by Paul Kearney
‘Ares Thuraman is your friend, is he not, Malchai?’
‘I have no friends. I have only comrades with whom I work for the good of the Chapter, in service to the Emperor. You might want to consider doing the same.’
A cold light came into Kerne’s black eyes. ‘Do you accuse me of neglecting my duty, Reclusiarch?’
‘You do it adequately, but you are hampered by your partiality towards certain of your brethren. You indulge Brother-Sergeant Fornix to a high degree, when he should have been disciplined long ago for insubordination, perhaps even broken in rank.’
‘He saved your life!’
‘That is irrelevant.’
Kerne’s voice rose. ‘But for Fornix you would have been slaughtered like a lamb as you wept over the body of Biron Amadai. Who was guilty of irrational sentiment then, brother?’
Malchai blinked, and something twisted for a moment in his face. ‘It is true, I failed in my duties on that day. I allowed myself to be crippled by emotion. You and Fornix should have let me die then – it was what I deserved. In that moment, I failed our brotherhood utterly.’
Kerne shook his head. ‘We saved a brother Space Marine that day, who has done great service to the Chapter ever since. No one thinks the less of you for that moment of weakness, Malchai–’
‘I do. I have spent all the years since atoning for it, striving to expunge the sin of it. It is why, Jonah, I have always refused the title of Master of Sanctity. I am wholly unworthy to hold the position once held by Amadai.’
‘A man should not spend his life on his knees because he stumbled once,’ Kerne retorted.
Malchai shrugged. ‘Sophistry. The fact is that I see in Brother Fornix the same weakness which once I felt myself. He cares more for the lives of his brethren than for the mission they have been entrusted with.
‘Space Marines do not consider the possibilities of their own death when they go into battle. They think only of the orders they have been given and the most efficient way of carrying them out. All else is extraneous.
‘More than that, to begin thinking in terms of individual survival verges on heresy.’
‘You will not utter that word to me, brother. My company has the best fighting record of any in the Chapter. We have never failed to complete a mission, no matter what the cost. And we pay the price it exacts without stint.’
Malchai nodded slightly. ‘That is true. But I came on this expedition because I wanted to make sure that record remains unblemished, captain. I am not here to undermine you, but to be a necessary adjunct to your authority.’
‘If that be so, then you will refrain from voicing any of your doubts and misgivings about my command except to me, in private. I will not have my orders, or those of my officers, questioned in open forum. And that is a direct order, Malchai.’
‘An order I will obey, of course. But I question its logic. The task of a Chaplain is to steer his charges on the one true road of loyalty and orthodoxy. I mean to hold the members of this expedition to the very letter of the Codex Astartes, captain.’
‘Sometimes the Codex is not enough, in war, Malchai. There must be room for flexibility on the battlefield.’
‘That way heresy lies.’
Jonah Kerne took a step towards the Reclusiarch, eyes blazing. But his voice was very quiet as he said; ‘I told you not to use that word in relation to my company.’
‘It is not your company, captain. Mortai belongs to the Chapter, and ultimately to the Imperium and the Emperor Himself. You are merely a custodian, an artisan who helps wield the tool, for a time.
‘When a Space Marine – especially a senior Space Marine – begins to think in terms of his own ego, the denizens of the warp sit up and take notice. Only ask Brother-Librarian Kass. We are travelling towards a confrontation with the Great Enemy – creatures who once were Adeptus Astartes like us. Our discipline and our faith must be unshakeable in the face of such abominations.’
Kerne’s gauntleted fists clenched and unclenched. Malchai noted this. ‘I congratulate you on your self-control, captain. I know how hard it can be for you to restrain that temper of yours.’
The Reclusiarch set his fearsome skull-helm on his head, and there was a snake-hiss of atmospherics as it conjoined with his power armour.
‘I will go now, and with your permission, visit the troop decks. I wish to preach a sermon to Mortai while the lessons of today are still fresh in their minds. Is that acceptable to you?’
Jonah nodded mutely, not quite trusting himself to speak.
