by Dan Abnett
A dedicated company of Ultramarines, the 199th, was assigned to Sotha as permanent protection, and the world was given the classification ‘restricted’.
All that had happened one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier.
Dantioch had been out on the promontory at sunset when the Ultramarines of the protection company came to tell him that signs of contact were finally becoming apparent.
It was about time. The ancient systems of the Pharos, vast quantum-pulse engines of almost inscrutable function, had been running for two weeks. Dantioch had begun to fear that he and the men he worked with had entirely misconceived the purpose and use of the artefacts.
It was late afternoon, the particular moment when the light above the forests and distant sea outside began to skew away, filling the apertures of the summit behind the promontory with a phantom luminescence.
It was the best time to appreciate the sheer magnificence of the structure.
‘There is a sign at last?’ he asked.
One of the Ultramarines, a sergeant called Arkus, nodded. He was accompanied by two young men of the company’s Scout section. The Ultramarines 199th had made the best of their residency on Sotha by taking pride in their specialist duty. They had adopted the name Aegida, or ‘shield’, Company while operating from the Legion orbital. They had also taken up a symbol as their company icon. Both the Scouts wore it on their pauldrons.
‘There are signs, sir,’ said Arkus. ‘Noises in the… the acoustic chambers.’
‘At last,’ Dantioch said. He limped across the rocky promontory to follow them inside the mountain, every step an effort for his massive, iron-framed physique. He no longer cared to disguise the attenuated gasps of pain that movement forced out of him. He had been genetically fabricated to withstand superhuman tolerances, and by the damned Emperor, he was withstanding them.
At the threshold of one of the vast apertures which opened like a giant eye socket in the mountainside, Dantioch turned back to look at the evening sky. Beyond the high cloud, he could detect the malicious disturbance of the Ruinstorm. It was easier to see at night, usually, but even in daylight hours the traumatic warp-spasms and ripples shimmering through space were visible.
The trigger point for the Ruinstorm had been the attack on Calth twenty-eight months earlier. Its hideous effects had rapidly spread right across the segmentum, and had engulfed the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.
No one knew how far the storm effects went. Some said they had possessed the entire galaxy. What was certainly true was that they had rendered the Five Hundred Worlds unnavigable except for the most high-risk enterprises. Trade and communication had collapsed. Ultramar, as a single and admirable area of governance, was ruined. Furthermore, all interstellar transit between the Eastern Fringe and the core segmenta, and beloved Terra, was impossible. The galaxy was, in effect, cut in two.
Lord Barabas Dantioch, warsmith of the IV Legion Iron Warriors, was technically a traitor. He was a traitor to the Throne and Terra, because his Legion had crossed the line and sided with the renegade Warmaster, Horus. Simultaneously, he was a traitor to his own Legion, because he had forsworn the Iron Warriors and decided to stand with the loyalists. He stood alone, besieged by the conflicting loyalties of the new, riven Imperium.
Being besieged suited all Iron Warriors, of course, no matter their inclination. No Legion matched them for their artistry in fortification, except perhaps for the VII Legion, the Imperial Fists. The comparative technical excellences of the IV and the VII would be put to the ultimate test, Dantioch was sure, before the Civil War ended. In fact, given that the morality of the Imperium had already been turned upside down by Horus’s revolt, it would seem a waste of the opportunity if the ancient rivalry was not tested by war.
For his excellence in siegecraft, and his staunch loyalty to the Emperor, Barabas Dantioch had been recruited by the Lords of Ultramar to help them construct and defend the greatest contingency plan – and perhaps the second greatest heresy – the Imperium had ever known.
Dantioch had accepted the challenge. He had supposed he would be employed in fortifying the physical defences of Macragge and other key worlds of Ultramar. That was his forte.
Then the Avenging Son had revealed to him the long-sequestered mysteries of Sotha, and Dantioch had realised that the survival of a pocket empire like Ultramar lay less in fortifying its physical defences and far, far more in strengthening its function and operation.
