by Dan Abnett
‘Yes, sir,’ John lied.
‘What were you back there?’
‘A farmer, sir.’
The Ultramarine nodded, compassionate. ‘These are tough times, Oll,’ he said.
‘They are,’ John agreed.
He felt a sudden, unexpected twinge of guilt. He thought of the real Oll Persson, his very real friend. He thought of the task he’d set for Oll, the danger he’d put him in. He thought about all the things at stake. Right now, Oll was cutting his way across–
No.
John regained control, regained clarity. He couldn’t afford to think that way. Worry and fear made him vulnerable.
‘There are a lot of women and children below,’ John said, gesturing towards the holding decks. ‘God knows, they could use proper help and not confinement here.’
‘‘‘God?’’’ asked the sergeant.
‘Apologies, sir – a slip of the tongue. Old habits die hard.’
‘You’re what? Catheric?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Play the role. Play the role. ‘Renounced, of course.’
‘So, what are you, a spokesman?’ asked the Ultramarine.
‘I guess. We’ve been here a while, sir. Days. Before that, ten months on a carrier from the ruins of Calth. We thought–’
‘I know it’s bad, Oll,’ said the sergeant. John read the legionary’s ambition more closely, and saw it for what it really was – a kind of nobility. Sergeant Zyrol wanted honour. He wanted promotion. He wanted the transverse broom-crest of a centurion. To earn that, he knew he had to be just like his primarch: open and honest, compassionate, caring, serious, truthful, firm, effective. This was not an act. This was his belief model. It was in his gene-code.
‘Women and kids down there,’ John said. ‘Waiting… It’s getting hard for them, do you see? To be at the doorstep of sanctuary and yet denied.’
‘New protocols, Oll,’ replied the sergeant, with a shake of his head. ‘First Master Auguston brought them in. We are obliged to hold, question and search them. Trust me, we hate to do it. You people deserve all the support Macragge can give you.’
Auguston. The name flamed up in the sergeant’s mind. These new security measures weren’t Ultramarines protocols, in John’s estimation. XIII Legion security was all about guns on walls. This was Iron Warriors style countermeasures… Long-term planning, arm’s-length caution. No, given the way the cards had fallen, not IV Legion. No, more like…VII tactics. Imperial Fists. John probed harder, caught a quick memory flash of Zyrol watching his superior Auguston taking the credit for a security scheme orchestrated by someone called Polux.
Auguston. Arsehole. Note to memory. Adjust, a new strategy. Zyrol was not going to bend, nor was he going to bad-mouth his arsehole superior, but he was noble. He wanted to be like Guilliman. He wanted to stand for honour and duty.
‘What’s that, sir, over there?’ John asked, pointing across the vast hangar space of the orbital deck.
Zyrol sighed. ‘The dead,’ he replied.
About half a kilometre away, across the rockcrete and adamantium cargo floor of the orbital’s western dock, sarcophagus capsules were being unloaded via suspensor webs into the open maw of a cargo lander.
‘The dead?’ John echoed. He was pushing a gentle mental finger into the sergeant’s frontal lobe dopamine system.
‘We’re repatriating the fallen of the Thirteenth to the Memorial Gardens for interment.’
‘You…’ John paused for effect. He amped his emotions so that tears would well. ‘You prioritise the dead over the living?’ he asked.
‘It’s not like that, Oll,’ the sergeant protested, suddenly guilt-stricken.
John shook his head and walked away. It was all right. He’d already secured from Zyrol’s surface thoughts the name of the officer in charge of landing schedules.
John shed the Oll Persson guise as easily as one might take off a coat. He adjusted, and became Teo Lusulk, a fleet Intelligence officer assigned to the orbital. He gained access to a prep room, and acquired a clean flightsuit and a carrybag to stash his possessions in. He was particularly careful with one item. It was heavy, but not much bigger than a short sword. John had wrapped it in silk cloth, and he further bundled it inside his dirty clothes.
As he changed garments and cleaned himself up, John allowed the Mark of Calth that he had psyko-somatically applied to his left cheek and forehead to begin fading.
