by John French
A beam of purple-wreathed blackness shot from the black sphere beneath the disc. For a second the world seemed to freeze, colours to flip to white, light to dark, shadow to bright brilliance. And then there was a sound like a thunderclap in reverse. Kord felt warm liquid running from his nose. He felt like he was spinning through the air, waiting to hit the ground.
‘Noon Star’s gone!’ Sacha’s voice was a shriek of hysteria. ‘Gone, just–’
‘Fire,’ he croaked.
But all he could see was the disc rotating towards him, and the power begining to build around the black sphere
‘Fire… Someone, fire.’
A flash of las-light cut across his vision, shattering the disc’s shield into a cloud of oily sparks. War Anvil’s demolisher cannon fired an instant later.
The shell hit the disc’s centre and broke the black sphere. Darkness rushed out from the broken disc, as though trying to swallow the light of the explosion. Kord felt tears gush from his eyes. The pain of a thousand needle punctures stabbed his face.
‘Finish it,’ he managed to call. The main cannon fired. The blackness shattered, then sucked into a pinprick of night before vanishing. Kord felt himself swaying in his seat. Through watering eyes he saw battle automata stutter to a halt, then stagger and begin to slump to the ground. Everything was very far away though, and swirling, swirling like water. He was… the last thought that interrupted his fall into oblivion was to wonder who had fired the lascannon bolt that had broken the disc’s shield.
‘Where do we begin?’ he had asked. His father and master had lowered his head, the black gloss of his eyes spreading to pool in the sockets of his eyes.
‘Within,’ Perturabo had said.
‘The powers that exist beyond the walls of reality mock our strength, and try to turn this war to their own. There is no one left to trust besides the Warmaster, and serpents coil around him. There are two wars now, the war to topple the Emperor and the war against those who would betray us in turn. And in that war we need to be sharpness and obliteration, we need weapons, we need to be iron once more.’
‘Your will is mine.’
‘You do not know what I ask yet.’
The memory, which was half a dream, fell away from Hrend’s sight. He was standing on the side of a valley, the machines of his assault group spread out beside and behind him. Before him the valley side fell away in spills of grey schist. Above him the fog held to the hidden mountain caps as a rippled yellow ceiling. The air in the valley was clear, but the jagged shapes of the rocks made the returns from the sensors dance with ghost shapes. To his left the mountain pass itself opened beyond a wide canyon mouth which split the bare rock of the valley’s end like an axe wound. The canyon beyond formed a pass between two mountain peaks, and must have borne a road in Tallarn’s past. Cracked slabs of stone formed the remains of a crude road surface within the canyon’s walls, and signs of its course could be seen tracing a line across the valley floor. It had begun to snow while they waited, the wind spreading black and yellow flakes across the grey ground.
Above him, further up the slope, Spartan 4171 waited, hull-down behind a ridge. Even at this distance he thought he could feel Hes-Thal looking out at the world, and seeing… He had no idea what the Navigator saw, only that it had led them to have to cross the mountains.
‘Target is two kilometres distant,’ said Jarvak, his voice juddering as the signal was shredded by the walls of the pass. ‘Speed and signatures consistent. Unit count is sixteen. Force strength is heavy. I count two heavy-grade signatures, Baneblade or equivalent yield. Twelve battle tank hulls. Two smaller units, scouts or armoured cars.’
Hrend listened to the words as he cycled through the raw sensor data. It was not clean, but he had told Jarvak to make sure that he was not seen or detected. That put limitations on reconnaissance information. They had picked up the enemy force moving into the canyon as they were moving into it themselves. Hrend had considered simply meeting the enemy force head on and battering their way through, but had decided to withdraw to the valley and wait. Jarvak’s machine had carried on alone, its systems flooding the space before it with distorting sensor ghosts. Now he had seen the strength of the enemy force, Hrend judged his decision to withdraw correct.
‘We hit them as they exit the pass,’ he said.
