by Paul Kearney
‘You saved Brother Valerian, from what he tells me. And that may have proved the most vital aspect of your mission. He got through, brother – he contacted Seventh. Ixion is on his way with the Andronicus fleet.’
Proxis closed his eyes again. He gripped Calgar’s gauntlet. ‘Throne be praised.’
Calgar straightened. ‘Another ork assault is coming. I want you on your feet for it, brother. We need you on the walls.’
Proxis made as if to get up, but Calgar pushed him gently back down again.
‘They are not at the gates just yet, Proxis. Take this time we have. Become strong again. Brother Orhan has effected repairs to your armour. It is ugly, but functional.’
‘Much like himself,’ Parsifal said.
‘I will be with you, lord,’ Proxis said. ‘It is my place, after all.’
‘It is. Where would I be without you to watch my back, my friend? Now I will leave you. Obey Brother Parsifal in everything as you would me.’
‘My axe–’
‘It waits for you, as I do. Take this time to heal, Proxis. There will be more work to be done soon enough.’
Brother Orhan joined him as they left the apothecarion. ‘He is as hard to break as the armour he wore.’
‘And how is that armour, Orhan – in fact, how do you rate all our wargear? You are the closest I have to a Techmarine on this world.’
They took one of the great conveyors down into the heart of the spire. Orhan seemed to be running a checklist in his head.
‘Everyone has sustained minor damage of some sort. It has all been easily patched up, though it is not perfect – I cannot restore our equipment to perfect functionality without our own tech-priests and a good, trained Techmarine, which I am not, my lord, despite your generous appraisal of my abilities.’
‘You trained on Mars.’
‘Not for long enough. And besides that, some of us wear and fight with gear that was created by technologies now lost to us. I think of your own power suit, and my own, and that of Proxis. Such ancient equipment is still robust enough to take minor repair, but the systems within the bare plate – if they are damaged, there is little I or anyone can do to bring them back online. Ideally, they should be sent back to Mars itself for full-scale evaluation and restoration. They are artefacts from a lost time.’ He touched the aquila on his own breastplate.
‘They are all we have on Zalidar. They will have to serve, as we do ourselves,’ Calgar said. ‘Work with what you have, Orhan. This lull in the assaults will not last much longer.’
‘Of course, my lord. Where to now?’
‘To Morcault, and his ship. I must speak with the old voidsman. I have…’ Calgar let it trail a moment. ‘I have a favour to ask.’
The honour guard Ultramarine had something else to say – Calgar could sense it. As the conveyor continued on its interminable descent, Calgar said, ‘What’s on your mind, brother?’
Brother Orhan was a conscientious soul, utterly lacking in any kind of flamboyance. Calgar sometimes thought that something of the Mars tech-priests’ clinical attitudes had rubbed off on him. He was a formidable strategist, and a master of detail, but he seemed sometimes a little outside the brotherhood. Someone who could stand outside the Chapter and look in. It was for these reasons that Calgar kept him in the honour guard. Orhan never failed to bring a sense of objectivity to any proceeding.
‘I was thinking on Seventh Company, my lord.’
‘Yes?’
‘They have taken to the warp to get here, and I know that their Navigator, Fell Grimstone, is more than capable. But the warp is fickle, above all at times like these, when there is a great bloodletting to disturb the currents of the immaterium. It seems to me that Captain Ixion could be here within a few days, or he might take much longer to arrive.’
‘That much is merely obvious.’
‘My lord, if he is long delayed, then he will almost certainly arrive above Zalidar to find the planet overrun – we will all be dead and the orks will be in complete control of this world. Is that not so?’
‘Yes.’ Sometimes Orhan’s relentless logic took a long route to arrive at the conclusion, and he liked to build it up in unassailable blocks. It was an irritating but valuable asset. Calgar knew where it was headed.
‘Our policy, when a planet is irredeemably lost to the xenos, has been to issue an Exterminatus. It has been thus since the Behemoth campaign, has it not?’
