by Dan Abnett
‘He used to,’ said Heth. ‘But we’re the only ones here today.’
Thirty-Two
Ardamantua
There would be no glory. Daylight knew that now. He had been foolish to expect it and wrong to crave it. A warrior of the Adeptus Astartes did not go to war for glory. War was duty. Only duty.
He had yearned for reinstatement for such a long time. Like all the wall-brethren, passing their silent and lonely years of vigil on the Palace walls, embodying the notion of Imperial Fists resilience, he had secretly and bitterly mourned the deprivation. He had yearned for so long, even to the point, on some dark days, when he had almost wished for a threat to come to Terra, or another civil strife to ignite, just so he could defend his wall and test his mettle again.
When the call had finally and unbelievably come, he had armoured himself without hesitation and left his station on Daylight Wall to go to the side of his Chapter.
Making that journey, he hadn’t been able to help himself. He hadn’t thought of duty.
He had thought of glory.
Instead, he had found this. A slaughter, a final, miserable slaughter. In the twilight shadow of a nightmare moon-that-should-not-be, in the freezing, pitiless rain, on the blood-soaked soil of a broken, unimportant backwater world, his ancient Chapter was being cut down to the very last man. The venerable order, the illustrious heritage, the bloodline of the Primarch-Progenitor, it was all about to be lost forever. It could never be brought back.
Terra’s greatest champions were about to be rendered extinct, and the gates and walls of Eternal Terra were to be left unguarded. The enemy was already inside, terrifyingly close to the core.
Stupidity had led to this. Strategic carelessness, the vain ambitions of High Lords and the complacency of veteran warriors who should have known better and had led to this. A calamity had been mistaken for a minor crisis. An ancient and so frequently dismissed enemy had been woefully, woefully underestimated.
What’s more, no one would learn from this dire mistake, because no one would live. Terra would burn.
There would be no glory.
The orks were upon them, bestial, roaring faces in the streaming rain. They swarmed across the lakeside in their thousands, raging and howling, blowing their dismal warhorns, slamming their weapons against their shields to beat out the final heartbeats of the last few human lives. Above, low and impossible, the face on the clockwork moon howled threats at the world it was killing.
Rainwater and blood streamed off the visor of Daylight’s helm. He tightened his grip on his gladius. His ammo was spent, so he had clamped his combat shield to his left forearm to meet the foe up close and force them to pay a bitter tithe for his lifeblood.
The orks rushed in, tusks bared, spit flying from snarling lips. Daylight met them, drove his sword blade through a head, severed a limb, gutted an armoured torso. Algerin was already gone, a butchered, headless corpse on the blood-black ground. The rain was a curtain, a veil of silver, like fine chainmail. Tranquility was at his left hand, Zarathustra at his right. Together, they formed as much of a wall as they were able, stabbing and hacking, ripping green flesh and brute armour. Zarathustra’s war-spear punched through plate and leather, flesh, bone and blood. Broken mail rings and shreds of leather flew up into the rain from the blows of Tranquility’s hammer. Blood squirted, jetted.
Daylight put the edge of his gladius through a jaw and a tusk. He back-swung to open a throat, blocked an axe with his shield and stepped in to kill the owner. Too many, now. Too many. Too many to strike at. Too many to fend off. Relentless, unending, like the noise bursts, the gut-shaking roars. Daylight felt the first of the wounds, blades reaching in under his defences, around his shield, from behind. Waistline. Hip. Lower back. Nape of the neck. Upper arm. Thigh. Armour splitting. Warning alarms in his helm. Pain in his limbs. Blood in his mouth. Red lights on his visor display. Teeth clenched, he turned in time to see Tranquility fall, head all but severed by a jagged cleaver, the greenskin whooping its triumph, drenched in Space Marine blood. He heard Zarathustra roar in rage and pain. Daylight staggered. He fought. He swung his sword, even though it was broken.
He said, ‘Daylight Wall stands forever. Daylight Wall stands forever. No wall stands against it. Bring them down.’