‘They are wary,’ said Jarvak. ‘There is wreckage in the valley floor beneath the pass. This is not the first time this place has been a battleground.’
Hrend made to reply, but suddenly the world was gone.
The sound of breaking steel rolled over him. There was fire, the strobing blink of white starburst, and he was burning, his skin melting into his armour…
His sensor sight jumped back into cold awareness.
‘Master, what is your will?’ asked Jarvak. Hrend looked at the time count at the corner of his sight. He had been silent for almost two full minutes.
‘Estimate time until they exit,’ he demanded.
‘Thirty minutes,’ said Jarvak. Hrend added the timing to his battle plan. Nothing needed to change, he had crafted every point correctly. Every unit in the Cyllaros had absorbed the plan and was placed to execute it. It was a future moment of destruction ordained in every detail. Now it simply needed to become.
‘Withdraw to the designated position,’ he said. ‘Wait.’
He engaged the fingers of his fists. They moved. He did not feel it. He would…
…the fire was his skin, and his screaming was the roar of muzzle flare, and the hungering crash of rending metal. He was breathing ash, and every breath was a blaze of white fire…
‘Enemy will exit canyon in ten minutes,’ called Jarvak. Hrend tried to blink as sensor data spilled into his vision. His Dreadnought frame clanked as servos tried to answer the dead nerve signal. He saw Jarvak’s Sicaran emerge from the canyon mouth, its position painted by cold blue markers. It settled into place behind a low rise on the opposite slope of the valley.
‘Waken weapons,’ he said. The Cyllaros obeyed. He tried to blink again, and again his body twitched in confusion. His hands were burning. The fire held in their palms were blisters of bright pain in the cold dark. He had to let go, had to allow the fire free. He had to…
Coldness, and the dead silence of a lightless amniotic tank.
‘Two minutes.’
The first tanks emerged from the pass, two smaller machines, running fast on narrow tracks. They split and moved to either side of the valley. Hrend could hear their auspexes as faint, metallic whispers. Two blocks of battle tanks came next, spreading into two lines behind the scouts, bracketing the valley floor as they came forward. The air was thick with sensor waves now. They were not as powerful, nor could they see as far as the sensor eyes of Legion machines. That limitation and the Cyllaros’s cloud of countermeasures would hold for a little longer.
The first of the true giants rolled onto the valley floor. It was a Baneblade, the father of a dynasty of destructive children. Its hull was twice the size of the three battle tanks which rolled in front of it. The turret atop its gun-studded hull turned with slow purpose, the gaze of its vast gun tracking across the snow-shrouded land. Behind it came its cousin. Twin clusters of multi-barrelled mega-bolters jutted from the block of armour atop the second super-heavy tank. It was a Stormlord, and the sight of it made Hrend pause as fresh combat estimations scrolled across his sight.
There was no choice, though; they had to act now. He waited as the twin super-heavy machines broke into a staggered pattern, and the last squadron of battle tanks took up line formation behind them. It was a significant force, and well arrayed. He could read experience, discipline and training in the way that the machines moved. The Cyllaros were outmatched in numbers and fire power. Normally the most direct method of addressing that disparity would have been to trap the enemy in the pass between the canyon walls. That was not an option here. Hr
end and his machines had to pass through the valley and through the mountains. The pass needed to remain unblocked.
The enemy cleared the gates to the pass, moving forward at the lumbering speed of the two behemoths at their heart. Their overlapping auspex signals were clawing at the Cyllaros’s sensor baffles. That concealment would not last much longer. Snow swirled down from the clouds above. The dirty flakes settled and began to melt on the metal skin of the war machines.
‘Now,’ he said.
