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

by Guy Haley

  Sanguinius’ stride was the speed of a legionary’s jog, which was the speed of an unmodified human running, so they travelled many kilometres in a few hours, and by the closing of the day, by which point Sanguinius had been on the Daylight Wall for seven hours, they had covered nearly a hundred, and so made their way through lesser league-castles to the Helios Gate.

  The party headed directly for the command centre at the tower’s heart. A thousand men and women laboured in a modest recreation of the Grand Borealis Strategium. Emergency lumens saturated the spherical room with threatening red, and though thousands of hololiths and other displays provided illumination of other hues, they were too weak to banish the bloody glow.

  Once more Raldoron greeted him.

  ‘My lord,’ he said.

  ‘The section where the first tower was brought down has been repaired?’ the primarch asked. His eyes went to screens showing the enemy siege camp on the horizon, aglow with active shielding and flashing with the work of construction.

  ‘Thane’s men did as they pledged,’ said Raldoron. ‘Truly, they can work miracles with false stone. The wall there is plugged, and the walkways reconnected. They have repaired most of the damage so far inflicted on my section, my lord, while Salamanders repair ruptured power networks and bring guns back to life. It is good to see our kindreds working together. I thought not to see the like again, there has been so much suspicion bred between Legions.’

  ‘But there is still damage.’ Sanguinius did not criticise. There was damage everywhere, worst on the far north of the Dusk Wall on the opposite side of the Palace, where a score of major towers had been reduced to rubble by arcane energy cannons, and the wall only held at great cost.

  ‘Eighty-seven way castles from the five hundred in my protection are damaged, four lost entirely,’ said Raldoron. ‘The Helios Gate comes under protracted attack with each aerial foray. The aegis here is failing. Every attack sees more void blisters scoured from their mountings, though the Emperor’s squadrons make them suffer for it. I fear what Horus’ Martian lackeys have in store for us behind that energy screen.’

  ‘We have been lucky thus far,’ said Sanguinius. ‘The walls are holding past Dorn’s more optimistic estimates.’ He ran his gaze over the displays, away from the live feeds covering the siege camp. ‘The outworks less so,’ he said, gesturing to the images of scarred, twisted lands where trenches, walls and men had been only a fortnight before. ‘The enemy continue to test our defences, and taunt us with their intent.’ He pointed at the shimmering energy fields of the siege camp. ‘This is a ritual. The Palace is the epicentre. I imagine whatever they plan will be fuelled by blood.’

  All the Blood Angels present had been at Signus, and at Davin. What had been consigned to the realm of impossibility was now a matter of course.

  ‘Sorcery must be accounted for strategically like any other factor of war. We help them by fighting, we lose if we stand back. We are damned if we do and damned if we do not.’

  ‘An ancient saying,’ said Raldoron.

  ‘But apt,’ said Azkaellon.

  ‘The conscripts fight bravely,’ said Raldoron. ‘They hang on, and repulse the enemy every time, though they dwindle in number daily and I am forced to order the wall guns activated more frequently to bombard compromised sections. I regret we cannot go down to aid them ourselves, but I understand my orders,’ he added.

  ‘Lord Dorn forbade me from fighting outside the walls,’ said Sanguinius. He turned his sad, noble eyes onto his equerry. ‘He did not forbid us to venture outside.’

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘Let us go down outside the wall. I want to go among them. I want to see the troops. I want to tell them their heroism is valued.’

  ‘There is no attack at the moment,’ said Raldoron thoughtfully, and no enemy near the gate, but the bombardments come without warning.’

  ‘There are other considerations.’ Azkaellon stepped in front of his primarch. ‘There have been mutinies on the line.’

  ‘You suggest that I, a son of the Emperor, have something to fear from my father’s subjects?’ Sanguinius said.

  ‘You are not immortal, my lord,’ said Azkaellon quietly. As Sanguinius’ death approached, all the Blood Angels had a foreboding that their lord might leave them soon. They felt it in their hearts and in their humours. Azkaellon’s words hung over them, like the dying echoes of a funeral bell.

  ‘Nothing truly is.’ Sanguinius smiled sadly. ‘But I do not die today. Gather additional legionaries if it will make you feel easier, Azkaellon, but I am going outside the wall.’

  Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus

  Katsuhiro was there when an angel came down from the distant heights into the mudscape of the outworks. He arrived without warning, passed among them like something from a dream and was gone before they could acknowledge his reality.

  Sanguinius was gold and he was glory. Familiarity can lead a man to accept the worst circumstances as normal. In the blood and the destruction, where flesh was pounded into the pulverised stone, Katsuhiro had forgotten what purity looked like. In the person of Sanguinius he was reminded.

  The first Katsuhiro heard were shouts of amazement, and he looked back from no-man’s-land to see a soft glow, then Sanguinius himself. He stood behind the broken rampart in full view of the enemy. There were snipers in the drop-craft wrecks, but he forgot them.

  The guns on the walls were firing, aimed at the siege camp and the contravallation that grew day by day around the city. Counter bombardments answered from the enemy lines; the orbital batteries had not ceased, nor had the fleet bombardment, and shells periodically broke the flickering voids to blast up craters among the defensive lines. The roar of the siege was at its worst, save for those times the foe made direct attempts on the outworks, when all became a bedlam of flashing light and terror.

  A hush descended. Though the guns continued to fire, their violence was somehow lessened by the primarch’s presence.

  Men and women fell to their knees as Sanguinius passed along the line. His entourage of aides, standard bearers and the gold-armoured and winged elite that guarded him were almost as affecting as the primarch himself. Grumbles were silenced. Fear ebbed. Filthy hands reached out to touch the Lord of Angels. His warriors moved to push the soldiers back, but Sanguinius raised his hand, just slightly, and the guards moved away. A female soldier was the first to dare to hold out her fingers to his wings. The feathers twitched, but Sanguinius stood firm, and allowed her to caress him.

  Another person came forwards, then another, until a crowd was around the Great Angel, arms radiating inwards like worshippers from less enlightened times stretching for their idol.

  Sanguinius was uncomfortable, Katsuhiro could see. The primarch kept his perfect face as neutral as he could, but it was there in the set of his lips, and the way he looked upwards, away from the supplicants around him. Like all the rest, Katsuhiro was captivated, and moved towards him, his feet dragging through the mud of their own volition. The Angel’s radiance touched Katsuhiro. He felt a peace in his heart, a calmness in his mind and a stilling of fears. The aches and chills that sickened him were alleviated briefly. For a moment, he felt whole again.

  Surrounded by the dirty and the desperate, Sanguinius shone as pure as sunlight reflected from snow.

  Then it was over. The light dimmed. The Great Angel’s guards moved forwards and, gently as they could, pushed back the weeping crowd so Sanguinius could address them.

  ‘Be brave, children of Terra,’ he said. ‘Your courage and your fortitude are most needed in this war, and I, on behalf of my brother Rogal Dorn, and the Emperor of Mankind, thank you.’

  With those words he moved on, his crimson-armoured sons marching in wary perimeter. Their boots were smeared with the muck of the field, but Sanguinius was pristine, or so it seemed. He was as much a vision as a solid being, and as a vision he was untouched and untouchable by the filth of the mundane world.

  Kats
uhiro watched him go, joy and awe overwhelming him.

  ‘You there!’

  A man with a sergeant’s rank insignia stitched to his civilian clothes accosted Katsuhiro. The man was trying too hard, probably angry at his own awed reaction to the primarch. Not one man had continued his duties while Sanguinius was there.

  ‘Stop your gawking. Captain Jainan is looking for volunteers.’ He looked Katsuhiro up and down. ‘A little small, but I think you’ll just about do.’

  Jainan was sick. Katsuhiro was not the only soldier feeling ill. A host of minor ailments had swept through the defence force. Coughs, colds and digestive complaints to add to the misery of rad poisoning. Nothing immediately fatal, but every sickness wore down the resolve of the men and women in the outworks, making their condition that little more insufferable, and every misery increased the chance that they would run. But Jainan was genuinely afflicted. He was propped up in a makeshift bed occupying the shell of a bunker. Part of the roof had been blown in by a direct hit. The gap was covered over with corrugated sheeting. The walls were blackened. Katsuhiro couldn’t stop looking at the marks. Much would be the soot from incinerated human bodies.