He said it as though it still meant something. He said it as though there was anyone other than the orks left alive to hear it.
He kept on saying it until the pack of beasts tore him apart.
Thirty-Three
Ardamantua
Ship deaths lit the sky. Bright fires flared across the face of the attack moon. Some were pale green ovals of expanding light, some messier smudges of flame, drive fuel and torched munitions. A few were massive detonations that spat out expanding hoops of burning gas.
Slaughter hoped that some of them were greenskin ships, slain by the batteries of the reinforcement fleet, but he had a grim suspicion that most were the grave-pyres of valiant, outnumbered Imperial warships.
The stockade was lost. Slaughter had lost sight of Woundmaker when the west wall caved under the ork body crush. Missiles hammered in from the sky.
He swung the ancient sword of Emetris, put it through two charging greenskins, and then headed for the nearest fractured outlets of the ruined blisternest, which jutted like broken drain pipes from the mire. The rain was still heavy. Every surface shone almost phosphorescently with rebounding rain splashes.
Another ork, its face dyed crimson, swung at him. Slaughter ducked the blow, got his sword in, and cut the creature wide open. It fell back into the wet, sheeting water up as it landed.
The Imperial Fist reached the blisternest outlets. He saw a man just inside, lying where he had fallen, cut through the spine and the hip.
‘Brother!’
The dying Fist looked up. Severance, of Lotus Gate Wall.
‘Slaughter,’ he wheezed.
Slaughter tried to lift him, to patch him, but there was far too much damage, far more than even the accelerated biology of a transhuman could repair.
‘All gone,’ murmured Severance. ‘All gone.’
‘Stay with me!’ Slaughter growled.
Severance shook his head.
‘Too late for me,’ he said. He unfixed the battered teleport locator from his harness. The power light was still on.
‘Take this.’
‘It doesn’t work,’ said Slaughter.
‘Not for me. No use to me. But take it. All the while there’s hope.’
Slaughter took the locator and clipped it to his belt.
‘Thank you for the thought, brother,’ he said, ‘but I fear we are all past saving.’
Severance didn’t reply. Death had taken him.
Slaughter could hear more of the greenskins closing in. He moved on down the tunnel. Two found him there in the alien darkness, and he killed them both with his sword. Then he heard las-shots and a terrible scream.
A human scream.
The chamber used by the magos biologis was awash with blood. Major Nyman was dead, split in half by an ork’s sword. Laurentis, stabbed in the gut but not yet dead, had fallen across the precious apparatus, smashing most of it.
The ork warrior turned as Slaughter entered. It swung its sword, but Slaughter parried, deflected, and sliced the greenskin’s face off. It pitched forwards, issuing a ghastly, frothing squeal, and Slaughter finished it with a beheading cut.
Laurentis had only a few sucking breaths left in him.
‘Finished now,’ he whispered. ‘The vox just went dead and the link failed. That means the Azimuth has gone. The flagship. Lord Heth. All of them.’
‘Just us,’ said Slaughter.
‘Just you, really,’ replied the magos biologis. His breathing was very shallow.
‘We can still get out, if…’
Laurentis laughed.
‘Still trying to make light of it?’ he asked weakly. ‘We really are in trouble.’
Slaughter nodded.
Laurentis managed a half-smile. Then he closed his eyes and died.
Slaughter rose to his feet and turned, his broadsword in his fist. Orks loomed in the doorway, sniffing and growling… two of them, four, six, more…
‘Who’s first?’ asked Slaughter. ‘There’s enough for all of you bastards.’
Thirty-Four
Terra – the Imperial Palace
‘This statement must necessarily be brief,’ the recording continued. The pict quality was not sharp. It had been subjected to extreme astrotelepathic transfer and encryption, and there was a lot of distortion. It was just possible to make out the face of Lord Commander Militant Heth. There were other figures around him, though they were indistinct, and behind them, what appeared to be the bridge of a starship. The recording source kept jarring and vibrating.
