by Gav Thorpe
Now he saw and knew for certain the face of his father, the only individual worthy of Corvus’s unwavering obedience. He lowered himself to one knee in deference, understanding that the stranger spoke the truth. Here was the Master of Mankind.
‘What do you call this place?’ the Emperor asked.
‘It used to be called Lycaeus,’ Corvus replied. ‘Now we know it as Deliverance.’
‘A good name,’ said the Emperor. ‘Please, rise, my son. We have much to talk about.’
And they did. Corvus withdrew from his men and took the Emperor to his quarters, an old guard station in the mid-levels of the Black Tower. Corvus sought out food and drink for his guest, ashamed at the meagre fare he could offer his father. The Emperor waved away his concerns, sitting on the rough bunk that served as a chair for the massive rebel commander.
‘Do you recognise me?’ the Emperor asked. His expression was hard to read, but Corvus thought he detected a hint of surprise behind the question. Whatever glamour had befallen the guerrillas had a lesser effect on Corvus, and the man before him was definitely the same as from his old memories.
‘As if from a dream,’ he replied.
‘Interesting,’ said the Emperor, with a smile and a nod.
They spoke about many things. Though Corvus was bursting with questions, about the Emperor, himself and the wider galaxy, he found that he did most of the talking, answering constant queries from the Emperor concerning what had taken place on Deliverance and Kiavahr. Corvus furnished him with all the information he could concerning the history of the star system and the war for freedom he had waged over recent years.
Corvus paced the room while he spoke, animated and energised. The Emperor sat on the bunk and nodded occasionally, in understanding rather than approval. In fact he showed no judgement of any kind: no condemnation or endorsement of Corvus’s actions. He listened intently to everything Corvus told him, sometimes asking exceptionally pertinent questions about the tiniest of details, wishing to absorb everything about Corvus’s life.
‘But there is one piece missing that I cannot answer,’ Corvus said, finally voicing what his heart had yearned to know since his first discovery. ‘How is it that I came to be here?’
The Emperor’s mood darkened and his face grew grim. For the first time, he took a sip from the glass of water Corvus had given to him hours earlier, eyes haunted.
‘There is another universe,’ he said. ‘It lies alongside ours, part of it but also separated. It is called the warp.’
‘I know of it,’ said Corvus. ‘Though I have not seen it, I hear that ships can use it to travel to distant stars. Some of the machines of Kiavahr are said to harness the energy of the warp.’
‘It is a universe of boundless power, and can be accessed as you say, by ships and by the minds of special men that we call psykers,’ the Emperor continued. ‘Like our galaxy, the warp is inhabited, by creatures not of flesh but thought. Sometimes they hunger for our material lives, wishing to feast on our mortality. You and your brothers were taken from me by denizens of the warp before you were ready.’
‘Brothers?’ Corvus was excited by the prospect, pushing aside the questions that the Emperor’s answer had prompted. Though he had made many friends amongst the prisoners of Lycaeus, always Corvus had been aware of his otherness, and when they had started to call him Saviour any hope of normal relationships had ended. That there were others like him filled Corvus with hope again.
‘Yes, you have brothers,’ said the Emperor, smiling at his son’s delight. ‘Seventeen of them. You are the primarchs, my finest creations.’
‘Seventeen?’ Corvus asked, confused. ‘I remember that I was number nineteen. How can that be so?’
The Emperor’s expression grew bleak, filled with deep sorrow. He looked away as he replied.
‘The other two,’ he said. ‘That is a conversation for another day.’
‘Where are my brothers now? Are they with you?’
‘You and the other primarchs were snatched from me by strange powers of the warp, thrown across the galaxy on unnatural tides. That is how you came to rest beneath a glacier on this moon. Yes, I have seen what befell you, learning your life the moment I laid eyes upon you. The rumour of you, of a magnificent being who led a rebellion here, has travelled farther than you realise, and it was word of this that attracted my attention. Your brothers, those I have found, were similarly scattered to far-flung worlds. Like you, they are all great warriors and leaders. That was my gift to you. You are supreme commanders, with intellect and physical ability unmatched by anything in the mass of humanity. I engineered you from my own genetic structure, to be my sons and my lieutenants in the Great Crusade.’
