Age of Darkness

by Christian Dunn

  The Horus Heresy

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

  Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

  Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

  As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

  Rules of Engagement

  Graham McNeill

  He wanted to weep, but the last two years had turned his heart to stone. Too much had been asked of him, too much had been lost, and he had no more sorrow left. Brothers forsaken, a world of Ultramar burned and the golden dream of galactic unity reduced to ashes. Such a singular moment in history should be mourned. It demanded tears, a rending of clothes, a tearing of hair, or, at the very least, an outburst of primal rage.

  He indulged none of these cathartic releases.

  If he allowed tears of sorrow to fall, they might never stop.

  The interior of the Arcanium was a twenty metre square cube with an arched doorway in each wall, softly lit by thick candles held aloft in iron sconces worked in the form of eagles and lions rampant. The floor was of a dark slate, and its walls were formed from bare timbers, polished and worked smooth by a plane wielded by his own hands. He remembered finding refuge here many years ago, when the incessant bickering between the senators of Macragge had become too unbearable for a boy who thrived on action and excitement.

  That boy was gone now, drowned in the blood of Konor’s murder and the greater tide of slaughter he had unleashed in the wake of that treachery. Once he had called it justice, but the passage of time gave him the perspective to recognise the truth of his motivation. Revenge was never a worthy reason to send men to war, and he had resolved to never again fall prey to its seductions. Having identified the flaw, he had taken steps to purge himself of that weakness, and the execution of Gallan had been the last time emotion guided his hand.

  He returned his attention to the book before him, hearing the bustle of the fortress beyond the lovingly crafted walls of his private sanctum. Once this place had been remote from any petitioners, built hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, but its isolation was now a thing of the past. Acres of marbled walls, glittering geodesic domes, soaring towers and perfectly proportioned structures surrounded it. An entire library had been raised up around the chamber, and though the architects and mathematicians had begged him to consider the harmonious geometry of the golden mean inherent within their plans, he had refused to allow the Arcanium to be demolished.

  He wanted to smile, recognising that perhaps Gallan’s execution hadn’t quite been the last time emotion had played a part in his decision-making process after all. But the smile refused to come, and in the face of all that occupied his thoughts now, his determination to hang on to this fragment of his youth seemed a wilfully petty thing.

  Seated at a heavy table of dark wood that filled the centre of the chamber, he read the words he had just written in the enormous tome before him. Its spine was a metre long and thick enough to enclose a book fully thirty centimetres deep. Brilliant gold leaf edged the warm leather binding, and the pages were pale vellum that still carried the scent of the beast from which it had been cut. Tightly wound script filled the leftmost page, each letter precisely formed and arranged in perfectly even lines of text.

  The work was progressing, and every day brought him closer to completion.

  It was to be his greatest work, his Magnum Opus, the undertaking for which he would be forever remembered. Some might consider such sentiment to be vanity on his part, but he knew better. This was a work that would save everything his gene-father had tried to build. Its teachings would form the foundation of what was needed to weather the coming storm. Selflessness, not pride, guided his hand as he set down decades of accumulated wisdom, each chapter and verse a fragment of his biologically encoded genius, each morsel of imparted knowledge a building block that would combine to form a work immeasurably greater than the sum of its parts.

  In the wake of the devastation unleashed on Calth, the Legion was looking to him for leadership more than ever. His warriors had suffered a grievous blow to their pride, and desperately needed to see their primogenitor. Helots brought petitions for audiences from his Chapter captains every day, but this endeavour was too important to grant such requests.

  They did not understand why he sequestered himself away from his sons, but they did not need to understand. All that was required of them was obedience, even when his orders made no sense and seemed as heretical as those that had set the galaxy ablaze.

  In all his years of service to his gene-father, he had never faced so terrible a choice.

  The Imperium was lost. Everything he knew told him so, and this betrayal was the one thing that would save the dream at its heart from extinction.

  The body of the Imperium was dying, but the ideals of its foundation could live on.

  His father would understand that, even if others would not.

  Roboute Guilliman wrote two words at the top of the right-hand page: words of treachery, words of salvation. Words to herald a new beginning.

  Imperium Secundus.

  Engagement 94

  His name was Remus Ventanus of the Ultramarines 4th Company, and he was a traitor.

  This sat ill with him, but there was little he could do to change it. The orders came directly from the primarch, and if there was one thing drilled into Ultramarines from the earliest days of their training it was that orders were always obeyed, no matter what.

  Intermittent flashes lit the mountains of Talassar with a scratchy, pale glow as bright streamers of fire dropped burning traceries like phosphor tears across the night sky. The retreat from Castra Publius had been long and gruelling, made more so by the relentless, dogged pursuit of their attackers. Like razorfins with the scent of blood in the water, the warriors of Mortarion never gave up, never let up the pressure and never, ever, stopped attacking once battle had been joined.

