The Primarchs

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  As members of Effrit approached each other in the crowd, the legionnaires brushed shoulders and exchanged their hololithic semblances. With their amulets changing hands in choreographed patterns, it would be far more difficult for the mark to keep track of his pursuers.

  Auguramus stared into the crowds, probably on the lookout for assassins or grab-teams. His eyes routinely returned to Omegon, who was maintaining a steady pace and swiftly convincing the man that he was about to be intercepted.

  ‘We have a boulemart coming up,’ Effrit Four hissed over the open channel.

  ‘Move in,’ Omegon said. This time he was not careful about how he spoke, and Auguramus – who had been peering above the heads of the crowd at him – saw the stranger’s lips give the order.

  Panicked, the artisan moved with his servitor guard over to the side of the galleria. Omegon watched him sidle over to the boulemarts leading off the main esplanade, and felt his prey’s temptation to run building into irresistible paranoia.

  Four members of Effrit closed in on Auguramus from different directions, in plain sight, but Omegon saw the surprise evident on the artisan’s face as one by one his pursuers disappeared. Each one had inexplicably vanished in the crowd.

  Spinning around, Auguramus’s surprise was replaced by horror as he found himself alone. His servitors were no longer there to protect him.

  In their place were the four strangers who had been approaching, now staring silently. Auguramus cast about for any chance of escape. He found only more faces that he had come to recognise in the crowd, and Omegon swiftly bringing up the rear. It was too much for the poor man.

  ‘Stay away from me!’ he blurted before bolting for the boulemart – a narrow arcade lined with stalls and porch bazaars. Omegon watched him blunder straight through a rag curtain and past a handful of bewildered onlookers.

  The servitors stood, silently obeying their master’s last command. Omegon had simply arranged for the closing legionnaires to plant their field generators on the bodyguards as they passed, before disappearing back into the multitude. Auguramus believed that they had abandoned him and had been replaced by members of a grab-team when, unwittingly, he had dismissed and mindlocked them.

  Tearing aside the curtain, Omegon found two disguised Effrit squad members holding the artisan in a porchway. They stood either side of the heavyset man, their short blades nestling in his folds of neckflesh, and one also held the microvox to Auguramus’s throat.

  Omegon approached with predatory composure. Auguramus instantly recognised him as the shadow that had been following him through the mercantile world masses.

  ‘You’re making a big mistake,’ he yelled at Omegon. ‘I have influence with the feared and the powerful. You couldn’t even imagine…’

  Omegon took the field generator from his belt and dialled down through the hololithic frequencies. The image of a De Sotan nobody shimmered and warped until it finally fizzled away to the reality it concealed – an armed Alpha Legionnaire, the Legion insignia upon his chest. The other two warriors did the same.

  Auguramus stared wide-eyed at his sponsors. He had no words or pleas for such a turn of events.

  ‘Oh, I think I might be able to imagine, Artisan Empyr,’ Omegon said. ‘I too have influence with the feared and the powerful. They trust you with their secrets: they wish to know why you are trading them with the rest of the Imperium.’

  Auguramus found it difficult to catch his breath. Omegon’s reveal had been shocking enough, but he struggled to speak with two blades resting at his throat like a pair of shears.

  ‘I’m not… selling anything...’ Auguramus managed.

  ‘I know, Artisan Empyr,’ Omegon told him. ‘You’re buying. And you’re doing what you do best – you are building. Except you’re not building for us. You’re building for yourself.’

  ‘Did Master Echion send you?’

  ‘Master Echion had his suspicions, but no.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Auguramus gasped.

  ‘I want you to restrict your talents to the wishes of your sponsors.’

  ‘But the technology is… remarkable. Potentially even superior to the devices on Perditus.’

  ‘I know,’ Omegon replied. ‘It was I who supplied you with the specifications and the original materials.’

  ‘It is clearly xenos in origin. Ancient. Where did you–’

  ‘Where I acquire my information is my concern. Now, if you test my patience again with another ill-advised question, I’ll take your head from your shoulders and leave your fat carcass dumped in an alley.’

