Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  The kill-rate increased. Friends were dropping all around them. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) couldn’t tell who. A body twisted. Was that Jurgan Thoroff (77th Kanzeer Light) or Uzman Finch (Slovak 14th)? Just a figure caked in mud, identity lost, no longer able to utter its brackets, no face left to wipe clean so that features could be discerned.

  Smoke everywhere. Dust. Vaporised blood. Filthy rain. The chanting. The constant crack and rasp of weapons firing. The slap and scorch of impacts on stone and rubble. The hollow thump of impacts on meat. You knew when a body had been hit. A muffled punch came with an exhaled gasp as air was squeezed out of lungs. It came with the sharp stink of burned cloth and exit steam, the burned and atomised innards splitting skin to escape.

  You learned the sound fast if you didn’t already know it, because it repeated a dozen times a minute.

  Willem Kordy grabbed his friend’s sleeve and they ran together. Others ran too. There was no cover. They scrambled up a bank of nibble, rounds slapping the tangled debris around them. Joseph Baako Monday made the mistake of looking back. He saw-

  He saw that Captain Tantane had definitely gone the wrong way, and taken two hundred or more people with him. The traitor multitude had boxed them. He saw-

  He saw taller figures pushing through the marching traitor files. Beast-giants armoured in black. He knew they were Astartes. War horns.. billowed through the smoke-fog. More now, more giants.

  He saw-

  He saw these Astartes wore armour of dirty white, like spoiled cream. Their pauldrons were black. Some had great horns. Some had cloth tied around their armour like smocks or aprons. He saw-

  He saw the dirt was caked blood. He saw the aprons were human hides. The Astartes in black slowed their advance. They let the Astartes in white rush ahead. They surged like dogs, charged like bulls. They weren’t men, or even like men. The Astartes in black were upright, like handlers. The Astartes in white galloped, almost on all fours.

  They shrieked in berserk pain. They swung chainblades and war-axes that Joseph Baako Monday knew he could not have lifted. He saw-

  He saw them reach Captain Tantane’s group. He saw Tantane and those around him screaming and firing to hold them at bay. And failing. The Astartes in white ploughed into the mass of them, through them, running them down like trains hitting livestock. Slaughter. Butchery. A huge cloud of blood-vapour billowed up the slope, coating stones like tar. The Astartes in black stood and watched, as if entertained. He saw-

  A hand on his arm.

  ‘Come on!’ Willem yelled into his face. ‘Just come on!’

  Up the slope, sixty, seventy of them, scrabbling up the rubble incline, .sixty or seventy that had not made the mistake of following Captain Tantane. Up the slope, dragging each other when feet slipped, up the slope and onto what had once been the roofs of habitats. The horror below them The war-horns booming. The grinding squeal of chainblades. Billowing clouds of clotting fog.

  The roofs ran out. A huge structure had collapsed, leaving nothing but frame of girders and spars rising from a sea of shattered masonry. A twenty-metre drop. They started to clamber out along the girders, the sixty or seventy of them, single file, walking or crawling along girders hall a metre wide. Men slipped and fell, or were knocked oil by shots from below. Some took others with them as they clawed to stay on. They had all passed through fear. Fear was redundant and forgotten. So was humanity. They were deaf from the noise and numb from the constant shock. They had entered a state of feral humiliation, of degradation, mobbing like animals, wide eyed and mindless, trying to escape a forest fire.

  Willem nearly fell, but Joseph clung to him and got him to the far side, the roof of an artisan hall. They were among the first to make it. They looked back at their friends, men and women clinging like swarming ants to the narrow girders. They reached out, grabbed hands, brought a few to safety. Jen Koder (22nd Kantium Hort), Bailee Grosser (Third Helvet), Pasha Cavaner (11th Heavy Janissar)…

  War-horns boomed. Bigger horns. Deeper, howling sounds that shook the breastbone. Two dozen streets away, true giants loomed out of the haze. Titan engines, glimpsed between the soaring towers as they strode along, demolishing walls and whole buildings, black, gold, copper, crimson, infernal banners displayed on the masts of their backs. Each was like a walking city, too big to properly comprehend. Their vast limb-weapons pulsed and fired: flashes that scorched the retina, static shock that lifted the hair, heat-wash that seared the skin like sunburn even from two dozen streets away.

