by David Guymer
Marcarian was standing by the chart desk that dominated the strategium turret. The base unit was an illuminated table, above which a wavering hololithic grid chart was displayed. A golden aquila dead-centre represented Dantalion. She was surrounded by a cloud of unidentified blips, trailing back towards the bloated, crimson wire-frame that represented the Vandis star. The intervening grids filled fast with ship markers, like a spreading infection reviewed on rapid playback. The banks of time-lapse and repeater screens that surrounded the desk were walled with static.
‘Disregard the orks for now,’ Marcarian commanded the strategium liaison. ‘Authorise removal of the necessary coding wafers and route the spared cogitation capacity to parse Last Wall identifiers.’
‘Do you not want targets?’ asked Zerberyn.
‘Scanning for Last Wall signals will identify both the source of the distress beacon, and our own fleet if they are here. That should be our first priority.’
Zerberyn offered his silence by way of agreement. Before a void fight with a Death Guard flotilla had wasted his right side and earned him his command, Marcarian had been Augur Master aboard the Grey Ranger. He knew his system.
‘I’d also recommend mobilising the First. The orks have shown themselves to favour long-range teleport actions.’
It was then that Zerberyn realised that at some point during the translation cycle he had drawn his pistol.
‘We are ready for them.’
All Adeptus Astartes fleets employed the same classes of ship, but the modular design allowed for variations on the basic STC. Fists Exemplar warships differed from those of their cousins in many ways, but principal among these was the manifold layers of dedicated psychic shielding they employed. They were built for void-war, purposed to patrol the storm-wracked region of wilderness space afflicted by the Rubicante Flux. In addition to the cherub-serfs that filled every inhabited section with song, choristers from the Chapter Librarius psychically conducted the chorus from chambers specifically designed for their warp-soothing acoustics. Every one of Dantalion’s millions of consoles was worked with monomolecular silver wires. Her ballast chambers were filled with the scent of candlewood and samphyr, silvic oil and rose cedar. Even the very halls of the ship were arranged into the schematised form of potent protective runes and a good portion of her orbit-to-ground firepower had been retrofitted with psychic null generators.
She had been designed to fight the enemies of Man and triumph in regions of space where other ships could not enter, and only deep-survey barges of the Inquisition sailed with greater protection against warp-borne assault.
‘But again, granted. Have them deploy at your discretion.’
‘Bright skies…’ someone exclaimed.
Zerberyn followed the staring faces to the main viewscreen. Someone amongst the veteran crew zoomed the screen’s visual feed and placed a bracket around a patched-up old colossus. Almost three times the mass of Dantalion, it looked like an Imperial Navy battleship. It was heavily damaged and, so it appeared, either partially or carelessly rebuilt. Its aft section was almost completely crumpled, and had been fitted with a monstrous engine housing almost as large as the rest of the ship that filled the void behind it with cones of chemical fire. Construction scaffolds spread from the hull like a beetle’s wings. Fires burned on several decks.
‘Oberon-class,’ Marcarian confirmed. ‘Or she was.’
The big vessel yawed into the lower quadrant of the main viewer, drifting across the plane of the solar system with a trail of gnat-like ork fighters in pursuit. ‘Approaching on an intercept vector.’
Whatever their current naval supremacy, the orks would always make use of what they found. Zerberyn could almost respect them for that.
‘No serial codes, no auto-transmissions, no response to hails.’ Marcarian limped through the strategium desks, looking over shoulders at the read-outs. ‘I’d say it’s an ork ship.’
‘Of course it is an ork ship. That much is clear.’
‘Still no sign of Last Wall transponders on our scans, lord captain,’ said Marcarian, stiffly. ‘All hands ready for emergency translation at your order.’
Zerberyn brought the barrel of his pistol to his gorget ring and tapped it as he thought, watching the zipping ork fighters wind about the nearing battleship like surgical thread through a wound.
‘Lord captain, I think that–’
‘I commend you your unfettered thought, it improves us all,’ Zerberyn spat, quoting from the Oriax Variorum. The ship slid into full view, Dantalion gunning for it amidships. Zerberyn aimed his bolt pistol at the viewer.
‘Kill that ship.’
Two
Terra – the Imperial Palace
The shuttle deployed its landing struts for its final descent stage onto Daylight Pad Theta, the light void craft wobbling in the crosswinds generated by the perpetual grind of the Palace hive’s colossal cycler fans and the sheer volume of air traffic. Transorbital lighters were picking up and setting down in a near-constant flow, crowding the Palace’s skyline: red and purple and black and gold, a swirling plasteel snow of new conscripts pressed into the Navy’s proudest regiments. To navigate a shuttle through either obstacle, let alone both, was a task closer to reading the Emperor’s Tarot than landing a void craft. To even make the attempt took the superhuman reflexes and unshakable confidence of the Adeptus Astartes.
Koorland, Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, looked up to watch the shuttle’s approach.
Waves of promethium heat beat down on him, and the roar of the angling turbofans rippled his lips and cheeks, but his eyes stayed open despite the onslaught. The Templar crosses emblazoned on white panels on the shuttle’s nose and underwing appeared to resize as aerofoils made minute adjustments. Jets of air from lateral stabilisation thrusters held it level. Roused from torpor by the approaching lander and flushed of soporific neurosedatives, servitors bonded to caterpillar-tracked motive assemblies moved haltingly forwards against the jetwash. Lengths of bright orange vulcanised hosing played out behind them, the oil-washed outlet valves supplanting superfluous hands and emerging from artificially gaping mouths flanked by mind-wiped stares.
