by Dan Abnett
‘Kill it!’ Loken heard Brother-sergeant Jubal instruct over the link. Jubal’s order was given in the curt argot of Cthonia, their derivation world, a language that the Luna Wolves had preserved as their battle-tongue.
The battle-brother carrying the squad’s plasma cannon obeyed without hesitation. For a dazzling half-second, a twenty-metre ribbon of light linked the muzzle of his weapon to the auto-mortar, and then the device engulfed the facade of the palace in a roasting wash of yellow flame.
Dozens of enemy soldiers were cast down by the blast. Several were thrown up into the air, landing crumpled and boneless on the flight of steps.
‘Into them!’ Jubal barked.
Wildfire chipped and pattered off their armour. Loken felt the distant sting of it. Brother Calends stumbled and fell, but righted himself again, almost at once.
Loken saw the enemy scatter away from their charge. He swung his bolter up. His weapon had a gash in the metal of the foregrip, the legacy of a greenskin’s axe during Ullanor, a cosmetic mark Loken had told the armourers not to finish out. He began to fire, not on burst, but on single shot, feeling the weapon buck and kick against his palms. Bolter rounds were explosive penetrators. The men he hit popped like blisters, or shredded like bursting fruit. Pink mist fumed off every ruptured figure as it fell.
‘Tenth Company!’ Loken shouted. ‘For the Warmaster!’
The warcry was still unfamiliar, just another aspect of the newness. It was the first time Loken had declaimed it in war, the first chance he’d had since the honour had been bestowed by the Emperor after Ullanor.
By the Emperor. The true Emperor.
‘Lupercal! Lupercal!’ the Wolves yelled back as they streamed in, choosing to answer with the old cry, the Legion’s pet-name for their beloved commander. The warhorns of the Titans boomed.
They stormed the palace. Loken paused by one of the induction gates, urging his frontrunners in, carefully reviewing the advance of his company main force. Hellish fire continued to rake them from the upper balconies and towers. In the far distance, a brilliant dome of light suddenly lifted into the sky, astonishingly bright and vivid. Loken’s visor automatically dimmed. The ground trembled and a noise like a thunderclap reached him. A capital ship of some size, stricken and ablaze, had fallen out of the sky and impacted in the outskirts of the High City. Drawn by the flash, the phototropic towers above him fidgeted and rotated.
Reports flooded in. Aximand’s force, Fifth Company, had secured the Regency and the pavilions on the ornamental lakes to the west of the High City. Torgaddon’s men were driving up through the lower town, slaying the armour sent to block them.
Loken looked east. Three kilometres away, across the flat plain of the basalt platforms, across the tide of charging men and striding Titans and stitching fire, Abaddon’s company, First Company, was crossing the bulwarks into the far flank of the palace. Loken magnified his view, resolving hundreds of white-armoured figures pouring through the smoke and chop-fire. At the front of them, the dark figures of First Company’s foremost Terminator squad, the Justaerin. They wore polished black armour, dark as night, as if they belonged to some other, black Legion.
‘Loken to First,’ he sent. ‘Tenth has entry.’
There was a pause, a brief distort, then Abaddon’s voice answered. ‘Loken, Loken… are you trying to shame me with your diligence?’
‘Not for a moment, first captain,’ Loken replied. There was a strict hierarchy of respect within the Legion, and though he was a senior officer, Loken regarded the peerless first captain with awe. All of the Mournival, in fact, though Torgaddon had always favoured Loken with genuine shows of friendship.
Now Sejanus was gone, Loken thought. The aspect of the Mournival would soon change.
‘I’m playing with you, Loken,’ Abaddon sent, his voice so deep that some vowel sounds were blurred by the vox. ‘I’ll meet you at the feet of this false Emperor. First one there gets to illuminate him.’
Loken fought back a smile. Ezekyle Abaddon had seldom sported with him before. He felt blessed, elevated. To be a chosen man was enough, but to be in with the favoured elite, that was every captain’s dream.
Reloading, Loken entered the palace through the induction gate, stepping over the tangled corpses of the enemy dead. The plaster facings of the inner walls had been cracked and blown down, and loose crumbs, like dry sand, crunched under his feet. The air was full of smoke, and his visor display kept jumping from one register to another as it attempted to compensate and get a clean reading.