The Cyllaros fired as one. Streams of energy converged on the valley floor. The Baneblade’s turret blew into the air. An instant later the conversion beamers turned its flank plating into a molten cloud. Fire rolled out in every direction. Snowflakes became steam. Two of the three battle tanks riding in front of the Baneblade skidded and tumbled over. Lines of accelerator shells hit their belly armour, punched inside, and their death flames screamed to the already burning air. A third tank jumped across the ground like a kicked stone. Above the valley a glowing pillar of smoke spread into a thunderhead. The rest of the tanks were still moving forward, carried by shock and momentum.
Hrend watch three target runes blink out.
‘Go,’ he said.
The tunnel shook as they walked through the strobing alarm light. Spills of dust shook from the ceiling and dusted Argonis’s armour. Sota-Nul was a too-close presence at his shoulder. Prophesius was a little further back, matching speed with him as though tugged by an invisible chain. Figures moved around them, hurrying, running, never coming too close, never looking at the trio directly. The tunnel shook again, then twice more in quick succession. None of them looked up at the quartet of strangers passing in the opposite direction.
Taldak walked ahead of them. Argonis had been watching the warrior since they had left their chambers. There was a stiff set to Taldak’s shoulders, his movements powerful but rigid. He reminded Argonis of a bull grox he had once seen forcing its way against the current of a river, blunt head low, strength battering each step forward as though to do anything else was to admit defeat. It was a quality he both admired and found stifling. It also made the prospect of what they would need to do much more dangerous.
A series of deep tremors ran through the walls. The lighting flickered. Argonis looked up at the dust spilling past the strobing gloom.
Orbital bombardment, thought Argonis, as the bare slabs of rockcrete quivered. Concentrated fire, at least two ships in firing pattern, possibly more. They were hitting the area directly above the complex core. Seismic charges most likely. That and enough plasma fire to melt half the surface rubble to glass. He could not fault the usefulness of the timing.
‘You are certain that what we seek will be there?’ he said into his helm vox without looking around. To anyone observing them he would appear to be walking in silence, the short-range vox signal passing between them alone.
‘No,’ replied Sota-Nul. ‘Nothing is certain, but it is likely that we will be able to gain access from the location we are bound for.’
‘No killing,’ he repeated, after a long pause of silence.
‘It is not in the necessary parameters of our plan,’ she said. ‘As you know.’
‘No matter what, if one of the Iron Warriors dies here we lose everything and gain nothing.’
‘Not necessarily.’
Argonis’s jaw tensed. Inside his helm his lips had peeled back from his teeth. Sota-Nul’s voice scratched through his nerves even over the vox. Especially over the vox.
‘I am surprised that such a prospect causes you concern,’ she continued. ‘You were present at the kill-cleanse of Isstvan, were you not?’
‘They are our allies?’
Sota-Nul began to speak again. He was unpleasantly aware that her voice had added a mocking edge to its monotone.
‘There are recordings I have heard-reviewed, the last transmissions between different Legions on Isstvan Five. They believed the same falsity-fact until we began to kill them. Perhaps some of them died still believing it.’
Argonis felt his hand twitch towards his weapons, then restrained the instinct. The tech-witch would have registered the gesture, he was sure. He would have felt satisfaction if he had thought she cared. He was certain that she did not. Nothing seemed to intimidate Sota-Nul. She was not without fear, but was as though she found the concept amusingly redundant.
‘The Iron Warriors have denied us nothing,’ he said carefully.
‘Except the truth,’ she said. ‘That is why we are here.’
A unit of human troopers in heavy enviro-suits ran by, pausing to give a stylised salute that Argonis did not recognise. Taldak made no gesture of acknowledgement. They had not seen another warrior of the IV for some time. Even here at the heart of their fortress the Iron Warriors were spread thinly, tens of thousands dissolved into millions of human soldiers.
They walked on without speaking, the blare of alert alarms and the beat of the bombardment shaking the ground filling the pause. He glanced at Sota-Nul as she glided on, her robe rustling as it dragged along the floor. Her shoulders were moving, flexing as though she were breathing hard. But she was not breathing. In the time he had spent in her proximity he had never heard her breathe once.
