by John French
‘We have you, brother,’ said a voice that was a machine whisper. It seemed to carry out of a night filled with dreams of the ice and dead ships glittering in starlight.
I knew it would fall to me. I knew the protocol of our Legion as well as any other, but that did not stop me wishing it was otherwise. The remembrancers and iterators speak of the Legiones Astartes and say that we are without fear, that nothing fills our hearts and minds but resolve and fury. Of the Imperial Fists they say more: that we have souls of stone, that emotion is silent inside our flesh. The truth, as ever, is something that words cannot touch. If we felt nothing we would have failed in the thousands of wars we have fought on the Emperor’s behalf. Without doubt to temper boldness our enemies would have slaughtered us many times over. Without rage we would have never have reached the heights of glory. I do not feel fear, but inside me something of it remains, mutilated and withered, its strings tuned to different notes. Where a human would feel fear I feel the tug of another emotion, one layered and spliced into my psyche by the process that made me. Sometimes it is rage, caution, or cool calculation. And sometimes it is dread, a ragged echo of fear that is lost to me. And it was dread that I felt as the leadership of the fleet gathered on the Tribune.
They passed me as they filed into the granite and bronze chamber. A hundred war leaders arrayed for battle. Intricate silver patterns wove across the golden yellow surface of each suit of armour, and the emblem of the clenched fist worked in jet gleamed from chests and pauldrons. Some were old, their faces lined and scarred; others seemed young, though they were not. There was Pertinax, watching me with green machine eyes. Beside him walked Cazzimus, who had held the towers of Velga for six months. There Iago, who had fought in the first pacification of Luna. Beside them were marshals, siegemasters, and Legion seneschals. Between them they carried half a millennium of
waging war.
Once they had all passed I followed, walking down to the centre of the chamber. The machine adepts were repairing my armour so I wore a saffron robe knotted at the waist with a blood-red cord. I stand taller than all my brothers, and even without my armour I still dwarfed every warrior in the room. The chamber was silent and my steps echoed as I limped between my peers. I could feel their eyes on me, watching, waiting. My left arm was stiff at my side, the old scars of teeth and the newer wounds hidden by my robe’s wide sleeve. The healing flesh shot traces of pain up my nerves. None of it showed on my face.
The chamber was deep in the hull of the Tribune, now the flagship of the Retribution Fleet, or what was left of it. Polished bronze lined the walls and its floor descended in tiers of black granite. Firelight from braziers filled the chamber with a red glow, and a ghost-green projection of a star and planets revolved above the open space at its centre.
Tyr had told me what must happen. He had come to see me as I recovered under the eyes of the Apothecaries.
‘It falls to you, Polux,’ he had said, looking down at me, his eyes dark in his axe-sharp face. The medical servitors had been bonding flesh to the left side of my body or I would have risen to reply. As it was I had to remain on the steel slab as the razor lasers and cauterising torches worked to rebuild my mashed and frozen muscle.
‘There are others more worthy,’ I had said, without breaking his stare. The edge of a sneer twitched at the edge of Tyr’s mouth. Control is one of the first qualities required of an Imperial Fist, and I had no doubt that Tyr’s hint of derision was no slip. Maybe he thought my words a sign of weakness, a betrayal of a flaw not yet discovered in my decades of service. Perhaps he simply did not like me. We are brothers, bonded together by oaths and the blood of our primarch, but brotherhood does not require friendship. In truth I do not know what he thought. I have always been apart, unable to read the signs of my Legion brothers’ thoughts. They are blank to me, and perhaps me to them.
Tyr had shaken his head, the hunched shoulders of his Terminator armour shifting with the small movement.
‘No, brother. You are Yonnad’s pupil, the heir to this command. The primarch and Sigismund passed it to him. Now it is yours, but it is not yours to refuse.’
I had looked into Tyr’s eyes that were so like our primarch’s. I had not spoken from false modesty; there were others more worthy to lead a force that was still a fifth of our Legion’s full strength. Better men had survived the wreck of the fleet: commanders with more campaign experience, higher in the rolls of honour, and more skilled at arms. Tyr was one such leader.
