She gave him a look. She gave him the look. ‘I’m serious, Tobin.’
Sarrin keyed in a command on her throne’s armrests. The primary oculus screen changed views, showing one of the Word Bearers king-ships slowly pulling up from Armatura’s atmosphere. Just looking at it made her stomach lurch. Such furious, immense majesty. The Blessed Lady rose on thrusters, ramming through the wreckage of the destroyed Ultramarines fleet.
‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Tell me why, when Lorgar commands vessels like that, we even needed to make planetfall. One of those alone would have washed the surface with flame. And Lord Aurelian has two of them. That’s not even counting the Lex, the Conqueror, and our armada.’
Tobin watched the vast ship in silence. Before speaking, he returned his attention to the strategium and its busy, bustling crew. With the void war winding down, the Conqueror’s bridge still buzzed with activity. Various stations were trying to piece together a full analysis of the battle, with losses and casualties; others were doing all they could to coordinate the nightmare on the surface. Lotara, a void fighter far beyond any other in Tobin’s experience, always joked that these were ‘the little details’.
‘You know my feelings on politics, ma’am.’
She had her boots up on one armrest now. ‘Politics?’ She gave a snort he sincerely doubted had come from her time in her home world’s courts. ‘This isn’t politics. This is tactics, and you know it.’
‘Be that as it may, ma’am, I feel supremely unqualified to comment.’
She shook her head with a smile. ‘Coward. You’re lucky I need you.’
‘As you say, ma’am.’
Lotara turned at the sound of a proximity alarm. ‘Details?’ she asked.
‘The Ultramarines vessel Praetorian Trust has powered up in the wreckage, ma’am.’ Scrymistress Lehralla was a crippled thing, emaciated and legless, augmetically bound to the central auspex console. She turned to face Lotara, the cables stringing between her head and the ceiling machinery giving her a crown of serpents, like something from the old Grekan mythos. ‘It seems to have powered down in the debris and played dead for several hours, drifting free of the battle.’ Her voice was surprisingly gentle, and wholly human.
‘Trust the Ultramarines to stick to the classics.’ Lotara leaned forwards in her throne, watching the tactical hololithic. ‘And trust us to fall for them.’
Tobin pursed his lips, watching the flickering red rune blink as it moved across the three-dimensional holo-map. ‘They’re running.’
‘Like hell they are. No one runs from the Conqueror.’ She gestured to the helmsmen. ‘Chase at once. Order all other vessels to hold back, this one’s ours.’
Tobin straightened his uniform as he kept watching the map. ‘They’ll be free to break into the warp in seven minutes.’
‘They’re sluggish and plasma-cold from hiding in silent running,’ she replied. ‘We’ll catch them before their engines are even warm.’
‘Four minutes, ma’am, if they wish to risk navigational flux from the debris field.’
Lotara was staring now, her eyes bright. The Conqueror shook as it breathed again, running hot and hard. ‘We’ll have them in three minutes, Ivar. Am I ever wrong?’
He cleared his throat, avoiding eye contact. ‘There was the incident at New Kershal.’
Lotara held up a finger. ‘Hush, now. We don’t speak of New Kershal.’ She grinned as she looked back to the oculus. ‘Three minutes, you watch. Weaponmaster, ready the ursus claws.’
‘Aye, ma’am,’ came the reply, the only reply she ever wanted to hear when the sirens wailed.
Scrymistress Lehralla twisted in her life-support socket. She leaned over the hololthic projector table, her augmetic fingers manipulating the starfield image: rotating it, zooming, forcing focus.
‘Ma’am, the Word Bearers king-ship Trisagion is also moving to engage.’
‘Duly noted, scrymistress. Kejic?’
The vox-master looked up from his console. ‘Ma’am?’
‘Inform the Trisagion that this is our prey. They are to break off pursuit at once. Try to phrase it politely.’
As Kejic relayed the message in his crisp, clear tones, Lotara stared at the hololithic display, waiting for any sign the Trisagion’s rune was falling off pursuit. It blinked once, twice, and its projected vector turned aside.