‘It has.’
‘And in your absence, Captain Ixion will, I suppose, adhere to Chapter policy.’
‘He will, Orhan.’
‘You did not mention this to any of the planetary authorities.’
‘Would there be a point? If it comes to that, they will all be dead anyway.’
‘You sought to spare them this knowledge – that their world might end up as dead as Thrax did, thirty years ago.’
‘I sought to keep their backbones straight. Ultramarine strategy is to defend until the last, and to destroy that which is lost rather than leave it in the hands of the enemy. Is that all, Brother Orhan?’
‘Yes, my lord. I am not questioning you. I just like to have these things clear in my mind. Forgive me if I spoke out of turn.’
‘There is nothing to forgive, brother.’
They rode the elevator the rest of the way down in silence.
The message came through towards the end of the next night, at that time when the body is at its lowest ebb, the dark hour before the dawn.
Valerian sent it, in a burst of Ultramarine battle-code. And with it, everything had changed, and nothing had.
When it arrived, Marneus Calgar was in a small half-ruined Imperial shrine a few blocks from the forward command post, on his knees, with the rain spattering down cold upon his bare head.
He knelt there and prayed to his primarch, great Guilliman, for insight and guidance. He prayed to his Emperor in far-off Terra, half a galaxy away. And he prayed to the dead brethren whose faces he still saw in his sleep, a long parade of them stretching back over the years.
He prayed that he might be worthy of their sacrifices, their loyalty, and the honour they had brought to the Chapter.
The little chapel had been beautiful once, and now that it was half a ruin, it might be more beautiful still. Even as Calgar knelt there, the endless rain finally let up, and a cool wind blew through the darkened streets of the city. And there were stars overhead, the first he had seen in a long while.
There was still traffic to be heard on distant roads, and a kind of hum that spoke of human concourse. There were millions contained within the walls of Zalathras, and even in the straits of a war as desperate as this, they went about some shadow of their usual business, striving for scraps of normality in the face of so much horror.
Far off, he heard the scattered crump of ork artillery. It was as much a part of life here as that human hum, that ticking-over of humdrum activity. War never could be forgotten, not here, not anywhere else. It was the state of all existence. The universe turned around it.
On that implacable wheel whole worlds were broken. Calgar knew this – he had seen it many times. But he retained enough of his humanity to feel grief for the loss and waste. That grief would never stop him from doing his duty, but it left its mark on him, as he suspected it had upon his mighty primarch, and upon the Emperor Himself when that puissant super-being had walked the galaxy as one man amongst men.
Humanity had to be protected, guarded and led. Sometimes that path led to the annihilation of innocent billions and the extinction of whole worlds. That was the nature of the universe they inhabited.
‘By Your will,’ Calgar whispered, a lone supplicant under the stars, kneeling in prayer as his ancestors had done before him in millennia beyond count.
He was not surprised by the flickering message-rune that lit up in the field of his bionic eye, tho
ugh it might signal his deliverance, and that of the city itself and the world around him. Nor did he raise his head when almost at the same time the klaxons began to sound from vox-casters all over the city, a thumping urgency that signalled imminent ground assault.
He had seen it coming. He had known, somehow, that it would be today, on this morning. Great events had their own gravity. They drew together in lines of fate entangled.
Lord, in Thy glory and Thy goodness, Thou hast sent me Thine enemies to kill. Let me be worthy of Thee, bright father. Today, let me be Thy instrument.
Then he rose to his feet, flexing his fists in the Gauntlets of Ultramar. Orhan and Proxis were waiting for him, and beyond stood Mathias, Valerian, and all the surviving brethren he had brought down to Zalidar. They were thirteen Adeptus Astartes in all, brothers in name and in blood, living embodiments of faith and courage and honour.
‘Brothers,’ Calgar said, smiling, ‘Let us go to the gate.’