‘What is this crusade? How many of my brothers have you found?’
‘Most of them,’ replied the Emperor. ‘I have vast armies: the Legiones Astartes. As you are crafted from me, so they are created from you. The primarchs are the generals of those armies, leading humanity’s reconquest of the galaxy. The Long Night, the Age of Strife, has ended. The remnants of the old empires smoulder out in the darkness, the dying coals of humanity almost smothered by the dark. The Great Crusade fans the flames into life, bringing with it reason to drive out superstition, Enlightenment to replace barbarism. With your help, I will unite humanity and lead mankind to rule the stars.’
It was so much to take in, but Corvus knew it to be true. Not only the words of the Emperor seemed certain, the idea of what he described meshed with a much deeper feeling. Knowing he was a primarch, that he had been created to fight and to command, explained much that Corvus had never understood about himself. On a level that he understood in his spirit and was encoded into every cell of his body, Corvus knew what he was.
‘I swear my loyalty to you,’ said Corvus, sinking to one knee in front of the Emperor. He met the Emperor’s gaze and felt elation like no victory had given him before. ‘I am your son, your primarch, and your will shall be my command.’
‘That is good,’ said the Emperor. ‘I have an army waiting for you. They are the Raven Guard, highly decorated and distinguished in my campaigns already. When you are ready, you will assume command of the Legion.’
‘Am I not ready now?’ Corvus said, having been elevated and then deflated by the Emperor’s words.
‘Not yet, my son,’ said the Emperor. ‘But soon you will emerge to join your brothers and take your place at my side and at the head of the Raven Guard. First though, tell me of Kiavahr. What are your intentions?’
‘To bring peace to both the world and its moon, and to heal the wounds of the past,’ said Corvus. ‘With your help, I will succeed.’
‘Peace is the hardest goal to achieve,’ said the Emperor. ‘Victory, the cessation of war, the demilitarisation of our opponents, these we can obtain with might of arms and perseverance. Peace? That is an altogether different beast.’
Corvus frowned, but nodded slowly.
The Emperor sipped from his glass, his gaze unmoving. ‘Tell me again, then. Tell me of the wounds you and your followers inflicted upon this world, and of the peace you would bring to it with my help.’
THERE WAS PALPABLE excitement amongst the legionaries within the inner vault. Alpharius had seen many things in the service of his Legion – sights that would stay with him until he died, of strange worlds and even stranger foes – but the very mundanity of his surroundings added to their mystique. This was a place of science, the laboratory where the Emperor had set about bringing to life his vision for the galaxy.
Unnoticed by the others, Alpharius walked around the circle of incubators until he came to the one numbered 20. The last, always overlooked, his primarchs had begun their lives in this metal and glass construction. It looked the same as the others, no larger to account for the twins that had been nurtured within. Perhaps the Emperor had not intended for there to be Omegon and Alpharius. That the two had been nourished as one accounted for their strange bond, and perhaps their slighter build in comparison to their b
rother primarchs.
Had the Primogenitors of the Alpha Legion known this was where they would send their agent? Surely not, Alpharius thought. Who would have believed that this place still existed?
Everything was pristine, exactly as it had been for decades, centuries perhaps. Alpharius wondered why this place had been kept in this way. What purpose did it serve? He heard Magos Orlandriaz talking excitedly as he accessed a data terminal in the central tower. Wires snaked from the wrist of the tech-priest, plugged into a series of sockets beneath a flickering holographic runepad. A wide screen scrolled with a mass of symbols, the green light reflected in the magos’s eyes.
‘This… This is amazing,’ gushed the tech-priest. ‘So much is here. So much!’
‘What have you found?’ asked Corax, as the primarch looked over the magos’s shoulder.
