by Paul Kearney
His helm’s auspex was nearly useless out here; there was so much of the stuff adrift in the atmosphere around them. He scanned the contorted landscape with active dislike. There were too many avenues of approach, too much cover and dead ground. If an enemy came upon them here, it could be within fifty yards before it was seen.
But it was not his task to pick and choose where he fought. He had been assigned an arc of fire and he would watch it, as all around him the other members of his squad did likewise, stationed in all-round defence with bolters poised.
He heard the crackle come to life on the vox.
‘Affirmative, brother, we are reading– with some –culty. Boost –nal. Zeroing in now. Signal has cleared.’
‘What is your status?’ Tersius heard Brother Ameronn ask.
Fading in and out, but intelligible, the reply came back.
‘This is Brother Antonus. We are approximately a mile into the wreck, and have lost contact with Brother Starn, who was reconnoitring a deep chasm in the wreckage. I am preparing to be lowered down to search for him. We have blazed the route with infrared markers – it should be easy to find should you wish to follow.’
‘Brother Antonus – can you access company vox?’
‘Negative. I cannot raise the Rex or the Penitent, even with the additional boost. You will have to relay, brother.’
‘I acknowledge. Find Brother Starn and exfiltrate as soon as you are able.’
‘Does the Rex still register our locator beacons?’
‘Yours, but not brother Starn’s. It has either become damaged or he is out of range. Captain Galenus has ordered us to consolidate on the surface. The Chapter Master will be joining us with Seventh Company as soon as is practicable. My mission is to find a suitable location for a base of operations on the surface, and I have been given command of your squad. Do you acknowledge?’
There was a pause, and then Brother Antonus said, ‘Affirmative.’ The First Company Veterans were notoriously reluctant to accept the leadership of anyone but the senior officers of the Chapter, but they would obey the dictates of the Codex. And besides, brother Ameronn was a veteran like themselves.
‘We will keep you informed of progress,’ Brother Antonus added.
‘Any sign of life, brother?’
‘Negative. The ship is the Centurius Sol of the Imperial Navy, that much Brother Starn discovered before he disappeared. You might want to relay that to Captain Galenus.’
‘I will. Throne be with you.’
‘And with us all. Antonus out.’
Brother Starn was hanging upside down in a tangled mesh of cables and wires that he had plunged through in his fall. He checked his armour systems. Several were in the amber range and two more in the red, but he had not suffered any critical damage.
He had fallen some hundred and fifty feet, by the altimeter, crashing off a jagged girder of the smashed superstructure, careering into other obstructions and protuberances, and finally coming to rest in a great bird’s-nest of wreckage with a jolt that had momentarily made him black out.
The Terminator armour he wore was scratched and battered, and the broken line across his helm readout spoke of damage to the internal systems, but the suit’s damage control protocols were already rerouting along secondary pathways. In a few seconds his display cleared and all runes came up green or amber. Good enough.
He struggled in the net of wire and cable that had arrested his fall, igniting his power fist, dialling up the energy input and slashing through the imprisoning wreckage with the edge of his fingers. The metal sparked, glowed, and fell apart, dripping molten as the disruptor field agitated the molecules of the cables to the point of dissolution.
He fell sideways, grasped a shank of copper cabling with his bolter hand as the great weight of his armour slewed around, and his feet fell free. He ranged out with his auspex, but the system was still sputtering, trying to repair itself. One of his stablights had been smashed and the other was an erratic flicker, but it served to illuminate the space around him fitfully. He was hanging above a massive crevasse in the very substance of the hulk. It went down into unfathomable darkness, as though cloven by some great blade. He could see layers of strata running down the edges of the gash, like sediment packed by geological action, except that these strata were all composed of compacted man-made materials. He was in fact looking at a cross-section of the sub-surface of the hulk; layers upon layers of void-going ships, all crushed by the weight of those above them, reduced to flattened metallic pulp only a few dozen feet wide.