III
The Gatekeeper of Zalathras
Twenty-One
The sun rose, and for once there was clear sky above the wrack of cloud that hid the horizon, a delicate green that deepened into blue as Zalidar’s terminator moved steadily across the planet.
The ork bombardment had stopped, and the world seemed an eerily quiet place as the dawn came reaching towards them. A hush spread out over the blasted mire that extended to the south of the city for so many miles.
Not even the carrion eaters of Zalidar picked at the corpses out there. The wasteland was complete, churned clean of all indigenous vegetation, the roads which had run across it obliterated, the landmarks gone, replaced by wrecked vehicles and the strewn heaps of the ork dead, incubating their replacements in garish fields of green fungi.
The encampments of the orks were a scab that stretched across the land to the south, and there was movement out there, massed formations of the xenos moving out and beginning the long march up to the walls. They were in numbers such as the defenders had not seen before.
Marneus Calgar stood on the shell-shattered summit of the Vanaheim Gate with his brethren deployed around him. Beside him stood Governor Fennick, Colonel Boros, Rear Admiral Glenck and Lieutenant Roman Lascelle.
‘I wonder if they know,’ Fennick said.
‘I doubt it,’ Glenck snorted, his jowls quivering. He had lost weight everywhere but his face these last few weeks, and was shrunken, an admiral without a fleet. Or nearly so.
‘It seems almost too good to be true, after all that has happened,’ Colonel Boros said, shaking his head.
‘Brother Valerian has confirmed the message the Hesiod got through,’ Calgar told him. ‘He has established communications with Seventh Company’s Librarian, Brother Carimus.
‘The Andronicus battlefleet re-entered normal space last night on the outskirts of the system. It will reach orbit around Zalidar in two planetary days. My brethren were skilled – and fortunate – in their navigation of the warp.’
‘The orks must know,’ Roman Lascelle said, wondering. ‘They’re coming out to fight, to try and get the thing done before your people arrive, my lord.’
‘That is the orks for you. Nothing if not stubborn,’ Calgar said. But his tone belied the lightness of his words. ‘A lot can happen in two days, gentlemen. They know that as well as we do.’
‘There is something different in the air,’ Fennick said. ‘Can you feel it? Like the heaviness before the break of a storm. It sings in my head like a song I cannot get rid of.’
They watched as the orks massed across the plain in their tens of thousands, summoned by wardrums whose bass thump carried across the intervening miles in the morning quiet, a steady, ominous beat.
‘We have the resources for one more all-out fight,’ Colonel Boros said. ‘After that, we’re done. We’ll be fighting with lasguns and knives.’
‘We will fight with those, if it comes to that,’ Calgar told him grimly. He scanned the towering walls that stretched out east and west from the Vanaheim Gate. The battlements were full of militia. He had brought south as many as he dared, denuding other sections of the perimeter. The orks had remained fixated on the Vanaheim from start to finish. They would not attack anywhere else now; the place had for them become symbolic of victory or defeat.
‘I did not know there were so many,’ Rear Admiral Glenck said, awed by the sight of the marching thousands.
‘Then you should have spent more time on the wall,’ Boros said sharply.
‘Lord Fennick, have all my instructions been complied with?’ Calgar asked, ignoring the exchange.
‘Yes, my lord. Every available heavy weapon in the city is now concentrated in this sector, and the ammunition stockpiles are even now being shifted south for quick access. We could not move them earlier, because of the bombardment.’
Calgar nodded. ‘Very good. Where is Morcault?’
Fennick seemed surprised. ‘As far as I know he and his crew are still trying to repair his ship.’
‘He has been given every cooperation in your power?’
‘Yes, my lord. I detailed the engineers myself. But I am still not sure why.’
‘The Mayfly may not yet be finished as an asset.’
Fennick looked at Calgar strangely. ‘Does – does Morcault know that?’
‘I spoke to him a few hours ago.’ Calgar did not elaborate.
‘What of our other repair job?’ Colonel Boros asked.
