Ultramarines

by Graham McNeill

  Weary, his mind awash in pain, Tigurius turned towards Geta’s body. He could hear the sound of tyranids scuttling in the dark, and knew that they would come again, and again and again, until Kantipur was theirs. They knew neither defeat nor victory, only hunger. And when this world had fallen, they would hurtle into the void, in search of another. Unless they were stopped, once and for all. Emperor willing, Tigurius would be there when it was accomplished. Even if it meant his death.

  But for now, his fight was done, and it was time to leave. He dragged Geta’s body up, and slung it awkwardly over his shoulder. He would not let the hive fleet have it.

  The other Ultramarine, Castus, groaned. Tigurius bent low and hooked his arm. ‘Up, brother,’ Tigurius said, dragging Castus to his feet. ‘It is time to go. Kantipur is lost. But there are worlds yet that might be saved.’

  Macragge City’s coast sweated under a bone-white sky and a sun like a heated bronze disc. It wasn’t Quintarn hot, which was something to be thankful for, but it wasn’t far off.

  Torias Telion nodded to Sergeant Kaetan, and they pulled a chromed ammo case from the back of the Cargo-6 parked next to the two idling Thunderhawks on the Evanestus platforms.

  ‘Careful now,’ said Telion as they carried the heavy crate into the gunship. ‘These are custom-made stalker shells.’

  ‘I’m not one of your bloody neophytes,’ snapped Kaetan, nodding towards the squad of Scouts seated along the fuselage. ‘And this isn’t the first time I’ve loaded a Thunderhawk.’

  ‘These are delicate, precision-made kill rounds that don’t take kindly to your rough handling,’ said Telion as they set it down in a recessed stowage bay in the deck.

  Kaetan’s fingers moved in Scout sign.

  ‘Careful,’ grinned Telion as they went back for the last crate. ‘Language like that and I could cite you for conduct unbecoming.’

  The platforms were thick with shouting voices, machine noise and hot fumes. Orbit-capable ships came and went in rigorously controlled schedules, and the backwash of atmospheric jets filled the air with light and noise. A pair of translifters from the Helion demi-plate were one platform over, offloading a host of blinking pilgrims. Other ships were spread further afield, bringing yet more pilgrims, workers and hopeful aspirants to Macragge.

  Armed provosts in blue frock-coats escorted them all, guides and security combined. They would see them to the culmination of their pilgrimage at the Temple of Correction. Some pilgrims carried sling bags filled with their few worldly possessions, but most arrived on Macragge with nothing but the clothes on their back.

  ‘Loading a gunship yourself, Telion?’ asked Captain Fabian, standing at the ramp of a Third Company Thunderhawk. ‘Accipiter won’t wait for us.’

  Just the sort of thing a captain would say to an officer inferior to him in rank, but whose depth of experience far outweighed his own. Telion’s eyes met Kaetan’s and the younger sergeant looked away to hide his smirk.

  ‘Get them to do it and let’s be on our way,’ said Fabian, gesturing to the brutish servitors, with their over-muscled torsos and piston-augmented limbs.

  ‘If it’s all the same, sir, I’d rather not trust my load-out to their clumsy hands.’

  ‘I won’t be delayed because you’re getting all precious about your ammo,’ said Fabian. ‘Get it loaded and get airborne.’

  Telion nodded as the assault ramp of Fabian’s gunship lifted with a pneumatic whine. Its engines spooled up to launch power. Kaetan opened his mouth to say something, but Telion beat him to it.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ Telion warned Kaetan. ‘He’s still a captain, and we’re both sergeants.’

  Kaetan nodded and they turned back to the Cargo-6. Telion took hold of the last crate, but paused as something caught his eye from the opposite platform. Something out of place.

  Around six hundred pilgrims were in the process of being formed up for the long march towards the gates of the Servian Wall and into the mountains.

  ‘You heard the captain,’ said Kaetan, when Telion didn’t lift. ‘Let’s get this on board.’