  It was a trait Remus had once admired.

  He had no idea how the war across the rest of Talassar went. All he knew was what the planners in the grand strategium fed him through his helmet, but they jealously guarded their secrets and were miserly when it came to distributing information.

  Eighteenth Company had held Castra Publius to the last man, long enough for the remainder of the Ultramarines to escape, falling back to pre-prepared positions raised by helots, Talassar Defence Pioneers and the monstrous construction engines of the Me
chanicum. Those engines were proving key to their strategy, and Remus was grateful the primarch had seen fit to demand a permanent presence of the Martian priesthood on each world of Ultramar before the Red Planet had fallen to the Warmaster’s allies.

  Remus pushed himself to his feet and lifted his bolter from the rocks beside him. He ran through the readiness checks and snapped home the safety, the action so ingrained it was automatic. Just like everything a warrior of the XIII Legion did. He clamped the weapon to his thigh and looked out over the landscape around him.

  The mountains of Talassar snaked across the planet’s single continent like a buckled spine, each vertebra a gnarled peak and each gap a series of corrugated valleys with hairline fractures that penetrated deep into the rock to form hidden valleys, dead-end grabens and narrow gorges whose floors never saw sunlight. It was terrain to favour the defenders, and every scenario of invasion relied upon the mountainous bulwark and its linked fortresses.

  What those scenarios hadn’t counted on was a foe as implacable as the Death Guard.

  An angled wall of compacted rubble and rapid-setting rockcrete sealed this particular valley with a series of fortified redoubts and strongpoints. Remus was no stranger to the speed and completeness with which the Mechanicum could sculpt landscapes, yet the sight before him was still incredible.

  The valley had grown wider and deeper, its flanks blasted, excavated, drilled and dug out to form the linked series of earthworks that spanned its width. He and the 4th Company had deployed from here less than half a day ago, when the valley floor had been smooth and empty, and the black, volcanic walls were coloured by hardy lichen and projecting evergreen firs. All that was gone; the once verdant highland valley now resembled a quarry that had been worked for decades. Talassar Auxilia units manned artfully wrought redoubts formed from pre-stressed slabs, and Ultramarines heavy guns occupied revetments that hadn’t been there ten hours ago.

  It had been a hard retreat, with the forward units of the Death Guard harrying them every step of the way. Remus had balked at the idea of allowing the enemy to maintain the initiative, but the new doctrine required them to give ground.

  Gathered in carefully placed groups, the three thousand Legiones Astartes of the 4th Company took their rest behind the high wall, and Remus threaded his way through them. He shivered as he passed beneath the shadow of one of the Mechanicum’s construction engines. It towered over him, longer and wider than the Gallery of Swords on Macragge; and set the earth trembling with the low bass note of its mighty engine core. Its enormous bulk was a dusty ochre colour, studded with weapon mounts, striped with hazard chevrons and stamped with monochrome representations of the Cog Mechanicum.

  His warriors were deployed behind the wall, each squad placed exactly according to the new tactical doctrines recently put in place. As part of a radical shake-up of the way the Legion was organised, a series of new regulations and orders of battle had come down from the Fortress of Hera, imposing strict guidelines upon how each warrior and squad operated within the Legion as a whole. It felt strange to devolve command autonomy to a set of predetermined strictures, but if there was anyone who could devise a tactical doctrine to meet any foe and any situation, it was Roboute Guilliman.

  He saw Sergeant Barkha at the steps leading to the fighting platform, listening to the reports from the 4th Company Scouts on the cliffs above. Of all the warriors of the Ultramarines, these warriors had the toughest time adapting to imposed rules, but such was the comprehensive nature of their new operating procedures that even the 4th Company’s irascible Head Scout, Naron Vattian, was finding it near impossible to find fault with them.

  ‘Any sign yet, sergeant?’ asked Remus.

  Barkha turned and hammered his fist to his chest, the pre-Unity salute. It felt strange to see his sergeant make such a gesture, but Remus supposed it was more appropriate than the aquila, given that they were now traitors.

  ‘Lots of activity around Castra Publius, but no sign yet that they’re on their way,’ said Barkha, his hands now ramrod straight at his side, as though he stood on a parade ground instead of a battlefield.

  ‘We’re not on Macragge, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘No need for such arch formality.’

  Barkha nodded, but his stance remained unchanged.

  ‘Standards, captain,’ replied the sergeant. ‘Just because we’re on a war footing is no reason to let them slip. That’s how this mess began after all. Standards slipped. Won’t happen on my watch.’

  ‘Is that a rebuke?’ said Remus, wiping the coarse black dust of the mountains from the azure surfaces of his battle-plate.