He agreed absolutely with Roboute Guilliman. Sotha offered a way in which they might overcome the Ruinstorm rather than batten down against its wrath.
Dantioch had spent the last nine months working to that end, unlocking Sotha’s mysteries and activating the planet’s deep-time secrets.
The day’s ebbing light shone into the aperture and the great coiled chamber. The interior spaces of the Pharos, each one of them cut from the mountain’s living rock by processes that no one had been able to explain, reminded Dantioch of the inner spaces of a great conch shell. They were polished, smooth, and curved. There were no straight lines or hard edges. Vast, organically curved chambers led one into another, sometimes connected by smaller, flask-chambers or rounded coils of hallway that felt like tubes or blood vessels. Everything was a polished, gleaming black: a surface treatment of the exposed rock that was durable and resistant to scratching or cutting. It was like a black mirror, yet it gave back very little reflection – just the merest shadow – and held very little light, except for when, at the end of each day, the sunset flooded through the mountain-top apertures, and a curious golden light dripped and drained down through the Pharos chambers, deep into the mountain, like liquid fire running off the polished black walls.
The early surveyors had found the Pharos, men working in the fleets sent out by Guilliman to expand the realm of Macragge, and reconnect with ancient fief-holdings that had been part of the realm before the Age of Strife. This had always been Konor’s dream. Konor had ruled Ultramar from Macragge, but his Ultramar was but a shadow, a fraction of the culture that Ultramar had been before the Long Night. Konor had been determined to rebuild the mythical Five Hundred Worlds, and, after his death, Guilliman had set out to achieve his father’s ambition. It was while he was rebuilding the Five Hundred Worlds, and making them the greatest empire in the galactic east, that the crusading fleets of Terra had reached Macragge, and Guilliman had finally met his blood father, and learned of his true inheritance.
That the Pharos was an immense structure of xenos origin had been obvious. That was why Sotha had been restricted and placed under guard while it was thoroughly investigated. Guilliman, so forward thinking in other ways, had a natural mistrust of technologies not built by man, especially those that could not be easily reverse-engineered. The Pharos of Sotha was potentially many things, with many possible functions, and Guilliman was cautious of them all. The survey mission was established on the planet, a planet that otherwise would have been rapidly colonised, and a community of settlers founded to support the scientists.
This amused Dantioch. The settlers were simple agricultural workers charged with food production and livestock management. They lived simple, pastoral lives on the lower slopes of the mountain. Forest growth on the slopes was rapid and vital. It had taken several years to clear the entrance apertures just to gain access. Every summer, the farm workers came up from the arable fields in the valley below, bringing their scythes and harvesting hooks, and worked to clear away the year’s grass and brush growth where it had begun to choke and invade the gleaming black halls again.
This simple, rural tradition, dating back over a hundred years, had given rise to the protection company’s choice of icon.
The people of the farming community did not hold the Pharos in any particular awe. It was simply part of their world. They often used its obsidian apertures as caves to shelter them and their herds from storms. They had also, long ago, discovered the extraor
dinary acoustic qualities of the linked chambers and halls, and had taken to playing their pipes and horns and psalteries in the deep caves, creating music of unparalleled beauty and mystery.
From the first moment that he arrived to inspect the Pharos, Dantioch had understood that the interlinking chambers had not been intended as occupation spaces, at least not for any creatures of humanoid dimensions. There were often places of near impossible access between chambers: deep, polished drops; smooth sheer curves; untenable slopes. There were no stairs, no measured walkways. In one particular instance, a vast tri-lobed chamber, shaped almost like a stomach, plunged away into a polished tube seven hundred metres deep, which opened in the ceiling of another vast, semi-spherical hall a hundred metres high.
A long, slow process of construction had been undertaken over the years, establishing self-levelling, pre-fabricated walkways of STC design to provide platforms, ladders, stairs and bridges that would allow humans to traverse and explore the almost endless interior of the Pharos.