The sight startled him. There must be thousands upon thousands of wrecks making up this artefact. And the farther one travelled into the uttermost depths, the older those wrecks must be. But what was at the core? What had formed the original structure?
He released a flare, twisting in the immense armour to follow its path into the chasm. It twinkled down into the abyss like a falling star. He watched it until it disappeared, his helm systems tracking it, calculating.
The hole below him was at least two miles deep.
It looked as though part of the crust of the hulk had been torn apart by gigantic forces that had worked upon the structure like a man tearing open an orange with his fingers. It must be the warp. The hulk had been subject to the titanic eddies and currents that roared in the immaterium and had been made and remade over the centuries, split and compressed with every translation.
And yet, by his readings, the Geller field was still intact, as was a gravitic field which was stronger than anything a fifty-mile diameter asteroid had any right to produce – stronger, in fact, the deeper one went.
Somewhere in this thing, power was still being generated, and it was being used to keep the hulk intact, to keep it free of the worst insanity of the warp.
Which meant that there was, or had been, an intelligence at work aboard.
Brother Starn was not surprised. It was rare that space hulks were uninhabited. The survivors of the ships they drew in often created an existence for themselves in their vast prison. But it was unknown for men to survive such an experience with any remnant of sanity remaining. More commonly, it was xenos who eked out an existence on such monstrosities. That, or the spawn of the Ruinous Powers.
He tried the vox. It was dead, but the sigils and runes running down one side of his helm display told him that the Terminator systems were in full autorepair mode. They were in the ancient alphabet which every wearer of the Crux Terminatus had to learn in training, a code that reached far back to the lost years of their making.
Dead nodes were being bypassed, sundered connections being re-established by the nanomolecular redactive abilities of the armour. Such processes were not wholly understood, even by the tech-priests who maintained the armour. The technology that had created such miraculous subtleties was long forgotten. The shell that enclosed him truly was a relic from a former age.
But it worked – which was the main thing.
And Brother Starn had found, quite by accident, a way down into the depths of the hulk.
He keyed his locator beacon and waited, but no teleportation occurred. He had not truly expected it. The radiation, the conglomeration of untold megatonnes of signal-absorbing material, ruled out any easy exit from this place. To teleport out blind would be insanely hazardous; he might rematerialise within a slab of iron. If he was to get out of here, it would have to be done the hard way.
There was immense strength in tactical Dreadnought armour, but little in the way of agility. Brother Starn moved ponderously, slow as some great beast hauling itself out of a sucking swamp. Step by step, he climbed up the long drooping fall of wiring and ferrocrete reinforcement rods which had saved him, as one would clamber up a boarding net. Many times, he slipped back as his great weight snapped the weakened metal under him, but always his progress was steadily upwards, until he came to another opening in the side of the chasm, and
pulled himself within it.
There he immediately scanned the passageway, the roof of it scraping his hood, and consulted his compass. The digital readout ran past in a meaningless blur of figures, thrown out by the great mass of metal that surrounded it. There was no magnetic pole on the hulk, but he was keyed in to the direction-finders of the Rex, and the compass could not fasten on to the locator pulse from the cruiser; the signal was blocked.
Some of his other systems were still thready and weak, flashing up red for seconds at a time as he walked down the passageway. He could feel the weakness around his right knee joint where it had slammed into an outcrop of shard-sharp ceramite in his fall. The whine of it went in and out as he walked steadily onwards, hoping to find a way back up to the surface. He was no good to his Chapter here.
Dust was thick under his feet, and as he stirred it up it hung waist-high around him in a shining fog. Visibility was reduced to ten or twelve feet and the auspex was greyed out by the floating metallic particles.
He sensed rather than saw the movement as it flashed through the fog, a shadow moving ahead, and instinct as much as training made him raise the storm bolter in a split second and fire a five-round burst down the passageway, shattering the silence, lighting up the polluted air around him. Then he powered forward, limping but still moving as fast as an unencumbered human sprinter, and fired again as the shadow sped down into the darkness beyond, and disappeared into it, black into deeper black.
