by Guy Haley
The migration ships came next, weird agglomerations of plated fungal matter, so far as could be discerned through their null-time blind shields. Hundreds of these slipped through the Legion picket fleets ringing the subsector.
Worse was to come. The xenos had a last surprise.
‘Look at the planet! The planet!’
The subaltern’s voice was frightened enough to distract Perturabo from his screeds of data. More shouts rose up from the deck at his feet. Slowly, his eyes refocused from the mental construct he had conjured for himself, and he looked upon the surface of Gugann with his men.
The planet was heaving, giant fissures breaking across its tortured surface. Orange magma glow flashed and faded around the shifting parts of Gugann’s crust, its cooling accelerated by the hrud’s strange influence before whatever was moving beneath broke the surface again and the light shone anew.
‘I ordered no Exterminatus!’ bellowed Perturabo in a fury. ‘We have been ordered to take these worlds intact!’
‘No order was given,’ replied his shipmaster robotically. Perturabo knew this well, because he knew everything. He cursed the weakness his outburst revealed and fought his anger back down.
Gugann shook.
Pillars of lava, miles high, blasted into space, raining back down onto the planet’s surface with the force of cometary impacts.
‘The city,’ said Forrix, who was watching everything from the main deck level. He gripped the edge of the rail about the hololith projection pipes. He stared up at his master. ‘The entire city is moving.’ Gugann trembled on its axis as the hrud capital warren broke free from the bedrock. Blinding veils of white light propelled it upwards, pushing the impossible mass into orbit using the substance of the world as fuel. A sea of magma boiled where it had torn itself from the ground. Still the Iron Warriors fleet rained fire down onto the surface, opening up more wounds, but these were mere puddles of fire compared to the ocean the hrud themselves had gouged into the rocky flesh of their world. Teardrops of lava plummeted from the underside of the capital warren.
‘That thing’s the size of a continent,’ said Forrix. His tone was changing, becoming excited.
‘My lord!’ called up an astropathic liaison. ‘I am receiving word of similar breakouts at Jupor, Hranenen and Voltis.’
‘They are vulnerable!’ shouted Forrix. He walked around the hololith pit. ‘All vessels, open fire on the city vessel.’
New firing solutions were quickly formulated. Lance beams converged on the hrud warren-craft.
Perturabo did not share his first captain’s excitement. He looked on with mounting horror as the hrud ships fell into formation with the giant vessel floating up from the surface of Gugann. They rotated around the city warren, forming a hollow cube Painfully bright arcs of light leapt from their scabrous hulls and joined them to the city-ship. ‘All ships, belay that!’ roared Perturabo. ‘Evasive action!’
A sickening flicker surrounded the hrud vessels. Their image smeared on the hololith, and they blinked out of existence.
From every augury station on the deck, tocsins clamoured. Perturabo dipped into the data-streams still cascading through his mind. Where the hrud vessels had been, space was convulsing. ‘We have a temporal collapse!’
‘What?’ shouted Forrix.
‘They have torn a hole in space and time. Get us about, shipmaster!’ Perturabo roared. Alarms whooped. The Iron Blood shook from stem to stem as its engines powered up to full. Its vast spear-tip prow swung about. Other vessels were attempting their own escape, sharp blades of engine wash stabbing from their stacks. They rolled as retrothrusters puffed out fire and vapour all along their flanks. The Iron Warriors’ habitual good order collapsed, and the fleet became a collection of desperate individual vessels.
‘Full motive!’ ordered Perturabo. ‘Divert all power to the engine stacks! Forty degrees down and starboard - get our prow pointing directly away from the temporal surge.’
‘My lord, that heading will put the Magnificence of Steel directly athwart our passage,’ called out an auspex operative.
‘Order them to accelerate If they are not clear, smash them out of the way!’ the primarch commanded. He abandoned his station in the strategium minoris, exiting it via a door that hissed into the sphere’s shell at his approach, and ran down spiral stairs to the main deck to stand before the giant, luminous globe of the hololith. ‘Time to impact!’ he commanded.
Hearing the primarch’s voice, a hundred servitors responded together. ‘Five minutes, twenty-one seconds to impact.’