I am no hero, no champion of the Legion. I know how to defend and attack, how to stand and not to yield. I have nothing else. It is all I have. But we are Imperial Fists and form and order is not something we set aside easily. Yonnad had designated me as his successor. That command might fall to me so soon was a possibility I doubt he contemplated. But they had pulled me alive from a frozen wreck, and the storm had taken my mentor. Tyr was right; I could not refuse. It was my duty, and that duty led me in limping steps to the centre of a circle of my peers.
I stopped at the chamber’s centre, under the turning display, and looked up at the faces lining the raked tiers. A hundred pairs of eyes glittered at me from the shadows. I felt deeply honoured and completely alone. The truth was that I did not fear the command. Yonnad was the Legion’s finest fleet master and I was his best pupil; I had commanded expeditionary fleets and campaigns of conquest. With Yonnad dead in the storm I was his heir. It was an honour the Legion had tutored and trained me for, but it was an honour I did not want.
Our fleet was the primarch’s first answer to his brother’s treachery. Five hundred and sixty-one ships and three hundred companies had left the Phalanx. First Captain Sigismund had been given command but the primarch had taken him back to Terra, and so we had jumped towards Isstvan under Yonnad’s command. The storm had seized us as we entered the warp and it had not let go. The Navigators could not find the beacon light of the Astronomican, and every course took us deeper into the tempest. We were lost, drifting on the currents of a malign sea. After what seemed like many weeks the Navigators perceived a break in the storms, a single point of stillness. We had fled towards it, and the storm’s fury had followed.
The fleet had translated into reality on the edge of a star system. The power of the storm in those last moments was like nothing I had ever felt. Geller fields failed, hulls sheared into fragments and burned in the fires of their own reactors. Some ships had reached safety, but many had died, their corpses spat out of the warp to freeze in the void. Two hundred warships lost, their remains left spinning in the light of a forgotten star. They had found me in the remains of one of those broken wrecks. I was one of the few.
Ten thousand Imperial Fists gone. I could not grasp that loss.
Three hundred and sixty-three warships remained. The fates of over twenty thousand of my brother Imperial Fists were now in my hands. It was a weight that I had never carried before. I must, I thought. Even if it is more than I can bear, I must.
I nodded once to the assembled chamber.
Silence. Then a hundred fists slammed into chest plates in unison.
I gestured across the slowly rotating projection of the system we found ourselves in. Its name was Phall, a system so minor and un-noted that it existed only as an obscure footnote in navigational records. The projection spun, the orbiting planets disappearing as a section of the image grew to show the surviving Imperial Fists vessels. I let it rotate for a moment. There was a question that all those present needed to consider.
‘Five hundred vessels aimed at the heart of the greatest betrayal ever committed. Two hundred lost as they fled to the one point of calm amidst the storm. Two planets, once inhabited, now empty.’ I looked at where shifting purple clouds represented the relative warp conditions around the system. ‘Here we sit, surrounded by the storms that drove us here. Cut off from communication. Contained. Trapped.’ I looked up at the watching faces; some were nodding as if seeing where I was
going. Perhaps they had already seen the same elements of our situation and made the same judgement. I knew how to construct a trap, had used them in dozens of wars, and I knew what it was to kill a weakened and surprised enemy. Looking at the projection of our fleet floating in the Phall system I saw a trap. How anything could create such a thing was beyond me, but I knew what every instinct was telling me.
‘And if we have been trapped here,’ I said, and my voice carried through the silent chamber, ‘who is coming for us?’
The Imperial Palace, Terra
His father waited for him at the summit of the oldest stronghold on Terra. The Bhab Bastion was an irregular cylinder of rock that rose to the roof of the world like a finger pointing to the heavens. In the long millennia of Old Night warlords, kings and tyrants had made it their refuge, and even they had called it old. Now it was an ugly relic surviving amongst the growing sprawl of the Imperial Palace, a blunt reminder of barbarity fused into a monument to illumination and unity. Sigismund wondered whether now the barbarity of the old fastness would triumph over the palace that had tried to tame it. The old ways and necessities are come again, he thought, as they always do. War had been the only constant of existence since mankind first walked under the rays of this sun, and it would last long after that same sun burnt to a cold ember. Of that he was certain.
