Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Decapitation strike,’ said Malcador, speaking for the first time. His .voice was like a dry wheeze, like a creak of weight-stretched rope.

  ‘Decapitation strike,’ said Dorn, nodding. ‘Very quick and very sure.’ ‘Then we fortify-‘ Valdor began.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dorn. ‘Of course. But this is my point. We are stretched too thin. The crisis points, Constantin. Perturabo drives at Gorgon Bar. If he breaks us there, he takes the central line of aegis generators and splits the Sanctum open. Best case, once that happens, two weeks.’

  ‘You have Sanguinius at Gorgon.’

  ‘And more besides,’ said Dorn. ‘So I trust we can hold it. The Lord of Iron also focuses effort at Colossi. A breakthrough there would take him right to the Lion’s Gate. The very door of the Inner Palace, Best case there, a month. We anticipated they’d get there eventually of things continue as they are, but if Colossi falls, it cuts five months off our projected hold-out lime.’

  ‘But your other brother stands there,’ replied Valdor firmly. ‘Jaghatai, thanks to your handling, and I will be at his side.’

  ‘So, again, I trust in our forces prevailing,’ said Dorn. ‘Then there’s the port.’

  ‘He can’t take another port,’ said Malcador. ‘He has one. Eternity Wall Port would more than double his capacity to land ground forces. The result would be devastation.’

  Dorn nodded. ‘The loss of a second port would escalate this siege.

  I estimate the advantage a second port would give him… it would shave four months off our holding threshold.’

  ‘And deprive us of an exit route,’ said Valdor. ‘Lose that, and we would no longer be able to choose the contingency of evacuation.’

  The Sigillite sat with his head bent, one bony hand cupped in the other, as though in prayer. ‘He will never leave,’ he said. ‘The question went unanswered. I can tell you, He will not agree to it.’

  ‘He might have to,’ said Valdor. ‘His safety is my duty. It’s the one area in which I have final say. I won’t ask. I will just do it.’

  ‘He’s fighting a war of His own,’ the Sigillite rasped. ‘You know that, Constantin. If He leaves the Throne, we lose more than Terra.’

  ‘Four crisis points,’ said Dorn. ‘We can’t afford to lose any of them. But we must decide which is the most affordable.’

  ‘Sacrifice one?’ asked Valdor.

  ‘Give up a piece to win the game,’ said Dorn. ‘Sacrifice a queen to secure checkmate. It’s ruthless, but sometimes it’s the only option. Which do we give up?’

  Valdor stared at the Praetorian. He bared his teeth in a half-snarl. ‘You’ve already decided,’ he said.

  ‘I have. But I’m asking.’

  ‘A rhetorical question,’ said Valdor.

  ‘We give up the port,’ said Dorn. ‘It is a massive loss, but it is the least worst of our options.’

  There was a moment of silence. The annulled air was stifling.

  ‘The port,’ whispered Malcador with a frail nod.

  Valdor sat back. He cleared his throat. The rage in his eyes was a terrible thing to see.

  ‘The port,’ he conceded.

  Dorn turned and looked down the table. ‘Mistress?’

  The shadow of her shivered, as if she was surprised to be consulted.

  The port, she replied as a thoughtmark.

  ‘So, we draw back forces,’ said Valdor. ‘I suppose it’s one less front to fight. We can redeploy strengths to-‘

  ‘No,’ said Dorn. ‘That’s the bitter part.’

  ‘There’s a bitter part?’ asked Valdor sarcastically.

  ‘I’m sorry, Constantin,’ said Dorn. ‘We need to defend the port. Make a decent and convincing show.’

  ‘A show?’ Valdor shook his head in disgust. He looked as though he wanted to get up and leave.

  ‘He can’t know we know,’ said Dorn. ‘If we let go of the port, Perturabo will know we know about Saturnine.’

  ‘So what?’ asked Valdor with raw scorn.

  ‘To undertake Saturnine successfully,’ said Dorn slowly, ‘he will will send an elite force. It’s a decapitation strike. He will use the very best.’

  He let that thought hang.

  ‘And if you’re waiting for them, you take a significant scalp?’ said Valdor quietly.