  It was shelter, and Jainan needed it. His eyes were red and puffy, and his nose ran. His skin had turned an even unhealthier stage of grey. Sores spotted his mouth, and his breath was rank; though Katsuhiro was never nearer than an arm’s length away, the stench of it filled the enclosed space.

  Katsuhiro arrived to find Doromek, Runnecan and the woman present. She and Doromek were drawn with hunger, but less afflicted than the others.

  Jainan coughed before he spoke. A light tickle that grew into heaving, rib-punishing hacks. When it subsided, he spoke quickly, in case it began again.

  ‘Acting Lieutenant Doromek here has come up with a worrying possibility. There are tunnels… There are…’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘Doromek, you explain.’

  ‘I’ll keep this simple,’ Doromek said, shifting his gun on his shoulder. ‘There are supply tunnels under the battlefield running out from the second line to the bastions. Some of them have been opened by bombardment. They might give the enemy a way behind our lines. I think we should check them out.’

  Jainan’s eyes closed. ‘You’re a good man, Doromek, a real find. There we have it. I need someone to go into the tunnels to see what’s left. To…’ He swallowed. His pale lips trembled. ‘To see if they’re a risk.’ He was struggling to speak, and coughed again. Through spluttering breath he managed, ‘Dismissed. Be about it,’ before he curled in over himself, a bowl was brought and he bent double to vomit up a stream of red-streaked phlegm.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Katsuhiro asked Doromek. ‘It’s not rad poisoning, is it?’ he added. They all suffered that to a degree. Anti-rad pills kept the worse effects at bay, but Katsuhiro lived in terror of the day they stopped working.

  ‘Nah, it’s the camp sickness,’ Runnecan said.

  ‘What do you know about it?’ Doromek said. He strode easily through the mud. The woman, Myz, he’d heard Doromek call her, was even more assured. Thin-faced Runnecan scampered, rodent-like, his small feet pit-pattering. Only Katsuhiro was struggling, needing to wrench his boots from the sucking ground with every step.

  ‘You’ve never been in a war before, Runnecan,’ said Doromek.

  ‘I have. I’ve fought on five worlds for the Emperor.’

  Katsuhiro looked at him in mild astonishment.

  ‘I was born hive scum, and I am hive scum, but I was a soldier in between,’ Runnecan said proudly. ‘I’ve seen people get sick, all the time!’ He sniggered. ‘Then they die.’

  ‘Nasty little piece of work,’ Doromek said. ‘You are a hive rat. In this place, awful as it is, we have medicine. That’s the reason why you’re not all dead from rads yet.’

  ‘They’re stopping the rads but what about everything else? The medicae aren’t doing any good!’ said Katsuhiro.

  ‘Do you know, Katsuhiro, I like you but you take forever to catch on. Exactly, the medicae aren’t doing anything. These sicknesses are coughs and sneezes and upset bellies. Nothing any anti-viral or bacteriophage shouldn’t stamp out. But they’re not working.’

  They were walking away from the front, towards the second line. Bastion 16 loomed large to their right.

  ‘Is Horus using germ war on us?’

  ‘Now you’re getting it,’ said Doromek. ‘Could be.’

  ‘I feel dreadful, why are you still healthy?’ Katsuhiro said.

  ‘Natural resilience,’ Doromek said humourlessly.

  ‘Be quiet, all of you,’ Myz snapped. She pulled ahead, heading for a gap blown into the second line. Twisted lengths of plasteel reinforcement writhed up like briars around the breach.

  ‘Why do you let her speak like that to you?’ said Runnecan. ‘If my woman spoke to me like that, I’d give her a hiding.’

  ‘That attitude explains your lack of female company. She’s not “my woman”. I barely know her.’

  ‘I think you do,’ said Runnecan slyly. ‘I think you know her much better than you’re saying.’

  Doromek grunted. ‘What can I say? I lose my heart to pretty faces. That’s as far as it goes. I know her about as well as you do.’

  ‘What did you think of the primarch?’ asked Katsuhiro, trying to find something positive in the day.

  Doromek shrugged. ‘How did he make you feel?’

  It annoyed Katsuhiro that the question was turned around on him, but he answered anyway. ‘Joy, awe.’