  And the noise. The noise so loud, each shot so loud, it felt as though the noise alone could kill. At each discharge, everything shivered.

  We will die now, thought Joseph, and then laughed out loud at his own arrogance. The giant engines weren’t coming for him. They didn’t know he even existed. They were striding west, parallel to him, driving through the harrowed streets to find something they could kill or destroy that was worth their titanic effort.

  The sixty or seventy of them had become thirty or forty. They slithered down slopes of scree and broken glass. No one had a clue where they were going. No one knew if there was anywhere left that could be gone to. Buildings around them were burning or blown out, the streets buried in a blanket of debris.

  ‘We should fight,’ said Joseph.

  ‘What?’ asked Willem.

  ‘Fight,’ Joseph repeated. ‘Turn around, and fight.’

  ‘We’ll die’

  ‘Isn’t this already death?’ asked Joseph. ‘What else are we going to do? There’s nowhere to go.’

  Willem Kordy wiped his mouth and spat out dirt and bone dust. ‘But what good can we do?’ asked Bailee Grosser. ‘We saw what-‘ ‘We did see,’ said Joseph. ‘I saw.’

  ‘We won’t measure it,’ said Willem.

  ‘Measure what?’ asked Jen Koder. Her helmet was so badly dented, she couldn’t take it off. Under the crumpled rim, blood ran down her neck.

  ‘Whatever we are able to do,’ said Willem. ‘We’ll die. We won’t know. Whatever we do, however little, we won’t know. That doesn’t matter.’

  No one said anything. One by one they got up, picked up their weapons, and followed Joseph and Willem down the street, picking their way over rubble, heading back the way they had come.

  The Space Marine was in their path, hazed by a draw of thick smoke. Scarred siege shield propped in one hand, longsword resting across a huge shoulder guard. Plate dented and scored, even the ornate laurels on the breast. Eyes, slits of amber throbbing in the mauled visor.

  Their weapons came up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ it asked.

  Back. To fight,’ said Joseph.

  ‘Correct,’ it said. ‘That’s what He needs from us.’

  ‘You… heard me?’

  ‘Of course. I can hear a heart beating at a thousand metres. Follow me.’

  The legionary turned. Its armour and siege shield were yellow.

  ‘I am Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army),’ Joseph called out.

  ‘I don’t need to know,’ the legionary replied, without glancing back.

  ‘And show some damn noise discipline.’

  ‘I need you to know,’ said Joseph.

  The legionary halted, and looked back. ‘That doesn’t matter

  ‘It matters to me,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s all we have. I am Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).’

  ‘I am Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile),’ said Willem.

  ‘Adele Gercault, (Fifty-Fifth Midlantik).’

  ‘Jen Koder (Twenty-Second Kantium Hort).’

  The Space Marine let them all speak. Then it nodded.

  ‘I am Camba Diaz (Imperial Fists). Follow me.’

  * * *

  ‘Wait,’ said Archamus, seeing them approach, but not looking up, one finger raised for patience.

  ‘I won’t. How is he occupied? Right now? One hundred a
nd more days of this, and the deepest shit yet, drowning in our own blood, and he’s occupied?

  Archamus’ face was expressionless. ‘Consider your tone please, colonel,’ he suggested.

  ‘Screw my bastard tone, lord.’

  Archamus rose. Vorst had risen too, heaving his yellow-plated bulk out of his seat. Again, Archamus signalled him to return to work with a brief gesture.

  ‘We are all very tired,’ said Niborran quickly. ‘Very tired. Tempers fray and-‘

  ‘You don’t look tired,’ Brohn said to Archamus. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Bred that way,’ said Archamus. In the first hundred days he’d stood three tours on the lines. The grazes and dents on his yellow plate hadn’t been finished out and were there for all to see. But no, he didn’t look tired. He looked Astartes, the way he always did. Unmoving, as solid as a statue. He didn’t look tired the way these three humans did, with their hollow eyes and drawn cheeks and shaking hands.

  ‘I will allow you some latitude, colonel,’ he said. ‘The circumstances-‘

  ‘The circumstances are shit, and getting shittier by the second, and Dorn is absent. He is supposed to be running this. He’s supposed to be the bastard genius-‘

  ‘That is now enough,’ said Archamus.

