by William King
‘Niflgard is once more in the hands of our enemies. It seems we will be starting again from scratch,’ said Drake. He was fishing for information.
‘It will not be so for long,’ said Macharius quietly. ‘Once Richter and his staff have fallen.’
Drake shot him a puzzled look. ‘What do you mean?’
Macharius gestured to a tech-adept and the view zoomed in to show the area over which we had fought so long and hard previously. Massive armoured citadels lay in a fortified ring. Each was a fortress city holding tens of millions of people. Each had the industrial capacity to supply a dozen armies.
‘Niflgard was to be an advance base for a conventional campaign. We needed its hive factorums to provide munitions and material, to supply our war machine, to compensate for the long supply lines. We wanted the world’s resources. We don’t need them any more. What matters most is that we settle matters with Richter and the powers that stand behind him.
‘Previously we got bogged down in endless warfare fighting the way our enemies wanted, to our own disadvantage. Not this time. This time we attack Richter directly.’
‘But that ring of citadels is impenetrable. It is impervious to the most potent orbital bombardment of the greatest fleet. You yourself said we would need to take it on the ground.’
‘I was wrong,’ said Macharius. ‘There is another way. We will drop from orbit into the centre of the ring and strike the head off the monster.’
Drake looked at him as if he suspected Macharius had gone mad. I could understand why.
‘We don’t have twenty Chapters of Space Marines,’ the inquisitor said. ‘We will die like flies on the ground. You said you no longer wanted to waste the lives of our soldiers. Do you intend to throw them all away at once in some grand gesture, to martyr yourself for the Imperium?’
There was an odd tone in the inquisitor’s voice, as if he did not entirely disapprove of the ideas to which he was giving voice. I noticed that the Naval officers nearby were listening intently, a kind of calm curiosity written on their faces. They could afford to feel that way. They would not be trying to force a beachhead on the surface of Loki in the teeth of the defences of those fortified mountains.
Macharius laughed. It was a merry sound with no hint of madness in it but it did not reassure me. ‘I am not ready for death yet, my friend,’ he said. ‘Not until I have settled scores with all my enemies.’
Looking back now, it seems to me that he gave Drake an odd look when he said all my enemies. At the time what I noticed was that the calm assurance of his words made all the listeners shiver. He was completely certain of what he was doing. It was like listening to the old Macharius who had always been the still centre of the storm of battle around him. The difference was that I had changed. I no longer shared the Lord High Commander’s self-belief. I had allowed myself to doubt my complete faith in him, and once that had happened there was no going back to the old ways.
‘We are going to destroy those fortresses,’ said Macharius. ‘And here’s how.’
He outlined his plan, crisply and clearly. It sounded like madness, but as I listened I found myself starting to believe again. It might, after all, just work.
The sorcerer-enginseers of the Adeptus Mechanicus had finished their work. Their ships departed from the surface of the lesser moon. I stood beside Macharius and Drake and the others and watched their ships return to join the body of the fleet.
‘How long?’ Drake asked. His voice was sombre.
‘The drives will be activated in the next cycle, then we shall begin.’ He turned to speak to his staff officer. ‘I want everyone ready to go within the next twelve hours.’
‘All troops are on standby. The shuttles are ready. We await only the coordinates for landing, sir.’ He stood tautly to attention and was clearly waiting for Macharius to reveal the landing point.
‘Very good,’ said Macharius dismissing him. ‘I want my personal shuttle ready to spearhead the attack on the ground. I want all the men to know I am going with them. I will be on the ground, sharing the risks.’
I listened intently. Anton caught my eye. His face was a blank mask but I could tell what he was thinking. If Macharius was going to be on the surface, I was going to be there too, and so were Anton and Ivan.
Macharius issued the final orders and then we were left alone with him and Drake. ‘You are playing this close to your chest,’ Drake said. ‘Do you still suspect there is a traitor among us? Another Crassus, or something worse?’
Macharius shrugged. ‘I do not know where we will be landing… yet. I will not know until the divinatory altars tell us where we can set down and that won’t be for another four hours.’
The hours crawled by. Macharius and Drake and his upper echelon of command sat in his grand stateroom and surveyed the greenish, polluted outline of the world below them. They smoked and drank like condemned men. I think all of them felt that Loki was going to be their graveyard. It had been an unlucky place for Macharius, the crusade and the Lion Guard. We had fought there for so long and to so little effect that no one quite believed that this time it was going to be any different.
And yet, for all that, they sat there tense and drawn, ready to respond to any command. No matter how the rest of the crusade now felt, these men were still ready to follow Macharius to their deaths.
‘What if it doesn’t work?’ Inquisitor Drake asked. He sounded worried. All of the officers gathered in the chamber looked at him as if he were expressing a heresy.
‘It will work,’ Macharius said. ‘I have every faith in the Adeptus Mechanicus. Their scholars have performed every calculation a thousand times. All of the engines are placed correctly. There will be no mistake.’