He walked into the busy control ring levels of the orbital’s western watch tower. The great arched windows were open to permit a view across the grey cityscape of the titanic plate, the shoals of ships beyond, glinting in hard light and sharp shadows, and then the bright and vast sweep of sunlit Macragge, painfully lit against the throbbing darkness of the void. Operational code magenta, he decided. If the day’s status was higher than scarlet, the window ports would have been automatically blast shuttered.
Passing as someone you were not was all about confidence: the confidence of body language and mind-state. John simply walked through the bustle of fleet staffers and servitors, passing Thallaxii sentries and Ultramarines security without even glancing at them. He was stopped, once, at the hatchway into a strategium.
‘Papers and ident,’ the Ultramarine said, his voice a glottal drawl emanating from his vox-grille.
‘Of course, sorry,’ John replied. He made a show of searching his flightsuit pockets. At the same time, he planted a thought-seed in the Ultramarine’s head.
‘Apologies, Lusulk,’ the Space Marine said, waving him through. ‘Didn’t recognise you, friend.’
The strategium was humming with dataflow. Tactical officers, intelligencers and Mechanicum adepts worked around the glowing hololithic display tables. John picked up a data-slate and pretended to consult it as he moved closer.
He read dispositions. Near orbit and high anchorage were both packed tight as a drum. So many ships. Close to a third of the Ultramar warfleet by the looks of it, and another big fleet had recently taken up station in Macragge’s polar range.
Were those Dark Angels ships? First Legion? Holy hell. Holy shitting hell.
John looked closer, reading the fine detail. There was a stand-off. It was subtle, but none of the Dark Angels vessels were out of gunsweep from either the Ultramarines warfleet or the principal weapon orbitals. Shit, what did Guilliman think his brother-Legion was going to do?
Of course. Of course. The answer was ‘almost anything’. The galaxy had been turned upside down. No one trusted anybody.
What else? What the hell was that navigation beacon? Since when did Macragge have an Astronomican?
Except it wasn’t an Astronomican. John could feel it. He could feel the light of it pulsing in his brain and heart and spine and balls. It was xeno-tech. Guilliman was using some kind of xeno-tech to pierce the warp storm and make the Five Hundred Worlds navigable. Holy, holy hell. The galaxy had turned upside down. Even sane men were resorting to desperate measures.
The xeno-tech was ugly. It was an ugly light – an old light, like a lamp lit aeons earlier. John didn’t like it. It reminded him of something, something that had lurked deep in the Acuity he had shared with his alien puppet masters in the Cabal; a species memory, a memory of old time, of pre-humanity. It was tech that had taken others across the gulf of stars long before man, long before the eldar, even.
The feeling made him shiver. It made him fear for his own kind, for mankind, even though he had been a traitor to his kind for longer than he cared to remember.
He was an agent of the Cabal. He wondered for how much longer. John Grammaticus had a conscience, despite all evidence to the contrary. How much longer before he would finally be forced to acknowledge what his conscience was telling him and pay it some heed? How much longer before he let it guide his actions?
The galaxy had turned upside down. What else had to happen before he finally told his
alien masters to go screw themselves?
His alien masters would kill him, of course. Permanently, this time.
John crossed to the next hololithic display table, a downsweep view of Macragge.
He bumped into a good-looking female officer, who was turning away from the table.
‘Sorry,’ he said, picking up the data-slate she’d dropped. She smiled.
As he handed it back to her, he got a decent hot read as his mind brushed hers. Her name was Leaneena, which was nice but not important. More significantly, he took her console access codes out of her head, like plucking individual whisker bones out of the cooked flesh of a good piece of fish.
John got to the table, and keyed the code into the fascia panel. He had data access. He started to work, carefully and methodically, trying not to make it look like he was gorging on information. He pulled up meteorological views, disposition spreads and data-slides. He dragged as much of it as he could over to his borrowed data-slate, his hand moving through the motion-conductive light-cloud. Some of the data was rebuffed and wouldn’t copy to his device, because his clearance wasn’t high enough. He copied what he could and memorised what he couldn’t.