‘What is your concern in this?’
‘One of my kind was requested by the Maloghurst, and sent by the most knowing and high Kelbor-Hal. I am an emissary to an emissary. I am here to lend aid. You know this. You are simply struggling with emotions.’
‘Emotions?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ her voice now the dead-toned texture of a static. ‘Revulsion, possibly disgust, probably loathing. The current actions we are engaged on have elicited a heightened response that your mental conditioning is displacing into other existing areas of emotion that you can understand.’ She paused and her voice slid into a tone which sounded all too human. ‘You cannot feel fear so you are feeling hate.’
He did not reply. He was not sure which was worse: the accuracy of what she said, or that he could hear the relish in her voice.
They turned a corner, and a set of blast doors closed the tunnel before them. Gun servitors flanked the oiled steel. Targeting lasers flickered over Argonis and his entourage, found the authorisation they needed and dropped the aim of their weapons. Taldak took a step closer, and pressed an armoured hand against the doors. A clang rolled through the air, louder even than the alert sirens. The doors ground open. A bare platform waited beyond. Taldak turned his helm to face Argonis.
‘Emissary,’ he said. Argonis stepped onto the platform. The rest followed, and the doors closed on them. A heartbeat later the platform jerked and then began to descend. Argonis looked up. The shaft above them was a black hole boring into the lost dark.
‘We are approaching the correct level,’ said Sota-Nul.
‘Yes,’ said Argonis turning his face back to Taldak. Prophesius took a single, silent step forward.
‘I am truly sorry,’ he said. Prophesius reached out and up, his hand like a pale spider descending on a thread as it touched Taldak’s head.
The images from the net-flies watching the lift platform fuzzed with static. Iaeo switched view as black blobs formed and flowed over the image. Prophesius’s hand closed on the Space Marine’s head.
Active psychic capability, she added the datum to the cloud of observed facts on Prophesius, and switched her awareness to another portion of the net-fly swarm. She blinked as a different set of perceptions washed over her. She had only dared deploy the swarm into the datastacks in the hour before Argonis had begun his own mission to reach them. Part of her hungered to tap into the information held in the vast cogitator and data looms. There was so much there, so much possibility, so many additional factors which could…
No, she had her focus now.
She let out a breath and, as though answering a tremor, ran through the ground. A grumble of distant explosions rumbled
in her ears. This time it was strong enough to make her senses flick back to the reality of her physical location. She was briefly aware of the confines of the Mars-pattern tank hull enclosing her. It was one of 156 burned or damaged hulls stacked in a row in armoury cavern 102-B. It had no turret, or sponsons, and most of its insides were gone. The through-and-through shot that had killed it let the light of distant welding torches flicker across her face. She had sat cross-legged on the floor of the machine for two hours. She had 7506 seconds before the probability of detection became unacceptable.
She flicked back to the feeds of data and watched Argonis. Part of her – a very, very small remnant of empathy – hoped that he would not get himself killed. If he did, that would be exceptionally awkward.
There was always a ship burning in the orbit of Tallarn’s star. Above the war world battles never ceased, as both sides fought to control the key approaches. Battlegroups came together in spirals of silent light, and broke apart again, leaving the cooling debris of their meeting. Even in the orbits close to the system’s star ships clashed, as they tried to skim the gravity and radiation-thick zones to reach Tallarn itself. Further out on the system edge, battlegroups ran the outer reaches of the Oort cloud, hunting for ships fresh from the warp. Battle light never left the skies above Tallarn. But the coming of the Golden Fleet brought a fire to the void like no other.
The first ships to meet the Golden Fleet were a battlegroup bound to Perturabo’s command. Their challenges were answered with reassurances, and respect.
They were on the same side, said the ships of the Golden Fleet. They had come to answer the Lord of Iron’s call. Of course they would accept forces onto their bridges and move in system under escort. Of course…