‘I will refrain from taking Brother-Sergeant Fornix aside for counsel, in deference to your orders. I leave that task to you.’
Malchai thumbed the lifter button. As the platform sped up to the ledge out of the dark, he said:
‘And I will of course be making a full report on these matters, to be sent back to Phobian on the next vox-link.’
He stepped onto the lifter platform, and Jonah Kerne watched the twin red lights of his eyes recede as the Reclusiarch disappeared, descending into the shadow below.
SIX
Hominum Fragilitatum
General Pavul Dietrich did not suffer fools gladly, which was unfortunate, since he sometimes seemed to find himself surrounded by them.
‘What do you mean, the vox is down?’ he asked with simmering impatience.
The engineer officer set a hand on the comms bench, and the stubbornly flashing red lights thereon.
‘Sir, Dardrek is offline. We no longer have any communication with our forces there.’
‘When was our last vox from them?’
‘Fourteen hours ago, general. Since then, nothing.’
‘Are we being jammed?’
‘Not that I can tell. We managed to bypass their jamming frequencies two days ago, and since then we had been getting regular reports. Colonel Brix is very reliable, sir.’
‘Thank you for pointing that out, lieutenant. You will keep trying until I say otherwise.’
‘Yes, sir.’
It was uncomfortably warm in the bunker, despite the ventilators, and with every passing day of the dry season it grew hotter.
Ras Hanem was a bleak world which had once, by all accounts, been beautiful. Several thousand years of Imperial occupation had seen the tropical forests felled, the rivers drained and the savannahs polluted. Save for the domed enclaves where intensive agriculture was pursued, the planet was now a sand-swept wasteland.
But below the sun-baked surface of the world the true treasure of Ras Hanem had been exploited for generations. Palladium, uranium, and above all adamantium ores were present in the guts of the planet in bright-seamed abundance. They had drawn the Imperium here, and led to the construction of massive armaments manufactoria. The Departmento Munitorum rated Ras Hanem as a priority asset, to be defended at all costs, and to its voice was added that of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
On this planet the chassis and armour plating of Titans were designed and forged, to be taken off-world in heavily escorted tranports to Cypra Mundi, the capital of the entire sector. On this planet, giants were born.
On this planet, I sit, waiting for the hammer to fall, Dietrich thought grimly.
‘Dardrek is gone,’ Commissar Von Arnim said. ‘That must be assumed.’
‘If it is,’ Dietrich grunted, ‘then they didn’t make much of a fight of it. Fourteen hours ago the planet was only just reporting the arrival of the enemy fleet. There was a full regiment under Brix, Cadian trained.’
The commissar took off his peaked cap and wiped his forehead. He was lean as a thorn, with a face so heavily lined it looked as though someone had whittled it out with a knife. His eyes were pale as rockcrete, and held about as much softness.
‘Dardrek is only three days away. They are taking down the system world by world, general.’
‘And leaving us until the last. Well, there’s honour in that I suppose. We have a timetable now, Ismail. We must keep to it.’
Three days. Dietrich shook his head. He had
counted on more. The outer planets had fallen far too quickly.
‘Let’s walk outside. It’s too damned warm in here, and I’m sick of breathing other men’s air.’
The bunker was deep buried, part of a huge subterranean complex which was the size of a moderate town. Home to thousands of Administratum servants, servitors and military personnel, it was designed to withstand a direct atomic strike. It was also humid, crowded, and stinking, the condensation running in streams down the ferrocrete walls and the ventilation systems never quite adequate. A stone jungle, Dietrich thought it seemed, full of too many useless mouths. When real war came to this world, he would leave it behind gladly.
Above their heads, fifty million more people were enclosed within the circuit of the sprawling blast-walls. In manufactoria and atmosphere domes and soaring hive-scrapers the greatest concentration of humanity in the entire system lived and died. This was the teeming metropolis of Askai, capital of Ras Hanem, and chief city of the Kargad System.
A place which Dietrich had come to know and loathe intimately in the few months he had been here.