‘Trisagion reports that she’s killing thrust and coming about,’ Kejic confirmed.
‘See?’ Lotara said to Tobin. ‘Look where manners gets you. All ahead full.’
The Praetorian Truth fled through the debris, and the Conqueror followed. Impact flares danced across both vessels’ void shields as they ploughed through the junk field. Praetorian Truth fired her lances once, risking the threat of inertial drift and power drain by emitting a barrage of cutting beams to carve through the hull of a dead cruiser turning in space before them. They bisected the hulk, as neatly as any surgeon would incise flesh, and sailed clean through the dead ship’s severed halves.
Lotara actually cheered in her throne. ‘That was beautiful,’ she said. ‘Blood of the primarchs, what shooting. Convey my compliments to the enemy captain.’
Vox-master Kejic tried. ‘No response, ma’am.’
‘Oh, well. Ask for their surrender and cut space with a warning shot.’
The Gloriana-pattern Conqueror, outweighing the Praetorian Truth by several classes, spat an indifferent lob of lance fire after its prey. Everything went calculatedly wide.
The Truth kept running.
‘No response, ma’am.’
‘I don’t know,’ Lotara feigned a sigh. ‘You try to be noble and you get nowhere.’
‘Two minutes, captain,’ said Tobin.
‘Oh, do shut up,’ she replied.
‘And might I go on record as saying this is a most inefficient use of the boarding talons?’
‘Your objection is noted and duly ignored, commander. The primarch and Khârn got to have their fun. Time for me to have mine.’
Ivar Tobin faced forwards again. No wonder the World Eaters liked her so much. She was one of them.
‘Helm, how long?’
‘Claws’ range in twenty seconds.’
Lotara was never smug. She gave Tobin a glance, a slight raise of one eyebrow, but it wasn’t the smug smile she might’ve gotten away with.
‘Ma’am!’ called several officers, the same moment a dozen others called, ‘Mistress!’
She saw it herself. The Praetorian Truth, a spear of cobalt armour with bone-white spinal battlements, was coming about. It was actually coming about. Her skin crawled with unwanted admiration. The chase was over, and the prey had stolen her chance to pounce.
‘Brave,’ Tobin said quietly. Strange, how the atmosphere soured when the prey turned and showed its teeth. Always harder to kill a courageous enemy. Desperate ones? Cowardly ones? They fell with nothing but smiles on their killers’ faces.
The ursus claws would be useless now. They were for catching fleeing foes, not engaging brave ones.
Lotara watched the smaller cruiser turning in the void, imagining the last speech its captain would be giving, as thousands of slaves ran out the warship’s guns for the final fight.
‘Kill them,’ she said, softly, calmly. ‘Just kill them.’
He led the remnants of three companies deeper into the city. The Armaturan Guard made them fight for every footstep, but Khârn’s warriors were resupplied and reloaded, and no humans could be expected to stand against them. The mortals died, and those who didn’t die added a handful of hours to their lives by running. They fell back in good order, disciplined to the last and defending every street in their city, but Khârn knew fleeing when he saw it. He chose to call it what it was, even when it wore tactics as a second skin.
This time, he countered snipers with gunships of his own, and answ
ered Armaturan heavy armour with Land Raiders and Malcador battle tanks in the XII’s battered blue and white. Sunset made little difference. Day was darkened by the dust, and night was brightened by the city’s bones burning.
Gorechild was in guarded storage aboard his personal Thunderhawk, and he’d left the small army of servitors spreading across Valika Junction, beginning the painstaking excavation work with retasked loader-Sentinels. Heavier-duty mechanised lifters were on their way down from orbit. Rank had its advantages, once in a while. It was good for more than a helmet crest that marked you out to snipers and enemy champions with something to prove.
Time didn’t pass in minutes or hours, but in broken barricades. Their howling, sprinting charges were backed by a percussion of booming tank guns and the enraged shriek of low-altitude thrusters.
