by Guy Haley
Sanguinius was captivated by the sight of his brave sons holding back the tide of the traitors. Such pride stirred in him at their sacrifice, such sorrow that he would behold their valour only a few more times before the final act of his life played out.
Until that moment, he was safe. He could not die. He would not. That was his advantage.
Time was running against them. The hordes of the enemy were converging on the tower. They would keep coming, brave in their madness, and no matter how many Raldoron and his warriors slew, eventually they would overcome the defenders. The tower had to fall.
Aid was at hand. Five towering walkers were making their way out from the gate. Sanguinius looked upon them from the siege tower. Many times the height of the war engines, the tower’s very existence made a mockery of the laws of physics. No mortal engineer could build such a thing and expect it to hold up against gravity, but, he reminded himself, they fought the wars of gods now.
And yet the mortal realm still had might of its own.
‘Great Mother, I am pleased you heeded my call,’ he voxed. ‘I salute you for overlooking factional division in the name of the greater cause. We will stand together in victory.’
‘This war construct at the walls, you wish it gone?’ Esha Ani of the Legio Solaria responded.
‘Indeed,’ said Sanguinius. ‘The hour hangs on you.’
‘Then stand clear,’ she said.
In the command czella of Luxor Invictoria, Esha Ani Mohana Vi drew a bead upon her target. Her new augmetics troubled her, but they had certain advantages, bringing her closer to the roaring soul of the Warlord through the holy unity of steel with flesh.
Through his eyes she saw the rear of the daemon tower, where was mounted a gargantuan steam engine, meshed in fleshy sinew, and powered by a furnace of damned souls. From the engine great pistons led to the drive wheels of the tower. It idled, having done its purpose of bringing the tower to the wall, but she had another use for it.
‘Increase reactor to maximum output,’ she commanded. ‘Disengage fail-safes. Remove limiting protocols. Stand by for core venting.’
In ordinary wars, her orders would have been rigorously questioned by the Titan’s enginseers. Overpowering the plasma core of her god-engine carried a high chance of its destruction, but this was not an ordinary war.
‘Legio Solaria,’ she said, voxing the other Titans in her mongrel maniple. ‘We stand on the brink of annihilation once again. Let this not be the last action we undertake. Keep the enemy from me while I serve the Lord Sanguinius, and prepare for immediate retreat.’
Her mind meshed with that of her Titan. They had yet to know one another perfectly, she and Luxor Invictoria, but they held a common bond in their grief for Esha Ani’s lost mother, and that made them strong together. His systems gave her insight into the abominable engine they faced, and his bold spirit picked out two sites for her, one for each of the Titan’s volcano cannons, that would bring the damned thing low.
Toscins rang, klaxons grated at her hearing. The soft alarms of the Warlord’s servitor clades whispered in her mind, their voices still human, though they had but one thing to say.
‘Danger, danger, danger.’
Solaria were spotted. Punishing fire from the enemy contravallation zeroed in on them. Void indicators flickered with troubling portents of failure. She did not have much time. At Luxor Invictoria’s knees, Warhounds and Reavers burned back enemy infantry and armour with plasma, flame and bullet. The enemy were so many.
She could not fail.
The whine of the reactor climbed. The great god-engine trembled with barely contained power. More alarms pushed into her being, prodding at her soul through the manifold.
Gauges slid into the red. Target locks screamed at her. The machine-spirits of the volcano cannons begged for release. Still she did not fire. She waited for maximum power, the very acme of destruction.
Alarms shrilled. The moment came.
‘Legio Solaria, switch fire – all weapons to the siege tower, now.’
Immediately the god-machines obeyed, swinging their great limbs to bear, and opened fire. The shields of the tower, weakened during its advance on the walls, finally collapsed under the pounding of the Titans’ guns.
‘Loose,’ she said.
Luxor Invictoria sighed with machine pleasure as its cannons were unleashed. Alarms screamed. An overbearing wailing resounded through the entire machine, promising imminent destruction, but she did not shut the energy stream off until the last.
The giant las-beams slammed into the tower engine, itself bigger than the Warlord. They burned through warp-infused bronze, put out the hellish furnace.
The Titan’s reactor howled.
‘Dump all coolant. All Titans retreat to the Helios Gate.’
Clouds of superheated gas burst from the cannons’ thermal vents, shrouding the maniple in pure white steam. Alarms still shrieking, still under heavy fire, Luxor Invictoria turned about as the daemon tower’s engine exploded.
Scalding fluid blasted out in every direction. The tower shook, spilling the tiny figures of battling Space Marines from its broad ramp. Chained explosions raced up its many floors, blasting flames from its firing slits and windows. Magazines caught. Energy sources detonated.
Esha Ani did not see the tower’s final demise; she wrestled with her Titan’s desire to fight while her tech clade brought down its internal temperatures, until it arrived, still spraying scalding gas, back at the Helios Gate, and returned through the wall.
The cannons hit the tower, shaking it from top to bottom. Sanguinius staggered. The Death Guard coming up the main stairs to confront him fell back. Sanguinius used the distraction to jump at them, incinerating them with his spear’s energy cast, and took again to the air.