‘The ork “attack moon” that I described has immense capabilities and possibly almost limitless resources. As we have no hope of outrunning the greenskin fleet, Admiral Kiran, whom I commend utterly, has taken this ship in close. We have attempted to damage the so-called attack moon with primary weapons, to no avail. It is both armoured and shielded, possibly by some form of gravitically manipulated field. It is bombarding us with crude but effective rock-mass projectiles. Our scans reveal that the moon is partly hollow, and – internally – not a sphere at all. The attack moon is simply the physical end in this location of the orks’ subspace tunnel. It is the mouth of a corridor, a conduit through which they can transport potentially unlimited reinforcements and vessels.’
On screen, Heth looked up briefly as the ship he was aboard shook wildly. The pict image blinked off for a second and then restored.
‘With the very little time and limited resources available to us, we have attempted a rapid transliteration of the broadcasts being made by the attack moon. Magos Biologis Laurentis, whom I also commend without reservation, has devised some translations which seem reliable. They are all statements issued by the apparent warboss of the ork horde. All recorded transmissions from the ork vessel, along with all of Magos Laurentis’s notes and ciphers, are attached to this communication in compressed data form. We have deduced that the orks refer to their subspace tunnel as a Waaagh! Gate. That is a reasonably close translation. The warboss refers to himself by a name that is harder to find a single, specific translation for. Depending on nuance, it seems to be “beast” or “slaughter”, or “lord that will make great slaughter”. I don’t think it matters. His intent is obvious and–’
The image blanked again. This time it took longer to return.
‘Time’s almost gone,’ said Heth when he reappeared. He had been cut by something, probably flying glass. He looked straight into the recorder source. ‘Study the files I’ve sent. Study the damned data. For the love of Terra. You need to understand. You need to be ready. The Imperial Fists are gone. They’ve wiped them out. The entire damned Chapter. We are finished here and unless you prepare yourselves you–’
The screen went blank.
‘The communique ends there, sir,’ said the aide.
Lansung nodded. He sat back and thought for a long while.
‘Send a message directly to Lord Udo. Tell him we require an emergency sitting of the High Lords immediately. Immediately.’
‘Yes, sir. Is that the whole of the Senatorum, my lord?’
‘No,’ said Lansung. ‘Just the High Lords. Just the rest of the Twelve. No others.’
‘Study the files I’ve sent,’ the uneven image of Heth was saying. ‘Study the damned data. For the love of Terra. You need to understand. You need to be ready. The Imperial Fists are gone. They’ve wiped them out. The entire damned Chapter. We are finished here and unless you prepare yourselves you–’
The screen went blank.
‘Lights up,’ Wienand said. She rose from her seat as the light levels in her private chamber intensified. She looked at her silent circle of interrogators. Despite their novitiate robes, some were far more senior than they appeared.
‘That was the latest intercept,’ she said. ‘It went directly to the Admiralty via a secure beacon, but we extracted the data-copy thanks to well-placed friends in the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. Lansung will present it, or redacted highlights of it at least, to the High Twelve in the next hour.’
She paused.
‘I think three things are self evident. One, we must act and act now, without hesitation. The crisis is as bad as anything we feared and predicted. Two, the public must not be informed of the extinction of the Imperial Fists. That is a priority matter of morale. Three, we must raise our game. There is no more time for subtlety. We knew what was coming in more detail than the Navy or any other body. We did not share that knowledge with the High Twelve because we knew that Lansung’s power bloc would make it impossible for us to direct the correct and appropriate policy. Traditional and hidebound military dogmas would have hamstrung us and delayed our ability to react. We must determine policy from this point on. We must be the actual and real root of power during this crisis and beyond, or the Imperium will not survive.’
There was silence. One of the hooded figures raised his hand.
‘What, mistress, of the rogue elements?’ he asked. ‘What of them? There are more pieces involved in this game than the main and obvious players.’