It was extremely demanding, keeping up a psyk disguise in such a crowded and vigilant environment. John reckoned he could do it for thirty minutes, tops, before his control started to fray. This was his one shot at learning how the ground lay.
He looked at Macragge. According to the Cabal, his target was down there somewhere, somehow.
John had been many things for them: procurer, suborner, spy, panderer, recruiter, persuader, provocateur, iconoclast, thief.
He’d never been an assassin before.
He rotated the table view and rolled the three-dimensional globe of Macragge around on its axis, flicking aside the meteorological overlays and air traffic schemes. He wanted security data.
He got it. He’d been hoping for a teleport entry, but that was clearly out of the question. Some supremely clever bastard had retrained a modest proportion of the orbital auspex systems to watch the surface. Clever. Oh, very clever. Any teleport burst would be seen and logged. The same applied to unauthorised drop pods or landers. That was definitely Imperial Fists thinking. You can’t keep everyone out. What you can do is know if they have got in.
What else? Well, authorised planetfall was restricted to the primary starport, and the primary damn starport looked wide open, but it wasn’t because starship-quality void fields had been set up to close down the lower orbital tracks and the entire port area at a second’s notice. So, zero chance of stealing a lander and then pleading code ignorance on the final approach. They’d just slam him out of the air.
John Grammaticus sighed. Sweat was starting to bead on his forehead.
It looked as if he was going to have to go with a crazy improvisation that had crossed his mind earlier.
Teo Lusulk became an Army officer called Edaris Cluet, who was attached to the repatriation process. As Helion plate was overtaken by the terminator and night fell, Cluet boarded a bulk transport and stood, solemn and dignified in his mourning uniform, alongside other officers of his stripe, beside a row of sarcophagi. A fanfare sounded.
Lifting on hot blue burners, the transport rose and moved out of the orbital bay.
10
A Pride Comes
to Ultramar
‘Enter every city as though you are its first-born master.’
– Fulgrim, Primarch of the III Legion
The six great war horns of the ancient Battle Kings sounded across the storm-lit Civitas, screeching out long, rasping blasts in unison. The horns, hollowed from the tusks of an extinct beast, had once been wheeled into battle on giant cart-engines in the vanguards of the armies that Konor and his forebears had taken to war. Now, they were placed in the minarets of fortified towers around Martial Square and the great wall of the Fortress.
As their hoarse bellows died away, like the fading roars of a monstrous bull or glacial pachyderm receding into myth, the sharper fanfare of the XIII began – silver trumpets and carnyx, eight hundred of each, swelling with bright, triumphal joy.
In full, magisterial wargear, like a golden and azure demigod, Guilliman stood on the platform of the colossal Propylae Titanicus, the ‘Titan’s Gate’, that formed the northern entrance of Martial Square. It was a pylon gate, large enough for even the largest engines of the Collegia Titanica to pass beneath without stooping, a fact that had been demonstrated twice that morning. Titan’s Gate had been draped with the colours of the XIII Legion for the occasion, flanked on either side by the drop banners of the Titan Legions, various Army regiments, along with the standards of the V, VI, VII, X, XVIII and XIX Legiones Astartes.
Guilliman breathed in, ignoring the dull wound-ache in his back and the cramp of his healing lungs. From his vantage overlooking the nine hundred-hectare square, paved in polished azurite and marble from the quarries of Calut, he could see the Avenue of Heroes, the central axis of the Civitas. Its pavements only one-thousandth part engraved with the names of the fallen, led due north to the massive glacis of the Aegis Wall that surrounded the Castrum. Above that majestic, cliff-like rampart rose the implacable towers and halls of the Fortress of Hera, dwarfing the Residency, the Agiselus Barracks and the High Senate, each one a vast building in its own right, but which clustered like small children in the skirts of the Legion Fortress. The Fortress and its surrounding structures on the high Castrum were collectively known as the Palaeopolis, or ‘Old City’. Behind that vista, stabbing into the sky, climbed the distant mountains, the points of Hera’s Crown, usually ghost blue at that time of year, but now a submarine green thanks to the storm-light.
