by Gav Thorpe
Horus was present, his bald head sheened with thick sweat, his eyes sunken, ringed with darkness as one suffering heavy fatigue. Abaddon thought it impossible for a primarch to show such weariness, much less his master, but Layak had told him of how the Ruinous Powers’ presence in his mortal form taxed the Warmaster’s strength to its limits.
Horus’ expression was grim as he raised his gaze to meet the stare of Abaddon.
‘The war progresses too slowly, Ezekyle,’ the Warmaster pronounced. There was no accusation, simply a statement of fact. Horus gritted his teeth and sucked in a breath, odd lights dancing across his eyes for a few seconds. He blinked them away and seemed restored, his face not so lined as moments before, his shoulders straighter.
‘I did not think Perturabo would fail you,’ said Abaddon. ‘If he cannot devise a means to enter the Palace, I do not think his brothers will do so. Perhaps it is time that the greatest of our leaders takes his rightful place at the forefront of the battle.’
‘You think I shirk my duties as general?’ Horus seemed amused by the idea.
‘Not at all, Warmaster. I think your Legions and countless other servants would fight harder to see you at their head. Your vision has brought us to the door of the Emperor’s throne room, but at the moment of your victory you stand aside and let others break it down.’
‘It cannot yet be done,’ Horus said with a slow shake of the head, his expression turning sombre.
‘Because of this psychic shield that bars the daemons?’
‘In part. But also, the powers that work through me gather yet more strength. When I strike, I must annihilate my father entirely, body and soul, physically and psychically. Not a shred of him can survive lest it grow again in some future century.’ Gauntlet-claws tapped on the arm of the throne for several seconds. ‘Perturabo is the sanest of my brothers. His agenda is solely to serve me, to prove himself as strong as he believes he can be. You have already seen how the others work at cross purposes except under firm hand. The Lord of Iron must be allowed his time of glory or he will lose faith. And if I lose my reliable commander, what can I achieve with unreliable ones?’
‘What is to be done?’
‘We shall see.’ Horus turned his head and nodded to one of the army of lesser creatures that attended the court. Incense billowed from burners and the hololithic comms array flickered into life, bringing with it the images of the Warmaster’s primarch allies. Angron licked gore from a clawed hand, twitching with the taste of it, his bestial features broad and large in the column of light that projected from the ceiling. Fulgrim seemed to be lounging on a couch made of corpses, tail languidly flicking back and forth, while attended by creatures with eyes and mouths stitched shut, offering flagons and platters of treats to the primarch. Mortarion seemed the most attentive, though his features were obscured by billows of vapour erupting from his mask with each stentorian breath. He was clad in darkness and what Abaddon first took to be vox static soon resolved itself into the buzzing of thousands of flies.
It was several more seconds before Perturabo answered the council. He paced, appearing and disappearing from view as he passed in and out of the comm-capture unit aboard the Iron Blood. His fingers flexed murderously and Abaddon caught glimpses of wreckage in the primarch’s hall.
Of Magnus there was no sign.
Perturabo stopped his pacing and glared through the projection at his brothers.
‘The space port should be invested by now! We wasted many lives and much time in pointless attack, when my cursed brothers cannot cross the boundary into the Emperor’s domain.’
‘Cursed?’ drawled Fulgrim. ‘Says one that has not experienced the delights an immaterial existence has to offer.’
‘Cursed,’ Perturabo snapped. ‘You are less than I, for you cannot even set foot upon the Palace grounds.’
‘Then take Forgebreaker and knock upon the Emperor’s doors yourself,’ replied Mortarion, gaseous puffs accompanying his words.
‘I did not think the Lord of Iron was so cautious of spending his warriors’ lives,’ said Abaddon. ‘The Fourth rightly earned themselves a reputation for forcing battle even in the face of costly resistance and tremendous casualties.’