  ‘Several, perhaps.’ Dorn watched Valdor’s face for a reaction.

  ‘I take it you intend to run that line?’

  ‘I do,’ said Dorn. ‘If Perturabo goes at it blind, thinking we are ignorant of the weakness, we may have a chance to accomplish something significant. Not just protect the Palace. That’s paramount. But we may achieve a victory of true consequence. Strike a blow that puts a… a Saturnine in his strategy.’

  ‘Allowing us to win this?’ asked the captain-general.

  ‘It could take us much closer to a win,’ Dorn said.

  ‘Who would he send?’ asked Malcador, his voice as small as a hedgerow rustle, ‘in your estimation?’

  ‘It’s a spear tip strike,’ replied Dorn. ‘Who would you send? Who was always the master of that kind of war?’

  Valdor breathed out heavily. ‘Oh, Terra!’ he said. ‘Is that why? Is that why we haven’t seen him yet?’

  ‘You know him,’ said Dorn. ‘He wants that glory. In person. He wants to be the one that spills blood across the Throne.’

  ‘We would be condemning every soul who stands at the port to death,’ said Malcador. ‘Without doubt. We would send them out there knowing. And we couldn’t tell them. They cannot know or this ruse of yours falls down.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Dorn. ‘It’s not how I ever thought I’d run a war. It’s a burden we would have to bear. An unforgivable guilt.’

  He ran out of words, and wiped his palm across his mouth, as if trying to stuff back in words he wished he’d never uttered. He stared at nothing. Valdor’s face was set expressionlessly, like a death mask. He glanced at the Sigillite.

  Malcador leaned forward and splayed a knotted-twig hand on the table, the fingers extending towards Dorn.

  ‘Every loyal warrior is oathed to give his life,’ Malcador said to the Praetorian quietly. The weight of his words stretched the old rope of his voice lighter still. ‘For Terra, for the Emperor. That’s why they commit and die. Rogal, that’s all they need to know. It’s all they know already.’

  ‘It still sits heavy,’ said Dorn. ‘I am going to have to order men, to their fates, knowing-‘

  A sharp thumping interrupted him. He looked down the table. Krole had tapped her armoured knuckles on the wood again to get his attention.

  ‘Mistress, what?’

  Her hands moved.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dorn. ‘There will be daemons there.’

  * * *

  On the nineteenth day of the fifth month, the north-east hem of the Imperial Palace began to vanish.

  Magnifican, the eastern and greater half of the Palace megastructure, an immense super-city in its own right, had previously been breached, by traitor forces storming east out of the Anterior bridgehead and by rabble hosts swarming up from the south-east. No one, not even the seniors on station in Bhab, openly admitted it, but Magnifican was already regarded as lost. It was non-vi. ft could no longer be protected from external attack, or held. The vast territory of its sprawling district, comprising almost two-thirds of the Palace area, was now acting as a soak, ft had become a massive urban battlefield where the loyalist forces, falling back, fought delay and denial actions in hold off the invaders, slow their inexorable advance to join the main engagements in the Anterior Barbican and face the proud gates of the Sanctum Imperialis.

  On the nineteenth, the nature of that collapse changed. Detonations came first, and firestorms followed.

  The first projectile strike consumed a street section almost a kilometre square. Large buildings at the epicentre were simply atomised, Then, a blast wave of churning flame and concussion levelled
more, block after block, shredding civic stone, granite and steel, disintegrating buildings like petals in a tempest. That missile was only the first. Its immense lire cloud, boiling with a billion sparks that seemed to hang and linger in the air, was still unfolding when the rest projectile fell, and the next, each one overlapping, explosions propagating from the first tanged point. Fire cloud blossomed beside his cloud and proud streets vanished, reduced to dust or whizzing fragments of stone. Incendiary payloads of sticky napthek and aero-solised pyrosene spewed outwards, engulfing neighbouring blocks, where buildings had survived the initial impacts. Their windows punched in like gouged eyes, they lit and were enveloped, whole boroughs and districts swept up in seas of fire thirty storeys high. A canopy of black smoke covered forty square kilometres. Ash and petrochemical waste fell twenty more beyond that. Outrush wind carried soot further still.