  Telion stared at the people on the opposite platform. The pilgrims’ faces were filled with wonderment at the sight of Ultramar’s heart, staring up at the glittering might of the Fortress of Hera, the crenellated majesty of the Castrum, the Senatorial Halls and the great relic of the Residency. Telion’s eye fixed on one man in particular.

  Shaven head, narrow features. Borderline malnourished.

  Nothing unusual for someone who’d travelled a mendicant’s path to Macragge, but something about him raised Telion’s hackles. He followed the man’s eye-line.

  Telion snapped his fingers and made the Scout sign for enemy sighted.

  Kaetan’s body language changed instantly.

  Where?

  North. One hundred metres, shaven head.

  Acquired.

  Telion eased his way around Cargo-6, lifting his Stalker from the running board and silently working a round into the chamber. He kept the vehicle between him and the pilgrim, never once losing line of sight.

  Kaetan moved in the opposite direction.

  Target threat?

  ‘He’s spent the last year or so in pilgrimage,’ said Telion, activating his sub-vocal vox-bead. ‘He’s just arrived on Macragge, but doesn’t look up at the Fortress of Hera? No, he’s looking for someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  Telion scanned the platform.

  ‘Him,’ he said, spotting a man dressed in the oil-stained overalls of a stevedore. He was moving against the crowd towards the pilgrim, a heavy kitbag over his shoulder.

  Two potential targets. No time to request backup.

  ‘Lock him,’ said Telion.

  ‘Done,’ said Kaetan. ‘Risky shots.’

  Telion shook his head. ‘No shots at all. Could be wrong.’

  Kaetan looked at him in askance.

  ‘Since when?’

  Kaetan was right. Telion’s instincts were almost never wrong, but he wasn’t about to shoot a potentially innocent man without being sure he was dangerous.

  ‘They’re closing,’ said Kaetan, as Fabian’s Thunderhawk lifted into the air on a screaming column of jetwash.

  The stevedore put down his kitbag and two men came together, embracing like long lost friends. Telion saw the pilgrim pass something to the stevedore. Something metallic from beneath his robes. A piece of machinery? A weapon? A relic of the Pilgrim Trail brought to Macragge for an old friend?

  It was just about credible that the two men knew one another, but Telion doubted it. They moved like soldiers. Again, nothing un­usual in Ultramar, where every civilian received training.

  The stevedore bent to his kitbag. The pilgrim’s face shone.

  Telion’s heart sank. He’d seen this before: the joyous release of tension, a job almost finished, the shimmer sweat of zealots.

  No, not zealots.

  Martyrs.

  The pieces fell into place. Bloodborn posing as pilgrims, bringing a disassembled weapon to the surface, piece by piece so as not to trigger the chem-auspex or rad-counters.

  And this was the last piece.

  ‘Drop them,’ he said, bringing his bolter to his shoulder.

  Kaetan’s pistol was on target a heartbeat later.

  Telion centred the curve of the pilgrim’s scalp in the scope and squeezed the trigger. The bolt carved a valley through the top of his skull without exploding. A kill shot, but one aimed high enough to not detonate the mass-reactive warhead and harm innocent people nearby.

  The second man fell with Kaetan’s pistol round ripping his arm off at the shoulder. Screams of panic erupted from the pilgrims, who scattered from the epicentre of the bolter impacts.

  Provosts yelled at people to move. Defence Auxilia at muster points ran to the source of the shooting.

&
nbsp; Telion saw the stevedore slumped over his kitbag. Half his side was missing from the torso up to his shoulder. A crudely assembled device sat exposed in the kitbag, all crudely-wrapped wiring and improvised components. The stevedore’s other hand held a primitive trigger mechanism.

  Telion fired again, putting a round through the man’s wrist and sending his hand flying.

  He and Kaetan ran over to the two dead men, weapons scanning for threats as yelling provosts corralled the pilgrims back aboard their vessels.

  Telion knelt beside the kitbag. He’d built enough battlefield explosives in his time behind enemy lines to recognise what he was seeing.

  ‘Tactical atomic,’ said Kaetan.

  Telion nodded. Something didn’t feel right.