The heat blasted them as the vault doors opened, a malevolent dust-choked wind which made Commissar Von Arnim utter a swift curse and tug at the lapels of his leather overcoat. Dietrich sucked the hot air deep into his lungs, even as it dried the sweat on his face to a salty powder. He had been born on a desert planet on the other side of the Segmentum Obscurus, and this oven-bright atmosphere reminded him of his childhood.
Another reason to hate it.
‘We must brief the governor,’ Von Arnim said.
‘Protocol – yes I suppose we must, for all the good it’ll do. It never fails to amaze me, Ismail, how such mediocrity rises so high within the Imperial Administratum. Do you know what he was doing this morning? Designing a new uniform for his bodyguard. So important was this to him that he kept me kicking my heels for half an hour in his anteroom, being stared at by boys in scarlet tunics with lasguns as big as themselves. Soldiers! They still had their mother’s milk on their mouths.’
‘The Imperium decided to continue with the hierarchy it found when the planet was brought into compliance,’ the commissar said in a tired tone that intimated at the repetition of this conversation. ‘Riedling’s family have been rulers here for thousands of years, and it was not thought necessary to disrupt that tradition.’
‘There will be disruption aplenty in the next few weeks, and that painted ass will no doubt contribute to it,’ Dietrich snarled. He spat, his cotton-dry mouth producing a white gobbet of foam which the wind took away. ‘No matter. The thing is on our doorsteps now, and there will be no more politicking – just a soldier’s fight. We must have an orders group this evening, all heads of department–’
‘Including the Administratum?’
‘Damn it, yes. It’s their planet, after all. Were it not for that damned warp storm we wouldn’t be here at all.’
Von Arnim pursed his thin lips. ‘Perhaps now is the time to implement the course of action we discussed earlier, general.’
‘Martial law? I’d love to. But according to regulations I can only do so with Riedling’s cooperation. We are not yet under attack, and until the fighting begins my position is unclear. I command a regiment, but Marshal Veigh is leader of all the home-grown forces: five divisions.’
‘They are not the Imperial Guard,’ Von Arnim said with a sneer of contempt that made Dietrich smile.
‘I know, my friend. But remember, I was not ordered here to take command. It is mere happenstance that the 387th is on Ras Hanem at this time. I have been ordered to cooperate with the planetary authorities, not supplant them.’
‘When the bolts begin to fly, they will appoint you commander-in-chief, or I will know the reason why,’ Von Arnim said. ‘This world is too important to lose, and the 387th is by far the strongest formation upon it. There are precedents, general – I have made sure of it.’
‘Good. I should hate to lose my head to the Adeptus Arbites before I lose it to the cultists.’
‘You jest, so I shall let that comment go.’
‘Forgive me, Ismail, sometimes flippancy is all that stops me from tearing my hair out.’
‘What hair?’ Von Arnim asked, and Dietrich snorted with laughter, running one hand over his smooth scalp.
The sandstorms of the last few days had died down to a brown haze along the horizon, and there was even a hint of blue at the apex of the sky. Pollutants and dust so fogged the atmosphere of Ras Hanem that it was a rare thing to see, and Dietrich stared at it as the transport took him over the teeming bulk of the city towards the towering cloud that was the citadel, to the north-east.
To his right, four kilometres away, was the deep channel of the Koi River. In what passed for Ras Hanem’s wet season it would run with ochre-coloured water a metre deep and a kilometre wide, hugging the ravines and deep draws of the western bank, but now it was as dry as Dietrich’s throat, a wide, cracked, flat-bottomed valley with the cliff of the city’s blast-walls rearing up over it.
It was spanned by three bridges of graceful swooping sandstone which were millennia old, testament to a time when the river had existed in more than name. Beyond them was a sere yellow plain which stretched for dozens of kilometres to the east, until it was brought up short by the first rumpled foothills of the Koi-Niro Mountains.
It was under those mountains that the mineral wealth of Ras Hanem lay, buried deep in the bedrock of the planet. The mineworkings went down five kilometres, and buried highways now connected them to the city itself, rendering the ancient bridges redundant.