  ‘The Praetorian’s absence is concerning,’ said Niborran. ‘Brohn is out of line, but his sentiment is-‘

  ‘We’re screwed,’ snapped Brohn. ‘His plan is splitting at the seams. Lion’s Gate is done. They’re in. Inside Anterior. The aegis is blown in eight places. They’ve got engines on the ground and they’re walking, Our plan is on fire. It’s gone to shit-‘

  ‘Get out.’

  The words were a whisper, a hiss, but they cut like acid through metal. Everyone in the Bhab strategium fell silent. No voices, just the chatter and babble of cogitators and the crackle of vox monitor stations. Eyes averted.

  Jaghatai Khan stepped up onto the central platform. How anyone or anything so big could have entered the Grand Borealis without being heard, or could have walked silently from the chamber arch across the plasteel deck, in full, fur-draped armour plate…

  He towered over them. There was blood on his cheek, beard, gorget, left pauldron, breastplate. It matted his cinched-back mane, freckled his ermyet furs, and ran down his left thigh-guard. It wasn’t his. His left hip was scorched back to bare metal from a melta burn.

  ‘Get out,’ he repeated, looking down at Brohn.

  ‘Colonel Brohn is tired, lord, and spoke poorly,’ Niborran began.

  ‘I don’t give a shit,’ said the Great Khan.

  ‘My lord,’ Niborran pressed. ‘Colonel Brohn is a senior and decorated Army officer, and an essential part of the-‘

  ‘Not a single shit,’ said the Great Khan.

  Niborran glanced at the deck. He sighed.

  ‘His question was insolently framed,’ said Niborran flatly, ‘but his point was valid.’

  He looked the primarch in the eyes. He did not waver.

  ‘My lord,’ he added.

  ‘You too,’ said the Great Khan. ‘Get out.’

  Brohn glanced at Niborran. Niborran shook his head. He tossed his slate onto the desk, turned and walked out. Brohn followed.

  The Great Khan didn’t even watch them leave.

  ‘Which seniors are on the next rotation?’ he called out to the chamber. ‘Find them. Wake them. Get them here.’

  Several adjutants jumped up and hurried out. The Great Khan turned to Archamus.

  ‘Where is Dorn?’ he asked.

  ‘In council with the Sigillite and the Council.’

  ‘Get him here,’ he said. He glanced at Icaro. ‘You. Icaro. Begin.’

  Icaro cleared her throat. ‘Aegis failure in eight sectors,’ she said. She swept her hand across the face of her dataslate like a sower scattering seed, and threw the data up onto the display. Ugly blobs blossomed across the northern and central areas of the vast Palace map.

  ‘Repairs?’ asked the Great Khan.

  ‘Pending. Voids sixty-one and sixty-two are beyond salvation. Lion’s Gate Port remains wide open. Bulk landers are setting down along the northern upper platforms at a rate of sixty an hour. Vox and noospherics are interrupted in those sectors and adjacent zones.’

  She cast more blobs onto the holofield.

  ‘Multi-point auspex confirms engines walking here, here and here.

  Legio Tempestus. Legio Vulpa. Perhaps Legio Ursa too. Progressing to Ultimate Wall, Anterior Wall, and into Magnifican.’

  ‘They have one, they want another,’ said the Great Khan. Archamus nodded.

  ‘I believe so, lord,’ he said.

  ‘Army lines are fracturing across the northern reaches,’ said Icaro. ‘Assault is a primary factor, traitor hosts driving up from the south. They have Astartes support.’

  ‘On the ground?’ asked the Great Khan.

  ‘On the ground, in force,’ she confirmed. ‘World Eaters, Iron Warriors, Thousand Sons, Luna Wolves-‘

  They’re not called that any more,’ said the Khan.

  ‘My apologies, lord. But I won’t use his name,’ she replied.

  ‘Just use numbers,’ said Archamus gently.

  ‘Yes, lord. Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Fourth, Sixteenth, Third. Perhaps others. Assault pressure is the primary factor, but Army cohesion is disrupted by the loss of vox and comm-channels. We can’t issue orders to the plates where orders are most needed.’

  She looked at the primarch.

  ‘The merits or demerits of the Praetorian’s defence plan are moot all the while said plan cannot be implemented,’ she said.