At that point the moon was on the far side of the planet, hurtling along its final orbit. I looked at the chrono on the wall and realised that very soon now we would find out whether Macharius’s plan was going to work or whether his final desperate gamble was going to fail. The man himself showed no sign of being worried. If there were any doubts in his mind there was no clue to that fact upon his face. He glanced around at all of his sub-commanders and smiled.
‘There is no need for all the long faces, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I want you all to be prepared to descend upon the surface of Loki at a moment’s notice and to destroy the heretics there with complete and utter ruthlessness. Now is not the time to have any doubts. Now is not the time to show mercy. Now is the time to seize victory for the Imperium with our own hands and to show the watching worlds that the crusade is still a force to be reckoned with.’
One by one the officers around the table appeared to relax. One by one they became infected with the confidence that their leader showed. It was just like the old days when Macharius had seemed invincible and just for a moment it seemed that he was once again the unbeatable strategist that we had believed him to be.
‘I don’t like this,’ Inquisitor Drake said. ‘Too much can go wrong. Too much has been left to chance. What if the enginseers have failed to take some factor into account? What then? You will not have another chance to do this.’
Again Macharius smiled. ‘There is no one more aware of that than me, I assure you, inquisitor. I also assure you that if something goes wrong we will have lost nothing. We will be no worse off than we were before. And if things go according to plan – which they will – then we will have crushed the most vile citadel of apostasy and wickedness in this sector. We will have demonstrated to all of those who doubted us that we are still a power to be reckoned with.’
There was compelling force in his words, but I wondered as I listened whether he was talking about the crusade or himself when he was talking about the doubters.
The hands of the chrono circled just as the moon raced around the planet. The shape of the planet floated within the holo-sphere, as if seen from a distance somewhat greater than that at which our fleet orbited. On the far side through the world’s ghostly representation I could see the red dot that represented
the lesser moon. It was three-quarters of the way around the planet now and I wondered whether or not it had performed this partial circuit much quicker than its previous ones.
Drake’s eyes were focused on it almost obsessively. He might have been watching the last seconds ticking down to his own execution. He seemed completely wound up to a pitch of nervous tension that I had never seen him at before, almost feverish in his excitement.
At the time I wondered whether it was simply nervousness about Macharius’s chance of regaining the leadership of the crusade in one mighty stroke. He had spent decades attached to the Lord High Commander’s cause to the point where its success was identified with his success and its failure with his own. In many ways he had as much riding on the coming campaign as Macharius himself.
Silence filled the room and the only sound was the occasional cough of a nervous officer. Occasionally someone lit a lho-stick. Someone drummed his fingers on the table top until he noticed and stopped.
‘Twenty minutes,’ an officer announced. Macharius nodded and looked at the holographic representation for a moment. An expression of satisfaction passed across his face even though he could not have seen anything more than the rest of us. He was still a supreme actor and this might be his last great show.
Minutes stretched out like hours. I was aware of the drumbeat of my own heart. All the officers stole stealthy glances at the globe and its hurtling satellite. This three-dimensional representation began to change now. It zoomed in to show the small moon in greater detail rushing across a quarter-section of the planet. A tech-adept made some adjustments and for a moment I caught sight of the pockmarked surface, so like that of a large asteroid, except that huge machines had been placed at various points on its surface and those machines were now surrounded by the eerie glow of ancient drives slowly drawing more and more power into themselves.
Drake barked an order and the technician hurriedly changed the point of view again. Now we could see that the circling moon had begun to shudder slightly and deviate a little from its orbital path. Perhaps it was an illusion, but it definitely seemed to be picking up speed.
I heard one officer gasp as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing. The moon was definitely changing course now and it had begun to move downwards towards the planet’s surface. I found that I was holding my breath awaiting the outcome of this last titanic throw of the dice. I looked at the chrono again and suddenly it seemed as if the hands of the clock had raced forward, gaining speed like the moon, for there was less than one minute left on the timer.
A comet trail of vapour was starting to form around the lesser moon now. Drake drummed his fingers on the table. ‘This is where it could go wrong, if they have miscalculated and performed the invocations wrong.’
I suspected he meant that the atmospheric turbulence might cause the moon to deviate from its trajectory. Even a slight change in its course would mean it would land hundreds of leagues off target. Even as he spoke the words the moon was changing colour. Trails of red and yellow plasma joined the greyish vapour. It was heating up like a shuttle decelerating into the atmosphere. I wondered if there was anyone down there looking up at the night sky now. Perhaps they would think they were seeing a large meteor. If there was any gap in the clouds they might witness something strange and unnatural, the satellite that had been orbiting their world for millions of years drifting out of position, hurtling downwards towards them like a hammer wielded by an angry god.
I imagined the dead men wandering across the shell-churned landscape and looking up with their greenly glowing eyes to witness this terrific descent. I stared at the image of the moon. It was surrounded by a red halo now, as it began its final fall. The mountains seemed to rise to meet it as it descended through the clouds, and then came the moment of impact.
I held my breath. For a brief heartbeat, almost impossibly, nothing seemed to happen. The thought skittered across my mind that it was impossible. Millions of tons of rock accelerated to such terrific velocity must have some effect. The point of view of the sphere pulled back and I saw shock waves rippling out from the point of impact, as if a man had smashed into a mud ball with a hammer. Mountain ranges bent and tumbled. The moon burrowed into the cold crust of Loki like a bolter shell seeking a heretic’s heart.
