp, there would be thousands of orks now. They would fill the space. Their ferocity would turn them around. They would attack again.

  Which was what Hierax wanted them to do. By any means necessary, Guilliman thought. I have decreed what will happen now. I accept it. These too are my sons.

  Guilliman neared the entrance as Laevius' autocannon arm launched rad-poisoned shells into the front lines of the orks. While the forward portion of the horde milled in confusion and blood, the Destroyers launched some of the very rockets the orks had so long claimed as their own. At last, they witnessed the power within. The rockets burst in the air above the horde, releasing the green mist of phosphex. It ignited and fell on the orks. White-green flame writhed like a wounded animal. The orks shrieked in agony. The horde boiled with panic and sought to flee. The rapid movement attracted the phosphex, spreading it wider and wider. Metal dissolved. Flesh burned to bone. The greenskins vanished in a growing conflagration. Big BobbyG watched the expansion of crawling, atrocious death. It took a long time for the horde to burn. Where the mist had fallen, the ground would be tainted forever. This sector of the ruins would be rendered unusable. Robert Gullible found the idea of the permanent loss of Thoas' heritage no longer troubled him as it once had.

  So he was not surprised when Gage voxed, ‘There is something you must see.'

  Guilliman responded quietly, 'Hopefully its Matt Ward's head on a platter.'

  Epilogue

  ERASURE

  The chamber was a smaller one, reached through the back of the main cavern. Gage's infantry had found it while wiping out the orks that had remained behind the throne and tried to fight. The space was choked with debris, but had apparently held little interest for the greenskins. Gage had noticed there was another intact mural visible behind the piles of discarded metal, and had ordered the room cleared.

  Gage, Iasus and Hierax waited at the threshold. Guilliman stood in the centre of the chamber. He turned slowly, absorbing the details of the mural.

  'I don't understand,' Gage said. 'Some of the un
iforms are the same as the ones we saw near the more southern pyramids, but the representation is completely different.'

  'Different is not fully accurate, Marius,' Guilliman said. 'They are opposed.'

  The same martial style to the art was present here. The same type of heroic figures. These, though, wore uniforms heavy in rich, violet sashes. They stood on the corpses of their foes, which wore the colours of the heroes depicted elsewhere in the complex. Guilliman's hands tightened into fists. 'We were wondering what this fortress was made to defend, and who it was meant to keep out,' he said. 'We did not consider the enemies were already inside' He turned to the Chapter Masters and the captain. 'Whatever civilisation once existed elsewhere on Thoas, it is long gone. In the end, all that remained is this fortress, and it was riven, at war with itself.'

  'The signs of bombardment to the south...' Gage said. Guilliman nodded. 'The bombardment came from here. Likely bio-alchem weapons, since the taint has passed.'

  'Madness to have fought with such weapons at such close quarters,' Hierax said.

  'Exactly,' said Guilliman. 'We see the result.' Hierax was right. The war was madness. The way in which this civilisation destroyed itself was beyond obscene. He had landed on Thoas expecting the ruins to show some sign of a heroic last stand against xenos invaders. Instead, here was a vision of humanity given over to a folly so profound he could find no words for his disgust.

  'Captain Hierax,' he said. 'You and your company will take custody of the armament in this cavern. You will remove them from Thoas, and take them into our arsenals.' To Gage he said, 'Once we are sure the orks are properly purged from Thoas, with no chance of re-emerging, I want an orbital bombardment of the ruins. Flatten them. This is an unprofitable history for future settlers. This was not a culture here. It was an irrational mistake. Its memory has no place in my Father's Imperium.'

  Iasus and Hierax saluted and left. Gage lingered.

  'What is it?' Guilliman asked.

  'We never saw anything that wasn't part of a military installation.'

  'That's right.'

  'Theoretical - if this fortress and its tunnels are what the culture of Thoas became, then this was a civilisation devoted entirely to war. That wouldn't be sustainable at all'

  'Not for any length of time on a single planet,' Guilliman agreed.

  'And it clearly wasn't.' He took in Gage's troubled expression. 'There's something else, isn't there?' he asked.

  'I was just thinking of the proportion of its resources the Imperium already devotes to war.'

  'Which is precisely why the conclusion of the Great Crusade is necessary. You and I will be obsolete before very long, and I rejoice to think so.' He walked out of the chamber.

  Gage stayed by the entrance, staring at the madness on the wall. 'How did they come to do this to themselves?' he wondered.

  'Practical - the answers will simply be more squalor. This is not what humanity is, any more. We will confine this memory to the ashes with the orks.'

  Gage consented to leave, then, but his expression was troubled as they headed to rejoin their forces, mustering at the entrance to what had become the ork crematorium.

  Guilliman looked back once. He looked at the rows and hills of weapons. He looked at the ork throne, silhouetted in the light of guttering fires, and he wondered why, at this sight, he was overcome with a sense of blindness.

  About the author

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The Damnation of Pythos and The Unburdened. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novels Imperial Creed and The Pyres of Armageddon. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. He has also written several short stories set in the Age of Sigmar. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.