He moved down the inner hall, hearing the echo of gunfire from deeper in the palace compound. The body of a brother lay slumped in a doorway to his left, the large, white-armoured corpse odd and out of place amongst the smaller enemy bodies. Marjex, one of the Legion’s apothecaries, was bending over him. He glanced up as Loken approached, and shook his head.
‘Who is it?’ Loken asked.
‘Tibor, of Second Squad,’ Marjex replied. Loken frowned as he saw the devastating head wound that had stopped Tibor.
‘The Emperor knows his name,’ Loken said.
Marjex nodded, and reached into his narthecium to get the reductor tool. He was about to remove Tibor’s precious gene-seed, so that it might be returned to the Legion banks.
Loken left the apothecary to his work, and pushed on down the hall. In a wide colonnade ahead, the towering walls were decorated with frescoes, showing familiar scenes of a haloed Emperor upon a golden throne. How blind these people are, Loken thought, how sad this is. One day, one single day with the iterators, and they would understand. We are not the enemy. We are the same, and we bring with us a glorious message of redemption. Old Night is done. Man walks the stars again, and the might of the Astartes walks at his side to keep him safe.
In a broad, sloping tunnel of etched silver, Loken caught up with elements of Third Squad. Of all the units in his company, Third Squad – Locasta Tactical Squad – was his favourite and his favoured. Its commander, Brother-sergeant Nero Vipus, was his oldest and truest friend.
‘How’s your humour, captain?’ Vipus asked. His pearl-white plate was smudged with soot and streaked with blood.
‘Phlegmatic, Nero. You?’
‘Choleric. Red-raged, in fact. I’ve just lost a man, and two more of mine are injured. There’s something covering the junction ahead. Something heavy. Rate of fire like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Tried fragging it?’
‘Two or three grenades. No effect. And there’s nothing to see. Garvi, we’ve all heard about these so-called Invisibles. The ones that butchered Sejanus. I was wondering—’
‘Leave the wondering to me,’ Loken said. ‘Who’s down?’
Vipus shrugged. He was a little taller than Loken, and his shrug made the heavy ribbing and plates of his armour clunk together. ‘Zakias.’
‘Zakias? No…’
‘Torn into shreds before my very eyes. Oh, I feel the hand of the ship on me, Garvi.’
The hand of the ship. An old saying. The commander’s flagship was called the Vengeful Spirit, and in times of duress or loss, the Wolves liked to draw upon all that implied as a charm, a totem of retribution.
‘In Zakias’s name,’ Vipus growled, ‘I’ll find this bastard Invisible and—’
‘Sooth your choler, brother. I’ve no use for it,’ Loken said. ‘See to your wounded while I take a look.’
Vipus nodded and redirected his men. Loken pushed up past them to the disputed junction.
It was a vault-roofed crossways where four hallways met. The area read cold and still to his imaging. Fading smoke wisped up into the rafters. The ouslite floor had been chewed and peppered with thousands of impact craters. Brother Zakias, his body as yet unretrieved, lay in pieces at the centre of the crossway, a steaming pile of shattered white plasteel and bloody meat.
Vipus had been right. There was no sign of an enemy present. No heat-trace, not even a flicker of movement. But studying the area, Loken saw a heap of empty shell cas
es, glittering brass, that had spilled out from behind a bulkhead across from him. Was that where the killer was hiding?
Loken bent down and picked up a chunk of fallen plasterwork. He lobbed it into the open. There was a click, and then a hammering deluge of autofire raked across the junction. It lasted five seconds, and in that time over a thousand rounds were expended. Loken saw the fuming shell cases spitting out from behind the bulkhead as they were ejected.
The firing stopped. Fycelene vapour fogged the junction. The gunfire had scored a mottled gouge across the stone floor, pummelling Zakias’s corpse in the process. Spots of blood and scraps of tissue had been spattered out.
Loken waited. He heard a whine and the metallic clunk of an autoloader system. He read weapon heat, fading, but no body warmth.
‘Won a medal yet?’ Vipus asked, approaching.
