‘Lotara,’ he voxed.
Her image pulsed into being, just her head and shoulders, in a crackling, distorted hololithic window to the right of his targeting array. As usual, her long hair was bound back in a ponytail to keep it from her face. Her features were in profile, with the imagifier attached to the side of her command throne.
‘Khârn?’ Her voice was a buzz, all quality savaged by the temperamental vox. It made a mess of her usual measured, spire-born eloquence. ‘Are you smiling?’
‘Give me the orbitals, flag-captain.’
‘As you wish, not that there’s anything to see. What are you doing down there, anyway? The city is drowning in dust. Even by your sloppy standards, this is a mess.’
Secondary image windows bloomed into being on both sides of his flickering retinal display. Each one showed the city from above, blanketed in clouds of choking smoke. Towers peeked from the very top of the ash cloud, but the cityscape itself was lost beyond hope.
‘You should have let me bombard the city from orbit,’ Lotara added. ‘I’m sure the two Word Bearers king-ships would have loved to do the same. You never got to see the size of them, stuck in your little drop pod. Quite a sight.’
Khârn’s smile was dangerously close to a sneer. ‘You mock me and my men, flag-captain, but at least we know when our enemies are really dead. We finish the fight.’
He approached a dead tank, an idle and silent shape manifesting from the choking dust. His retinal display locked onto it, spilling out a screed of data he didn’t need to see. Maximus-pattern armour was a technological marvel, but the autosenses took a great deal of tuning to meet a warrior’s personal preferences. Khârn usually ignored most of what his armour tried to tell him. As if he cared what forge world had churned out any particular Rhino chassis. As if he cared about the density of the alloys making up its hull, and how they differed by point-one per cent from others.
A great XIII emblem marked the slain tank’s sealed doors. He strained to hear anything within, but with the city falling down around him, that was always going to be a forlorn hope. Instead, he tapped the edge of his chainaxe against the vehicle’s armour plating.
‘Knock, knock.’
Silence answered from inside, no fun at all. Rather than climb the sloping sides, he vaulted up to its roof in a smooth leap. Both boots thudded on the top with a resonating clang. Any hope that a higher vantage point would help his vision was laughable, but he was willing to try anything.
He spared a glance back at the useless orbital imagery scrolling across his left eye lens. ‘Intensifiers?’ he prompted.
‘I have servitors working on scrubbing the pict-feeds.’ Lotara’s image shook with something more than distortion. ‘We’re busy up here ourselves, you know.’
Khârn crouched by the sealed cupola. ‘Very well. Enjoy your little skirmish in the void, flag-captain.’
She turned her head, grinning right into the imagifier. ‘And you enjoy wading through the dirt, Khârn. Such an inelegant way to fight a war.’ Her image blanked out, taking the useless orbital feeds with it.
Khârn was about to tear the cupola open when another rune blinked into life on his eye lenses. A name-rune.
‘Skane?’
‘Captain.’ The reply was immediate, amidst a chorus of draconic howls. Engines. Turbines running too hot, for too long. The warrior’s augmetic vocal chords didn’t steal emotion from Skane’s voice, but they did add a burbling, crackling quality to everything he said.
‘You just came into vox-range. For the last seven minutes, the only contact I’ve had is with the ship.’
‘Aye, it’s all rather gone to spit down here,’ Skane voxed back. ‘Where are you?’
‘I don’t know.’ A moment’s pause. ‘When we broke the Academy Guard, I was with the vanguard pursuing the survivors.’
‘The Nails?’ Skane asked.
‘The Nails took,’ Khârn admitted, knowing it would explain everything.
‘Understood. We can’t track you, our auspex is already dead.’
Of course it was. Of all his squads, it would be the Destroyers he made first contact with. The ones whose weapons annihilated the efficiency of their more temperamental equipment. Argel Tal often said that Fate had a vicious sense of humour. Khârn never doubted it for a second.
‘Connect it to your armour. Leech power to amplify your locator rune for a moment.’
‘That never works,’ he muttered, but said, ‘Aye, captain,’ a little louder.
