The order was given, the ships moved.
Across the VI Legion fleet, every ship fired up low-burn engines and sent void shields shimmering down snarl-edged flanks. Escorts raced ahead, engines blazing, machine-souls eager for the hunt. The true giants lumbered in their wake, wallowing as they came about before gunning drive-trains into life.
The shoal of sleet-grey ships spread out, slotting into assault formations. Fire-angles were established in all directions, a three-dimensional sphere of destruction spreading from the centre. The rust-red bloom of the nebula suddenly glowed with a thousand points of intensity, swiftly extinguished as the fleet pulled up into attack speed.
Ahead of them, thousands of kilometres distant and out of unaugmented visual range, the Alpha Legion did the same. Their vessels were similarly gargantuan, similarly bristling with weaponry of almost absurdly destructive potential. Some vessels were adorned with new Legion symbols – edged with sapphire and emerald, the sigil of the striking hydra. Others still bore the colours of fidelity, crowned with the old chain-linked Alpha-Omega device. As ever with the XX Legion, nothing had been entirely settled. Everything was still in flux.
Bjorn watched the enemy from the bridge of the Helridder, studying their formation, noting the patterns. The two fleets still weren’t visible to one another in the realview ports – his images were the grainy, poorly resolved feeds from long-range augurs.
He didn’t feel any particular emotion. Prospero had been the same – a task, much as countless others that the Wolves had been given; something to be carried out efficiently. Only later had the dull sense of wrongness fallen over them.
We are outgunned, he thought.
He performed rough calculations in his head and knew that the strategeos in the flagship would be reaching the same conclusion. They would already know how many more ships the Alpha Legion possessed and how quickly their lethal complements could be brought to bear.
‘We are outgunned,’ said Godsmote, just a fraction behind, standing next to Bjorn on the command plinth of the bridge with the rest of the pack. He was in his armour, the dirty grey of it streaked with bloodstains and ritual kill-marks, and his voice came tinnily from behind his helm’s death mask.
‘Looks that way,’ agreed Bjorn, studying the incoming feeds.
‘Wise to meet them head-on?’
‘Probably not.’
Godsmote grunted. No use questioning a decision once it had been made, and the Wolf King hadn’t been in any mood to back down from another fight no matter how badly mauled they were.
We are a blunted blade, thought Bjorn bleakly. We have been used too much.
All Legions had taken casualties during the Great Crusade, but some assignments had been bloodier than others. The Wolves numbers had never been among the highest, a feature exacerbated by their aggressive drive to limit recruitment to Fenris, and their constant deployment – usually self-appointed – to some of the most arduous warzones of the campaign. Prospero had hurt them further, perhaps more than they truly understood.
‘I wondered if it would become easier,’ Bjorn mused.
‘If what would?’ asked Godsmote.
‘Killing another Legion. Killing kinsmen.’
‘We’re not there yet.’
‘Yes, we are.’
Bjorn already saw how it would play out: comms would be transmitted from the Hrafnkel to the Alpha Legion flagship demanding that they stand down. No answer would come back. The Space Wolves would hold fire until the last moment, right up until the range of the main lances had been reached, issuing demand after demand. Then the killing would begin.
Helridder would play its part. It was built for fast-attacks: agile and weapon-heavy, sparsely crewed and with scant berthing for anything but fuel and ammunition. The entire legionary complement on board was six. A lean pack, but one in command of an agile hunter-killer.
‘They’re moving to an attack spread,’ noted Godsmote, glancing at the screens.
‘Strange, isn’t it?’ Bjorn watched the pulses of green light crawl across his tactical readout, creeping towards one another with deceptive slowness – the velocities were now incredible. ‘What do you know of the Alpha Legion?’
‘Not a lot,’ said Godsmote.
‘Ever heard of them mounting a major fleet action?’
Godsmote paused. ‘Should I have?’
Bjorn shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard of it. Not really what they’re known for.’
To the extent that anything was known about the Alpha Legion, it concerned subtlety, subterfuge and infiltration. Guilliman, famously, thought little of them. Russ, less famously, thought much the same. They didn’t like getting their gauntlets bloody, it was said.