The whole area of the planet’s surface around it seemed to be being pushed inwards by the enormous impact. Lava lines appeared as the fiery heart of the planet spilled out in a huge wave that would destroy anything in its path. An enormous mushroom cloud of dust rose skywards, obscuring everything from sight.
For long, long minutes everything was silent. I think everybody, even Macharius, was appalled by what we had witnessed. In our mind’s eyes we were all imagining what it must have been like to be at the focal point of that vast impact. We waited and we waited and we waited for the dust to clear, for the divinatory sensor images to stabilise so that we could see what had happened.
Terribly slowly it all became clear. The ancient moon had smashed the crust of the world, toppling mountains, destroying fortresses. The land over which we had fought so bitterly for so long had been swept clean of earthworks and emplacements by a tidal wave of shuddering earth, the ripple of the planet’s skin, leaving huge new heaps of rock and dust and rubble. Niflgard was gone, a child’s sandcastle kicked over by an angry giant. Even the most distant of the heretic fortresses had suffered terrible damage. Their armoured carapaces had been cracked open. They looked like vast termite mounds that someone had riddled with autogun bullets until they had fallen apart.
Clouds swirled everywhere, contrary to any normal weather pattern, their movements driven by the awesome turbulence caused by the staggering impact.
‘There,’ Drake said. His pointing finger stabbed out to indicate something. By some strange chance, or perhaps by design on the part of Macharius, one gigantic hive citadel was left standing, its surface ruptured but its structural integrity intact. It stood now on the edge of a vast crater from which an immense red-hot cliff-spire emerged. I realised it was a fragment of the shattered moon. It must have broken up on impact and been tossed scores of leagues through the sky. ‘That is Richter’s citadel.’
The earth around it was a maze of new canyons, where the earth had folded and rippled. In the midst of a new valley was a large flat area. ‘Then that is where we must go,’ said Macharius. He turned to the officers. ‘Be ready for action. We descend when the land has cooled and the air turbulence settled.’
The officers leapt into action. In a moment the chamber was clear of all except Drake and Macharius and their bodyguards. Macharius said, ‘Now we shall see what we shall see.’
He strapped on his chainsword and picked up his bolt pistol and made ready for his final battle.
As we raced through the ship, I thought I caught sight of a familiar face among the officers watching us head to the shuttle. It raised a hand to wave to me and I thought I saw a fleeting expression of sadness, then it was gone, vanishing in the direction of the shuttles.
Anton caught the look on my face. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
It was not a ghost, it was Anna. She was on the ship again, moving in disguise through the corridors. No doubt she had intended for me to see her, because she could easily have concealed herself in a hundred different ways had she so wished. Was this farewell?
‘Nothing,’ I said. There was no time left to stop and explain. No time for me, no time for her and no time for any of us.
We joined the rest of the Lion Guard within the shuttle and waited for the warning klaxon to sound, telling us it was time to descend once more to the surface of Loki. A feeling of dread filled my heart at the thought of it.
Twenty-Three
The shuttle, massive as it was, shook on the way down. Atmospheric conditions were still not settled after the moon-strike. I stared at the faces of my companions. They were all partially concealed by rebreathers but their eyes looked grim.
; It seemed to take forever until the shuttle touched down. It hit the ground with a shudder and then vibrated as the ramps were lowered. A moment later we were heading down onto the soil of the world we had vacated what felt like a short lifetime ago.
The first thing I noticed was how cold it was. Loki had never been exactly tropical, but now it was chillier than it had been in the depths of winter. The dark clouds in the sky that obscured the sun might have had something to do with that. It felt almost like night even though dawn had already risen in the east. No stars were visible. Unconsciously I looked for the hurtling lesser moon but, of course, it was no longer to be seen nor would it ever be again.
There was a strangeness about the advance down onto the planet’s surface. This was not an area we had ever reached during our original advance. It was too deep in the enemy heartland, surrounded by a maze of fortified trenches and citadels. Now there was no sign of any work of man. The ground had a crumpled, crumbled look, as if a huge hand had dug its fingers in deep and squeezed. As far as the eye could see were ridges and deep craters and vast blocks of splintered moon-rock. Fires burned all the way to the horizon. Some were distant volcanic eruptions, and others were hive cities venting gas and chemicals in sheets of flame a kilometre high.
Shadows danced everywhere. Our breath came out in clouds. Tiny motes of dust or perhaps disease spores swirled everywhere. The headlights of armoured vehicles caught the dancing particles. Some of them glittered, though I have no idea why.
We hit the ground hard and fast and moved to establish a perimeter. We needed to establish the beachhead as quickly as we could. The heretics had not responded and there was no guarantee that they would, but we could not count on that. Company by company, squad by squad, the spearhead of the crusade dispersed across the shattered landscape, digging in where it could, establishing strong points, guard posts and lines of sight for artillery and armour and heavy weapons.