The wind that blew across the bastion top was cold and scented by spices carried from the work camp on the distant mountain slopes. Above him clouds scudded through a brightening blue sky and a chill dawn light fell across the bare skin of his face. It was a face that might have been handsome, but war and genecraft had carved it to a different end. Noble features were spread across a blunt face, the skin pitted and the flesh under the right eye chewed by a scar that ran down the cheek to the jaw. But it was the eyes most people noted: bright sapphire-blue and lit by hard intensity. Clad in burnished gold battle plate, swathed in a white surcoat crossed in black, he bore the marks and honours of a hundred wars like a second skin. In battles across the stars he had never been defeated. From the gladiatorial pits of the World Eaters to the conquest of star clusters he had demonstrated what it was to be a warrior of the Imperium. In another time he would have been the greatest warrior of his age, but in these times he was merely the strongest son of the being who waited for him by the tower’s parapet.
Rogal Dorn glimmered in the brightening light. Standing head and shoulders taller than Sigismund, the primarch of the Imperial Fists was a demigod clad in adamantine and gold. Beside Dorn stood an astropath, a hunger-thin woman whose bent spine showed clearly under the green silk of her robe. Neither said anything but Sigismund could feel that a conversation had just ended, the severed tension still hanging in the air. He knelt, the wind stirring his tabard against his armour.
‘My thanks, mistress.’ Dorn nodded to the withered astropath, who bowed and walked away. ‘Rise, my son,’ he added.
Sigismund rose slowly and looked up at his father. Dark eyes glittered at him from a face of hard lines and unreadable stillness. Dorn smiled grimly. Sigismund knew what that meant; it meant the same as it had every day since they had returned to Terra.
‘There is no word, my lord?’ asked Sigismund.
‘None.’
‘The warp storms occluding the–’
‘Would make communication unlikely, yes.’ Dorn turned away. Out beyond the battlement an eagle turned against the cold blue sky, skimming the edge of a plume of drifting smoke. Dorn’s eyes followed it, tracing the spiral of its flight as it rose on a column of warm air.
It had been many weeks since Dorn had heard and seen the evidence of his brother’s treachery. Sigismund remembered the rage in his father’s eyes. It was still there, he knew, wrapped in will and buried beneath layers of control. He knew it because it burned in him, a bright echo of his father’s cold fury. Dorn had wanted to go and confront Horus himself, to hear the traitor’s confession and bring retribution with his own hands. But duty had held him back: duty to the Emperor and the Imperium that Horus now sought to destroy. They had returned to Terra, but Dorn had sent his sons as emissaries of his anger. He had named it a Retribution Fleet. Thirty thousand Imperial Fists and over five hundred warships had struck out towards Isstvan, a force great enough to subdue a hundred worlds, bearing a brother’s wrath. Now a second force from many Legions gathered to strike at Isstvan, but no word had come from the Retribution Fleet.
‘Word will come, my lord. The galaxy does not simply swallow a third of a Legion.’
‘Does it not?’ Dorn turned his dark eyes on Sigismund. ‘War amongst the Legions. Horus a traitor. The ground under our feet becomes the sky. Can we be sure that we know anything for certain?’
‘You have been listening too much to the worries of the council, my lord,’ said Sigismund in a level voice. Fear surrounds us, he thought. It ran through the halls of Terra like a cold wind. It ran through the hive sumps of Nord Merica, and through the whisper colonnades of Europa. It spread in glances, rumour and in the silence of fears left unsaid. It was everywhere and it was growing. Horus’s treachery had shaken all assumptions of loyalty and truth in the Imperium. In a single moment everything had become unsure. Who else had sided with Horus? Who could be trusted? What would happen? The questions went on without answer. As he looked into his father’s eyes Sigismund reflected that knowing some of the answers gave little comfort.
‘The fleet will arrive at Isstvan, and whatever happens to them they will endure. They are your sons.’
‘Do you now regret returning here?’ asked Dorn.
‘No. My place is here,’ he said, looking back into his father’s face. Command of the Imperial Fists sent to Isstvan had been Sigismund’s, but it was a duty that he had not taken. He had asked instead to return to Terra. Dorn had trusted his son and acceded to his plea without question.
He had kept the real reason to himself, sensing that his father would not understand. Sigismund barely understood it himself, but he had made his decision. That deception had weighed on Sigismund like penitent chains ever since.