Once the news had come in from Isstvan V, once it had been given time to settle, some treacheries had seemed more obvious than others. The World Eaters he could understand. The Iron Warriors similarly, and so too Mortarion’s strange Death Guard.
But the Alpha Legion. Something about their switch of allegiance bothered him. It felt… unsound.
‘Why are they here, doing this?’ Bjorn asked, speaking as much to himself as to Godsmote.
Godsmote smiled bleakly. ‘Looks obvious.’
Bjorn didn’t smile. Even before losing his hand to the daemon he had never smiled much – now, less than ever. He knew that the packs laughed about it, poking fun at his unremitting seriousness, but they could laugh as much as they wanted.
He felt a weight on his soul, sometimes – like an anvil resting on his chest. He’d sit on the edge of the fire-circle while the others sang or recited, listening but not speaking. For a long time he’d not envisioned himself becoming an integral part of the Legion, just one of its fringe elements, destined to die in some blood-drenched campaign on some world or other.
Now that feeling had left him. Oddly, just as everything changed, his old sullen desire for withdrawal had ebbed, replaced by something else. After time long spent on the fringes, Prospero had begun to draw him into the Rout’s heart. The primarch knew his name now. The sagas mentioned him, guaranteeing a kind of immortality in the cold halls of the Aett. It felt as if the centre of gravity had shifted, dragging him closer towards the savage embrace of a Legion whose temper had always contrasted so badly with his own.
‘It is not obvious,’ said Bjorn. ‘Not to me. There are mysteries here.’
The lights on the bridge began to lower. From somewhere far below a warning chime sounded. Guns were being hauled into position, firing solutions were being calculated.
Far ahead, in a slender line on the very edge of vision, the first pinpricks of light from the enemy positions crept into the realviewers, like a string of jewels slung against the void.
‘Well, that may be,’ breathed Godsmote, his voice already heavy with relish. ‘But here they come, and for myself I wish only to discover how they die.’
Yesugei leaned closer to the viewport and watched the plains of Chogoris fall away into a pale blur. For a few moments after takeoff he’d been able to see the Khum Karta monastery laid out below him in all its sprawling glory – the old towers of the Khitan, the training grounds, the gardens ripe with plum trees. Gold pinnacles had glinted in the sunlight. Soul-pennants had snapped in the stiff breeze.
Then it was gone, lost in a haze of pale greens and browns. He watched the Altak stretch out, spreading out across the continental mass, devouring everything. Only a few wisps of cloud scudded across the emptiness, ephemeral against the vastness.
All worlds looked much the same from space. The colours varied, but the real differences were all hidden in ground level details – the smells, the feel of the gravity, the taste of the wind. Yesugei had trod upon a hundred different worlds and none had ever really resembled another. Humanity had spread itself across a bewilderingly wide range of habitats, conquering each one with the remorseless patience and ingenuity that was, so he had come to learn, the mark of the species.
Soon Chogoris ceased to look different from any
other planet – a blank sphere hanging in the uniform blankness of starlit vacuum, its distinctiveness lost.
Yesugei turned away from the viewport and settled back in his chair. He never enjoyed leaving the home world. Before the Master of Mankind had arrived and brought the Great Crusade to them, Yesugei had been quite content with the limits placed upon them by a single world. They had enemies to fight, kingdoms to lay low, prey to hunt; he had never wanted for more than that. The Khan had been the same.
He remembered talking to him once as the moons rose, back in the old days when Khum Karta had been a tenth the size and built of red-tinged stone rather than underpinned by rockcrete and steel.
‘What will we do when all enemies are conquered?’ Yesugei had asked, feeling warm dusk breeze against his skin.
The Khan stood on the parapet, his long, lean frame proud against the lowering light. By then he was the master of the whole continental mass, the conqueror of the Khin-zan, the Qo, the Khitan, the Nyomen and a hundred other nations.
‘Let them go again,’ he said calmly. He flexed his fingers against the red balustrade. ‘I have no desire to become their master.’