  Auguramus restricted his response to a fearful nod.

  ‘You are gifted among even your kind,’ the primarch admitted. ‘That is why we came to you. That is why we took you into our trust. Do not make the mistake of thinking you were the only prospect. There are others who can still deliver what we need.’

  Again, a nod of pale-faced dread.

  ‘Artisan Empyr,’ Omegon said, ‘why are you building a replica of the Tenebrae Pylon Array on the agri-world of Parabellus?’

  ‘The technology,’ Auguramus told him delicately, ‘– alien though it may be – could revolutionise the Imperium. It could secure our astrotelepathic network and the immeteorology of our trade routes.’

  ‘Open your eyes. The galaxy doesn’t need revolution,’ Omegon told him. ‘It suffers a little too much from that already. You’re securing the Warmaster’s Imperium before he has even won it. I don’t care if your intentions were noble – an operative of the Alpha Legion cannot expect to betray his masters and live long afterwards.’

  ‘D-d-don’t kill me, please...’ Auguramus begged. ‘I can still be useful…’

  Omegon leant in with an ominous intimacy. ‘We are the Alpha Legion, Volkern. Whether they know it or not, we always find a use for everyone.’

  GAMMA

  Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω2/002.68//OCTTenebrae 9-50 – Trojan Asteroid

  The boarding torpedo Argolid drifted through the void of the Octiss system. Like a bullet through the black, the torpedo sliced through the frozen absence, iInertial velocity maintained, course unwavering.

  Octiss was like a forgotten corner of the galaxy. A debris field of rock and ice circled in the silence, begirdling the bright but bleary 66-Zeta Octiss; it was a shattered realm, a sea of cosmic offal in which pockmarked planetoids and lighter-than-air giants scudded.

  Inside the Argolid, everything was a frosty darkness. Squad Sigma stood to attention in their boarding cages. Legionnaire Arkan sat strapped into the pilot’s throne in front of a set of rudimentary controls. Omegon stood at the narrow strip of armourglas that could only charitably be described as a viewport. Wiping the rime from the surface, he allowed a brighter shaft of light to cut through the gloom of the torpedo compartment. 66-Zeta Octiss was close, then. Rune banks and decking twinkled and glistened with an icy sheen.

  A few hours earlier, Omegon had had Arkan shut down everything with a power signature within the torpedo – heat, gravity, life support. The legionnaires were all decked out in full plate and helmets, and had engaged the maglocks on their boots. The Argolid had fired its final burn before going dark and hurtling between the mute fury of two gas giants. The serene deep-ocean green of their smooth surfaces belied the true nature of the planets: unimaginable depth and pressure, winds thousands of kilometres in speed, eternal storms and cyclonic pits, intense radioactive fields and a comet-trap gravitational influence.

  Arkan held a simple astrolabe to his helmet optics and made measurements through the cleared section. The shaft of sunlight suddenly disappeared, indicating that something of size had moved between the Argolid and the uncomfortably close Octiss star.

  ‘Well?’ Omegon looked to the legionnaire.

  ‘On target, my lord,’ Arkan replied. ‘As long as we don’t hit anything.’

  ‘We cannot
afford the attention that a correctional burn might attract,’ Omegon told him, but there was little they could do about the fragments of metal and rock spinning serenely through deep space about them.

  Before the reinforced nose-cone of the boarding torpedo rolled the stately magnitude of Tenebrae 9-50. Like a mountain range plummeting through the void at colossal speed, the asteroid was rugged and irregular, scarred by craters, impact sites and chasmic fractures. Arkan pointed out a deep cleavage in the asteroid rockface, a natural feature designated as the 61° 39’ Ecliptic, or colloquially to the base personnel as ‘Vacuity’s Bosom’. The deep fissure had been chosen as the Alpha Legion’s point of entry.

  Omegon watched the colossal asteroid tumble towards them, rotating around its bulbous centre of gravity. The primarch was silently impressed with Arkan’s calculations. The boarding torpedo was not only closing on their target solely under the power of inertia, but it was being almost effortlessly targeted towards a jagged pit gaping in the asteroid’s midriff, all while the gargantuan rock itself slowly spun in the void.