Dorn smiled.
‘So certain, so little doubt,’ he said.
‘Doubt is the greatest weakness.’ Sigismund frowned.
Dorn raised an eyebrow. ‘Quoting my own words is unsubtle flattery, or a very subtle rebuke.’
‘The truth is a many-edged blade,’ quoted Sigismund in a flat voice. Dorn’s laughter blew across the platform like brief thunder.
‘Now you really are trying to provoke me,’ growled Dorn, but the words still held a note of laughter. He gripped Sigismund’s shoulder. ‘Thank you, my son,’ he said, his voice grave again. ‘I am glad you are here.’ For a moment Sigismund thought of telling him the truth, of telling him why he had returned to Terra. Then his father looked away and the feeling passed.
‘And there is more for you here than keeping me from melancholy.’ Dorn’s eyes had gone to the stars glittering on the horizon’s edge, his gaze fixed on where a red spark flickered like a cooling cinder. ‘It has reached us,’ he said. ‘The treachery is at our threshold.’
‘The reports are true, then? Mars is falling?’
‘Yes.’
Sigismund felt anger coil through him at the thought of an enemy so close to the heart of the Imperium. The hate built within him, running through his limbs in a hot wave, feeding on lesser emotions until it was a focused line of barely shackled fire. It was this inner fire that had made him a warrior without peer beneath the Emperor and the primarch whose flesh he shared. For a moment he felt as he had before the encounter on the Phalanx, before everything had changed.
He let out a long breath. ‘I will grind the Martian traitors to dust.’
Dorn shook his head. ‘There is no time. For now we must secure what we need for the defence of Terra: the armour from Mondus Occulum and Mondus Gamma.’ Sigismund nodded. If they had no allies remaining amongst the Martian adepts
it would be a punishing task; punishing, but straightforward.
‘My resources?’
‘You have four companies, and Camba-Diaz will go with you.’
‘To shackle my temper,’ snarled Sigismund, seeing the wisdom in his father’s order even as it pulled at his pride.
‘All of us need others to balance us.’ Dorn inclined his head slightly. ‘Is that not so, my son?’ Sigismund thought of the flicker of uncertainty he had seen in his father’s eyes and of the real reason he had asked to return to Terra. He stands at the centre of a storm of fear and betrayal, he thought, and I must stand with him no matter what is to come.
‘It will be done, my lord,’ he said, and knelt at his father’s feet.
‘Of that I am certain,’ said Rogal Dorn.
Eighty-eight days before the Battle of Phall
The Phall System
The fire from the fleet’s engines blotted out the stars. Beyond the Tribune’s viewports hundreds of warships slid across the darkness in an interlacing web of plasma trails. Each was moving on a precise arc around its fellows, forming a shifting lattice like an ever-changing orrery. Some were so close that I could see the augur spines projecting from their backs and bellies. It was an arrangement I had created, placing each element and setting their trajectories in motion. Every ship was in a constant state of readiness, their shields raised, and their weapons ready. At another time such a creation might have pleased me, but it only served to fill my mind with half-formed worries. It had been weeks and nothing had happened.
I flicked my eyes back to the battlegroup commanders that stood in a circle around me. My first sergeant, Raln, stood a little behind me, his helmet in his hand, his face devoid of its normal crooked grin. We stood at the centre of a spit of white marble that ran down the centre of the Tribune’s bridge. Black stone walls curved above our heads to a vaulted roof. Round viewports ran the length of the bridge, their armoured eyelids open to the void beyond. In the clefts to either side of us rows of servitors sat bound to machines by thick creepers of cable. The smell of warm wiring and the sound of clicking cogitators filled the air. Human officers paced the long rows, followed by hovering servo-spheres that projected transparent curtains of data in front of their faces. Beneath my feet images of mythical beasts inlaid in gold and bloodstone writhed across the marble. The Tribune was the product of the Inwit shipyards, and like all ships birthed above that world of night and ice its master commanded on his feet. Those that came into his presence stood with him, equal in respect if not rank. It was a principle that appealed to me, but after dozens of councils I sometimes felt that the Inwit shipwrights had been kinder to the commanded than the commander.