  The Great Khan nodded, and tried to comb dried blood out of his moustache with his fingers. ‘And daemons?’ he asked.

  ‘Probably very many,’ she said. There was a tiny wobble in her voice. ‘Probably the most significant threat to the Sanctum Imperialis Palatine. But they are not detectable by our systems.’

  ‘That assessment is confirmed,’ said Archamus.

  ‘We are relying on sighting reports,’ she said, ‘which are… unreliable and confused. And dependant on vox. We must trust, 1 suppose, in our lord the Emperor’s will to keep them at bay.’

  ‘That trust is never unfounded,’ said the Great Khan. He looked at at the shimmering, updating chart. ‘They’re coming to our doors. Right to our doors. Lion’s Gate, Ultimate Wall. But they want that too.’

  He pointed to the icon that represented the Eternity Wall space port.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Archamus.

  ‘If they take that, they have both principal space ports in the northern reaches. Double the landing capacity.’

  ‘Surely they’ll concentrate on the Sanctum now?’ Icaro asked. ‘The added capacity is useful, but Lion’s Gate is closer, its landing volume is immense, and they’re at our throats already.’

  ‘No, they want it,’ said the Great Khan. ‘Get as much on the ground as they ran to knock us down. It’s what I’d do.’

  ‘And it’s what I’d do,’ said Dorn. He stood at the foot of the plat

  form steps, looking up at them, ‘And it’s what I know our brother Perturabo would do. Maximise landing capacity. Deprive us of orbital access. I am sure this is as Horus has instructed.’

  ‘They want them both,’ said Jaghatai Khan.

  ‘They want them both. They want everything,’ said Dorn.

  The Great Khan nodded. He looked at Dorn.

  ‘So, there you are,’ he said.

  ‘Here I am,’ said Dorn. ‘I had business elsewhere. Ironic… it’s usually you who slips away and can’t be found.’

  Jaghatai Khan did not soften. The Lord Khagan would clearly not be mollified with gentle good humour.

  ‘What now, brother?’ asked the Great Khan.

  ‘I have been examining the latest variables,’ Dorn said, joining them on the platform. ‘Each move our opponent makes reveals more of his intention. I’m beginning to see the Lor
d of Iron’s strategy in some depth, which means I can predict where-‘

  ‘We do not need to predict,’ said the Khan simply.

  ‘This is a complex, multi-aspect battle sphere, brother,’ Dorn began, then cursed himself inwardly. Jaghatai Khan’s martial doctrines were very different from his own, but the Great Khan was a peerless, precise and subtle warrior. He did not deserve condescension. He did not need to have complexity explained to him the way humans did.

  Jaghatai Khan shook his head. He looked weary, and that in itself was concerning. For a primarch to look tired…

  ‘He wants our father,’ said the Khan quietly. ‘He wants unhindered access to the Palace. He has one foothold, he wants another. It is not complex, Rogal, not any more. Eternity Wall Port must be defended and held. Lion’s Gate Port must be retaken. It is an offence they have claimed it at all.’

  ‘It was unavoidable,’ said Dorn.

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Rogal,’ said the Khan. He sighed. ‘We must hold the ports. Deny them access. What forces they have already landed can be contained and butchered.’

  ‘Jaghatai,’ said Rogal Dorn. He cleared his throat, as if considering what to say next. ‘I assure you, I have weighed every option. I applaud yom determination, but it’s not quite as simple as you-‘

  He cut short. Jaghatai Khan was gazing at him. There was a hardness in his look that made Icaro take a nervous step back.

  ‘I think you misunderstand me, Rogal,’ the Great Khan said. ‘I am going to take Lion’s Gate Port back. I’m not asking you. I came here to tell you what I’m about to do.’

  * * *

  She asked, ‘Why are you kneeling?’

  He was renewing his oath of moment in a dingy cubicle a million light years from the place she’d first watched him perform the ceremony. His private arming chamber on the Spirit, that seemed like false memory, something he’d imagined but which had never been true. The metal walls lacquered pale green, the smell of lapping powder, the noise from embarkation decks outside. Those images didn’t belong to him any more, the oaths of moment pinned to the wall under the stencilled eagle, those too. They belonged to something else. They were deeds another man had done, and he was dead.