Heralds of the Siege

by Nick Kyme

  Caught on the verge of saying it, Kolo instead nods, and continues with his endless pacing up and down the gallery, like a beast in a cage driven mad by confinement.

  Six days later, Thane’s company is on guard rotation over the Katman Road. They line the walls of the artificial canyon the road runs down. Hundreds of Space Marines in golden yellow stand as still as statues. Maximus Thane has forbidden his men to move. Attention to detail and discipline are the Imperial Fists’ defining characteristics, and they obey. Thane wishes his company to present the appearance of an indomitable wall of ceramite-clad flesh, because that is what his primarch expects. The Space Marines of the loyal Legions will be the Palace’s true defence against the traitors, no matter how high Lord Dorn piles his fortifications.

  Only the parchments bearing the Imperial Fists’ oaths of moment stir in the breeze. The moment was long ago. The moment has stretched, become weeks, months, years. The ink of the neat, Inwitian script declaring intentions to fight to the death has faded from black to russet. Many of the scrips are tattered. Some of Thane’s men have begun to replace them. The words on the parchments are not the only things to have lost their vibrancy. The canyon is of lustrous black stone. It appears grey under sickly skies. It is as if colour has been leached from the landscape.

  The civilians feel it. They rarely pause to look at the wonders around them. In the early days of Thane’s vigil, they would congregate to talk around the monumental statuary lining the way. In their rest periods they would take refreshments in the restaurants and taverns that occupied the arcades at the feet of the canyon wall. They would point out the sentinels in yellow and be comforted by their presence. Not anymore. Food is administered centrally. The places of entertainment have closed. The clothes of the civilians are worn and hang off frames made spare by rationing. The civilians’ walks have lost their briskness. They shuffle where once they strode.

  Thane looks down on them from a soaring bridge of stone. They move slowly from their hab-blocks. They have a walk of almost a kilometre from the outer edges of the Demesne of Recorders to their work units. The flow of the crowd never stops. It is divided into two by a line of dirty red rope strung from tarnished poles. On the left, fresh shifts walk towards their employment. The rightward lines are returning home. The honk of the shift-horns blare with merciless regularity, chopping Thane’s watch into four-hour blocks.

  Thane supposes the civilians are luckier than some in the Palace, for they at least have the variety of workplace and home. For many others who labour in the Emperor’s fortress, the two have become one and the same. When Thane came to the Palace, the civilians were freer; they came and went from Palace and planet. The war grinds down their freedoms. Travel is difficult, secured only by permission chits that must be validated by multiple authorities. The likes of the Recorders remain trapped where they were employed when the war broke out. The rebellion on Mars, the early battles in the outer system and Alpharius’ incursion – each event has chipped away another facet from their lives, until only service remains.

  The Recorders are part of the machinery of government. During the Great Crusade they logged the growing possessions of the Imperium, parsing data into forms useful to the colonial authorities. Despite their name, the Recorders are assessors, of a sort. Thane does not know what they are assessing now, or if the information they process is useful any longer.

  Thane wonders if things will ever return to normal.

  The reports that crackle periodically in Thane’s ear sound at exactly the same times, every single day. They report the same information. In the main they are sign-offs from his squad sergeants, announcing incoming data bursts conveying the physical status of his warriors and their wargear. All of them are hale. If he were to examine the data more thoroughly, and bring up rune displays for each one, then the outline diagrams of their war suits would show green. Their ammo counts would read at full. Their biological signifiers would all be within normal parameters. There have been no problems in his company with implant degradation or rejection, and all their equipment functions at peak efficiency. Garrison duty gives his Apothecaries and the Techmarines plenty of time to minister to their charges.

  There is no guard rail or parapet to line the edge of the Katman road, and the drop from the edge would probably kill Thane if he fell. The distant ground is hard rockcrete paved with marble. As he scans the crowds, Thane thinks about the drop.