  ‘This won’t be the only one,’ he said.

  A second later, he was proved right as a blinding flash threw Telion’s shadow out before him. He shielded his eyes and turned to see a miniature mushroom cloud of detonation claw its way into the horizon.

  ‘One of the littoral platforms,’ said Kaetan. ‘Socus?’

  ‘Too far,’ said Telion. ‘It’s Lysis Macar.’

  The rumbling blast wave billowed over the coastline, but the saw-toothed peaks of the Evanestus peninsula directed most of it out to sea. The ground shook and the fire of the expanding cloud rolled in on itself to spread dark tendrils of smoke in all directions.

  ‘Damn,’ said Kaetan, looking out to sea.

  Captain Fabian’s Thunderhawk plunged towards the ocean, its engines trailing smoke and flames.

  ‘E-mag pulse,’ said Telion. ‘Must have blown out its avionics and engine controls.’

  The Thunderhawk slammed down into the ocean, and came apart in an explosion of debris. Nor was it alone. A transloader fell out of the sky, its pilots helpless to keep it in the air as every machine aboard was overloaded and blown out by the devastating pulse. Dozens more aircraft were spinning down to the sea.

  Warning sirens blew from the Servian Wall and multi-spectral lightning flared overhead as citywide voids were lit. Alert aircraft scrambled airborne from blast-hardened shelters.

  Macro-cannon batteries unmasked and every aircraft currently still flying was warned off and directed out to sea.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Kaetan. ‘A precursor to another attack? An invasion?’

  ‘No,’ said Telion, making safe his bolter. ‘This is just spite. This is the Bloodborn showing us that even though we beat them, they can still hurt us.’

  It seemed, at first, as if one of the stars had exploded.

  A blue light flared above the all-too-close horizon, and a rumble like thunder shuddered through the moon’s thin atmosphere.

  Kenjari was on his way to the mine when it happened. It was early in the morning, although day and night were just divisions on a chrono face here. He stood with a pickaxe slung uselessly over his shoulder, a rebreather clamped to his face, his feet rooted to the barren ground as something – something huge and dark and oddly symmetrical – came hurtling out of the sky towards him.

  It was only when his workmates panicked and ran that he thought to do the same. He wasn’t ready to die; at least, not this way.

  Kenjari was meant to die in the service of the Emperor, his body but not his spirit broken by the effort of hewing materials from the ground: vital metals to be forged into weapons and armour and vehicles for the Emperor’s glorious armies.

  His days of life had been numbered since his transfer to this remote facility.

  The truth was that few men ever saw out their two-year postings here. The moon’s atmosphere was toxic, even inside the billet huts since half the oxygen scrubbers had broken down. Almost as many miners were killed by minor rebreather failures as they were by tunnel collapses or simple exhaustion.

  Every time he woke up on his lumpy mattress, Kenjari checked that his facemask was in place and wondered if this new morning would be his last.

  After twenty months of wondering, he had just begun to feel, to hope, that he might be one of the lucky few. He had begun to think he might even see his home and his children on Agides Primus again.

  Kenjari was a worker, not a soldier. He had always imagined that death would steal up on him slowly, through the shadows of a blocked mine tunnel or across the filthy floor of a medicae hut. Not this way. Not this way!

  He hadn’t run like this in twenty years. His lungs, clogged with rock dust as they were, reacted violently to the sudden demand placed upon them, and Kenjari coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and stumbled badly. Another bright blue flash cast his shadow, long and thin, across the small, raised landing pad ahead of him and, instinctively, foolishly, he turned his head to look.

  The plummeting object blotted out the stars now; it wasn’t a ship as he had briefly imagined – it was bigger, far bigger than any ship – nor was it a meteorite, it was clearly a man-made structure. It was something the likes of which he had never seen before, something that made no sense to his fear-addled brain.

  It was wreathed in half-formed energy tendrils, clawing at its sides as if they were straining to hold it back. They didn’t succeed. It crashed through the towering pit head and splintered its plasteel struts like matchsticks. The winding wheel was completely demolished, stranding hundreds of miners underground.

