by Dan Abnett
‘I swear not!’ The Lion said. He glanced at the Dark Angels nearest him. ‘Stand down. Someone explain this!’
Holguin held out his data-slate.
‘Signal is confirmed. The Invincible Reason has launched a drop pod assault. Impact in three minutes and counting.’
‘Condemned from their own lips!’ Auguston cried.
‘This is a mistake!’ Farith Redloss shouted at the Ultramarines First Master. ‘A malfunction! A mis-launch!’
‘How exactly do you accidentally launch a drop pod assault, brother?’ asked Guilliman.
‘This is a malfunction,’ the Lion insisted to Guilliman. ‘I swear so.’
‘Accident or not, the pods will not reach the city,’ said Guilliman. ‘Our shields are raised. Our batteries have full lock. We will burn them out of the sky.’
The Lion swallowed hard and stared directly at Guilliman.
‘This is a mistake, brother. A terrible mistake. I swear it. And I implore you, spare my warriors.’
‘Your warriors?’
‘Four hundred drop pods. A great number of battle-brothers. Please, Roboute, this is a mistake. An error.’
‘All this time, while we talked of the future, your drop pods were loaded and ready with assault troops?’ Guilliman shook his head. ‘What do you suggest I do, brother? Lower the city shields?’
‘Yes,’ replied the Lion. ‘Drop your shields and allow the pods to make controlled landings.’
‘Two minutes!’ Gorod cried.
‘You cannot open the city to them, lord!’ Auguston yelled. ‘It is too great a risk! You must fire and eliminate them!’
‘Please,’ said the Lion, his gaze not leaving Guilliman. ‘I did not authorise this.’
‘But it is an attack force you had prepared and held in waiting?’
‘A precaution. You would have done the same.’
‘We must fire now!’ Gorod roared. ‘While they are still in optimum range. You must give the order!’
‘Please,’ said the Lion one last time.
Guilliman glanced sidelong at Prayto. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘Your brother is closed to me, but I can see enough to know that he is telling the truth. Perhaps not the whole truth, but enough of it. He did not authorise this attack. He is horrified by it.’
Guilliman looked back at the Lion. There was a long pause.
‘Your orders, lord?’ Auguston insisted.
‘Hold fire,’ said Guilliman. ‘Power down. Lower the shields and let them land.’
‘My lord?’ Auguston gasped.
‘Do it!’ Guilliman ordered. He returned his gaze to the Lion as Auguston spoke a rapid series of orders into his vox.
‘Do not make me regret this, brother,’ Guilliman said.
In the north-west deme of the great Civitas, Damon Prytanis paused halfway through the supper he had just purchased.
He was in Xanthi market, just north of the shadows of the granaries, where the day’s trade of clothing and livestock had shifted to farm produce and hot food in the late afternoon. He had bought a pastry stuffed with fish and vegetables from a trader with a clay oven, and then taken himself over to the market’s skirt wall nearby, so he could sit with his back resting against the foot of the wall and eat his fill.
He heard a murmur of voices, a change in the tenor of the crowd around him. Something was happening.
He lowered the half-eaten pastry, and got to his feet, wiping the grease off his lips as he munched.
Somewhere in the central part of the vast Civitas, alarms were sounding. People around him were pointing at the sky.
He looked up, and saw immediately the multiple heat trails slicing the darkening sky high overhead.
A massive drop pod assault. Unmistakable.
‘Holy living Emperor,’ he said out loud.
The leaves of the trees above him suddenly shivered in an evening breeze that had come out of nowhere.
John Grammaticus, his carrybag slung across his shoulder, was already walking quickly through the glade to find a patch of open ground where he might better see the evening sky.
He had taken shelter in the ornamental parkland at the foot of the Castrum’s mighty Aegis Wall and tried to sleep for a while, curled up on a grassy bank behind some lofty bluewoods, hoping that rest might help his mind unpack.