  If he took one step, he would plummet for exactly twelve point three seconds. He knows this because he has calculated it several times. At impact, the ceramite of his armour would crack open. The plasteel framing beneath the outer plates would buckle. Kinetic energy transferred to his body an instant later would rupture his internal organs. His fused ribs would burst. In all probability, only the soft bodyglove worn under his battleplate would retain its integrity. Nevertheless, he is a Space Marine. He might live. His armour and enhanced body would afford him a one-in-four chance of survival, if an Apothecary were to reach him quickly. Any unfortunate person he landed upon would surely die, though if he were to hit one of the civilians below, his own chance of survival would go up to around forty per cent.

  In his head, Thane calculates differing outcomes under differing circumstances. If he were to twist, or fling out his arms, or abandon his weapon, or fire his suit stabilisation jets on full burn at the last moment, or in brief bursts, or all the way down, or what would happen were he unarmoured. When he has exhausted all the variant scenarios he deems likely, he uses the idle processing power of his battleplate’s cogitator to check his results.

  He is never wrong. It would surprise him if the cogitator gave him a different answer. His Legion’s talents are in planning, and the complete command of probability. Such calculations are second nature. But an Imperial Fist never takes anything for granted; they deal in certainty, and certainty only comes by exploring every single variable. That is their way – Dorn’s way.

  Of course there is one flaw to this mathematical exercise. Thane is never going to step off the precipice. It is an impossible situation. His calculations are pointless, done for the sake of doing.

  He considers that he might be bored.

  Thane allows himself to abandon the discipline of stillness and moves his head, inclining it a few degrees skywards. He has been looking at the sky more and more often in recent days. Not one of the civilians passing below would notice the motion even if they were looking up at him, which none of them are. Space Marines are far more observant. His lieutenant sees, though he too is staring down at the civilians passing below.

  The vox clicks.

  ‘Captain Thane, is something wrong?’

  His lieutenant is named Guntren. In seven months’ time, he will be dead.

  Thane does not answer. The sky is strangely empty. The vast orbital plates have been torn down, or converted into fortresses and moved away from the planet. The Skye plate, now festooned with giant cannons, is the sole platform of any significance that remains visible from his position. Before there were many. Without them the heavens look naked and sad.

  Held aloft by the labouring of thousands of giant gravitic motors, Skye hangs in geosynchronous orbit to the west of the Palace, where the watery sun is making its way towards the horizon. Thin cloud obscures Skye’s details, but its presence remains obvious from the huge shadow it casts on the mountains. High above, the artificial stars of more distant satellites and the fleets of the Emperor make firefly swarms in the void. Thane watches them wordlessly.

  That Thane has disobeyed his own order concerns the lieutenant.

  ‘Thane?’ Guntren repeats.

  ‘Why do they not attack?’ asks Thane. ‘How much longer must we wait?’

  Guntren has no answer. The sky has no answer.

  The enemy do not come.

  Days bleed into weeks. Life is duty. Thane lives to fight, but garrison duty is a monotony of patrolling, analysis, weapons drill, planning and replanning. This is not living for the Imperial Fists
, it is existence of the most tense and tedious kind. Thane is weary for lack of action. Kolo is tired of looking at screens.

  One day, it changes, but only for the worse, and it is not the day the enemy comes.

  Thane’s duty has taken him to the Lion’s Gate, where he is on a rota to command from its strategic centre for twenty-eight days. His warriors man the guns and patrol its walls. To the naked eye nothing seems different. The void ships continue their thundering. The civilians their toils, the defenders their vigilance. Even so, things are not the same. There is a thrill to the air, the queasy foreboding of danger.

  There has been much activity in orbit. Ships are leaving Terra’s anchorages in number. Dorn has called a Great Muster at Beta-Garmon. Some of Thane’s brothers are bound there, to join the greatest assemblage of Imperial arms since the war with Horus began. Thane is not. His company is among many ordered to remain at the Palace. He hides his disappointment poorly, and he is short with his men.

  Upon the Throneworld, tension grows.