  Dropping down through the chasm, the boarding torpedo pierced the silky darkness of the asteroid’s interior. Here there was no light at all, not even the pinpricks of distant stars for company. Omegon looked to Arkan – he was monitoring a handheld chronometer.

  The boarding torpedo was designed to breach the armour of enemy vessels and the amalgamate hull sections of abominate space hulks, but Omegon believed that Tenebrae 9-50 would prove more of a challenge and so had planned for alternative disembarkation protocols. Once again wiping the film of ice from the viewport, he put his faceplate to the surface. Even with his more-than-human eyesight, the primarch could see absolutely nothing.

  ‘Legionnaire–’ he cautioned, but Arkan’s chronometer completed its countdown with a single click.

  ‘Launching counterhook,’ Arkan announced, pulling on a pair of pneumatic paddles set in the runebank above. A loud pressure snap reverberated through the torpedo as a harpoon launched from the rear of the craft, trailing an adamantium alloy line. Satisfied that the harpoon had embedded itself deep within the bedrock, Arkan reported: ‘Firing grapnels; engaging resistance.’

  Rather than tearing the rear out of the torpedo with a dead stop, the legionnaire brought the craft to a disciplined halt through the increasing drag offered by a heavy-duty gear assembly. Omegon could feel the hull trembling, and the assembly began to emit an grinding screech. He put out his arms to steady himself. The boarding torpedo was clearly decelerating but it was difficult to tell in the absolute darkness of the rocky trench whether or not it would be fast enough.

  The Argolid suddenly lurched; the counterhook had run its line. The legionnaires were secure in their boarding cages, while Arkan was strapped into the pilot’s throne. Omegon was thrown forward, but with his powered gauntlets fixed around the rail the primarch didn’t travel far. Yanked back a little on its tether, the torpedo proceeded to float through the darkness, scraping against the irregular wall of the shaft before bumping to rest against the cold rock. Omegon nodded, to the legionnaires and to himself.

  ‘Squad disembark. Vox silence until we reach the airlock.’

  Firing the starboard bulkhead, Sergeant Setebos kicked off into the lightless gap. The asteroid had next to no natural gravity and the legionnaire drifted through the blackness, bolter clutched in one gauntlet. He activated his suit lamps with the other.

  The halo of light around the sergeant glinted off the bottom of the shaft, showing the Alpha Legionnaires just how close they had come to a terminal impact. Floating one by one in the gloom, Squad Sigma joined him by a narrow cave entrance.

  Lead on, sergeant, Omegon signed, prompting Setebos in turn to put Zantine on point. The Legion’s battle-signals were a fluid exchange of deft hand movements, delivered and received with ease born from decades of use.

  Flipping their own suit lamps on, the squad leapt across the open space in a disciplined column. Snagging outcrops and pillars of rock with ceramite fingertips, the legionnaires pushed off using their legs and coasted across to each new foothold. Zantine held his bolter out in front of him, stabbing the barrel at the receding darkness of branching tunnels and hollows. It was a labyrinth of labyrinths – dark, with zagging passages leading off in every direction, including shafts thrusting both up and down into the depths. It was universally rough, rocky and thoroughly unrecognisable.

  Zantine swiftly established a general heading and despite deviations demanded by serpentine crawlways, choke points and bottlenecks, he kept Squad Sigma moving with purpose through the asteroid’s fractured innards. Legionnaire Vermes brought up the rear, routinely sweeping the muzzle of his bolter across the inky blackness which followed in their wake.

  Vaulting across the deep darkness of a crevasse, the Alpha Legionnaires soon found themselves confronted by a sheer wall of rock. Climbing up the precipice, their armoured legs dangling behind them, they gathered about Zantine. The Space Marine was hanging next to the narrow aperture of a tunnel entrance. Omegon watched as Sergeant Setebos wordlessly assisted the legionnaire in disconnecting his power cables and stabilisers, and stripping the pack from Zantine’s back.