Khârn looked at the blue-painted hull beneath his boots. The Rhino was motionless, its engine silent, but the scanners might still be operational. It would certainly be easier than dealing with his Destroyers and their degraded tech–
Miracle of miracles, Skane’s name-rune flared again, this time with translocation and distance data.
‘Got you,’ Skane voxed. Khârn was already running again.
Lotara Sarrin had earned the Conqueror’s throne six years ago, just before her thirtieth birthday. Her promotion had made her one of the youngest flag-captains in the entire spread of the Emperor’s expeditionary fleets, which in turn had made her a focus for scriveners and imagists inbound from Terra’s remembrancer order. They’d plagued her, dogging her every step in the brief period Lord Angron had allowed their kind aboard the World Eaters flagship. When they’d been shipped back to Terra in shame, their work undone – in fact, barely even begun – the official notations recorded their departure as due to ‘irreconcilable maladjustment to void wayfaring.’
Spacesickness. That had been Khârn’s idea, delivered with his usual sly, dry lack of a smile.
The real reason was simple enough: they’d annoyed Lotara Sarrin, therefore they’d annoyed Angron. The primarch had ignored them until the moment he heard Lotara’s first complaint. They were banished back to Terra the next day. Khârn had been one of the warriors tasked with throwing them off the flagship, ignoring their shouted protests and the way they’d waved Imperial licences that supposedly gave them permission to remain. It had all been accomplished with an admirable – and, given the Legion in question, surprising – lack of bloodshed. If anything, the World Eaters were more amused than anything else.
Lotara’s military record spoke in bland, archival terms – replete with neat, uninteresting servitors’ handwriting – of exemplary bravery, steadfastness and patience, citing her frequent dealings and mediations with the primarch of the XII Legion. It also noted her many medals and decorations – none of which she ever wore outside of formal occasions, and most of which languished at the bottom of the wardrobe in her forever-untidy personal chambers.
Anyone reading this record would also find various notations of level-headedness, commendable tactical insight and a gift for logistics. All very orderly, all to be expected in a prominent captain.
The only citation she actually cared about was noted in the following terms: ‘Awarded a unique distinction by the XII Legion for notable courage in the compliance of the worlds formerly claimed by the Ashul Stellar Principality.’
She wore that commendation, loud and proud. The Blood Hand, a red handprint across the chest of her crisp white uniform, as if the raised throne of ornate filigreed brass didn’t already mark her out from the three hundred other officers working in the strategium.
The Conqueror’s bridge was a hive of shouting voices, chattering servitors, and overseer officers calling from station to station. Lotara paid it no heed at all, content from the background noise that her crew was doing its job. She had eyes for nothing but the oculus viewscreen and the three-dimensional tactical display it generated. All the while, she kept a steady stream of orders relayed over her collar vox-mic, while drumming her fingertips on the armrests.
The void war was going well. She’d have known that with her eyes closed, given the unreal punishment both the Word Bearers king-ships were delivering to the bel
eaguered world of Armatura, but it was far from a foregone conclusion.
The primarch was off-ship, fighting on the world below. She was free to minimise casualties as best she could, rather than send the fleet into yet another cruel assault purely to inflict maximum damage and deploy boarding pods, regardless of the cost in men and materiel. This degree of tactical subtlety was a rare treat. Harder, though. She was used to fighting dirty, like the Legion she served.
She’d not lied to Khârn – the surface war was a mess of unholy proportions. Lotara kept sparing glances to the pict-feeds showing the city drowning in its own dust. She’d been at the briefings weeks ago, when Angron had demanded to make planetfall on Armatura and break it from within. No surprise there. What had come as a surprise was the moment Lord Lorgar Aurelian of the Word Bearers nodded in agreement with the Eater of Worlds. The last year had seen them cut across the Imperium, reaving through the worlds in their way, despite Lorgar’s protests to make full speed for Ultramar. Now they’d finally arrived in Ultramar’s heart, all restraint seemed cast to the solar wind.
She spared another glance at the pict-feeds. This time, the city’s images held her gaze. Lotara frowned.