The commotion had roused him. He’d heard it, but he’d felt it too, felt it between his eyes like a sharp pain, the sudden agitation of hundreds of minds. It had come to him almost before the sirens had started to wail.
He saw the drop pods filling the eastern sky like a meteor shower. Their flame trails stretched out behind them in bright orange tongues.
John wondered exactly what he was seeing. A new enemy – that seemed certain, a new threat bearing down upon them all. He remembered the farseer’s enigmatic remark: In eight minutes’ time, this communion will be eclipsed by another, more powerful psykana event in the city, followed by a considerable crisis. Both will divert attention from you.
This had to be that ‘considerable crisis’. Which faction was this? Which wayward brother? Which friend-turned-foe?
John reached out with his mind. He wanted to dredge for something he could use, something that would give him an edge in the hours to come. If he knew what was about to transpire, he could decide the best place to shelter from it, or the best allies to seek out.
What he got first was surprise. John blinked. At this range, he would not have expected to be able to reach specific thoughts or individual minds, but the unity of this hot-read shocked him. The warriors in those distant drop pods were surprised. The decision to launch an assault had come suddenly, without warning.
John reached harder, searching for more defined information.
He hit something else. It made him gasp and recoil. He’d touched a single mind, a dark thing, a midnight thing, quite unlike any mind he had ever touched before. It was ferocious: a black, hot, repellant presence, radiating energy rather than light; like a neutron star, hyper-dense and menacing.
John didn’t know what it was. John didn’t want to know what it was. He just knew that it was a greater threat than the four hundred drop pods and the armoured squads they contained.
‘Don’t let it in,’ he said to the evening air. ‘Don’t let it in.’
Why weren’t the city batteries firing? Why weren’t the orbital weapon systems lighting up? Why was this being allowed to happen?
‘Don’t,’ said John. ‘Don’t let it come here. Don’t let it land.’
There was a pop, a slight but noticeable change in air pressure. A breeze hushed through the bluewoods again. John felt it. He smelled ozone.
The void shields protecting Magna Macragge Civitas had been lowered.
‘No!’ he cried. He turned and looked up in fury at the palace high above him, towering over the trees and the grey cliff of the Aegis Wall.
‘You idiots!’ he shouted, as if they could hear him. ‘Raise the shields. Raise the damned shields!’
He could hear the howling of the incoming drop pods. Two screamed low overhead, trailing streams of blue-hot ablative burn, their braking jets beginning to fire. To either side of him, more pods flashed across the gleaming towers and high blocks of the Civitas, riding the flame-plumes of their retros. The noise was deafening.
John started to run. He began to sprint up the slope into the trees, heading west along the hem of the parklands towards the main Castrum gate. He had to get into the palace. He had to find someone he could trust and communicate a proper warning.
Hell was coming to Macragge.
Something crashed into him and knocked him down. John rolled, dazed. He tasted blood in his mouth. He couldn’t clear his head. What… what?
There was a weight on him, a terrible crushing weight. A huge, mailed hand closed ar
ound his throat. Over the roar of the braking jets and the thunder of the pods landing in open areas all across the city, John heard a voice.
‘Well met,’ said Narek of the Word.
‘Mute the damned alarms!’ Captain Casmir ordered.
One of the medicae staff turned to a console and tapped out a code. The alarm sounds and flashing lights in the quarantine corridor of the Residency’s medicae hall shut off. Through the heavy bulkheads and sealed hatches, the alarms sounding through the rest of the great palace precinct came soft and muffled.
The cessation of the lights and sirens did not placate the confined primarch.
Vulkan continued to hammer his bleeding fists against the armourglass wall as he had done since the alarms first sounded. He was howling, his mouth wide, in despair, like a trapped animal. The mess of plasma, blood and half-formed tissue his fists and forearms were leaving on the glass was miserable.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ asked the chief attending medicae.