‘We’re not going to make it,’ said Forrix angrily. He slammed his armoured hand into the rail around the hololith pit, denting it.
The temporal shock wave emanating from the hrud’s departure point travelled at only a fraction of the speed of light. Its lack of speed made it all the more terrifying; it was an oily roll in the space-time continuum that moved towards them with the deceptive slowness of a tsunami. The hololith struggled to depict what the augurs detected. Gugann jumped about, its image blocky with poorly formed projection streams. A loop-projector exploded under the strain. The hololith blinked, then stabilised as men shouted and ordered servitors to reroute the image collation through back-up systems.
In his mind’s eye, Perturabo saw what the planet would look like through the temporal wave: a moon’s reflection on a pool shattered into a thousand curved pieces by a cast stone.
‘Three minutes, three seconds to impact.’
‘We are bearing down on the Magnificence of Steel,’ reported the shipmaster. He had been deeply immured within the Iron Blood’s systems for so long that the man no longer had a name. ‘Range, fifty kilometres.’
‘The Magnificence of Steel will not get clear - we’re going to hit it!’ shouted the auspex operative.
‘Calm yourself!’ snarled his superior.
‘Open me a vox link!’ demanded Perturabo.
‘Compliance,’ droned a servitor.
‘Magnificence of Steel, remove yourself from our path or we will be forced to go through you.’
‘Primarch,’ replied the ship’s commander - an Iron Warrior by the name of Urdek, Perturabo recalled. ‘Our enginarium is overrun with hrud foray teams. Our reactor is ungoverned and overloaded. We are moving at half power.’ There was no hint of complaint or plea to Urdek’s report.
‘Are there other reports of hrud boarding?’ asked Perturabo.
‘A few incursions,’ replied the master of vox after a few, hurried inquiries. ‘Nothing major. All contained.’
‘It is not in their nature to risk themselves,’ said Forrix. ‘They seek to trap you. They see the Iron Blood as too dangerous to board. They expect you to stop.’ He glanced up at his gene-father. ‘They do not know you very well.’
‘Captain Urdek, abandon your ship. Launch saviour pods now.’
‘Yes, my lord. I will remain on board and attempt to steer the Magnificence from your path.’
Perturabo gave no thanks or valedictory words to his captain. He expected his warriors to die for him without question.
‘Put the forward view on the main hololith,’ ordered Perturabo. ‘Shipmaster, accelerate to maximum speed.’
‘We risk killing ourselves,’ said Forrix.
‘We will suffer major damage if we are too close when the reactor explodes,’ said Perturabo.
The Iron Blood rumbled. Metal squealed in its superstructure under the strain of the thrust generated by its massive engines. Officers muttered to one another and worked quickly at the master controls for the ship’s integrity fields, adjusting the energy matrices embedded in the craft’s skeleton to brace its members and prevent them from tearing themselves apart.
The tactical view of the battlefield vanished from the main hololith, and the Iron Blood’s forward view came into being. Sure enough, the Magnificence of Steel blocked their way. A grand cruiser, it was far less than the Iron Blood’s Gloriana-class tonnage.
‘Maybe we can adjust our cours
e a few degrees,’ said Forrix.
‘Under this acceleration, we risk breaking the ship’s back,’ said Perturabo. ‘Aegis control, divert all power to the forward void shields. Prow lances, stand by to open fire on my command.’
The space around the Magnificence of Steel twinkled as hundreds of saviour pods burst from their launch apertures, carrying away every important member of the crew. There were never enough for everyone aboard. Thousands of serfs would be left behind to die. Perturabo spared no more thought for them than he did for a raindrop in a storm.
‘Ramming speed!’ he said. ‘We shall show the hrud the measure of our mercy.’
The Magnificence of Steel grew from a bright needle to a massive, crenellated edifice nearly eight kilometres long. Its engine flare stuttered, its acceleration insufficient to propel it out of the Iron Blood’s way.
‘Range, one kilometre,’ said the nameless shipmaster.
The iron-grey side of the ship grew to fill the whole of the hololithic sphere. The flagship’s alarms became a clamour.
‘Fire!’ ordered Perturabo.