Closer to, the bulk of Askai itself was inelegant, ill-thought-out and badly designed. The city had formed along the banks of the Koi over many centuries of ad-hoc building, and sprawled in an ungainly corridor for over fifty kilometres. In the last millennium the Imperium’s engineers had, in a gargantuan feat, encircled all of this long snake of urban crush with two-hundred-metre-high blast-walls of reinforced ferrocrete, but in the years since, the city had continued to grow, and now whole districts lay beyond those walls; the famed adamantium gates of Askai had not been closed in living memory. They had become artefacts in their own right, emblazoned with the sun and swords of the Riedling family, and blessed time and again by priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, who revered them for their inviolability and ancient workmanship.
A congregation of the tech-priests were working on the gate mechanisms even now, trying to get the damned things to work.
An acrid cloud enveloped Dietrich for a moment and he cursed, while his pilot muttered apologies over the speeder’s vox.
‘Sorry, general, it’s hard to avoid over this part of the city.’
‘Just get us through it.’
The thick columns of black smoke rose from the foundries of the manufactoria day and night. The Imperial factoria employed eight million people in this city alone, and the Armaments District was almost a city unto itself, with its own inner walls and fortifications, its hive-slums and refectories, all supplied by a deep aquifer which ran under Askai in parallel with the Koi River.
Dietrich had lobbied for some of the manufactoria to switch to shell production for his tanks and artillery batteries, but so far the governor had refused, citing Administratum requirements and deadlines.
Perhaps the news, or rather the silence, from Dardrek, would reorder Riedling’s sense of priorities. Dietrich fervently hoped so. His regiment had enough of its own ammunition for one good engagement, no more.
We’re not even supposed to be here, he raged to himself. Were it not for the warp snaring our transports, we’d be in the middle of the Wendakhen campaign right now, fighting as part of the division.
He rubbed the smarting smoke and sand out of his eyes. Well, beggars would ride, if wishes were horses.
They passed the Armaments District, and ahead of them the tall shade of the citadel loomed out of the brown haze. At its foot was the spaceport, around which his regiment was encamped for the moment. He
could just make out the long lines of vehicles parked neatly on the borders of the landing-fields, and the sight of them lifted his spirits. He had not commanded the 387th long, but they were a veteran formation, recently brought up to full strength for the shift to Wendakhen, and what he had seen of them thus far pleased him greatly.
By the Throne, he vowed, it will take more than fourteen hours to silence this army.
‘On final approach. Landing in thirty seconds,’ the pilot said.
They were flying into the face of a mountain, it seemed. The citadel was an immense structure, a fortress half a kilometre high that was studded with brutal gun-emplacements and girded with blast-walls a hundred metres thick. On its summit, the governor’s palace caught the sun above the smog for a moment, a glint of gold on the gilded tiles of its spires and towers.
There was no time-killing in the anteroom this time. Dietrich was ushered into the audience hall without delay, and found himself waylaid by the chamberlain as soon as he was through the doors.
‘General, the governor is in his conference room with his captains. I am to lead you straight in.’
Gardias the Chamberlain was a tall, upright old man with the bearing of a soldier, one of the few on the governor’s staff that Dietrich felt any modicum of respect for. He followed him past the scarlet-clad bodyguards sweating along the sides of the hall to a door near the dais at its end, the hobnails in his worn leather boots echoing loud upon marble. There were several score others in the hall, courtiers and administrators and hangers-on, some of whom he recognised, all of whom he ignored.
‘General!’ As Gardias retreated, closing the door behind him, so Lord Riedling, Planetary Governor of Ras Hanem, came forward, holding out one hand and smiling widely as though Dietrich were an old friend he had not seen in years. He had the dissembler’s gift for false bonhomie, and shook Dietrich’s gloved fist with a fine relish. Dietrich bowed slightly in response, and said nothing. He saw that the news he had meant to deliver had run ahead of him.