‘You’re the damned surgeon!’ Casmir returned. ‘I thought it was a response to the alarms. Our Lord of Nocturne has clearly suffered through extremity. I thought the alarms had triggered some traumatic response.’
‘It wasn’t the alarms,’ remarked a junior medicae nearby.
‘What?’ Casmir barked, turning on her. She bowed her head.
‘Sir, I simply said that it wasn’t the alarms,’ she replied in a low voice.
‘How do you know?’ Casmir asked.
The young woman looked nervously at her superior, the chief attending.
‘I spoke out of turn,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Junior Physic Patrishana is one of our most promising novices,’ the chief attending told Casmir. ‘Patrishana, please… Explain your comment.’
The young woman nodded. She turned to her console and punched up a data review on the main lithoscopic display.
‘I was monitoring the vitals of our… honoured guest,’ she said. ‘Please, if you will, observe the time-count indicator on this replay, captain. I have slowed it to one-tenth speed. Although it was close, so close as to suggest cause and effect, as you’ll see…’
‘Great Hera!’ Casmir whispered. ‘He began his agitation three full seconds before the alarms started. As if…’
The young woman looked up at Casmir.
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘As if his response, like the alarms, was to something else.’
Casmir looked at the glass wall and the screaming figure beyond it.
‘What does he know?’ he asked. ‘What does he know that we don’t?’
Treads clattering off the basalt pavers, the Land Raider growled into Barium Square, just off the Via Laponis – the cardo, or north-south ‘heart street’ of the Civitas. Barium Square was a broad and pleasant area, the popular haunt of scholars and academics who used the many libraries and rubricatories there. Through to the west, the cross-streets afforded an excellent view of the majestic Titanicus collegium and the even more massive castle of the Mechanicum. In the centre of the square was a broad grass sward like a little green island, boasting a grove of handsome grey seamwood trees and some ornamental shrubs. Scholars would sit on the benches there on summer days and talk as they ate lunch.
Smoke fumed from the shrubs, and the grass was scorched. The drop pod had felled two of the seamwoods when it landed, and destroyed an ornamental bench. Its landing pads had cracked and dug up the pathway too.
Sergeant Menius of the Ultramarines 34th Company led his squad out of the Land Raider. He fanned them out with a gesture, weapons ready. The orders had come down from the First Master. Active and duty sentry squads were to attend and secure every landing site. Reports were already flooding back from across the Civitas of sites secured. The Dark Angels squads emerging from the landing pods had immediately submitted to the XIII Legion details, handed off weapons, and allowed themselves to be escorted to the holding centre at the Campus Cohortum. Some, it was reported, had apologised and begged for forgiveness from their battle-brothers.
There were also reports of minor property damage. No matter how carefully you tried to park a drop pod, it was not a subtle device.
Menius checked the area, and compared his visor data with the flow from the Land Raider’s more comprehensive auspex array. The square was quiet. Residual vapour rose off the drop pod, which sat at an awkward angle amongst the trees. Heat residuals were much hotter on the infrared display. It was bleeding out the fury of its atmospheric entry.
No contact. No life trace.
‘Power up,’ Menius voxed to the Land Raider’s driver. He heard the gunpods heat up behind him, and he rejoiced in the tight, metallic clatter the turret mounts made as they traversed, tracking for a target. Menius had killing power in his fists, in the hands of the battle-brothers around him, and almost excessive killing power in the vehicle behind them.
They wouldn’t need it.
Throne, this was already quite clearly a terrible mistake, and their brothers, the Dark Angels, were freely entering submission.
What was wrong with this one, then? Menius wondered. No life traces? What, a bad landing? It didn’t look that bad.
‘Summon an Apothecary on standby,’ Menius voxed to his subaltern. ‘There’s something off here.’
Bolters ready, the squad closed in on the smoking pod.
‘Hello?’ Menius hailed via his helm’s augmitters.