Yesugei laughed. ‘Then why conquer at all?’
‘Because we must.’ The Khan looked up into the heavens. Perhaps he knew what would be coming soon, the arrival that would change everything. ‘We hunt, because we are hunters.’ His expression became sour. ‘There is no point in saying, This is it, this is the end, you have achieved what you set out to do. The world will not remain still around you. You move with it, or you are swept away.’
Yesugei looked up at his master. The Khan’s physicality had never lost its power to impress. Everything about him was demanding. Some of the men of the ordu were already calling him khan tengri, tantamount to bestowing godhood. Yesugei couldn’t blame them. They’d all seen what he was capable of.
‘I do not know if I believe that,’ Yesugei said lightly. ‘You rule the land from here to the ocean. You will not give it up.’
The Khan turned his eyes on Yesugei. Those eyes, too, never lost their terrible power. Yesugei remembered when he’d first seen them, recovering in a fire-warmed ger after the powers he’d been born with had nearly killed him. They were like a god’s eyes – deep-set, unconsciously scrutinising. Pitiless.
‘I will, one day,’ the Khan said softly. ‘Do you know what I fear, Targutai?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Only beasts fear nothing.’
Yesugei smiled. ‘Decrepitude, then.’
The Khan nodded. ‘You do know me, zadyin arga.’ He looked back out over the plains. ‘Decay is the enemy. Every emperor we have deposed has been fat. They reached the limits of their power and sat back on golden thrones, satisfied with what they had done when they still had vigour. By the time we came for them, they could barely lift a tulwar.’
‘You will not become fat,’ observed Yesugei. ‘I do not think you are capable of it.’
The Khan shrugged. ‘My body, perhaps not, but my mind?’ He seemed to shudder, not from the cold – it was still warm – but from a lack of motion. Yesugei had noticed it before: he needed to be moving, out on the saddle, chasing something down. ‘There is only one unforgivable lie. That is the lie that says, This is the end, you are the conqueror, you have achieved it and now all that remains is to build walls higher and shelter behind them. Now, the lie says, the world is safe.’
The Khan shook his head. ‘All emperors are liars, Targutai. Safe.’ He spat on the balustrade. ‘No fouler word exists.’
That exchange had been over a hundred and forty years ago. Since then, of course, everything had changed, but Yesugei had never forgotten it. Sometimes he wondered whether he might ask the Khan about it again, seeing if he had revised his views. He doubted it: the Khan’s moods and temper seemed burned into him, like the Talskar imprint on his left cheek.
The lander neared its destination, and banked around for the final approach. As the starfield wheeled past the viewports, Yesugei caught a glimpse of the transport he’d requisitioned: the Legion frigate Sickle Moon, its spear-shaped profile standing starkly, picked out by the white livery and gold-red trim. The lightning-strike sigil, the mark of the khans for a thousand years, had been painted proudly along the forward flanks.
It looked fast. That was good – it would need to be.
The lander swept up towards the frigate’s dorsal hangar, guided by twin lines of strobing lumens. Once touched down inside, Yesugei stirred himself, got up and walked down to the lander’s embarkation ramp. He took a moment to smooth his robes and collect his staff before emerging out into the hangar – appearances were important, and despite everything that had happened the Legion still placed store in its Stormseers.
The lander’s outer doors hissed open. The hangar was lit brightly, as was usual on V Legion warships. Every surface was highly polished, glistening softly under hanging lumens. The interior smelt of steel polish, engine oil and falang, the Khitan ceremonial incense. Two lines of White Scars stood to attention on either side of the ramp, clasping their fists across their chest in the ritual greeting.
Still they respect us, even after all this foolishness, thought Yesugei as he descended. He found the display of respect touching. I am glad to belong to such a Legion.
The ship’s commander inclined his head as Yesugei approached.
‘Welcome, zadyin arga,’ he said. ‘You honour us with your presence.’
Yesugei bowed in turn. ‘I have taken you away from important duties.’
‘You have saved us from tedium. We are happy to have you.’