He lost the last clutches of infrequent contact with the Conqueror sometime after the fifteenth road was reaved clean. Other vessels reported her lighting up the void with engine flare and chasing an Ultramarines cruiser making a last-gasp effort at flight. That was Lotara all over, and it didn’t surprise him at all. She was denied the chance to bombard the surface; of course she’d leap at the first opportunity to do more than sit still and listen to the clicking count of the bridge’s chronometer.
When they’d overrun the last roadblock, Khârn had found himself running alongside Esca, chasing the human soldiers side by side. The young Codicier spared him a glance and a nodded salute, before powering one of his force axes through a soldier’s spine and hurling the body aside.
Khârn returned the nod, feeling the Nails sinking deeper into his thoughts. Even his skin itched at the other warrior’s nearness and he felt his lips peeling back in an unwilling snarl. Grey danced at the edge of his vision, but he resisted the order to separate Esca yet again.
He noted the instinctive gap all other warriors left around the Librarian. Esca ran alone at the middle of the pack yet far from its heart. One of the last left in the World Eaters ignored, tawdry little Librarius Division.
Psykers. The Legion’s first experiments in that regard hadn’t been pleasant. Kargos was one of the surgeons first trained to implant Nails in legionaries’ skulls, though he’d never beaten them into a psyker’s brain, and wasn’t responsible for the disasters that soon followed. What Khârn hadn’t seen for himself, he’d heard from his Apothecary.
The first signs of unease came when implanted Librarians started causing their closest brothers to suffer blinding migraines and debilitating facial bleeds. No Librarian could stand in Angron’s presence without enduring the same thing themselves; a reflection of what they inflicted on their brothers.
But the depths of the flaws became truly obvious in battle. Librarians gifted with the Nails lost the ability to control their psychic talents. One of them, a warrior attached to the 100th Company, had been lost to the Nails in his very first battle after implantation, and immolated three squads when he couldn’t cease projecting witch-lightning from his eyes. Several others had just… burst. They combusted in flaming gore.
More and more died – none right away, but they never survived for long. In a single month, almost every Librarian had been fitted with the Nails. Mere weeks later, they started dying.
Optimism, albeit cautious, had reigned for a while. After the first deaths, the psychically trained legionaries had sought to master the Nails, to balance their sixth senses with the bionics now altering their brains’ chemistry. A matter of willpower, they said, and their brothers had pretended not to notice the desperation in their eyes. Yes. A matter of willpower. It made sense.
But they kept dying. They died in battle, in storms of fire or lightning, or – in several incidents – by pulsing hateful pain through the Nails of nearby warriors and forcing their own kindred to suffer cerebrovascular blockages. Entire squads died of brain haemorrhages and strokes at their Codiciers’ boots.
That settled it. Angron gave his psychic sons a choice between execution and the Nails’ removal. The Legion learned, in those early years after their primarch’s rediscovery, that they’d mutilated themselves in the image of a man without mercy. The Nails couldn’t be removed; every World Eater knew it, for the Emperor’s own techno-mages had failed to remove the primarch’s implants. Even so, most Librarians submitted themselves for the attempt.
Every one of them died, without exception. With their rewired brains misfiring and enslaved to altered impulses, none of them died easy, and none of them died well.
Soon enough, the last Librarians were those who’d not yet received Nails in a Legion now overcome by them. They eked out an isolated existence in the near-empty halls of their Librarius aboard the Conqueror.
One by one they, too, began to die. Not from malfunction or misuse, but because they were World Eaters, and World Eaters lived brief, violent lives. A hundred remained. Then fifty. Then twenty.
No one mourned them. In a Legion that prized the bonds of front-line brotherhood above all else, the silent brothers died alone – never forgotten, but always ignored. Their gene-seed rotted with their bodies, unharvested in case their genetic legacy resulted in the same curse infecting a second generation.
He watched Esca running ahead. A loyal brother. Quiet, for reasons obvious to anyone. Removed from true kinship, even with the Legion’s utter refusal to heed – or even to acknowledge – the Edict of Nikaea. Obedience to that law simply blew beneath the World Eaters notice. By that juncture, their psychic kindred were an afterthought, scarcely worthy of consideration.