Dantioch and his Ultramarines escort descended on just such a walkway. The Imperial equipment, solid and steady, locked into place over the rolling, polished curves of the Pharos’s chambers, seemed crude by comparison: treated, unpainted metal, cold-pressed from a standard template, stamped with the Imperial aquila, echoing to their footsteps with leaden clatters. When they walked upon the polished black, they made only the softest tapping sounds. The walkways, stairs and platforms were also dwarfed by the gloomy chambers they threaded through, and seemed frail by comparison to the sheened black curves and cliffs.
Arkus and his Scouts patiently led the crippled warsmith to the abyssal plain of Primary Location Alpha. Twice on the journey they passed farmworkers eating supper and playing their instruments. Oberdeii, one of the Scouts, and the youngest of the entire company, shooed them away. The Pharos had been officially out of bounds ever since Dantioch had brought the quantum-pulse engines, deep in the mountain’s core, online. They could all hear, or at least feel, the infrasonic throb of the vast and ancient devices.
Dantioch had stood in Primary Location Alpha, and nodded to his escort to withdraw. He had been fairly confident that he understood the function of the Pharos even from the data he had studied before his arrival on Sotha. Guilliman had deduced it too. Primary Location Alpha was, he was sure, the centre of the entire mechanism. Dantioch found himself referring to it in his notes as the ‘tuning stage’ or the ‘sounding board’. It was a vast cave of polished black, with a domed ceiling and an almost flat floor.
Ghosts walked here, images of things light years away, drawn into the Pharos by its quantum processes. They were often fleeting, but always real. It had taken Dantioch two weeks and immense astronomical calculations to tune the Pharos as he wanted it.
As he walked onto the tuning floor, Dantioch saw Guilliman appear before him, as if in the flesh.
He had finally tuned the xenos device to far distant Macragge.
‘It is as you speculated, my lord,’ Dantioch said. ‘The Pharos is part of an ancient interstellar navigation system. It is both a beacon and a route-finder. And, as we just saw, it also permits instantaneous communication across unimaginable distances.’
‘You say I speculated, Dantioch,’ said Guilliman’s image, ‘but I never had the slightest clue what manner of technology it was.’
‘It is not fully understood by me either, lord,’ replied the warsmith. ‘It certainly involves a principle of quantum entanglement. But I believe that, unlike our warp technology that uses the immaterium to by-pass realspace, this quantum function once allowed for site-to-site teleportation, perhaps through a network of gateways. I also believe its fundamental function lies not with psychic energy, but with empathic power. It is an empathic system, adjusted to the needs of the user, not the will. I will provide fuller findings later.’
‘But it is a navigational beacon?’ asked Guilliman.
‘In many ways.’
‘You said it was part of a network?’
Dantioch nodded.
‘I believe other stations like the Pharos must exist, or once existed, on other worlds throughout the galaxy.’
Guilliman paused.
‘So it is not one, single beacon, like the Astronomican?’
‘No, lord. In two ways. I believe the Pharos and other stations like it once used to create a network of navigational pathways between stars, as opposed to a single, range-finding point the way the Astronomican does. Or did.’
‘Go on.’
‘It is more like a lantern than a beacon, lord. You tune it. You point it, and illuminate a site or location for the benefit of range-finding. Now I have tuned to Macragge, I can, I believe, light up Macragge as a bright spot that will be visible throughout realspace and the warp, despite the Ruinstorm.’
‘Just as I see Sotha as a new star in the sky?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
Guilliman looked at him.
‘I am loath to use xenos technology, but the light of the Astronomican is lost to us because of the Ruinstorm. To hold Ultramar together, to rebuild the Five Hundred Worlds, we must restore communication and travel links. We must navigate and reposition. We must pierce and banish this age of darkness. This is the first step towards our survival. This is how we fight back and overthrow Horus and his daemon allies. Dantioch, I applaud you and thank you for the peerless work you have done, and the labours you are yet to undertake.’
‘My lord.’