‘Intensify sectors eight and fifteen,’ she ordered one of the servitors slaved to the orbital-scrye console.
‘Compliance.’
She sucked a slow breath in through her teeth as she stared at the resolving images. ‘They’re bringing down buildings in quick succession,’ she said. ‘Look. Look at these barracks crumbling in neat order. That’s not from the battle. Those buildings have to be rigged with charges. The Ultramarines are killing their own city to bury our Legion in the rubble.’
Ivar Tobin, her first officer, nodded to her assessment. ‘So it seems, captain.’
‘Get me Angron,’ she said to him. ‘Now.’
‘Aye, ma’am.’ He left her side to make her request a reality. Getting hold of the primarch while he was embattled would take no shortage of patience and resolve.
Lotara turned her attention back to the void war unfolding above Armatura. She called up a quad-screened pict-feed, hazed by distance, of one of the new Word Bearers king-ships. The thing was monstrous in its beauty, big enough to make her breath catch if she looked at it for too long. The human mind processed detail in stops and starts; it was only when a lesser cruiser’s silhouette crossed the Blessed Lady’s battlements that the king-ship’s size became apparent, and each time it did, Lotara felt her stomach lurch. The thing looked too big to be real.
Orbital wars were their own beasts, with their own methods and moments of madness. A war above a world tended to play out in much closer quarters than many stately, oddly-placid void engagements. Fighting it out in high orbit meant getting in your foe’s face, and that suited Lotara just fine. She was used to it. The World Eaters liked to board their enemies’ ships, and that almost always meant coming in close, no matter where the Conqueror fought.
‘Why is that weapon platform not dead yet?’ she asked, eyebrow raised. ‘Chase the Venator Vorena, if you please. Pursue it into the fiftieth grid, with full broadsides on that platform as we pass.’
At only twenty-three, third officer Feyd Hallerthan was the youngest of the strategium’s command crew. ‘That will bring us dangerously close to the three cruisers holding off the Lex, captain,’ he said.
She clicked her tongue – a habit of hers when she was on the verge of losing her temper. Feyd was wrong, because she could see the oncoming press of another Word Bearers cruiser and its frigate squadron would force the three Ultramarines cruisers to pull up and regroup for another attack run, unless they had a sudden hunger to be rammed or crippled by close-quarters rupture fire. Their sound tactical retreat would open up all the room she required. It took her all of half a second to discern this from the flickering dance of ship name-runes clustering and twisting on her tactical display.
She knew he had other ideas, and that they’d be acceptable enough. But Lotara knew her game better than anyone else.
‘Look to the grid beneath the Lex, and the Word Bearers vessel rising in support. That’s why you’re wrong. The Ultramarines will pull up and away, before regrouping for a second run at the Lex.’
‘I see it, ma’am. But if the–’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she interrupted with a smile, ‘it’s not my job to explain why my order overrules your ideas. You should perceive the reasons yourself. Now do as I say, lieutenant.’
Leftenant, she pronounced it, ever the spire-born.
He flinched, and the several tactical alternatives he’d been about to suggest shrivelled on his tongue. ‘Aye, ma’am.’
Ivar Tobin – greying, stern, professional to his core – returned to her throne’s side. ‘The primarch has answered your vox-hails, ma’am.’
‘Well, then. This is a day of many wonders.’
Lotara leaned back as the ship juddered around her, momentum dampeners straining against the tight turn. A couple of tapped keys on her armrest activated her personal hololith generator. Angron’s image stood before her throne, towering tall, distorted and pale but undeniably the primarch. His axes dripped colourless blood, but the hololithic droplets ghosted away into nothing as soon as they hit the deck.
‘What do you want, captain?’ Pain tics flawed one side of his face, leaving the other slackened in a dull snarl. She knew better than to ask if he was in pain. Angron was always in pain.
‘The casualty reports from the surface attack are looking rather unpleasant. What’s going on down there?’
‘The Evocati.’ Angron’s image distorted to the point of failure, then streamed back into grainy existence. ‘And they have a Titan Legio as well. Sorry if we’re not pacifying the world as quickly as you’d like, Lotara.’
‘Don’t be childish, my lord.’