The Magnificence of Steel accepted its fate quietly. The full fury of the Iron Blood’s prow lance battery hit it amidships, carving molten gouges deep into its hull. The flagship opened fire again seconds before its bladed prow cleaved into the side of its sister vessel.
‘Brace!’ yelled the master of serfs. Mortal warriors hit the floor. Legionaries set their feet apart. The clunking of magnetic soles locking to the deck plating was the last ordinary sound before the ear-shattering crash of the Iron Blood hitting the Magnificence of Steel upended the world.
Perturabo was one of the few on the deck who kept his feet as the ships collided. The entire craft shivered from stem to stem as its ram crashed into the weakened middle of the Magnificence of Steel, breaking it in two. Legionaries were torn from their feet by the impact and serfs were flung into their work stations. Servitors jerked and died through sensory overload. The smell of cooked meat wafted over the deck as their cybernetic components fried.
Burning metal and flash-frozen atmosphere clouded the hololithic view. The whirling, terrified face of a dead serf connected with a pict-feed lens near the prow, ghastly in magnification.
The Iron Blood was through.
‘Time to temporal-wave impact!’ demanded Perturabo.
‘One minute, three seconds,’ responded the servitors.
According to his calculations, the wave would already be hitting the trailing ships of the Space Marine fleet ‘Give me a stern view!’ ordered Perturabo. ‘Show me my fleet.’
A viewscreen as big as a sail came on, displaying a grainy rear view half whited out by the Iron Blood’s own engine flare.
The Iron Warriors vessels were running, engines burning at maximum. The temporal wave bodily tilted them, like an object sliding down a lifted blanket. Those at the rear were caught in a wash of painful unlight The rearmost came to flaming pieces. A next aged a million years in a moment, its hull visibly corroding and its engine light dying until it was a crumpled, rusting hulk.
The temporal wave continued onwards through the Space Marine fleet, crippling ships and ageing crews to dust in seconds.
The effects were unpredictable. Some ships appeared to accelerate backwards at unimaginable speed until they vanished. Others disappeared into showers of disassociated particles. The result, however, was always the same: death and more death. The vox clamoured with screams and desperate shouts for aid from rapidly ageing throats.
‘Twenty seconds to impact,’ droned the servitors.
‘Faster!’ yelled Perturabo.
‘The Iron Blood proceeds at maximum acceleration, my lord,’ mumbled the encased shipmaster.
The ship began to shake again to a different resonance. The outlying disturbance of the wave reached into its fabric and teased at its atomic structure, temporal disruption perturbing the very forces that bound it together.
‘Impact… Impact… Impact…’ droned the servitors.
The Iron Blood rolled up and forwards as the ripple in the fabric of space-time passed under it. Alarms of every kind wailed. Metal screamed. Machines exploded. Time ran in confusing eddies. A bank of servitors aged to withered flesh and discoloured components while the group next to them were untouched. Different parts of the ship were forcibly jumped into different frames of reference, matter displacing seconds in time with explosive results. Space Marines toppled over, spilling dust and desiccated bone fragments from their scattering armour plates. A servitor vanished, replaced by the man he used to be, his reborn face insane with shock as he shucked off mechanical components and stood, unscarred. Some of the crew disappeared. Others collapsed into a cloud of black carbon dust.
Human senses were not designed to cope with such upheaval to reality, and men fell vomiting. Perturabo struggled to keep his mind together as the order of the world was overthrown. Events jumped out of sequence. The ache of great age bloomed in his bones.
The wave passed. The ship shuddered, as if it too were sickened. Fires burned unchecked in various quarters. Frantic damage reports barked from unmanned vox units. Part of the high roof fell down with a deafening crash.
Of all his crew, Perturabo alone stood. Mortals groaned, and the reedy, feeble cries of the elderly emanated from sparking work stations. Somewhere, a child was crying.
‘Shipmaster,’ he said. No response.
Perturabo marched to the metal scaffold that had encysted the man. Putrescent matter dripped from the apparatus. A naked skull glistened wetly inside.
He attempted his direct link with the vessel’s cogitators, only to be greeted with garbled nonsense.
‘Give me the hololith, pict screens, anything!’ shouted Perturabo. ‘I must see my ships!’