  ‘No, sir,’ replied Barkha, staring at a point over his right shoulder. ‘Simply a fact.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘If only the Warmaster had been attended by a naysmith like you, then this could all have been avoided.’

  ‘I was being serious, captain,’ said Barkha.

  ‘So was I,’ replied Remus, climbing the steps to the ramparts and casting his gaze down the mountains. Barkha dutifully followed him and stood at his side, ready to enact whatever order he gave. Though Remus couldn’t see them, he knew Death Guard units were probing the lower valleys, seeking the weakness in the Ultramarines defence line.

  ‘I’m no engineer, but even I can see we won’t hold this wall,’ said Barkha.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘They’ve built the wall too far out. The narrowest part of the valley is behind us.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s made the wall too long,’ said Barkha, as though unable to comprehend how his captain couldn’t see what was so obvious to him. ‘We don’t have enough warriors or heavy guns to repel a serious assault.’

  Barkha gestured over his shoulder. ‘Yaelen’s Gorge is to the south, but it’s too narrow to move heavy armour at any speed. Castra Maestor blocks the Helican Stairs to the north. This is the only viable route through our line, and the Death Guard will see that swiftly enough.’

  ‘All of what you say is true, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘Do you have a point?’

  ‘Of course. It’s almost like you want them to attack here. What I don’t understand is why we are letting them when we should be taking the fight to them.’

  ‘The Death Guard advance like a surge tide,’ said Remus. ‘If we meet them head on, their strength will sweep us away. But we pull back, drawing them ever onwards until they are thin and spent. Then we will strike them.’

  ‘This is your plan?’

  ‘No,’ said Remus. ‘It is our strategy as decreed by the primarch’s writings.’

  ‘Permission to speak freely, captain?’ asked Barkha.

  ‘Granted.’

  ‘Are we really going to play this out basing our tactics on a book?’

  ‘The primarch’s book,’ Remus reminded him.

  ‘I know, and I mean no disrespect by these questions, but can any book – even one written by a primarch – cover every tactical eventuality?’

  ‘I suppose we are about to find out,’ said Remus, as he heard chatter over the vox.

  Death Guard units were moving into the lower reaches of the valley.

  ‘Stand the men to arms, sergeant,’ ordered Remus.

  ‘Aye, captain,’ said Barkha. He saluted and turned to get the 4th Company moving.

  Remus Ventanus stared off into the distance, seeing a glitter of fires from further down the mountains. Castra Publius was gone, Ultramarines were being lost and the Death Guard were coming to destroy them.

  How had it come to this?

  The Death Guard attacked fifty-two minutes later, a brutal assault spearheaded by heavy armour and Dreadnoughts. It was a mailed fist, calculated to bludgeon the defenders into insensibility before the follow-up punch slammed home to complete their destruction. Mechanised infantry squads rumbled forwards in the wake of olive-painted
Land Raiders that hurled incandescent bolts at the defenders. Disciplined phalanxes of warriors armoured in the same livery deployed from the armoured transports and began their inexorable advance upon the Ultramarines position.

  Laser fire and bolters hammered the advancing warriors, punching holes in the advance but slowing it not at all. What little artillery they had dropped specially manufactured munitions into the enemy ranks, felling enemy squads in shrieks of light and sound. Enemy Dreadnoughts waded into the fight, weaponised arms sawing through the defenders with machine-like precision and lethality.

  Remus saw an entire squad of Ultramarines put down by two Dreadnoughts working in concert, and bellowed to his one remaining heavy weapons team to take them out. A trio of missiles leapt towards the Dreadnoughts, and one fell silent as it was struck in the flank by two warheads. The second was dealt with moments later as a multi-melta scored a direct hit on its sarcophagus.

  These were fleeting victories, bright moments in the face of overwhelming odds. The Death Guard fought like machines, driving forwards with the unthinking, unfeeling ardour of something soulless and mechanical. Remus was a warrior, a gene-crafted killer of superlative ability, but he had been created to be so much more than that. He took pride in his abilities as a warrior, relishing the chance to match his skill against another, but to see the Death Guard at war was to face an opponent to whom war was simply attrition.

  But Remus had no intention of dancing to the Death Guard’s war drums.

  Tactical feeds flickered and scrolled on his visor, casualty rates, kill-ratios, projected outcomes, and a dozen other battlefield variables. The flow of information would have left even an augmented Imperial Army Tacticus overwhelmed, but Remus’s genhanced cognitive architecture processed it in the time it took to blink.

  As the Death Guard regrouped for another assault on the walls, Remus’s eidetic memory accessed the parameters of battle as contained in the primarch’s tactical schematics. He found a match, following the logic path through its predetermined courses of action. Now was the time to pull back.