‘I am no one’s lord, and I grow bored of telling you that. You’re always very brave with me when I’m several thousand kilometres away, captain.’
‘I know, sire.’ She steepled her fingers, briefly distracted by the ship shaking around her again. The frigates passing their stern were targeting the Conqueror’s engine decks, to little effect.
‘How’s my ship?’ Angron asked, spitting blood onto the rocky ground.
‘My ship is fine,’ she replied. ‘How many Evocati are on the surface?’
The colossal figure grunted, lifting an axe in what might have been a god’s shrug. ‘A lot. All of them. I don’t know.’ He was looking away now, starting to scan the wrecked city over his shoulder. She didn’t have long, he’d be lost to the Nails soon.
‘The junctions in the capital, where the primary avenues meet; it looks like the Ultramarines have the buildings rigged to detonate. Be careful as you advance into the city, sire.’
‘You worry too much, captain.’
She clicked her tongue again. ‘Does it not seem perfectly reasonable, sire, that a war-world would be prepared for every eventuality when it comes to an invasion? At least consider advancing with the Word Bearers and sending scouts ahead to confirm what I’m seeing.’
‘My brother’s precious Bearers of the Word are hissing their insipid prayers as they march slowly down the streets. The war will be over before their bolters sing even once.’
She swallowed her temper as best she could. ‘Do you at least want me to target the Titan Legio’s foundries from up here?’
‘I want you to leave me alone, captain.’ Angron turned back to face her, his left eye twitching tightly closed in response to the spasms tugging at the corner of his lips. His unwilling smile bared one side of his implanted iron teeth. ‘Shoot whatever you wish, but cease whining to me about it.’
Distance did nothing to steal any of the primarch’s blunt, savage grandeur. He was a ruined, towering thing of pain-spasms and sutured flesh. Lotara had only ever seen two primarchs, but despite the legend that each was cast i
n the Emperor’s image, Lorgar and Angron couldn’t have looked less alike. The former had a face that belonged on antique coins, and a voice that made her think of warm honey. The latter was an angel’s statue, desecrated by a hundred blades and left in the rain. Angron was ripped skin and roared oaths over a core of thick blood vessels and muscle meat.
Whatever aesthetic intention there’d been in his creation was long lost; time and war had seen to that. Had fate not intervened, perhaps Angron would have grown to be as beautiful as his brothers Lorgar, Sanguinius, or even Fulgrim – but fate was never a silent ally to anyone.
The primarch’s distorted hololithic wavered as the ship took another barrage against its void shields.
‘How’s the void battle?’ Angron asked. She knew he didn’t want details, and knew his fragile, mutilated mind wouldn’t hold onto them even if he tried. Grey blood was already trickling down his white chin. Another nosebleed.
‘We’re still here,’ she said.
‘Good. Stay that way.’ As he turned his back on her, the image flickered once more and finally died.
‘This isn’t good,’ she mused aloud. ‘This isn’t good at all.’
‘Ma’am?’ asked Tobin.
‘Khârn’s right about the primarch.’ She turned her throne back to face the void war. ‘He’s getting worse.’
With restored vox, Khârn spent several painstaking minutes speaking with his sergeants, coordinating the movements of the few squads who weren’t lost to the Nails. Precious few of them, as it happened.
Esca was immune to ever being lost. The Codicier’s report was curt and clear; he knew full well Khârn preferred it that way. He had little to say, beyond the fact the fighting was fiercest at the avenue junctions. Ultramarines and Academy Guard resistance was at its strongest there, where they defended fortress-barracks brimming with defensive turrets.
Skane was still inbound, one of the few to keep his head in the battle, but Khârn found the Word Bearers before he found his brother.
A year’s alliance thus far had reaped little tangible reward. The Legions had almost come to blows mere weeks ago – both their fleets hanging in deep space with guns rolled out and boarding pods racked into firing tubes. Beyond that aborted betrayal, halted only by Lorgar and Angron finding a xenos fleet to murder instead, interactions between the Legions were considered on the right side of cordial if warriors managed not to spit at each other in mission briefings.
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