  The leading edge of the object – or perhaps just one of its tendrils – hit the ground and filled Kenjari’s head with a sound like every piece of metal in the world being tortured; and a cloud of dust and debris, the size of a hab-block and equally as impenetrable, crashed over him like a tidal wave.

  He couldn’t see his workmates, his friends, around him any longer or the ground beneath his feet. He knew that running was futile; still, he ran for as long as he could manage, until he stumbled again and finally fell. Then he lay on his stomach with his hands clasped over his head and a desperate appeal for the Emperor’s mercy straining to escape his choked throat.

  It was some time before he dared open his eyes again, before he realised that the all-pervading noise around him had given way to a silence that rang almost as loudly in his ears. His silent prayers must have been heard and he was alive. He was coated in rock dust; it sloughed from him as, gingerly, he tested each of his limbs in turn, relieved to find no broken bones. He discovered a body, half-buried, alongside him. Its head had been pulverised by a substantial hunk of debris, leaving him no means of identifying it. He had been lucky, that was all. Had his blind flight carried him an inch to the left or the right, he would likely have died too. He should have died.

  Kenjari scrambled to his feet. A black cloud of terror hung over him, but for now shock was keeping it at arm’s length and he only felt numb. The workers’ billet huts had been shredded, their remnants strewn across the jagged landscape. The same fate had befallen the dark, tubular towers of the smelting plant. He couldn’t tell where he was standing, which way he was facing, because every landmark to which he had become accustomed had been razed.

  Only one thing, one structure, reached above the surface now. It nestled, lopsidedly, in a crater of its own making, impossibly intact although sections of its walls had fallen and black wisps of smoke curled lazily upwards from its bowels. Kenjari thought about the miners in the tunnels beneath it. He knew they must have been crushed; the black cloud descended closer towards him.

  In that moment, he felt death stealing up on him through the shadows and he thought, for the first time, that he would rather not have seen it coming. I should have died like the others, he thought. That would have been the true mercy.

  Kenjari was a worker, not a soldier. He had always expected it would be his work that killed him. He had never imagined anything like this.

  He hadn’t expected – of all things – a castle to fall out of the sky on top of him.

  CHAPTER I

  As usual, Captain Sicarius was the first to emerge from the Thu
nderhawk.

  He stepped off the forward ramp onto earth that was cold and unyielding, even to his considerable armoured weight. He glanced up at strange patterns of stars, freckling the black sky. The captain wondered – as he had during every mission in the scant years since his rise to that rank – how many battle-brothers he would lose here.

  They poured out of the transport ship behind him: thirty of the Emperor’s finest, resplendent in blue power armour with gold and white trappings, the U-symbol of their Chapter emblazoned upon their left shoulders. They had donned their helmets, forewarned that the air was poisonous, so the only way to tell them apart was by their battle honours.

  More gunships – Thunderhawks and Stormravens –were in the process of landing beside them, easing themselves down onto cushions of noxious exhaust gases. They disgorged the remainder of the Ultramarines strikeforce onto this, their latest battlefield. At the same time, more Thunderhawks – modified to carry vehicles in place of passengers – swooped in to deposit their cargos of Predator Destructor and Vindicator tanks.

  The operation was executed with the utmost efficiency. Where, a few minutes earlier, this low plateau had been devoid of any life – or of anything that life may have created – now it teemed with proud blue juggernauts, and not a moment too soon, as the captain quickly apprehended.

  His auto-senses picked up the dull cracks of shell fire, even over the aircraft engines, before he could get his bearings. He stepped to the plateau’s edge and looked over a virtual labyrinth of trenches and foxholes. He could make out figures scurrying through those trenches: the soldiers of the Astra Militarum – a Death Korps of Krieg regiment, he recalled – whose reports had brought him to this tiny, unnamed moon.

  His gaze, however, strayed beyond them – to the object of the Ultramarines’ mission here. The horizon was closer than Sicarius was accustomed to, no more than three kilometres ahead of him to the east. Squatting there upon it, like some ancient, mythical monster, was the Indestructible.