Esca was avoided by all others. But loyal. Did the last living Librarians deserve more from their brethren?
Khârn knew the answer would depend on who he asked. Angron would snort and ignore the question; just being near to one of them was agony for reasons no Apothecary had been able to discern.
Argel Tal would engage him in a good-natured debate over an army only being as strong as the weakest link in its chain, and the value of respecting sacrifice.
Kargos would screw his face up into something even less appealing than its usual stitched mess, and ask why Khârn even gave a damn.
Skane would give in to distraction, cleaning his weapons as they spoke, the yellow of his eyes betraying how radiation poisoning wasn’t particularly useful for improving his attention span.
Each answer would be as annoying as the last.
Khârn cast it from his mind, relaying a steady stream of orders over the vox for his men to slow their advance and regroup. The dust was thick enough to choke on, but most of this district still stood tall. Great pillared buildings stared down onto the wide avenues, each one marked by statues cast in earth-dark bronze. Academies. Colleges. Colosseums. Watchtowers. Halls of debate. Armouries.
World Eaters gunships juddered overhead, their spotlights raking the ground, scouting ahead of the main forces. He had outriders on jetbikes, as well as recon teams ranging ahead, and for the last few hours they’d played the invasion out as any other Legion would. Rain, doubtless inspired by the atmospheric disturbance of thousands of vessels in low orbit and making planetfall runs to disgorge troops, lashed down in a tidal pour. It did nothing for the dust beyond turning the ground to clinging mud. It did, however, go some way to cleaning the World Eaters bloodstained armour.
A Storm Eagle, dense-bodied and hanging low above the next plaza, came apart in the sky. Khârn caught the garbled words of its pilot’s last report before the gunship burst with a distance-delayed boom, sending engines and armour raining to the ground in fire.
‘Ultramarines in the next plaza, then,’ Kargos voxed. Khârn could hear his grin.
‘All squads,’ the captain said. ‘Form up and be ready.’
The Praetorian Truth grew on the oculus. It grew, and its gun bays flashed as it bared its teeth.
The Conqueror shook in sympathy with its abused void shields. Mother-of-pearl light bled across space as the invisible kinetic en
ergy field shimmered under the impacts. Away from Armatura, away from the tight-packed iron-sky chaos of two warring fleets, the engagement was much more traditional, at a range of thousands of kilometres. Even so, the Conqueror had been closing fast, and the Praetorian Truth was now eating up the distance by coming straight at its pursuer.
Ivar Tobin stood with his arms crossed over his uniformed chest, watching the oculus. ‘They’re game, ma’am. I’ll give them that.’
Lotara didn’t disagree. She gestured to her weaponmaster and his two dozen servitors and menials.
‘Open fire.’
‘Firing, captain.’
The Conqueror shook again. An initial volley spread radiance across the Truth’s shields. A second punctured them, discharging power into the nothingness of space, no different to fluid bursting from a blister.
The cutting began, at a cost in countless lives, as the flagship’s lances knifed through unprotected battlements and spinal architecture. Fire breathed from the wounds, becoming mist in the dark, then becoming nothing at all.
‘They’re still closing,’ Tobin noted. ‘Looks like ramming speed.’
Lotara wasn’t so certain. The Truth would be dead before it got the chance to collide, leaving her with other suspicions.
‘Fire at will,’ she ordered.
More than one lance beam went wide. The Truth was a heavy cruiser, but her captain and crew demanded the best from her. Lotara watched with an admiring smile as the vessel banked and rolled as fast as its bulk would allow. It drifted aside from the Conqueror’s long-range calculated spite, closing the distance in a steady drive.
‘Ah,’ said Lotara.
‘Ma’am?’
She didn’t reply. She waited. She waited until her lances had clawed and cut and cleaved through the Truth’s hull. She waited until the Ultramarines cruiser was a crumbling, flaming wreck on dying engines, struggling to hold itself together. Inertia kept bringing it closer.
‘Here it comes,’ she said. ‘Any moment now.’
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