‘Captain, Brother Starn. Contact, I say again, contact at my location. I have movement in the hulk.’ There was almost no chance it would get through, but he made the contact report out of habit as much as anything else. The Codex was ingrained deep in him, as in every Ultramarine.
He stood there and let the dust settle somewhat, then walked forward slowly. The ground was uneven under his feet now, and as one boot moved it clicked against something on the floor of the passageway, half hidden in dust like something lost in sand on a beach.
He bent at once and went slowly to one knee. His great gauntlet felt through the particulate, grasped a hooped shape, and lifted it. What he had in his fingers made his eyes widen.
It was an Adeptus Astartes helm.
Six
Above Macragge, the ships had gathered at last, and were formed up in high orbit within supporting range of each other. At the epicentre of the formation was the mighty Octavius, the battle-barge of Marneus Calgar itself, one of three of this class that the Ultramarines possessed.
Four miles long, spired with a massive towering superstructure and lined with multiple batteries, the Octavius was manned by a crew of forty thousand human and servitor personnel, most of whom spent their entire lives aboard the ship. The barge was capable of launching three full companies of Adeptus Astartes into battle along with all their vehicles and a contingent of heavy armour, and its bombardment cannons could reduce the surface of a planet to cinders. Centuries old, the Octavius had endured battles beyond count, and had been refitted and largely rebuilt three times.
Now, it was taking Marneus Calgar and Seventh Company of the Ultramarines out to join Fifth, and confront the drifting enigma which was the Fury hulk.
Alongside this spacefaring giant were lesser ships. The light cruisers Spatha and Mutatis Mutandis of the Inquisition and the Adeptus Mechanicus flanked the huge Ultramarines vessel, and surrounding them were five Sword-class frigates of the Ultramarines fleet.
All told, there were perhaps two hundred thousand beings of one kind or another manning these ships, and yet it was but a tithe of the total might that the Ultramarines fleet possessed; for most of their formations were far out on the borders of Ultramar, divided into task groups that were securing Marneus Calgar’s vast realm from the depredations of the eldar, the T’au, and other menaces that erupted out of the void with ruinous regularity.
One by one, the Navigators of the fleet mustered their powers, orientated themselves to the distant pulse of the Astronomican, and linked in to the gargantuan drive engines of the ships, beginning the build-up to warp translation. To travel to Iax in normal space would take weeks, and time was precious, so the perils of the warp would be braved in order to bring the fleet to the vicinity of Fury. A task which for the Navigators would produce a psychic spasm of excruciating pain.
A short, calculated translation from the Mandeville point in the Macragge system, it still had its risks, as did all warp travel. The ship Navigators used their third eyes to peer into the psychically charged maelstrom that lay ahead of them and plotted a course through it, trusting that such a brief jump would not be thrown far off course or leave them remote from normal space-time.
For time moved strangely in the immaterium. One day in the warp might be half a month in the normal dimensions of space. It had been known for ships to become ensnared in the currents of the warp for years, centuries, all the while assaulted by the baleful malevolence of the Ruinous Powers. The dark evil that lay just beyond the void was never far away. For one of the Navigator kind, it was merely the other side of an unquiet dream.
A few hours they were in the warp, the vessels clustered close together, utilising their thrusters to maintain station in the currents and eddies of the immaterium. For those on the ships the time passed slowly, with a persistent ache to be borne, as though an infected tooth were throbbing in their head.
The Adeptus Astartes shrugged it off as they did all bodily pain, the servitors continued with the tasks that their existence was programmed to fulfil, and the human fleet personnel carried on doggedly with their own duties, ignoring the voices that seemed at times to whisper at them through the Geller field, putting out of their minds the noisome images which would creep into unwary daydreams. They kept their focus, as they had been trained, swallowed the nausea that gnawed at their guts and prayed to the Emperor to see them through the warp, to watch over them.