‘Retreat from the bridge, my sons!’ Sanguinius shouted. He blasted down with the Spear of Telesto directly into the melee, its strange energies leaving his own warriors unharmed, but turning the Death Guard into shattered husks of broken armour.
‘Fall back!’ Raldoron said, passing on Sanguinius’ order. ‘Fall back!’
The Blood Angels gave way, and the Death Guard spilled from the drawbridge onto the ramparts. For a moment the sons of Mortarion were triumphant. They fired as they advanced, killing many of the retreating Blood Angels, before the illusion shattered along with the tower.
The first explosion was so distant it was lost in the general roar of the battle, but as those that came after sped upwards, the noise grew to deafening thunder, shaking the whole structure so that warriors fell screaming to their deaths, until the top half was obliterated in a fountain of green fire, and a tempest of shrapnel burst over the rampart, slaying warriors on both sides. A pressure built in Raldoron’s head, and released again when a malevolent presence roared from the broken interior of the tower in a column of black flies. Glowing eyes stared down from the swarm’s midst, then the flies dissipated across the night sky, and the eyes faded away with a howl that made men vomit.
Raldoron grabbed the standard from a dead banner bearer and waved it over his head. The tattered flag snapped beneath the winged blood-drop finial.
‘To me, sons of Sanguinius! To me!’
The Death Guard had taken the brunt of the explosion, but they were hardier than they had ever been, and some dozens of them were on the rampart. The Blood Angels rallied themselves for a hard fight, warriors again attacking from both sides and running up against a wall of rotting ceramite and iron will.
‘The battle is almost won! Do not falter!’ Raldoron shouted. ‘Cast them from the rampart! For the Emperor! For Sanguinius!’
Called down from on high by his name, Sanguinius, most perfect of all the primarchs, hurtled into the middle of the Death Guard. His landing killed three even before he set his spear and sword whirling through them, cutting them down with contemptuous ease.
‘To the primarch! To the primarch!’
Bolters and voices roaring, the two lines of Blood Angels cras
hed back onto the ruined section of the wall walk, slaughtering the traitors utterly, so that not one was left alive.
Sanguinius swept his gaze over the battered remnants of the Blood Angels.
He held aloft his spear.
‘It is done!’ shouted Sanguinius, and his sons cheered him.
‘My lord! Look out!’ Raldoron pulled at his genefather’s arm, but no Space Marine could move a primarch.
Angron was flying straight at them, wings beating, howling madly, black sword drawn back to strike. The Blood Angels opened fire. Bolts ricocheted from Angron’s armour and his flesh without effect.
But Sanguinius stood there, and lowered his weapons.
‘My lord!’ screamed Raldoron in anguish.
‘Do not fear. He cannot pass. The Emperor’s ward is weakening, and soon the Neverborn will walk upon Terra, but for now, even Angron is forbidden entry to the Palace.’
There was truth in Sanguinius’ words. Angron spread his wings and came to a halt some way out from the wall. He swooped back and forth, his yellow eyes fixed upon his brother.
‘Sanguinius,’ growled Angron. ‘Face me. Let us fight, you and I.’
‘You shall not pass over these walls, nor under or through them until our father decrees it,’ said Sanguinius. ‘You know this to be true.’
Angron snarled. ‘Then come out and fight me, red angel to red angel, upon this field of battle where father can no longer interfere.’
Sanguinius saluted his brother as if Angron remained the troubled warrior of before.
‘We will fight, my brother, but not today.’
Angron roared and wheeled around, but he must have seen the truth of the Great Angel’s words, for he did not attempt to pass over the wall, and flew back to the burning plains below where the last unfortunate few of the outworks’ defenders were being hunted down.
Sanguinius stood at the edge of the ruined wall section. The crenellations had been entirely stripped away by the melta arrays, and the rampart cratered deeply. The wrecked stump of the siege tower burned some distance down. He looked out over Horus’ hordes, mutants and Traitor Space Marines, held up his sword and shouted.
‘None of you shall pass within!’ he told them. ‘You shall all perish! This is the judgment of the Emperor. Remember these words, for they shall haunt you when the moment of your death comes and you learn to regret your treachery.’
He turned away from it all.
‘Remove the corpses, Raldoron. Burn the Death Guard and throw the ashes over the wall. Have the Librarius check for warp taint. Mortarion’s sons have strange new gifts.’
‘My lord,’ said Raldoron.
‘And rest while you can.’ Sanguinius looked to the heavens. ‘They will try again and again. The veil between worlds weakens. The Neverborn are coming.’
Raldoron’s genesire had no further words for him, but leapt skywards and passed as a flashing mote of gold and white feathers towards the Palace centre.
Raldoron looked out over the zone of battle atop the wall. The Apothecaries and engineers had much work to do. Dozens of Blood Angels were dead or dying. The wall was badly damaged. The place where the outworks had sheltered the wall’s feet was covered over by the servants of the enemy. As his men worked through long hours to set things right, reports finally came in from Bhab command. At every point the enemy’s escalade had failed.
The walls held.
The attack was over.