‘Everything, I would say. All of the genetic files for you and your brothers. I have studied the splicing of genes and the manipulation of the same for over a hundred years and I cannot comprehend more than a fraction of this.’ The magos glanced at Corax, his strange eyes wide. ‘The root factors alone will take several years of analysis to deconstruct.’
‘We do not have years,’ said Corax. ‘Horus readies himself for his offensive. I need something that will enable me to rebuild the Raven Guard, not spawn endless theses and theories for your Martian friends.’
‘Of course,’ muttered Orlandriaz. He busied himself at the console for a while longer while Alpharius absorbed what had been said.
Corax intended to bring the Raven Guard back to full strength, that much was now clear. Alpharius did not know if such a thing was possible, but if it were, a restored Raven Guard Legion would be a serious threat to the Warmaster’s plans. The Alpha Legionnaire was confused by the possibility; the Raven Guard had been close to destruction, so what purpose would be served by allowing them to escape and cling to this lifeline?
It struck Alpharius that there was some more complex scheme at work than the simple elimination of his adopted Legion. He considered the possibilities and came to the inevitable conclusion: the Alpha Legion could do what Corax intended. If he was able to secure the secrets of the gene-tech for his primarch, his Legion would become paramount amongst those who had turned against the Emperor. He could see the sense in such a plan, and was pleased that it offered some explanation as to why the Alpha Legion had sided with Horus. The Warmaster had struck the first blow against the Emperor, but it would be the Alpha Legion who would eventually emerge from the shadows to take their rightful place.
His thoughts were interrupted by an exclamation from the magos.
‘Look at this!’ Corax leaned even closer, brow furrowed as he observed Orlandriaz’s work. ‘Here we see the derived strands, the foci divergences from the primarch material that was used by the Emperor for the first of the Legiones Astartes.’
Everyone in the chamber had heard the magos’s words. Custodians and legionaries all turned towards the tech-priest as he continued, talking more to himself than the audience.
‘It’s a masterpiece of engineering,’ Orlandriaz said. ‘Such sublime beauty encoded into the structure, yet imbued with endless potential.’
‘Speak clearly,’ said Corax. ‘What have you found?’
‘Evidence of the Emperor’s true greatness, proof of his claim to be the Omnissiah,’ exclaimed the magos. ‘New life from old life. Millions of years of evolution extracted, distilled and improved. It is the key.’
‘The key to what? You make no sense, magos,’ said Agapito. ‘What is so important?’
‘We must look for the stasis chamber,’ announced Orlandriaz, turning away from the screen. He flinched, as if he had forgotten the others around him. He looked around the chamber for a few moments before addressing himself to Corax. ‘It would take many years of deciphering these files to produce anything of direct use to you, Lord Corax. However, in the vault somewhere is a stasis cubicle, which contains the secret we require.’
The magos’s words prompted another flash of memory in the mind of Corax. He saw a cylinder, glowing with silvery light, encased by a mesh of golden wire. A sequence entered his thoughts, and the primarch tapped in the code on the holograph.
Dozens of lights lit up on the central console, flashing in sequence as Corax entered the cipher. When he tapped the last rune, the strobing lights settled into a constant gleam. New messages flickered across the screen, announcing security protocol deactivation, granting access to the console’s contents. With a puff of escaping gases, lines appeared in the central spire of the machine, which resolved into panels that extended outwards and slid down into newly-revealed recesses. Silver glowed from within as an intricate wire cradle emerged from the depths of the device, just as Corax remembered. At the heart of the mesh was a narrow cylinder half a metre high. It was encrusted with suspensor devices that lifted it from the containing web, as if it ascended on the light itself. A bluish-green fluid trembled inside, freed from the stasis field that had confined it.
‘This is the true secret of the vault,’ announced Corax. Around him, the Raven Guard, Mechanicum adepts and Custodians gathered, attention drawn by the spectacle. ‘This is the gift of the Emperor.’
‘What is it?’ asked Agapito, voice hushed.