  Kolo is no longer staring at screens. To his immense relief, his new assignment has him out of doors. He has returned to his squad and they are patrolling the Lion’s Market; his company are spread wide across the district. The market was the commercial heart of the Lion’s Quarter, but it is not the gaudy place it once was. Most of its stalls have been cleared. In their place are stacks of ammunition containers salvaged from Mars. Some of the stacks are almost as tall as walls, though nothing can match the height of the Lion’s Gate. The containers are empty, their contents removed far underground to hardened magazines. The remaining market stalls are small and sad in their shadow, and without exception their scuffed surfaces are bare. No one trades here anymore. It is not permitted. The shops around the periphery of the square are mostly shuttered, their keepers drafted to more pressing labours. The few that are open have little to sell.

  The Imperial Fists sweep the square in twos. It is an open show of force. Reassure the civilians, seek out malcontents and potential traitors. That is the idea. Those are their orders. But in the faces of the few people abroad Kolo sees no reassurance. All he sees is fear.

  ‘We are frightening them,’ Kolo says aloud.

  ‘Keep your mind on your duty, brother,’ his sergeant, Benedict, voxes back, but he is troubled too.

  A gaunt man shivers as Kolo checks his papers. It is cold, and the man’s once fine clothes are inadequate for the climate of the Himalazian massif.

  ‘You should not be out here,’ Kolo tells him.

  ‘Where can I go?’ says the man miserably.

  ‘You should not be out here,’ Kolo repeats. ‘You do not have clearance.’

  The man’s situation is not unusual. There are many people trapped in the Palace by the war. Most are travellers who cannot return to their proper place in the Imperium. Many of them have no legal residence. Lords from the Imperium’s far-flung dominions sleep rough alongside dispossessed workers, all finding themselves victim to bureaucracy’s mercilessness. The population of the Palace is in the millions. Keeping track of who should and should not be there is a never-ending task.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Kolo. He presses the tattered identity papers back into the man’s hands. ‘Find somewhere. Stay off the streets.’

  The man bobs his head in fearful gratitude, and hurries away.

  ‘You shouldn’t let them go,’ growls Kolo’s brother, Berthan. He is a veteran, and from Inwit. He has yet to fully accept Kolo into the squad. ‘All unregistered persons are a risk.’

  ‘His papers were in order,’ says Kolo. ‘As much as can be. We have to show some mercy.’

  ‘If he were an infiltrator, his papers would also be in order,’ says Berthan, watching the man depart. ‘Mercy is dangerous.’

  ‘You think we should kill them all, just to be safe?’ says Kolo harshly.

  ‘No,’ says Berthan. He lets the man go. He could stop him, but he doesn’t.

  Kolo wonders how long Berthan will reply that way, if the same question is asked again. It will be. It is inevitable. He can see Berthan killing the man in his imagination. He can see himself doing the same.

  ‘Squad,’ Sergeant Benedict voxes. ’Move out, now, to the Westway. There’s trouble.’

  ‘What kind?’ asked Berthan. He is eager for action. Anything to dispel the awfulness of waiting.

  ‘The civilian kind,’ says the sergeant. His voice is tense.

  Civilian trouble is the worst kind of trouble for a warrior to deal with.

  Maximus Thane watches a pict-feed of the brewing riot. A servo-skull swoops dizzyingly over a crowd of people. There are a few dozen enforcers in a line, far too few to hold back so many, and they are nearly as underfed and anxious as the crowd they oppose. The crowd had been in lines, waiting patiently to collect their rations in the Lion’s Market from the western entrance, where some of the empty cargo containers have been repurposed into a distribution centre. Doors have been cut into the sides, with counters to allow the allocation of food held within. But today the shutters didn’t open. They remain closed. That is the problem.

  The queues began to form at dawn. They reached a kilometre and a half in length before it became evident the doors were not going to open. Soon after, the lines began to fragment. The people that made up the lines are pressing forwards. A mob is forming. This would necessarily be a cause for concern. A quick thinker might have soothed their fears with words. But there does not appear to be one such among the enforcers, and there is a hard kernel to the crowd. A man is shouting something Thane cannot hear, but which is clearly inflammatory. People are listening. As a snowflake gathers around a fleck of dust, so danger accretes around this man.