  Three of the Lord of Iron’s siege-breaker chiefs, warlords of the Stor-Bezashk schooled in breach-craft by Perturabo himself, had broken the walls at Boenition earlier in the day, a calamity that passed almost unnoticed because of the intense fighting in the Central and Anterior reaches. Hundreds of thousands of invaders swarmed across the mangled rubble. Labour gangs and Martian engines began to clear pathways, and slave armies hauled in the first of the massive petra-ries and mass bombards. These were the monstrous siege engines that had been employed to crack the wall and collapse the voids, but their work was not done.

  By mid-afternoon – an entirely arbitrary division of time, as the skies were as black as night at every hour – the vast engines were repositioned inside the wall line, and had begun firing. Gastraphetes, gravitic ballistas and manuballistas whipped like cyclopean crossbows, launching colossal ceramite arrows or wall-felling blocks; torsion engines and graviton onagers fired low trajectory payloads; counterweight trebuchets, accelerator mangonels and manjaniqs slung high trajectory missiles. Some hurled inert, high-density loads of ouslite or tungsten that filthy abhuman teams had to wrestle onto the sling mesh. These wrought catastrophic damage by sheer kinetic force. Many of the payloads were slabs of broken masonry from the fallen wall or the ruins of Boenition District. The traitors were recycling the city, hurling shattered pieces of the Palace back against it to break it further. Other engines flung chemical or high explosive projectiles like pyrosene mines or drums of gas/fyceline intermix that exploded, spreading greedy fires that could not be doused.

  By nightfall, which passed invisibly for it was already perpetual night and had been for weeks, the petrary units ranged inside the shattered line of Boenition had reduced the north-eastern rim of Magnifican to pulverised rubble and firestorms as large as cities.

  They were not conquering. They were razing.

  Each impact, and they were unceasing, jarred the earth, even from many kilometres away. Shards of glass and plex rained from pressure blown windows in untouched streets. Soot swam like fog. Roofs shivered, split free and fell in avalanches. Terminal cracks rent buildings from foundation to eaves.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Camba Diaz instructed.

  The streets they trod were largely empty, an oddly tranquil hinterland, like the eye of a monster storm. To the west of them, the immense roar of the Anterior warzones. To the east, the volcanic pandemonium of the razing.

  People had fled, combatants and citizens alike. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) presumed they had fled west, hoping to find some kind of sanctuary in the Sanctum Palatine. Buildings stood empty, vehicles abandoned. The sky was an acid yellow smog, and white ash fell like snow, coating every surface.

  The hulking Space Marine led them onwards, saying little. His instructions were simply: ‘Stay grouped. Fire only on my orders. Retain formations at all times, no matter what.’ They were moving north, that was Willem’s guess. From time to time, they crossed the path of recent battles: buildings punctured with shell holes, or entirely collapsed; bodies; litters of hard-round casings brass-bright on the ash-snow. A bridge destroyed, except for its central span, still miraculously suspended. The gorge of a deep underpass canyon choked with rubble like a collapsed mine. Messages on walls or doors, frantic efforts to inform families and neighbours where the occupants had gone. On Caesium Rise, four Imperial tanks, squashed flat as if something vast had crushed them underfoot, and a fifth, burned out and embedded in the wall of a manufactory, six floors up, its broken tracks hanging like intestines.

  At Traxis Arch, they found another band of stragglers from the 14th Line, forty ash-caked troopers led by two more Imperial Fists. The Imperial Fists greeted Diaz with respect, and from that, Willem decided Camba Diaz was more than just a squad warrior. He heard them call him lord.

  ‘Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile),’ said Willem. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Lex Thornal (Seventy-Seventh Europa Max),’ replied one of the men. ‘We were on Line Fourteen at Manes Place, but the engines came.’

  ‘Noise there!’ Diaz called out. ‘Keep moving.’