‘The source of our existence, commander. Living genetic material used to create the primarchs.’
THOUGH HE DID not have the expertise of the Magos genetor, Corax knew enough from his own experience and the memories of the Emperor to understand the importance of the discovery. The Emperor had explained to him many years ago how the primarchs’ genetic material had been used to create the first warriors of the Legiones Astartes. His Raven Guard were his genetic sons, in a way, as all of the Legions were of their primarchs. Each of the twenty had been created by the Emperor, unique with their own strengths and weaknesses. What the Raven Guard had was the blueprint from which each of the twenty primarchs had been first derived. It was pure, for want of a better word, unchanged by the Emperor’s subsequent experiments. The perfect specimen from which to extract gene-seed for future generations of Raven Guard, or to create a whole new generation of primarchs.
‘Surely you do not intend to remove this sample from Terra?’ said Arcatus. ‘I am no magos, but I understand enough history to know that the secret of the primarchs’ genetic code cannot be allowed out of this vault. What if it were to fall into the hands of Horus?’
‘The Emperor himself led me to this place,’ replied the primarch. ‘I need no further warning, nor license, from you. It is the wish of the Emperor that I return to Deliverance to rebuild my Legion with this technology.’
‘Is it true, lord?’ asked Agapito. ‘Does this sample hold the key to the future of the Raven Guard?’
‘Yes it does,’ said Corax, smiling at the thought. ‘An untainted source of gene-seed, but more than just that. If the magos and I can unlock its secrets, we can combine its potential with that of the Raven Guard gene-code. The primarchs were created from birth, while a legionary must wait until adolescence before implantation can begin. Imagine a generation of Raven Guard that combines the code of both, the superior growth of a primarch enmeshed with the abilities of a legionary. What would normally take a generation could be accomplished in months.’
‘What about training?’ said Arcatus. ‘What about proper education in the nature of Enlightenment? A legionary is more than just an enhanced body. He is forged in mind as well as flesh. These things cannot be rushed, their implementation is as much an important part of the process as the physical changes.’
‘I did not say it would be instant,’ said Corax, annoyed by the Custodian’s negativity. ‘You still fail to understand the full possibility. At present, only the smallest percentage of candidates are suitable for gene-seed implantation. If we can use the primarch material properly, that will no longer be the case. We could take any child, from the earliest age, and accelerate their development, as mine was hastened. Any child. Our recruitmen
t pool would expand from a few tens of thousands to millions.’
‘But each primarch was crafted by the Emperor himself,’ said Agapito. ‘A labour of many years by the greatest mind of mankind. We do not have such resources, or the time.’
‘Which is why we will not be creating a new generation of primarchs,’ snapped Corax, exasperated that his commander showed such doubt. He calmed himself, realising that Agapito and the others, except perhaps for Orlandriaz, could not comprehend the technical issues involved. ‘The tech-priest will aid me in isolating those strands of the material we require, and we will then improve the Raven Guard gene-seed with that information. A blend of primarch and Legiones Astartes: a warrior superior to a legionary, yet produced on an unprecedented scale.’
‘And I say again that such a weapon cannot be allowed to leave Terra,’ said Arcatus. ‘If the Emperor had desired such a thing, he would have created it himself. There is a reason why he fashioned the gene-seed of the Legions in the way he did. Unless you think you will achieve something the Emperor could not?’
The retort that sprang to Corax’s mind stayed there as he considered the Custodian’s words. Was he allowing himself to get carried away by the prospect of rebuilding the Raven Guard? Was it even possible to achieve what he had said? Given pause, he took a deep breath, considering his answer.
‘It may be that the Emperor chose to create the gene-seed with its current limitations for good reason, but the galaxy has changed,’ said the primarch. ‘It is equally ludicrous to suggest the Emperor granted me access to this facility without knowing my full intent. He has allowed us to enter this place so that we might make use of its contents. It is the will of the Emperor that we unravel the secret of this technology and use it in the fight against Horus.’