  ‘Why don’t they arrest him?’ growls Thane. He was not made for police work, only war, but his mind is adaptable and expansive, and the solution to this brewing problem is obvious to him.

  ‘There are too few of them,’ says Guntren.

  Thane’s crag of a brow narrows in on itself. ‘Have they sent out a call for aid?’

  Guntren is quick in retrieving the relevant information. ‘No, my lord.’

  ‘Do we have a squad in the vicinity?’

  ‘There is a battle squad of twenty, sweeping the market. They are of Hanfeld’s company.’

  ‘Find me the relevant link codes and put me through to them,’ says Thane.

  ‘They have not called for aid. We should leave this to the enforcers,’ warns Guntren.

  ‘Noted,’ said Thane. ‘Do it anyway.’

  Kolo’s finger tightens on the trigger. He and his brothers face down the angry mob. There are thousands of them, and more are coming every minute. Fifty enforcers attempt to keep the peace. It is hopeless. The Space Marines have not helped the situation. When Kolo’s squad arrived, the crowd calmed a moment, but then its fury leapt back up, like a wildfire creeping across damp ground suddenly encountering dry grass. They are angry to see the Imperial Fists.

  ‘Stand down. Return to your quarters. There will be food tomorrow,’ says Sergeant Benedict. He sounds calm, reasonable, but the mob hears his words as provocative.

  There is a man at the heart of the trouble, standing upon a stall. Around him surge the crowd. Kolo has his helm zoom in on his face. There is light in his eyes Kolo does not like. Has desperation made him eloquent, or is there something more sinister at work?

  ‘There is no food!’ says the man. He waves his finger around, accusing everyone and everything of something undefined but monstrous. ‘There will be no more food! The warriors of Terra depart and leave us to our fate!’

  He gestures to the sky wildly, the crowd lets out a loud, animal moan.

  ‘They go to do the work of the Emperor,’ said Benedict. ‘They go to win the war. Patience. There will be food tomorrow. Return to your quarters.’

  ‘Then why do the wolves of Leman Russ not obey? Why does the Emperor leave Terra? Why is this so? Has our sacrifice not been great enough?’

  Both of these rumours have been ga
thering currency in the last few days. The first rumour is true. The Space Wolves have departed at odds with Kolo’s own primarch. They have refused to join the Great Muster. The second rumour is not. The Emperor remains on Terra, though only Dorn and the Imperial Regent know where. No one else has seen Him. The people are losing faith.

  The demagogue is furious beyond reason. The crowd are less fanatical, but they are scared, and their individuality is being subsumed into the volatile groupthink of the mob. Their minds melt together, like discrete cubes of ice in a bucket turning to indivisible water.

  Space Marines are not made to suppress riots. They are not made to arrest people and calm situations. Kolo can see what is about to happen. The energy of violence is on the air, as electric as in any battle. More and more people are joining the crowd. He reflects that this is the first time he has aimed his weapon at another living being. He hates that this is so.

  ‘Return to your quarters!’ shouts Benedict. His voxmitter booms loudly. His harsh, grating voice should have had the crowd running. It has the opposite effect.

  The first stone rings off Kolo’s helmet with the sound of a muffled bell. A gun goes off in the enforcers’ line. There is a scream. The crowd’s mood switches instantly, from hostile to murderous. They make more inchoate noises, speaking with one, mindless voice. Debris rains down on the Space Marines from all sides: metal poles from the abandoned stores, empty ration packs, cans, ordure, dead vermin. The Imperial Fists stand stock-still, guns braced in firing positions. Waiting.

  ‘You claim to protect us!’ shrieks the demagogue. Now his voice is almost lost under the bellowing of the crowd. It is the last shred of reason in a mind turning insane. ‘You oppress us! You are all the same, so-called sons of the Emperor! You will be the doom of us all!’

  The crowd attack in earnest. The fear transhumans engender in individuals has no hold on the gestalt entity of the mob. They are of a single thought now, a seething, multi-limbed creature driven by hunger, inured to fear. Feeble fists beat against Kolo’s armour. The cargo containers of the distribution centre rock as hundreds of men attempt to upset them. The enforcers are dragged down.