‘I would spend them for good cause, not dash them against the walls while my brothers amuse themselves with inhuman delights.’ The image of Perturabo turned towards Horus and lowered to one knee. ‘I know that I promised you the walls, Warmaster, but I have not the tools to dismantle this shield. It not only spurns the presence of the Neverborn, I am sure it steels the hearts of the Emperor’s servants. I could spend a century taking the space port apart piece by piece and yet my brothers would never lead their Legions upon the ground hallowed by our father.’
‘My faith in you is not misplaced, Perturabo,’ said Horus, standing up. He gestured for the Lord of Iron to do likewise. ‘One setback is not defeat, as you know well. It was wrong of me to send you forth unarmed against the foe you would face.’
Horus twisted, a clawed gauntlet stretching to point towards Layak.
‘In the absence of Magnus, who aids the soul-battle in his own way, the greatest proponents of these arts are the Word Bearers. I send to you my Crimson Apostle, the oracle of the Neverborn.’
‘I am honoured,’ said Layak, stooping from the shadows in a bow. ‘I have some theories regarding the telaethesic ward of the Emperor. I shall summon the most powerful of our brethren, and if the Lord Mortarion permits, discuss matters with Lord Typhus. Our efforts combined will find a means to break this shield.’
‘You will share all that your art can tell me,’ insisted Perturabo. ‘If I am to deliver the Palace to our Warmaster I must have proper understanding of all the elements.’
‘Of course. It will be necessary for me to be on Terra, if you are willing to hold council there with me.’
‘I will,’ agreed Perturabo.
‘And you will have Abaddon to accompany you,’ added Horus.
‘There are better aims to which I might be employed,’ argued the First Captain. ‘The Sons of Horus can draw defenders away from the Lion’s Gate by presenting threat elsewhere.’
‘You will go where I command,’ Horus said heavily, eyes flashing with anger. ‘Layak is to my soul as you are to my body. Where the one goes, so too does the other.’
Abaddon restrained any argument. He looked at Layak but it was impossible to read any reaction from the Crimson Apostle’s masked, inhuman face.
‘By your will I am commanded,’ said Abaddon, bowing his head to his primarch.
‘I will have Typhus ready for your instruction,’ said Mortarion. His image wavered and then vanished.
‘Then I will prepare for my descent,’ said Perturabo. ‘Transmit your coordinates, Layak, and the time of meeting.’
The Lord of Iron’s feed blinked out of existence.
Fulgrim muttered a distracted farewell and faded also, leaving Angron’s immense face floating in the midst of the chamber.
‘Be ready, Angron, when Perturabo calls upon you,’ said Horus, returning to his throne. He gestured and the link was severed, plunging the chamber into gloom once more.
Lion’s Gate space port, mesophex core,
eighteen hours since assault
Manish Dhaubanjar did not like the quiet at all. For all of his forty-eight years he had lived and served the Emperor within the great tower of the Lion’s Gate space port. Starspear by birth, and hauler operator by labour, he rarely ventured below the thirty-kilometre level. His world had always been one of clanking machinery, shouting overseers and the rumble of starship plasma engines.
Now all he could hear was the distant tremor of the Palace bombardment. The orbital attack had moved on from the space port. Through announcements and hall briefings, Colonel Maigraut had warned the people that this cessation of the artillery attack was likely a forewarning of a renewed ass
ault. The upper gun batteries had fallen silent for the time being, denied targets for their wrath while the enemy regathered their strength.
‘We’ve still got to be ready,’ he told his wife, Daxa. She nodded, fingering the autogun in her lap as she sat in a rocking chair made from spare hauler parts.
‘We’ll be ready, flower of my heart,’ she replied. ‘When the alarms sound, we’ll wait in the hall with the others.’
‘When the alarms sound,’ said Manish.