‘This is a crisis of unparalleled proportions,’ replied Wienand, ‘not a game. As for the minor pieces, they will be brought to terms, or contained. Or they will be silenced.’
‘What, mistress, of the rogue elements?’ asked the hooded interrogator sitting at the back of the chamber. ‘What of them? There are more pieces involved in this game than the main and obvious players.’
Wienand looked at her questioner carefully.
‘This is a crisis of unparalelled proportions,’ she replied, ‘not a game. As for the minor pieces, they will be brought to terms, or contained. Or they will be silenced.’
Vangorich pressed a key on his data-slate and the screen image of the Inquisitorial Representative’s private suite froze, paused.
Vangorich sat back in his chair, put the slate down, and steepled his fingers.
‘Beasts arise,’ he murmured to himself. ‘And as they arise, so must they fall.’
Thirty-Five
Terra – Tashkent Hive
It was a snowy night. Out of the steel-cold blackness, blizzards drove in and coated the spires of the vast hive as if they were a range of mountain peaks. Lights twinkled in the vertical city, numerous as the stars.
The routines of Adeptus Arbitrator Sector Overseer Esad Wire had been carefully observed for some time. His work at Monitor Station KVF usually ended at around three in the pre-dawn shift, and he would return to his habitation on Spire 33456 via an eating house in the Uchtepa District, which served food after hours.
On this particular day, there were variations. Two hours into his shift, Wire received a personal transmission via encrypted vox, a call that lasted only eight seconds, and which Wire did not contribute to. He merely listened. The nature and content of what he listened to was not possible to ascertain.
Presumably as a result of this transmission, Wire reported to his superintendent that he was ill, the unfortunate flare-up of some chronic condition. He requested, and was granted, permission to leave work early and visit the district medicae before returning to his hab.
He left the station three hours before the scheduled end of his shift, as soon as the relief overseer arrived to cover him, but he did not travel to the district medicae’s office, nor did he travel home. Instead, dressed in his long, brown leather storm coat, and carrying a small but apparently heavy bag, he went west through the Commercia District towards the Mirobod Transit Terminal. The Mirobod Terminal served the Trans-Altai maglev lines.
Approaching the terminal, Wire did not seem to be aware he was under observation or being shadowed. The exterior rail shutters had been opened, and snow was blowing in under the canopy, dusting the concourse.
Wire went down two levels and then, oddly, walked into the seedy basement section of the terminal where derelicts and low-life individuals congregated. Wire vanished briefly into the dank, concrete underlevel of support pillars, garbage and oil drum fires.
Uneasy, Kalthro decided it was necessary to act before Wire began to suspect anything. He left his vantage point, dropped down the east wall of the terminal on a micro-filament cable, and waited for Wire to emerge from the north end colonnade of the underlevel.
When the man in the long brown storm coat reappeared, Kalthro pounced. He brought the man down cleanly, broke his back, and snapped his neck.
The corpse was face down on the filthy rockcrete floor. Kalthro got up and rolled the body over.
‘You don’t need to pay a poor man to wear a thick coat on a night like this,’ said Esad Wire from behind Wienand’s agent.
Kalthro turned. He was very fast indeed. The snub-las was already in his hand. He was, as Wienand had boasted, a superlative operative, the best in the Inquisition’s employ.
But, as he turned, he was no longer facing Esad Wire, Sector Overseer, Monitor Station KVF (Arbitrator).
Beast Krule met him with a smile. He touched Kalthro’s right forearm and shattered the bones there. The snub-las dropped out of a useless hand. Then Krule put his right fist in Kalthro’s face.
It went through. Clean through. The knuckle points fractured out through the back of Kalthro’s skull, jetting tissue and blood with them under considerable pressure. The operative’s body hung off the fist, twitching. Krule jerked his hand back, and it came out gore-slick and steaming.
Kalthro crumpled onto the floor beside the dead vagrant in the brown coat. More steam rose. Blood pooled, dark and glossy. Then it began to clot and then freeze in the desperate temperatures.