The Lost and the Damned (The Horus Heresy Siege of Terra Book 2)

The Lost and the Damned (The Horus Heresy Siege of Terra Book 2) Page 19

by Guy Haley

  He had his own clade of lesser servants. Some of the disciples of Sota-Nul, such as Ardim Protos, had no followers of their own, whereas the likes of Illivia Epta kept legions of them. For Pent, eight followers were sufficient. Not too many to control, enough to be useful, and with the additional bonus of flattering Nul through imitation. The eight of them served him as ship crew, engineers, advisers, agents and all other things.

  said Acolyte Penta-7, who hunched low over the auspex scopes cramming the forwards portion of the command dome.

  Pent blurted. He used direct voxwave communication, always. The body he wore had a mouth, but it was not his own. Pent’s preferred disciplines were those of biomancy and cybertheurgy. He kept a stable of bodies of his own design to wear. He’d chosen his current one for its combat efficacy. It was large, heavily muscled, being vat-grown from abhuman gene stock, and heavily modified with bionics. Not that he intended to do any fighting; he wore it for appearance’s sake.

  Outwardly, he showed no sign of fear. Within his suit of flesh, it was a different story. Pent was little more than a brain in a jar hidden in the armoured chest cavity of his host. He had no face of his own to display worry or similar emotions, while that of his temporary body was immobile. Pent found joy in manipulating biological matter, but he saw no need for the humanity in them; the biological was merely another form of machine. The face had been cured upon the skull and painted brightly so that it looked like a carnival figure, and in whose permanently open mouth Pent’s glowing sensor array hid. But a magos can betray himself in other ways than an unguarded scowl or frown, and Pent kept a tight rein on his external links in case an involuntarily expelled data packet revealed his dismay.

  The command, delivered as electric pulses, was transmitted instantaneously via augmitter wired into his host’s vestigial brainstem. The ship shook when the order was executed. Air is remarkably hard and hot when encountered from the void, and the shields treated it as they would any other threat, shunting it partially into the warp.

  The violence of the reaction was alarming. The ship dropped by sudden degrees as the voids annihilated huge pockets of atmosphere, and accelerated into the lacuna, then decelerated abruptly when air rushed back in.

  An outside observer would have seen Pent in his grotesque body and his eight servants, all augmented to more or less horrific degrees, working quietly but for a gentle bleeping passing between them. The peacefulness of the data exchange belied the ferocious argument it conveyed.

  spoke Acolyte Penta-1.

  rejoined Acolyte Penta-2.

  said Penta-5, who was female once, but had transformed herself into a waving shock of metal tentacles arranged around a metal box.

  The ship lurched to the side. External gravity was taking hold, throwing the grav-plating’s effects out of true. Miniature gravitic vortices tugged at the adepts’ black robes.

  commanded Clain Pent.

  Attacks from the ground were coming in hard. Machines sang their hosannas of alarm as the first of the void generators burnt out. Immediately, servitors detached themselves from deep-set alcoves and clomped off the bridge to enact repairs. Pent reviewed the damage in his internal data-feeds. They were wasting their time.

  buzzed Acolyte Penta-3.

  By the time Penta-3 had finished, the next hit slammed home.

  demanded Pent. Fear suppressant swirled into the fluids of his cerebrarium, dulling the panic.

  responded Acolyte Penta-7.

  Pent’s brain twitched. Well-protected noospheres were the bane of the Mechanicum’s war. He cursed the day Koriel Zeth had conceived them. Though the one at Calth had been easily corrupted, the slaves of the Emperor had learned quickly. When any lesser system could be subverted, a noosphere on guard was nigh impossible to breach.

  Like Dorn’s walls.

  He was reminded there would be no lesser systems in the battle below, whether in the warp, the materium or the electronic ether world of machines. They were assailing the Palace of the Emperor Himself.

  Another thrill of fear, more deeply felt this time, shook his amygdala. He really ought to have it removed.

 

  said Penta-4. Thrusters fired on the upper surface of the ark, pushing it faster into Terra’s churning atmosphere.

  There were no windows on the Pent-Ark. They were weaknesses. Pent was in full agreement with the primarch Perturabo on that. Views of the exterior were displayed via hololithic representation and pure-data displays comprised of abstract symbols. Less dramatic to view, perhaps, but so much more efficient.

  Penta-7 reported.

  So unfair, thought Pent. The ark ships of the other seven disciples were also coming down, and all of them were screened by fleet assault. Why was he being singled out? He would petition the lords of the warp for more favourable luck after they landed.

 

  If they landed.

  The Pent-Ark shook, flinging the adepts about in their restraints. The reactors warbled at having to increase their power output, but the ship stabilised.

  Penta-7 reported.

  Penta-3 added.