To the east of the square lay the imposing domes of the new Senate House and the Diribitorium, the municipal buildings that dominated Circe Deme, a district of habitas and industry, which ran east across the valley to the Porta Medes, and the fine farming country beyond where many consuls kept their estates. Circe and its neighbouring demes were collectively known as the Neapolis, the New City.
To the west lay the river Laponis, shining like smoked glass in the daylight, which wound between the vast black ziggurat castle of the Mechanicum and the vertiginous Red Basilica of the Astra Telepathica. No birds ever flew in that part of the sky. This was a fact that Guilliman had noted from the moment the basilica was first raised and inhabited.
To the south-west of Martial Square lay the geographic centre of Magna Macragge Civitas, the point at which the north-south running cardo of the Via Laponis crossed the east-west running Via Decumanus Maximus. The spot was marked, at a circular intersection guarded by herms and blackwork statues, by the Milion, a milestone marker from which all measurements in the Civitas and, technically, the entire realm of Ultramar, were measured. It was from the top of that milestone, his hands red with traitor blood, that Guilliman had made his first rallying speech during Gallan’s revolt, the uprising that had left his beloved stepfather dead.
Due south of where he stood, the Grand Colonnade led straight and true from the south end of the square all the way down to the starport fields and the coast. The airspace had been cleared. Guilliman could smell the sea, and even glimpse the distant glitter of its racing waves.
It was nearly time.
The intensity of the trumpet fanfare shivered the air, but he knew it would soon be drowned out by the roar of braking jets and landing thrusters.
Guilliman felt a kind of gladness. The arrival of his warlord brother threw up many questions and troubles, but it at least marked a state change in the affairs of Ultramar. Whatever else it might be, this was a turning point.
It was also an excuse to take pride in the glory of Macragge and the XIII. It had been a long time since his Legion had assembled in full and formal regalia for the sheer magnificence of it. Nothing since Calth, not even the hard-fought victories and bloody feats of retribution, had caused them
to celebrate.
The arrival of the Lion called for nothing less. The galaxy contained only eighteen primarchs. The conjunction of even two of them was a singular moment when the balance of the cosmos was temporarily and specifically weighted, especially when those two were, perhaps, the most feted and respected war leaders of all.
This was a day to be marked, so that all of Macragge – all of Ultramar! – knew it. This was a moment. The lord of the Dark Angels deserved such respect, and by the high towers of Terra, Guilliman knew his warriors deserved to feel pride too.
Guilliman was accompanied on the platform by Gorod and the Invictus guard, by Auguston and fifteen officers of the XIII’s senior ranks, by ninety-four senior Army and fleet commanders, by high officers of the senate and the Mechanicum, and by twenty centurion-ranked warriors of the Legiones Astartes, representing an officer cadre for the other Legions that had come to Macragge. Of high officers of the XIII present on Macragge that day, only Valentus Dolor was noticeable by his absence.
The first fanfare of the trumpets had ended. As the second volleying blast began, the clean, silver notes of the horns lofting like a flock of bright eagles into the summer sky, the war horns of the Collegia Titanica began to boom in harmony. Forty war-engines, representing all eight of the Titan Legions pacted with Guilliman, the engine-forces of the forge worlds Tigrus and Accatran, stood on station around Martial Square, or flanked the Grand Colonnade to the starport gates. The assembly included nine Warlords and two Imperator engines, the Ijax Ijastus and the Death Casts Its Own Long Shadow, which had taken up positions on either side of the platform, and stood like vertical cities, bristling with guns.
The air did more than shiver. It threatened to split.
Guilliman allowed himself a smile. He glanced to his side, and saw Euten grimacing and covering her ears.
He beheld the scene again. This was his empire. It was magnificent. He would never use the phrase ‘his empire‘ out loud, of course, but it was. He had founded it and fought for it, and he knew that, one day, he would die for it too. Below him, the polished marble paving slabs of Martial Square gleamed in the storm-light and the eerie luminosity of the Pharos, the single star in the sky. Around the vast square lay the Magna Macragge Civitas, one of the greatest cities of the Imperium. It wasn’t the city that mattered – it was what the city bred. It was what the city could produce.