‘It’s just an automatic sentry gun,’ Loken replied.
‘Well, that’s a small relief at least’ Vipus said. ‘After the grenades we’ve pitched in that direction, I was beginning to wonder if these vaunted Invisibles might be “Invulnerables” too. I’ll call up Devastator support to—’
‘Just give me a light flare,’ Loken said.
Vipus stripped one off his leg plate and handed it to his captain. Loken ignited it with a twist of his hand, and threw it down the hallway opposite. It bounced, fizzling, glaring white hot, past the hidden killer.
There was a grind of servos. The implacable gunfire began to roar down the corridor at the flare, kicking it and bouncing it, ripping into the floor.
‘Garvi—’ Vipus began.
Loken was running. He crossed the junction, thumped his back against the bulkhead. The gun was still blazing. He wheeled round the bulkhead and saw the sentry gun, built into an alcove. A squat machine, set on four pad feet and heavily plated, it had turned its short, fat, pumping cannons away from him to fire on the distant, flickering flare.
Loken reached over and tore out a handful of its servo flexes. The guns stuttered and died.
‘We’re clear!’ Loken called out. Locasta moved up.
‘That’s generally called showing off,’ Vipus remarked.
Loken led Locasta up the corridor, and they entered a fine state apartment. Other apartment chambers, similarly regal, beckoned beyond. It was oddly still and quiet.
‘Which way now?’ Vipus asked.
‘We go find this “Emperor”,’ Loken said.
Vipus snorted. ‘Just like that?’
‘The first captain bet me I couldn’t reach him first.’
‘The first captain, eh? Since when was Garviel Loken on pally terms with him?’
‘Since Tenth breached the palace ahead of First. Don’t worry, Nero, I’ll remember you little people when I’m famous.’
Nero Vipus laughed, the sound snuffling out of his helmet mask like the cough of a consumptive bull.
What happened next didn’t make either of them laugh at all.
TWO
Meeting the Invisibles
At the foot of a Golden Throne
Lupercal
‘CAPTAIN LOKEN?’ HE looked up from his work. ‘That’s me.’ ‘Forgive me for interrupting,’ she said. ‘You’re busy.’ Loken set aside the segment of armour he had been polishing and rose to his feet. He was almost a metre taller than her, and naked but for a loin cloth. She sighed inwardly at the splendour of his physique. The knotted muscles, the old ridge-scars. He was handsome too, this one, fair hair almost silver, cut short, his pale skin slightly freckled, his eyes grey like rain. What a waste, she thought.
Though there was no disguising his inhumanity, especially in this bared form. Apart from the sheer mass of him, there was the overgrown gigantism of the face, that particular characteristic of the Astartes, almost equine, plus the hard, taut shell of his ribless torso, like stretched canvas.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ he said, dropping a nub of polishing fibre into a little pot, and wiping his fingers.
She held out her hand. ‘Mersadie Oliton, official remembrancer,’ she said. He looked at her tiny hand and then shook it, making it seem even more tiny in comparison with his own giant fist.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, laughing, ‘I keep forgetting you don’t do that out here. Shaking hands, I mean. Such a parochial, Terran custom.’
‘I don’t mind it. Have you come from Terra?’
‘I left there a year ago. Despatched to the crusade by permit of the Council.’
‘You’re a remembrancer?’
‘You know what that means?’
‘I’m not stupid,’ Loken said.
‘Of course not,’ she said, hurriedly. ‘I meant no offence.’
‘None taken.’ He eyed her. Small and frail, though possibly beautiful. Loken had very little experience of women. Perhaps they were all frail and beautiful. He knew enough to know that few were as black as her. Her skin was like burnished coal. He wondered if it were some kind of dye.
He wondered too about her skull. Her head was bald, but not shaved. It seemed polished and smooth as if it had never known hair. The cranium was enhanced somehow, extending back in a streamlined sweep that formed a broad ovoid behind her nape. It was like she had been crowned, as if her simple humanity had been made more regal.
‘How can I help you?’ he asked.
‘I understand you have a story, a particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’
‘Which story?’
‘Horus killing the Emperor.’
He stiffened. He didn’t like it when non-Astartes humans called the Warmaster by his true name.