The two of them walked together towards the hangar’s exit. Behind them servitors began to unload the lander, hauling grav-crates from the cargo bay.
‘So can you get me to Chondax?’ asked Yesugei.
The commander gave an equivocal gesture. ‘We will try, but you know about the storms. The Navigator says nothing can be promised.’
‘When has a Navigator ever said different?’
‘That is true.’
‘And you have me with you now,’ added Yesugei. ‘It has been a while since I peered behind the mask of heaven.’
‘This is a good ship,’ said the commander firmly. ‘A harmonious ship. Twenty major engagements since first launch and still harmonious.’
That was reassuring. Chogorian captains had taken all sorts of esoteric concepts up into the void with them since their sudden and enforced leap in technological progress, and ancient ideals of harmony and balance still counted for a great deal.
They reached the far end of the hangar and Yesugei paused before a set of double doors. ‘What is your name, commander?’ he asked.
‘Lushan.’
‘Khitan?’
‘Yes, from Xiam.’
‘From the beginning, then, Lushan, let there be no secrets between us. This turmoil is not natural. I do not understand its origin, but it makes our star-speakers deaf and dumb, it silences the galaxy and it masks the primarch. Defying it will certainly be dangerous. I say this only so you are aware.’
‘All of us are prepared,’ said Lushan, looking perfectly unconcerned. ‘We can head out to the jump point on your command.’
‘Good,’ said Yesugei, opening the doors with a gesture. ‘Then do so now. My dreams have been troubled – until I am reunited with the Khagan I fear they will become worse.’ He gave the commander a weary look. ‘And it would be nice to have some sleep.’
Torghun strode towards the Starspear’s command deck. He was curious. It wasn’t common for Jemulan to call the khans together. The noyan-khan preferred to run his fiefdom in the Chogorian manner: loose control from the centre, maximum autonomy extended to the various brotherhoods. Now, though, the order had come in and his commanders were hastening to comply. Those stationed on other vessels had taken shuttles over to the Starspear; some still located in the outlying regions of the cluster had arranged to be present by secure lithocast.
‘What do you think?’ asked Ma
nju, his lieutenant, walking alongside him. His face, light-complexioned and framed by blond hair, was creased with uncertainty. It was a markedly youthful face for a Space Marine, one upon which the Legion-scar looked oddly out of place.
‘No idea,’ said Torghun. He’d heard rumours that the astropathic veil was beginning to fracture, that some messages were beginning to get through at last, though nothing firm enough to place any confidence in.
‘The new assignment?’ offered Manju, his tone giving away his hope.
‘It would be about time.’
As was typical, the White Scars straggling Legion structure made coordination difficult – many brotherhoods were still engaged in the last gasps of xenos cleansing out in the far reaches. Others had been in their ships for weeks, hanging in orbit over the White World with nothing to do but practise their bladecraft in cages until fresh orders were issued from the Swordstorm.
The Chogorians seemed happy enough with that. They were used to their inscrutable primarch and his impulsive decision-making. The Terrans took it harder, at least those who hadn’t long resigned themselves to the Legion’s haphazard methods of command and control.
‘I thought they’d improved things,’ said Manju. ‘The Terran they brought in.’
‘She’s just one woman,’ said Torghun, smiling wryly. ‘She can’t change it all.’
They passed from the corridors into a capacious antechamber crowned with a high dome of glittering crystal. Fleet attendants bustled across the floor clutching data-slates, stepping clear of drone-like servitors in their paths. On the far wall was a Legion lightning-strike inlaid in alabaster and slate. The sigil of the Horde of the Earth stood next to it, a stylised mountain-peak modelled, so Torghun had been told, on Temudan, one of the holy peaks of the Legion’s home world.
Below the sigils were the huge doors of blast-grade adamantium that led into Jemulan’s audience chamber. Two warriors of his keshig stood on either side of the entrance carrying heavy glaives. Their faces were hidden behind sloping grilles of Mark III power armour, the helms crested with horsehair plumes dyed black.
Horus Heresy: Scars Page 7