The evening light had gone an odd, blue colour, as before a storm. Shadows had turned grey. Menius was aware that every move they made was accompanied by an over-loud sound. Every footstep, every grind of armour, every hum of power-support.
The city shields had not yet been re-fired. Menius could hear the distant chop and hum of the Thunderhawks and Storm Eagles despatched to cover each and every landing site. He could see some of them in the distance above the rooftops, circling as they probed neighbouring districts with their stablights. According to vox-data, his air cover was inbound and would be with him in two minutes.
‘Hold steady,’ Menius told his squad. ‘Stand and cover me.’
He approached the drop pod. The hatches were wide open.
‘Hello?’ he called again.
Nothing.
He approached the nearest hatch and peered inside.
The pod was empty.
Must have been a misfire. An empty pod, mis-launched. The word was, the whole swarm had been due to a malfunction.
‘Clear the area!’ Menius ordered. ‘Secure!’
He turned away from the pod and scanned the square. For a moment, he thought he might have glimpsed something moving along the portico of the Tigris Library. He dismissed it as his imagination. Nothing could move so much like a shadow, so jittery, so much like a flock of crows.
‘Sergeant?’
‘What?’ Menius asked, turning.
His subaltern was facing him.
‘We scanned the interior,’ the subaltern said.
‘And?’
‘The entire interior is coated with blood, sergeant.’
‘What did you just say?’ asked Menius.
‘Blood, sergeant, about eighteen litres of it.’
From the portico above Barium Square, Curze watched the Ultramarines trolling around the drop pod. So stupid!
Curze had targets elsewhere, and he intended to find them, but the stupid Ultramarines were so terribly inviting.
He’d never killed one of Guilliman’s. It was enticing, even though they did have a big, bad Land Raider with them.
The Night Haunter stood up, proud and tall, and opened his wings and his dreadful claws.
‘Death,’ he murmured, as a sentence.
Eighty-eight seconds later, Sergeant Menius and his entire squad were dead and the Land Raider was on its side and burning.
Konrad Curze had come to Macragge
.
14
Death in the Fortress of Hera
‘I am a brother to dragons and
a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me
and my bones are burned with heat.’
– from the Old Earth religious text known as ‘Job’s Book’
‘Our guests, my lord,’ said Verus Caspean, Master of the Second, ‘are being escorted to the Campus Cohortum.’
‘Any resistance?’ asked Guilliman.
Caspean shook his head. He had a sleek skull with very tightly cropped grey hair, and high cheek bones framing a blade of a nose. The shake of his head made Guilliman think of the warning sway of a mountain hawk.
‘Our guests have made no resistance,’ he replied, again stressing the word ‘guests’. ‘They have allowed themselves to be escorted to confinement.’
‘Have they surrendered weapons?’
‘Some of them have, lord,’ said Caspean, ‘but we have not made that demand of them. As per your instructions, we are treating them as respected battle-brothers, and regarding this as the unfortunate accident their lord claims it to be.’
‘How many?’
‘A strength in excess of five companies… as our Legion would consider it. I have little patience with their “wings” and cohort divisions.’
‘So… enough to kill this city?’
Caspean paused.
‘Easily,’ he replied. ‘Whatever else I think of them today, I am in no doubt of the capability and ferocity of the First. If we had dropped the city shields and their intent had been malicious, the Civitas would be burning, and the death toll unthinkable.’
‘Tell me when they are all confined,’ Guilliman said. ‘Have their drop pods recovered and transported for holding at Fortress Moneta. I will not have the reminders of an invasion, no matter how peaceable and unintentional it may have been, littering my city and scaring my population. Has Auguston made the announcements?’
‘Yes, lord,’ said Caspean. ‘He has made two statements over the Civitas address system, and they are being looped on the civilian datafeeds. I was impressed. He was quite reassuring. He insisted that there was no cause for general concern, and that it was merely a practical training exercise conducted in conjunction with the Thirteenth.’