  Passing it through the narrow gap, Setebos helped Zantine in the deadweight of his ceramite suit through the opening. Squad Sigma repeated this procedure until each legionnaire had negotiated the entrance and silently re-established power, life support and sensory feeds to their battle plate.

  A long crawl awaited the legionnaires on the other side. Punting their armoured forms along with their gauntlets, they increasingly encountered shattered rock and regolith hanging in the tapering space. The grit and stones tip-tapped against the legionnaires’ helmets and pauldrons, and Omegon found himself pushing clusters of small rocks ahead of him so that he did not get wedged against the low roof.

  The tunnel emptied out into a larger cavern and Omegon had opportunity to scatter the floating rubble out of his path, though Zantine seemed to have found a collection of much larger boulders and zero-gravity erratics, great shards of rock hung in the dark, gently bumping each other with crushing force in the crowded space.

  A sudden hand signal from Zantine swiftly brought the Alpha Legionnaires to halt. Like the thunder of a closing storm, a dull rumble swept through the rocky chamber. The cavern walls began to shudder and shake, while grit and regolith that had been dislodged by the quake drifted before the Space Marines and started to clot the darkness. The great stones began to clash with the walls and each other, smashing and splintering.

  Auguramus had warned Omegon and the squad about the tidal quakes. The installation itself benefited from its own gravity and structural dampeners, but the rumble of powerful tidal tectonics was still an occasional hazard, especially where the Pylon Array was concerned. The conflicting gravitational forces of the Octissian gas giants pulling at the asteroid provided them with a fractured internal structure through which to infiltrate, but it also presented a serious danger to the squad as long as they remained within it.

  Grasping a trembling ledge, Isidor reached inside the tunnel opening. Legionnaires were still exiting the tight confines of the crawlspace. It was clear from the clashing crags in the cavern that rock was moving against rock – without gravity the movements were unpredictable. The crawlspace was collapsing from below, and bedrock was rising against the legionnaires’ chestplates, seemingly intent on crushing them against the rough ceiling.

  Kicking away and swimming through the throbbing gloom, Omegon joined Isidor in grabbing his brothers and hauling them out into the cavern. Assisted in this way, Tarquiss and Krait scrambled clear, but Vermes was struggling – already, fragments of rubble were packing the legionnaire into a crawlspace grave. The closing rock drove chisel-tipped crags and spurs at the Space Marine’s body that scored lines into the indigo of his plate.

  Omegon reached back into the closing tunnel. He gestured for the legionnaire to ta
ke his gauntlet but the only response he received was a few grunts of exertion over the vox.

  Setebos was suddenly beside him, and he jammed the length of his bolter between the closing sides of the shuddering outlet. The weapon immediately began to bend and buckle and the sergeant instead thrust his grasping hand towards Vermes as well.

  They all heard the legionnaire growl in frustration before his gauntlet gripped the primarch’s own. Omegon heaved at the legionnaire, bracing himself against the rockface. Isidor and Setebos reached further in, looking for purchase on Vermes’s pack and plate. Between them, Omegon and the legionnaires pulled with all of their powered might, but the asteroid had Vermes firmly in its rocky jaws. They hauled at the doomed warrior for as long as they could before the collapse threatened to claim them too.

  Vermes’s vox-link crackled to a deathly static, then went silent.

  Squad Sigma held there for a moment, in the cold and the dark. The legionnaires stared at the press of compacted rock – a stone cold reminder that the galaxy still had surprises in store for them, and that even with the Legion’s meticulous planning, they could not always be anticipated or avoided.

  Keep moving, Setebos signed, slapping the pauldron of the legionnaire floating next to him. Drawing his bolt pistol and screwing the squat barrel of a silencer in place, the sergeant urged the squad on through the crowded chamber of butting rocks.

  They scrambled up, around and over the smashing obstacles, with shards and fragments raining in all directions, several of them suffering scrapes and dents in their plate. As one boulder drifted at Omegon with the threat of pasting him into the cavern wall, the primarch braced himself hard against the rock face. With his gauntlets held out in front of him, he tried to slow the hefty progress of the object, before shoving back and sending it drifting away through the crowded cavern in a tumble of smaller debris.