  Penta-2 code-blurted. A pause of several microseconds had Clain Pent fearing the worst. He’d always had an active imagination. During battle that was a curse.

  Penta-2 finally reported.

 

  ‘Show me Terra. I wish to see our target.’ This time Clain Pent spoke aloud in the standard Gothic, his rasping voice emanating from a voxmitter stapled to his host’s flesh. An indulgence, but it seemed appropriate to the occasion.

  Penta-2 responded.

  The middle of the room vanished, replaced by a view of the ground. The last streamers of ash cloud smothering Terra’s skies wriggled past the external augurs, giving Pent a view of his destination. He was looking directly down, but the image was presented vertically, so that it appeared, from Pent’s point of view, as if he were running towards it. Back when he had such things as a vestibular system, effects like that had made him feel mightily nauseous. Thankfully, such weaknesses were far behind him.

  As a biologian, Pent was apt to draw comparisons with fauna. From above, the Palace resembled a chelonian beast. He saw the inner precincts, isolated from the main body of the city behind the edifice of the Lion’s Gate, as a head extended on a neck. Being roughly circular and several times larger than the Sanctum Imperialis, the other Palace districts resembled the great shield of a turtle’s shell.

  The impression was fleeting. The Pent-Ark was coming down to the east, near the Helios Gate in the Dayligh
t Wall, and on a parallel with the Eternity Wall space port. As the ship neared the ground, perspective shifted, and Pent’s view of the Palace as a whole was lost.

  Thousands of fires burned on a cratered plain fronting the eastern walls. Defensive lines wriggled their way across the terrain, like the marbling of fat in meat. Flights of attack ships from both sides swarmed thickly over the battlefield.

  he said, his thoughts highlighting the fortification on the hololith. Thread-thin from that altitude, it was rapidly thickening into significance.

  Idle curiosity led him to superimpose old orbital views over the scene – first, the old Himalazian mountains and valleys, then over that the artificial plain the Emperor had levelled around His sprawling creation. After millions of years of stasis, the area had gone from the natural repetition of geoforms to rigidly imposed order to the void-ship graveyard in less than a few centuries. The plains were shattered. The corpses of fallen vessels were scattered everywhere, and the tides of armies moving over the land stained it black.

  Lower they went. The augurs flashed with every hit upon the shields. His acolytes burbled their status reports, but Pent paid them little attention. Instead his view was fixed upon the actions of the Palace aegis. It shimmered under the bombardment, revealing its complex, cellular structure. Far superior to standard void shielding, it was one of a kind. If Pent still had a digestive tract to call his own, his mouth would have been salivating at the prospect of learning its secrets.

  But first the aegis had to fall. He was proud to be playing a part in that.

  The wall grew larger and larger under the ship’s keel, perturbing Pent with its scale. Then that moved off to the left as they came down. The Katabatic Plains filled the holo side to side. The sights of individual skirmishes became clear, rapid, chaotic exchanges of las light slashing across blackened ground, and the flash of explosions like flowers on bare earth.

  More impacts were troubling the ship now as smaller weapons drew a bead on it. The void shield arrays chimed constantly. Large hits shuddered the shielding still, taking down two more of the Pent-Ark’s layered protective fields.

  intoned Penta-4. A great shaking took the craft. Pent saw individual men on the ground briefly, before the vibration blurred focus away from the augurs, reducing the ventral view to a brown smear.

  Bringing down a ship the size of the Pent-Ark was no small feat, and deleterious to its physical condition. It would likely never ply the void again once it set down, but the sacrifice of his personal ship was nothing compared to what Clain Pent would gain should the Warmaster be victorious.

  Screaming alarms forewarned of imminent arrival on Terra’s soil. Thrusters roared and the bombardment intensified, taxing the vessel’s shielding hard.

  Clain Pent gritted the memory of teeth.

  Penta-4 announced, when the screaming of the thrusters seemed about to break open the world.

  The ship settled. The engines cut out. The thunder of battle reasserted itself as the dominant noise.

  Pent drew himself up. Now was his moment.

 

  His acolytes worked fast, both physically and within the sacred world of the machines. The void shields were realigned, clamping hard onto the earth, and extending outwards to cover an area around the ship emanating two hundred metres out from its hull.

 

  reported Penta-2.

  added Penta-1.

  said Penta-5.

  said Penta-3.

  Pent’s grotesque body leaned forwards, huge hands gripping the railing around his command pulpit.

 

  The sides of the Pent-Ark opened like petals. Ramps slid out from housings. Armoured doors opened.

  The servants of the Order of Nul marched out.