During warp jumps, the shrines of the Omnissiah would become clustered with lit candles, and the tech-priests attached to the Chapter would lead chanting processions of their kind up and down the passages and maintenance conduits of the ships, swinging censers of sweet incense. Others of their Adeptus would take station in the enormous drive compartments, braving the terrific heat and noise to reassure the machine-spirits with ancient incantations and libations of lubricating unguents. The tech-priests called on the Omnissiah to fortify the spirits that dwelled in every humming, turning, rumbling piece of machinery which made up the greater entity of the ship itself. They soothed the unquiet impulses which could lead to malfunction, and prayed for the strength to navigate safely an environment that was inimical to all rational life.
In this way, the fleet of Marneus Calgar passed into the warp, and kept to its perilous course through it, the Navigators of each ship clinging to the beacon of the Astronomican to orientate themselves in a void without time or reason, one that skewed the normal laws of physics and sought to claw a passage into their minds. Shielded by their tenuous link to the immortal God-Emperor’s immense, dying mind, they pushed at the interstices of the warp, stretched it against the fabric of true space and opened a portal back into the void of normal dimensions.
The fleet reappeared again exactly where they had intended, and tore through into the Eastern Fringe of Ultramar trailing streamers of noxious waste and membranes of disintegrating warp-plasma. The battered Geller fields of the ships were powered down as the residue of their passage was burned off, sparkling on the shimmering void-shields that cocooned each vessel.
On the bridge of the Octavius, the cogitators noted the position of the mapped stars in the system they had entered and recalibrated their location, then reset the chronos. They had been four hours in the warp, but nearly twelve had passed in real time.
‘Translation complete,’ Varius Sulla, shipmaster of the Octavius said. ‘We are on station four hundred thousand miles astern of the Rex Aeterna. All ships, report in. Vox staff, re-establish the net.’
Marneus Calgar stood in full artificer-forged power armour in the middle of the Octavius’ nave. Readouts flashed across the data transfer interfaces of his bionic eye, read and analysed in a matter of seconds. He perused the reports coming in from every department of the battle-barge as they clicked across his own personal console, a triptych of data screens housed on the back of a wide-winged imperial eagle of pure adamantium that loomed over the nave. Then he went through the status of his own Ultramarines – all of Seventh Company down in the crew compartments near the launch bays, the attached Devastators of Ninth, a Scout squad from Tenth – before sounding out the escorting frigates one by one. They all reported in: the Axion, the Minarron, the Tyrus, the Rapidan and the Morcault – a ship he had named personally on its launch not twelve years before.
Finally, he extended augur range with a blink of his human eye, and ascertained that the Spatha and the Mutatis Mutandis were alongside the battle-barge.
‘Fleet is all present and complete, my lord,’ Shipmaster Sulla said formally, confirming it.
‘Thank you, shipmaster. Have a priority vox summons put through to Captain Galenus on the Rex and have it routed to my briefing room. Sound battle prep, and have the flight deck ready all Thunderhawks for launch.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
As the klaxon sounded, Calgar turned to Librarian Tigurius, who stood silently behind him.
‘Brother, alert the Adeptus Mechanicus personnel in the arsenal. Tell them to wake the Ancients.’
Tigurius raised an eyebrow. ‘Both of them, Chapter Master?’
‘Yes. The time for half measures is past.’
‘Then it shall be so.’
Calgar walked down the nave, his ancient armour glinting. A product of some lost, archaic technology, the plates of it ran with reflected light like the surface of rippling water, at times midnight blue, at others storm grey. The armour had been repaired many times, but the bulk of it dated back thousands of years. The unknown artificer who had created it on Ademax Primus millennia before had been a craftsman of genius, to forge something of such brute power and bewitching beauty. It was one of the treasures of the Chapter and Calgar had worn it in battle times beyond count, as had Chapter Masters before him.