Dantioch, with difficulty, bowed.
‘Warsmith?’
‘Yes, my lord?’
‘Illuminate Macragge.’
3
From the Heart
of the Storm
‘Hjold! The sea is set against us, for
it is the sea, and the darkness is set about us,
for it is the darkness, but
we will row on, brothers, backs breaking into each stroke,
we will row on because no other
life or comfort awaits us.
Fja vo! Survive! The sea and the dark are our context!
We will, before eternity, out-row all storms.’
– from The Seafarer (Fenrisian Eddas)
The hull had been screaming for months. Screaming like a newborn thrown to the night-packs.
Their ship was called the Waning Crescent; zeta-class, a courier ship. It was not the proud warship or longwarp they might have hoped for, but they were a small company of Wolves, and Leman Russ had no resources to waste.
Faffnr Bludbroder had felt his heart swell with pride when Russ had given him the duty. It was a duty that had been handed to the VI Legion by the Sigillite. However, Faffnr had felt his heart sag when he realised it was not going to be some great, sharp-edged expedition of battleships and barges, but ten wolf-brothers on a lowly ship to distant Ultramar.
Faffnr had quickened his edge anyway, accepted the fold of parchment upon which his duty was laid out, and bowed to the primarch of the VI Legion.
‘Ojor hjold. I will do this, lord,’ he had said.
They had set out, sworn and dedicated to what was one of the most shocking duties any of the Legiones Astartes might ever undertake.
Three weeks into their voyage, the warp had gone dark, the storm had risen, and the ship had begun to scream. It had been screaming ever since.
Most of the crew, the human crew, had gone mad. The Wolves of Fenris had been forced to kill some, and deprive most of the others of their liberty for their own protection. The Waning Crescent, aside from ten warriors of the VI Legion Space Wolves, was carrying gene-stock grain samples and ceramics. Within a day, the violence of the warp storm had smashed all the ceramics in the holds. The screaming… The screaming was…
It was as if the world were ending. The Bloody Sunset of legend, the end of things, the wolf eating its own tail, the end of the great cycle, to be followed only by the cold
moonrise of the afterworld. Faffnr had been forced to tie the whimpering shipmaster to his seat. Bo Soren, known as ‘The Axe’, had stood watch day and night over the Navigator’s socket-pit, blade ready to administer mercy. Malmur Longreach, spear in one hand and bolter in the other, had guarded the defibrillating engines. Shockeye Ffyn, Kuro Jjordrovk, Gudson Allfreyer, Mads Loreson and Salick the Braided had patrolled the empty companionways and echoing corridors of the stricken ship in rotation, watching for manifests.
Biter Herek had watched the fore-station.
Nido Knifeson had watched the stern quarters.
None of them had gone unchallenged.
The broiling warp had squeezed out daemonforms, creatures that had pierced the screaming, and slipped in through the hull plates of the ship. The Wolves had been tasked. They had been forced to draw down, stand their ground, and bloody their blades to drive the warp-things back. Malmur had fought two nights in the spastic engine room. Kuro had lost an arm to a tar-blackened maw that had swung in from nowhere. Biter Herek had split a lunging skull in twain with his axe, and had done it every night, to such an extent that it was almost a ritual. As the ship’s master clock struck four, the raging skull would appear at the fore-station, and Biter would be ready with his axe to greet it, and split it.
They all had stories, pieces of a saga that none of them would ever live long enough to pass on to a skjald for retelling.
It was a voyage of the damned. They believed that each day, marked out by the increasingly unreliable deck-clocks of the battered ship, would be their last.
Then their voyage and their saga ended in the most unexpected way; not in the jaws of the doomwolf, or a drench of blood spilt by an enemy’s blade or teeth.
No, their saga ended in a light, in a beacon.
In hope.
Somehow, during the storm crossing, they had become friends. Eeron Kleve of the X Legion Iron Hands, black in his mourning cloak, and Timur Gantulga of the V Legion White Scars, pale as tundra frost.