‘That happened months ago,’ he said dismissively. ‘I’m sure I won’t remember the details particularly well.’
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I have it on good authority you can be persuaded to tell the tale quite expertly. I’ve been told it’s very popular amongst your battle-brothers.’
Loken frowned. Annoyingly, the woman was correct. Since the taking of the High City, he’d been required – forced would not be too strong a word – to retell his first-hand account of the events in the palace tower on dozens of occasions. He presumed it was because of Sejanus’s death. The Luna Wolves needed catharsis. They needed to hear how Sejanus had been so singularly avenged.
‘Someone put you up to this, Mistress Oliton?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Captain Torgaddon, actually.’
Loken nodded. It was usually him. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘I understand the general situation, for I have heard it from others, but I’d love to have your personal observations. What was it like? When you got inside the palace itself, what did you find?’
Loken sighed, and looked round at the rack where his power armour was displayed. He’d only just started cleaning it. His private arming chamber was a small, shadowy vault adjoining the off-limits embarkation deck, the metal walls lacquered pale green. A cluster of glow-globes lit the room, and an Imperial eagle had been stencilled on one wall plate, beneath which copies of Loken’s various oaths of moment had been pinned. The close air smelled of oils and lapping powder. It was a tranquil, introspective place, and she had invaded that tranquillity.
Becoming aware of her trespass, she suggested, ‘I could come back later, at a better time.’
‘No, now’s fine.’ He sat back down on the metal stool where he had been perching when she’d entered. ‘Let me see… When we got inside the palace, what we found was the Invisibles.’
‘Why were they called that?’ she asked. ‘Because we couldn’t see them,’ he replied.
THE INVISIBLES WERE waiting for them, and they well deserved their sobriquet.
Just ten paces into the splendid apartments, the first brother died. There was an odd, hard bang, so hard it was painful to feel and hear, and Brother Edrius fell to his knees, then folded onto his side. He had been struck in the face by some form of energy weapon. The white plasteel/ceramite alloy of his visor and breastplate had actually
deformed into a rippled crater, like heated wax that had flowed and then set again. A second bang, a quick concussive vibration of air, obliterated an ornamental table beside Nero Vipus. A third bang dropped Brother Muriad, his left leg shattered and snapped off like a reed stalk.
The science adepts of the false Imperium had mastered and harnessed some rare and wonderful form of field technology, and armed their elite guard with it. They cloaked their bodies with a passive application, twisting light to render themselves invisible. And they were able to project it in a merciless, active form that struck with mutilating force.
Despite the fact that they had been advancing combat-ready and wary, Loken and the others were taken completely off guard. The Invisibles were even hidden to their visor arrays. Several had simply been standing in the chamber, waiting to strike.
Loken began to fire, and Vipus’s men did likewise. Raking the area ahead of him, splintering furniture, Loken hit something. He saw pink mist kiss the air, and something fell down with enough force to overturn a chair. Vipus scored a hit too, but not before Brother Tarregus had been struck with such power that his head was punched clean off his shoulders.
The cloak technology evidently hid its users best if he remained still. As they moved, they became semi-visible, heat-haze suggestions of men surging to attack. Loken adapted quickly, firing at each blemish of air. He adjusted his visor gain to full contrast, almost black and white, and saw them better: hard outlines against the fuzzy background. He killed three more. In death, several lost their cloaks. Loken saw the Invisibles revealed as bloody corpses. Their armour was silver, ornately composed and machined with a remarkable detail of patterning and symbols. Tall, swathed in mantles of red silk, the Invisibles reminded Loken of the mighty Custodian Guard that warded the Imperial Palace on Terra. This was the bodyguard corps which had executed Sejanus and his glory squad at a mere nod from their master.
Nero Vipus was raging, offended by the cost to his squad. The hand of the ship was truly upon him.
He led the way, cutting a path into a towering room beyond the scene of the ambush. His fury gave Locasta the opening it needed, but it cost him his right hand, crushed by an Invisible’s blast. Loken felt choler too. Like Nero, the men of Locasta were his friends. Rituals of mourning awaited him. Even in the darkness of Ullanor, victory had not been so dearly bought.