‘It is done,’ Fennick told him. ‘The vehicle is operational and is in place. But we have only a single shell for it.’
‘One will have to be enough,’ Calgar said, his face impassive, giving nothing away.
‘My lord, I would feel better if you included me in your planning,’ Fennick said, thrusting his bearded chin out. ‘I do not know all that is going on.’
‘Just keep the munitions coming, Fennick,’ Calgar said. ‘Colonel Boros, I want the reserves moved up closer to the southern wall. If the regiments there begin to fold, there will be little time to reinforce.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
Calgar studied the advancing orks. His gaze ranged across the broken battlefield, estimating numbers, studying the approach. The wardrums thumped endlessly, like the heartbeat of some vast distant beast buried out of sight.
‘Today will be the hardest,’ he said to those around him. ‘Today, they will come at us with everything they have left.’
‘All they have left is infantry,’ Admiral Glenck said. ‘My lord, their aircraft have been decimated, their armour destroyed, their aerial troops massacred. All they have left are footsloggers.’
‘They have more than that,’ Calgar said. ‘The orks always save the best for last. Brother Valerian?’
‘It is not yet here, my lord,’ the Librarian said. ‘I confess myself puzzled. I do not sense its presence anywhere.’
‘What presence?’ Fennick asked, irritation overcoming his customary courtesy towards the Ultramarines.
‘The orks have brought to the planet a last weapon, one of the greatest in their arsenal,’ Calgar said with unwonted patience. ‘Brother Valerian discovered it at the Ballansyr Quarries. It is a great beast, the likes of which is seldom seen, the very pinnacle of their barbarous ecology. It will be the centrepiece of their assault. Governor Fennick, I want every anti-aircraft gun you have to be manned and ready. If we are attacked from the air, the enemy craft must not be allowed to range over the city – that is imperative. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, my lord, of course… but–’
‘I want no surprises in our rear. Let them come at us as they always have. I have detailed Lieutenant Janus’ firefighter regiment to be on stand-by. Their command is left to you. There is a good chance I shall be very busy in a little while. Janus has received a warning order to move on your word alone.’
Fennick bowed slightly.
‘They’re coming closer,’ Admiral Glenck said. His glabrous face was white as chalk.
The drums picked up, a sonorous booming that carried from one end of the plain to another. The orks were advancing steadily now on a broad front.
‘There must be sixty or seventy thousand of them out there,’ Lascelle said, awed by the terrible spectacle.
‘Closer to one hundred thousand,’ Calgar informed him.
There was silence along the city walls, but out on the plain the ork masses had begun to set up a sound, a repetitive chanting that could not quite be made out. They were still some two and a half miles away, but the noise of their combined voices carried clear to the walls of the city, a dull murmur, punctuated by the relentless drums.
Calgar had read extensively on history, on the Imperium, the Great Heresy, and back before even that, the scraps and remnants of story that pertained to the origins of them all, ancient Terra herself.
There had been a place there, a city before which had stood a flat plain ideal for the massed movement of troops – and so often had armies contended on that soil that the plain had acquired a name. The city had been called Thebes, and the plain had become known as the Dancing Floor of War.
He looked out now at the chanting orks and the tortured earth that trembled under their feet. It seemed fitting here, also.
‘All artillery and mortars to hold fire until I give the word,’ he said.
‘What are they saying?’ Glenck demanded, listening to the thunderous voices of the ork host with fear and apprehension warring across his broad pale face.
‘Does it matter?’ Colonel Boros asked him.
Calgar clicked his battered Corvus helm with its wreath of gold from his thigh. He knew what they were saying, as did Brother Valerian.
‘It has come,’ the Librarian said in a quiet voice. ‘They have finally cohered. I can feel it, my lord.’
‘As can I,’ Calgar said calmly. He placed his helm upon his head and clicked it shut on the collar of his ancient armour. At once, readouts and runes sprang up in his vision.