‘Com… Com… Compliance,’ a malfunctioning servitor groaned. Broken ribbon projectors crackled in the hololith pit, painting in a view of the area line by line.
Gugann was a shattered mess. Clouds of debris trailed out into high orbit. A giant caldera, hundreds of kilometres across, boiled where the hrud’s primary warren had been. The surface flashed with the impact of falling rocks. Lightning wracked its thickened clouds.
However, the change to the planet was as nothing compared to that wrought at the heart of the system. The sun, nameless but for a string of astrogation numbers, had swollen to double its size, accelerated out of the main sequence and into stellar senescence It appeared that not even stars were free from the hrud’s devastating influence.
The time wave should not have hit the star so quickly. Perturabo had ceased trying to apply the usual paths of logic to the hrud and their effects on the universe, and he supposed that were he a mortal man his attempts to understand would have driven him mad. The sun had progressed from a small yellow star to a swelling red giant in a matter of minutes. Huge solar flares looped lazily out from its equator, sending sprays of light-speed particles sleeting through his fleet.
Vox communication was down. It was a kind of mercy that he could not yet learn how bad the damage was. The 125th Expeditionary Fleet was scattered across at least one astronomical unit of space or more. Its ships listed, powerless.
A cruiser exploded into a perfect sphere of light as he watched.
The Iron Blood’s cogitators were coming back online. Servitors were returning to consciousness; surviving Mechanicum adepts bustled from place to place. Slowly, function returned to the flagship.
Perturabo’s eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the devastation outside.
As he watched his ships die, his men thrown away for no good end, he could think only one thing.
This pointless, ruinous campaign was the fault of the Emperor’s vanity.
ELEVEN
SHAME
999.M30
THE IRON BLOOD, GUGANN SYSTEM
Crippled by extreme age, Dantioch walked slowly towards Perturabo’s throne. The triarchs looked on him with mixture of contempt and pity. To have such a weakling as a member of the Legion
was an affront to their sensibilities, but they were cognisant that in this war the same fate could befall them all too easily. Dantioch’s footsteps were not quite halting but were not far from it He stopped hallway to the throne of the primarch, and his body shook as he stifled a powerful cough. His sighs as the spasm passed could not be held back.
Perturabo sat in angry judgement over his warsmith, but seeing him so broken stirred pity in him.
‘Dantioch, what has happened to you?’ he said.
‘The hrud,’ the warsmith replied. His voice previously smooth, had a rough edge to it, like a nicked blade. He reached the foot of the throne. With pronounced difficulty he knelt and bowed his head. ‘My lord, the Vulpa Straits are lost.’
The concern of the primarch for his son was gone in an instant ‘I left you in command of three worlds, Dantioch. You dare to come here and tell me that you let all of them slip through your fingers?’ Perturabo’s shout silenced his birds’ gentle cooing. ‘Many millions of hrud have passed through this system, and you dare to inform me that there will be nothing to stop their escape?’
Fingers fumbling with the catches, Dantioch took off his helmet and raised his head. Perturabo paused at the sight of the warsmith’s ravaged face Dantioch’s hair had thinned to a few greasy strands scraped back over a liver-spotted, shining scalp. The skin atop his skull was taut, while that on his face hung in sagging pouches from the bones. Yellowed eyes peered from complex folds of skin, the orbits of them purplish. His lips had thinned to pink traces atop a chin riven with deep lines. His skull was visible under his face as if the skin was a loose cloth cast over a grisly trophy. He was physically lessened by age though his eyes shone with all the determination he had ever had.
‘Look upon me and you might understand why,’ said Dantioch. ‘The Apothecaries believe I have aged somewhere in the region of three thousand years. Apparently, we of the Legiones Astartes are not functionally immortal after all.’
Perturabo found it hard to look at his warsmith. He found such decay of the flesh unseemly. Stone and iron decayed, everything decayed, but the rapidity with which the human body ceased good function and began to collapse offended his sense of order. Humanity was, in many ways, despicable ‘Others have suffered the same fate and yet they fulfill the orders given them,’ said the Primarch. ‘You were told to hold the straits. You did not.’