  At seven other equidistant points around the Palace, the same procedure was undertaken by the rest of the disciples of Sota-Nul. Their ark ships put out a stream of cyborgs and semi-autonomous mechanisms, forbidden machine intelligences and things motivated by essences of darker sorts. They began working as soon as they walked off the ships, ignoring the weapons fire that punctured the void shields of their transports and shot them down, neat and as orderly as ants. Though each device had a governing mind of its own, be it human, machine or otherwise, all were slaved to the will of the Machine-God, as enacted by the eight. Under the disciples’ direction they began the next phase of the Warmaster’s plan.

  Such variety there was among these creations. Giant, armoured earth-moving machines came out first, beginning to heap up high banks of stone extending from the sides of the grounded arks as soon as they emerged. Teams of noo-linked servitors armed with melta-cutters followed behind, burning tunnels into the stone to house command centres, and carving trench networks behind the banks. Machines and prefabricated sections of buildings were wheeled out, their erection commencing before the fusion-smoothed ground had cooled. Among them went heavily armoured adepts and followers of the myrmidon creed, who strode the battlefield with arrogant disdain for the fury the enemy threw at them.

  Weapons fire from the walls zeroed in on these fledging networks, but in doing so they took pressure off the mortal servants of Horus, allowing ragged hordes of traitors deeper into the outworks. After weeks of attacks, the outworks were much disrupted, and though the arks set down close to the outermost perimeter, much was in ruin and there was little resistance to be found there.

  Physical defences were the least of the New Mechanicum’s assets. Within two hours, the framework of siege camps was in place, and growing outwards. When the excavators reached the limits of the arks’ void shields, more machines rolled out from the innards of the craft. Some bore giant shields of adamantium, others energy mantlets of varying type. They moved in precise order along newly carved roads, stopped, turned at forty-five degrees and presented their fronts to the enemy walls.

  said Penta-5.

  Clain Pent ordered.

  Penta-3 said.

  A few hits struck the hull as the void shields were recalibrated. Now was a moment of vulnerability. Through senses integrated with his ship, Pent felt the beat of activating power supplies radiating from the outside.

  The pulse built to a crescendo. Clain Pent cackled as the energy mantlets of the Ordo Reductor sprang into life across the siege camp and a wall of roseate light leapt between the machines.

  He glanced inwardly to his datacore, running a critical mind over the plans contained therein. The Ordo Reductor would be piecing together their grand cannons very soon, but he had his own work to do, a project of such ambitious scale he was daunted by it. Monumental engineering was required, and sorcery to bind an appropriately powerful soul.

  He watched the energy screens extending further out from the Pent-Ark. Soon, behind them, his grand work would begin.

  We are symbols

  Grounded Angel

  A subterranean break

  Eternity Wall, 3rd-7th of Quartus

  Forethoughts of death afflicted Sanguinius more often as the days passed. The vision of Horus, standing over him in leering triumph, leaked into his waking hours.

  Dorn had little time for him, and when he sought out the Sigillite for company he was nowhere to be found. Consumed with foreboding, the Great Angel sent himself out upon a tour of the walls. He did not tell Dorn. He had no wish to hear another lecture about keeping himself safe.

  ‘I am more than a symbol,’ he had said to Dorn.

  ‘Your value as such should not be underestimated,’ Dorn replied.

  ‘Then I should put myself to use and be seen on the wall.’ He would be gainsaid no
further, and left Dorn fuming.

  Dorn was right. All of them were symbols, and though he hated the role his father had placed upon him and which Guilliman had exploited, he took upon himself the burden of humanity’s hopes again. This time he did not fly. He went on foot, surrounded by all the ceremony his position allowed so that the people would better see him.

  Azkaellon insisted they stay upon the walls and not venture into the city wards.

  ‘The streets are not safe,’ he said. There was unrest throughout the Palace, the worst in the outlying districts close to the walls. Food and water were scarce, fear was in plentiful supply. Privation did the work of ten thousand enemy operatives, tying down troops to watch civilians when they would better serve the defence on the walls.

  Eventually Sanguinius relented, and they stayed out of the city on the perimeter defences, where the Angel might be seen by the populace from afar, and the warriors of the Legions stood at guard with predictable discipline.

  He set out with a dozen standard bearers, both imagnifers and signifers. The serried banners of the IX Legion made an awe-inspiring sight in ranks behind the primarch, and the winged figures of the Sanguinary Guard swooped overhead, weapons ready. Their wargear glinted in the fires of the bombardment, but there was more – an inner light that shone from the primarch, so those who saw him said. To these lucky witnesses, the Blood Angels appeared as a procession of demigods passing along the walls. Wherever Sanguinius went, memories of sunlit dawns were kindled, and people remembered better times, and hoped that those times might yet return. The arbitrators and enforcers of each city block he passed reported a calming of mood, and a cessation of violence that lasted several days.

  His procession took him many days, past several areas facing various siege camps of the Dark Mechanicum, but in time he found himself staring down the Daylight Wall, on that section overlooked by the heaped massif of the Eternity Wall space port.

 

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