Titans swayed through the Helios Gate, their ponderous footfalls shaking the ground. Again the voids slipped over Katsuhiro, making him sick to his soul. The Legio Solaria hooted a mournful salute to the fallen as the last came in.
Still firing into the enemy, who would not give up their suicidal attempt on the gate, the sons of Dorn fell back, covered by their tanks and the guns of the walls.
‘Close the gates!’ the cry went up, taken up by others.
Three minutes. That was what they had been offered. That was all that was given. Katsuhiro saw desperate men sprinting for the gateway. Three minutes was a lifetime quickly spent.
Once more the gate’s array of war-horns blared out their tune, the Palace itself giving a valediction for the dead. The ground thrummed with powerful motors, and the gates swung inwards. A last few conscripts sprinted through as they swung closed. Katsuhiro tried to go to them, but he was pulled away from the gate by shouting people he could barely hear.
Hands pulled him onto a low cot at the edge of the great canyon way behind the wall. There medicae personnel performed triage on a group of filthy, shell-shocked soldiers. Many thousands had manned the outworks in their section. Katsuhiro reckoned there to be less than one thousand left.
The Imperial Fists in the gateway altered their formation to intensify their firing through the gap of the closing portal. It shrank with increasing rapidity.
Guns fired nearby. A group of legionaries festooned with skulls ran at the rear of the gates from within the city and were cut down by bolter fire from loyal Space Marines, who turned around on the spot and smoothly switched targets. The Titans sang again as they moved off into the Palace. He watched them go. They moved so quickly despite their plodding pace. Then the gates swung closed with a boom, shutting out the battle and the horrors beyond the wall, drawing his attention back.
Katsuhiro stared at the rear of the closed gates. Transhumans moved all around the square behind the gatehouse. Now combat was done, they went about rearmament and repair without the post-combat shock lesser humans experienced.
A captain of their kind walked by, shouting orders from his voxmitter.
‘Please, my lord,’ Katsuhiro said, reaching up his hands.
He expected to be ignored, but the captain stopped at his cot and looked down on him.
‘Why did you save us?’ Katsuhiro asked.
As the Space Marine wore his helmet. Katsuhiro could not gauge his expression. Green eye-lenses stared at him hard, so soullessly he regretted speaking.
‘We were ordered to,’ said the Space Marine.
‘Then you think it a waste of resources,’ Katsuhiro said. ‘I do not blame you. I am a coward. Every time I think I have overcome my fear, then some fresh horror is revealed, and I am a coward all over again. The city was put in danger for our sake. I am sorry.’
The Space Marine lord stared down at him. He was so tall, so distant, the last bits of his humanity hidden behind the angled mask of his war-plate, and when he spoke his voice was near robotic thanks to the voxmitter; and yet Katsuhiro heard his compassion, even through all of that.
‘Hear me, son of Terra. Not one of you who fought upon those lines is a coward. You did what was asked of you. You performed your duty. I am proud to call you my comrade in arms, whatever the cost in blood and the risk of bringing you within these walls. This I, Maximus Thane, swear to you. Now rest. You will be needed again.’
The Space Marine walked away. A medicae orderly came to Katsuhiro and pushed him gently onto the cot. But Katsuhiro saw something behind Thane’s huge, yellow bulk that made him sit up.
‘That man! That man! Stop him!’
‘That’s the commander of the gate.’ The medicae muttered to his attendants. ‘Delirious. Battle shock. Administer somna vapour.’
A soft plastek mask was pulled over Katsuhiro’s face. He struggled against the hands pushing him down. Gas hissed down tubes beaded with condensation.
Thane moved on, calling to his men, revealing Ashul at the edge of a crowd, the man Katsuhiro had known as Doromek. The traitor.
‘Stop him, stop him,’ Katsuhiro muttered, already losing consciousness.
Ashul saluted ironically. Katsuhiro’s eyes slid shut. He forced them open one more time, but Ashul was gone.
Hissing filled the world, and Katsuhiro fell into welcome, dreamless sleep.
Gendor Skraivok and Raldoron duel on the wall.
The daemon primarch Angron sets foot on Terra.
Ascension
Absent father
A new
champion
Daylight Wall, Helios section, 15th of Quartus
A broken man in broken armour stirred at the foot of the wall. A single casualty among thousands, he was not noticed in the battle’s aftermath by either side.
Gendor Skraivok was dying. The fall had brought him down across a lump of rockcrete and his back had shattered on it. He could move his arms. Everything below his shoulders might as well have been sculpted from clay.
The hum of his warsuit’s reactor had stopped. No power ran through the armour’s systems, and much of its ceramite shell was broken open. Skraivok could see very little past his collar and his pauldrons. The walls soared above him, as if placed there with the sole purpose of framing the sky, where the living art of orbital bombardment danced in ever-changing patterns on the aegis. From a lump of stone his helmet looked at him accusingly, having been torn off as he slammed into the wall. It had contrived to land upright, solely, it seemed, to silently condemn him with cracked glass eyes.
Blood was leaking into Skraivok’s mouth. He spat weakly to the side, an action that stabbed his organs with a hundred knives of agony. The blood flowed faster than he could spit.
He groaned. If his other injuries did not kill him first, he was going to drown in his own vitae.