He pushed himself out of his low chair, limbs stiff with arthritis protesting at the sudden movement. Leaning his gun against the cupboard of their small kitchen unit, he picked up a pan and filled it from the water urn – the mains supply had been cut off in case it was poisoned by the enemy. Plague was rampant in the main Palace, but the space port had so far been isolated from the flux and poxes that were killing hundreds of thousands beyond the wall. The electric cook ring was also disconnected but the Imperial Army had issued tens of thousands of camp stoves. One sat on the countertop, smelling faintly of refined alcohol fuel.
‘Tea?’ He looked over his shoulder. Daxa was rubbing a smudge of gun lubricant from the cuff of her dress.
‘What’s the special occasion?’ she replied with a smile. ‘We won’t be getting any more for a while.’
‘Might as well drink it,’ he told her.
Just as he reached for the caddy, fifteen thousand kilometres away in low orbit the Iron Warriors cruiser Rebuke prepared to fire its main lance array. As did the seven ships of its battle group, plus scores of others. Simultaneously, a hundred gunships entered targeting range, loosing a storm of missiles and shells.
The combined weight of this gunship fire overloaded a patch of the Starspear’s protective fields roughly three hundred metres across. Into this relative eye of the needle the Rebuke and its fellow warships fired beams of energised particles powerful enough to punch holes through starship armour and level ground fortifications.
The upper atmosphere caused almost no diffraction at all, so that the combined beams hit the weakened patch of shielding at almost one hundred per cent strength. In microseconds scores of laser blasts punched through the skin of the space port, sheared through ten kilometres of bulkheads and supports but avoided damaging the core shafts of the transport network.
The first Manish and Daxa knew of the attack was when their bedroom vaporised, leaving a glowing hole in the wall between it and the living space. Decompression lifted them both from their feet along with chairs, pots, burner, guns and other detritus.
Manish’s scream ripped from his mouth as a wisp of vapour, a moment before his lungs emptied, their fabric disrupted by the sudden loss of pressure. The roar of winds disappeared as his eardrums burst. Manish spun through the air alongside his wife, moisture icing on his skin, the bodies of thousands of other workers flying alongside them until the onrushing winds dragged them into the atmosphere, forty kilometres above the ground.
Despite the freezing cold, his body temperature was warm enough to boil his blood at that altitude, though thankfully he was unconscious from hypoxia before his eyes leaked blood and his tongue swelled up to choke him.
He was already dead before he started falling and the silhouettes of hundreds of gunships appeared against the rising dawn.
Back in Starspear, alarms started to howl.
The archmagos
Obliteration
A concealed blade
Lion’s Gate space port, mesophex core, eighteen hours since assault
Olfactory sensors translated the stench of death into a series of quantifiable molecular components while audio interceptors turned the snap of volkite blasters and thrum of rad beamers into wavelength data. To Archmagos Inar Satarael these added to the beauty of battle rather than detracted from it, just as the annotation for an orchestral symphony contained all the potential for drama that was then expended during a performance.
For the insertion into the heart of the Lion’s Gate space port he had built himself a warform smaller than the cybernetic monstrosities he had favoured of late – it would be shameful to be denied entry to the control halls because the doorways were not large enough for such a body. Instead he had focused on anti-personnel weaponry and maximum shield efficiency, as well as the mobility afforded by a heximal limb layout. Even so, his bulk was twice that of a legionary, though composite materials meant he was no heavier than a normal man. Of these augmentations, the shield boosters were proving the most valuable, deflecting las-blasts and autogun rounds by the score every minute as he pressed forward along the arterial passage to the main dockwork controls.
Speed was vital. The Iron Warrior, Kroeger, had devised a simple plan, and a greater part of it relied upon the systems of the defenders being blind to the true nature of the attack being launched. Should the archmagos and the ally he was due to meet suffer undue delays the entire endeavour was at risk. With this in mind, Satarael ploughed into enemy fire with little concern, knowing that the clave of battle servitors that followed would cut down anything that evaded the attention of his maxim bolters and graviton imploder.
Via noospheric pulse he could also feel the converging approach of his allies in the Iron Warriors. Arriving at an angle of seventy-two degrees to his own attack, the IV Legion assault force was equally small but specialised. Their combined firepower would swiftly overwhelm any defenders still alive to hold the central command hall.