  * * *

  The hydrogalvanic plants at Marinus Spire had been crippled by something. Reservoir cisterns had ruptured, and trillions of tonnes of water were flowing through the streets and plazas, fast-flowing and a metre and a half deep. The water was turgid, frothy and grey. It carried debris and bodies with it, a flotsam of bloated corpses, some trailing tatters of armour. The soldiers waded and clambered across islands of rubble and scree. There was a large rockcrete embankment running to their right, but Diaz refused to let them use it as a pathway as it, in his words, ‘brought them up against the sky as targets’. They waded on, freezing, poling bodies out of their path with the butts of their weapons. Slicks of oil gleamed iridescent on the scummed surface of the flow. Ash fell like soft snow. To the east, beyond the rockcrete embankment, the sky was flooded with twisting amber light from the firestorms. They could feel the heat, but the water was freezing, and the ash snow fell unmelted. Jen Koder (22nd Kantium Hort), who had still been unable to remove her buckled helmet, sat down on the top of one of the rubble islands, and refused to go on. Willem knew her injury wasn’t survivable.

  ‘We have to leave her,’ Diaz said.

  Willem didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I can prevent her suffering further,’ said Diaz.

  ‘No, lord,’ said Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). ‘I will do it.’

  ‘No noise,’ said Diaz after a moment’s consideration. ‘A blade.’

  Willem watched Joseph slosh his way back to the mound of rubble. The rest of the party was already moving on. The inferno in the fast cast dancing, orange reflections across the floodwaters.

  Joseph reached her. She was blind. She jerked her head at the sound of him.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).’

  ‘Leave me,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want you to suffer,’ he said.

  ‘Mercy shot?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not permitted. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t want a knife,’ she said. ‘There’s no mercy in that. Or were you going throttle me, Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army)?’

  ‘I honestly do not know what I was going to do,’ he replied.

  The oddest smile crossed her blood-caked face. ‘You’re very kind,’

  she said. ‘This can’t get worse for me, but I won’t have it be worse for you. Go your way.’

  She allowed him what she was clutching in her hand.

  ‘I want it to be quick,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t been quick up till now. Go on your way. I’ll count to a hundred.’

  He could not say goodbye to her. It seemed worthless. He splashed and scrambled back to join the others. A few minutes later, as they clambered up a steep incline of debris, they heard the sharp thump of the grenade behind them. The sound of it slapped off nearby walls and rebounded along the wet pit of the street.

  Diaz look
ed at Joseph.

  ‘That was stupid,’ he said.

  ‘I’m only human, lord,’ Joseph replied.

  Diaz stared at him. It was impossible to tell what expression lay behind his glaring visor, but Joseph guessed it was a look that said ‘that’s the same thing.’

  It was stupid. Less than two streets on, drawn by the sound, the reavers found them. A Traitor Army unit in rags and furs, with skulls war-painted on their faces. They opened fire from cover along a raised colonnade. The waste-water began to splash and spray as las-bolts and hard rounds chopped into it. Two troopers were cut down, falling in clumsy splashes, then a third as he tried to run. Diaz gave the order to shoot. With no cover except the floodwater and a few atolls of rubble, the stragglers began to return fire, their lasguns blazing in sup port of the bolters wielded by the three Imperial Fists. The facade of the colonnade became ragged, chipped and scorched. Bodies twisted in the archways, slumped, slid or toppled forward into the water. The enemy fire eased. Joseph thought they had been discouraged, but they were preparing to charge. Feral figures leapt out of the archways, jumping into the water, yelling as they tried to run into the tide.

  ‘Hold ground. Selective shots. Fire,’ Diaz ordered.

  Freezing and soaked, they picked the traitors off as they lumbered through the water to get at them. Each kill-shot cut short another war cry. Joseph couldn’t bear to hear the phrase. He shot at faces and mouths to shut them up.

  The Emperor must d-

  At his side, Willem was murmuring, ‘It’s not your fault. This is not your fault.’

  It was, and it wasn’t. Hell had no rules. Whatever you did, or didn’t do, it came back to bite you.

  Some of the traitor reavers were abhuman giants. It took two or three shots to bring them down. Then a true giant emerged.

  It came through the colonnade at a run, as though it had been drawn to the gunfire and death. Its running leap took it through an archway and six or seven metres clear before it hit the water. It was still running, somehow unencumbered by the flood that was slowing the other reavers down. It kicked up sheets of spray. It was a Space marine: a Traitor Space Marine. One of the berserkers they had seen destroy Captain Tantane and his group in the first hours of retreat.