  They headed down the slope of the crater. Filthy water puddled the bottom. As they skirted it, Doromek glanced back.

  ‘That’s not all is it? Come on now, we’re all comrades here. Be honest.’

  ‘I feel… sad,’ said Katsuhiro uncomfortably. ‘Hollow.’

  ‘Insignificant?’

  Katsuhiro nodded. They walked into the network of trenches between lines two and one. Large sections of it were collapsed and abandoned.

  ‘They do that. Them and their sons. I ask myself why the Emperor created them,’ Doromek said. Myz was well ahead, and he spoke more freely when she wasn’t listening in. ‘He always said they were to protect us, and that men would take over when they were done. But why make something so powerful, so beyond humanity?’

  ‘Oooh, that’s treason that,’ said Runnecan.

  ‘Shut it, you,’ said Doromek.

  ‘He’s right, Runnecan,’ said Katsuhiro. ‘I don’t know what to think any more. I felt insignificant when I saw Sanguinius.’ He fell quiet for a few paces. ‘This is their war,’ he said quickly. ‘We’re just in the way.’

  Doromek nodded. ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  The aegis thrummed painfully overhead. A shell pierced the energy membrane and dived murderously for the ground, scattering troops with a terrifying howl. It bored into the mud and stone a few metres ahead of the first line and detonated, lofting a section of the outwork ramparts upwards with a searing flash. Katsuhiro and the others hit the ground the instant before it struck. He kept his hands over his head as debris pattered everywhere.

  They got up. Men were screaming. New corpses waited to be carted off by servitor orderlies to the funeral pits. Katsuhiro looked on helplessly at a screaming man clutching the ragged stumps of his legs. There was nothing he could do. Doromek was already walking on. The others followed. The screaming had stopped before they’d gone a hundred metres more.

  Myz was over by a small, isolated bunker at the end of its own run of trench.

  ‘Get a move on!’ she shouted.

  ‘I thought this was your idea,’ said Katsuhiro.

  ‘It was,’ said Doromek. ‘Truly.’

  ‘I thought you said she wasn’t your woman,’ Runnecan said unpleasantly.

  ‘I told you, she’s not,’ said Doromek, and jumped into the trench.

  A small plaque over an armoured door proclaimed the bunker Nexus Zero-One-Five. Myz did something to open the lock, and the four of them descended into the dar
k under the battlefield.

  A short spiral staircase brought them out into a tunnel just wide enough for two men to walk abreast. Cabling hung in long sweeps from loops set into the ceiling. The tunnel was made of precast ferrocrete sections, but if it had been laid straight, it no longer was. Deformation of the battlefield by the bombardment pushed the tunnel out of true, in some places forcing the segments apart and allowing water to seep in. As a result, a stream of dirty water, ankle-deep and polluted with bodily fluids, ran along the bottom, collecting into deeper pools where the tunnel sagged. The tunnel shook every now and then when a shell or energy beam made it through the aegis. The ground transmitted the vibrations well, and down there, without other distractions to the senses, hits on the earth seemed more frequent than they had above.

  Doromek consulted a map. Myz paid particular attention to it, then pointed off down the tunnel. The pair of them disappeared around a kink in the line. Katsuhiro made to follow them, but was stopped by a grubby hand.

  ‘Did you see that?’ said Runnecan. ‘She had a cypher wand.’

  ‘So what?’ said Katsuhiro grumpily. His bones ached with his fever and the rads. He welcomed the quiet under the battlefield. He wanted to lie down. Standing still made the aching worse.

  ‘Where did she get it from?’ said Runnecan.

  ‘I don’t know – Jainan?’

  ‘Then why didn’t he give it to Doromek?’

  ‘He’s not thinking clearly, he’s sick.’

  Runnecan gave a smile partway between sympathetic and patronising. ‘Listen, I know you don’t like me very much. You think I’m underhive scum, and I am. Because of that, I can see something odd is happening here. Those two know each other, trust me. There’s something going on here. I–’

  Footsteps splashed back towards them.

  ‘Come on. Stop hanging back. We’ll need your guns if there are infiltrators down here,’ said Doromek.

  ‘I bet you will,’ muttered Runnecan.

  ‘Coming,’ said Katsuhiro. ‘Just catching our breath, that’s all.’