The archmagos swept through the outer chambers without pause, slave routines directing the fire of his weapons while his conscious mind applied itself to the matter of the armoured portal sealing the inner sanctum.
It was substantial, reinforced with thick bars and heavy gauge locking wheels. Sparks emanating from the control panel at its side betrayed a desperate ploy by the defenders – the electrical locks had been blown from the inside, impossible to override. They were sealed inside, but it was an effective barrier to Satarael’s entry. The continued buzz of overloaded circuits highlighted that the measure had been taken perhaps only a minute earlier, in response to the rapidity of his advance.
Melta-burners seemed the best option, but there were none in his vanguard. His graviton imploder would eventually twist the door locks into scrap metal, but that would be costly in terms of time and energy output, during which his part in Warsmith Kroeger’s plan would be unfulfilled, risking the success of the entire enterprise.
Though he had every confidence in his own abilities, Satarael considered that it was somewhat foolhardy of Kroeger to place so much necessity into a single operation, especially one carried out by a relatively small military force. Whatever the merits of the plan, if the New Mechanicum was to thrive, the overthrow of the False Omnissiah was essential and Satarael was determined to play whatever part he could in that revolution. The future would be written by visionaries such as himself.
As he flashed active surveyor beams across the armoured door to assess its internal structural qualities, Satarael picked up an energy surge close at hand. Two pinpricks of white light resolved into bright patches around the central lock gears. The energy build-up continued until sparks erupted from the near side of the door, moments before the wash of high-intensity radiation burst through the two neat holes.
Something powerful slammed against the portal from inside the command terminal chamber, rupturing the remains of the lock’s gears. Molten droplets and slivers of metal showered outwards as the door cracked in half, the shriek of tortured metal filling the antechamber as it twisted on its immense hinges.
A figure the size of a Legion Dreadnought loomed through the smoke of vaporised metal and ceramite, the telltale gleam of two melta-cutters where eyes should have been.
‘You are late, archmagos.’ The creature’s voice warbled with artificial modulation, but there was also a strange after-effect that did not register with Satarael’s sensors: the daemon-voice of the creature’s cohabitant.
Volk-Sa’ra’am looked like a legionary in the same way that a battleship might look like an orbital shuttle if one mistook size for perspective. Everything about it was larger in scale, bloated with the power of the daemonic coupled with the technophagic enhancements it had been given by noted members of the New Mechanicum. It was impossible to tell where ancient battleplate ended and iron-hard skin began, but the gunmetal of its old armour gave way to patches of dark flesh in places, while horns and spines both of bone and metal protruded from breaks in the glistening carapace that had once been the Space Marine’s power plant backpack.
Its form was not static but an ever-shifting mass, more than simple mutation. The melta-cutters – or the analogue the daemon-machine hybrid had created – receded into the face and something approximating human features returned, a flat face with a bulbous nose. The eyes still gleamed with circuitry, devoid of any human feeling.
‘Are you ready for the transference?’ Volk-Sa’ra’am asked, turning away. Bone gears whirred and pistons shuddered with each step it took into the chamber, heading for a hexagonal console bank at the centre. A clawed hand as large as a service hoist lifted towards the cogitators. ‘There is still a connection here we can exploit.’
‘You understand what will be required of you?’
‘I will… divide and conquer,’ said the hulking creature, a sketch of a smile twisting its assumed face. ‘I will obliterate all opposition.’
‘Obliterate? Yes, that is certainly the word. All trace of the previous incarna machina will be replaced by your anaethemix.’
‘Blood is required, I was told.’ Volk-Sa’ra’am turned its arm as though offering a wrist. Metal plates peeled back like the petals of a mechanical flower, exposing blood vessels ribbed with cabling. Thin pipelines carrying other fluids ran alongside, pulsing with red and green and blots of purple.