The shuttle touched down within the innermost ring of blinking guidelights, and eased onto its landing struts. The roar of its turbofans became a whine and gases hissed from heat flues and radiator grilles, equalising pressure and temperature across the shuttle’s glowing heat-shields. One of the servitor units sprayed the shuttle with super-cooled carbon dioxide vapour. Another trundled underneath, frozen gases crystallising its slack features, and nozzled its wrist adaptor over the shuttle’s filler pipe. It emitted a guzzling noise, smoking under the white hiss of venting gases.
Either side of Koorland, an honour detail of human (and another of not-quite-human) troopers endeavoured to stand crisply at attention, despite the successive waves of engine heat and coolant that came at them from the middle of the pad.
The men were all tall and hard-faced, in black uniforms with red piping and frogging, armsmen of the Navy’s symbolic flagship, the Royal Barque. Each wore the Royal Barque’s forbidding ensign on their shoulder in place of the usual regimental insignia, a sheathed cutlass and a pair of ceremonial red gloves. They were the Navy’s elite protection detail, and only the highest-ranking admirals and most influential of visiting dignitaries warranted such bodyguards. In this instance, the subject of their care was Rear-Admiral Pervez Leshento of the Tiamat-class battleship Dies Dominus. The name was High Gothic for ‘Lord of Daylight’. An extraordinary coincidence, or Lansung was honeying Koorland’s gruel a little thickly.
On the other side were the skitarii of the Basilikon Astra, the exploratory fleets of Mars: visored, cloaked in dark, energy-dense robes worn over a bio-augmented flesh-carapace and an assortment of techno-esoterica. Koorland doubted that the cyborgised warriors suffered the extremes of heat and cold gushing out from the shuttle pad, but the jetwash
was certainly fighting them over their heavy cloaks. The commander of the maniple was a magos explorator named Benzeine. He was wrapped up to his throat in deep red robes woven with the machina opus. From the odd, twitching motions that occasionally stirred these robes, they were to protect the sensibilities of those he moved amongst rather than for his own benefit. Hololithic equations hovered about a millimetre in front of his black-chrome facial dish from a miniaturised projector embedded somewhere amidst the array of fluttering sensors.
The Taghmata of Mars had fulfilled their obligations in the Last Wall’s assault on the ork attack moon, limited though they were, and the Fabricator General was not about to relinquish control of that orbiting planetoid of xeno-tech now.
As Koorland waited, a pair of hypersonic Lightning interceptors rocketed overhead, the second surfing on its leader’s contrail. An expanding, rolling boom rattled the ornamental flak turrets of Dawn Spire and the leaded windows of the Walk of Heroes on the other side of the killing ground. The golden vexillum of the Daylight militia that flew from the plasteel-plated turrets of the Cathedral of Saint Clementine the Absolver bent after the passing fighters. Koorland looked up to catch them but even his genhanced eyes were too slow.
Instead, distorted by stained plex-glass and cracked UV-shielding, he saw the ork moon. Its cratered face glared down through a tangle of piping as if it always knew exactly when and where to look to find him. It was far smaller than Terra’s own moon, but hanging in geostationary orbit just a few hundred kilometres above the Sanctum Imperialis it appeared ten times larger. The larger vessels of the blockading fleet – Autocephalax Eternal, Dies Dominus and Abhorrence being but three – were visible from Terra, like clouds passing slowly over the face of the hostile alien planetoid. Koorland himself knew no fear, but despite the visual reassurance, he could well understand the terror the ork moon instilled in people.
Even those who would never see the sky could feel its power over their world.
A tremor passed through the mountainous bastion of Daylight Wall. Unsecured maintenance hatches rattled. Fern-like communications vanes hummed, the indelicate side-to-side motion transformed into harmonic vibrations. The mighty fortifications moved, as they had been designed to move under tectonic stresses or the crushing overpressure of an artillery bombardment, but their superficial facades crumbled, tank-sized chunks of ornamental masonry crashing down into the killing fields and the under-hives. Cabling tore – electrical, hydraulic, plasmic – and ionised gases and pressurised fluids sprayed photochemical ejecta into the Palace twilight.
The shaking eased. The shouts of rescue and repair units filtered up from below.
Things were not, at least, as dire as they had become on Ardamantua. The Last Wall and Basilikon Astra’s bombardment had obliterated the attack moon’s weaponry along with about ninety-five per cent of its crust. No, this was not a weapon. This was simply the seismic shock of having a lunar body suddenly transposed into near orbit.
He looked across the fretted robes of the skitarii, dazzling the air with arcane symbology, to where Daylight stood on the opposite side of the platform with his back against the steep drop to the Palace. The Fists Exemplar battle-brother who had taken the name, formerly Seventh Captain Dentor, looked good in his new livery, as much as it pained Koorland to compel his brother to wear it. He knew the value that the warrior’s home Chapter placed on outward humility and inward pride. The golden spear and shield he carried were not the same as those borne by his namesake, for they too had been victims of Ardamantua’s destruction, but had been selected for him from the Chapter’s armouries on the basis of being a good enough likeness to fool anyone who was not a son of Dorn.
To his dishonour, it did feel good to share his wall with a brother again. And Lord Udo had been right. The populace appreciated the sight of Imperial Fists on the walls.
Daylight nodded the all-clear, and Koorland returned it.
In a squeal of hydraulics, the shuttle’s boarding hatch lowered. The ramp struck the platform with a dull metallic thump, flexing and rattling as if in the grip of another quake as the power-armoured High Marshal of the Black Templars emerged through the coolant vapours.
Bohemond’s face was a burned ruin, scorched by the witch-fire of an ork psyker in a battle long before the present uprising. Half of what remained was a metal mask as emotive as the chrome plate of the magos explorator, but the other half was what struck terror into mortals and transhumans alike. It was flesh, but it could not be called a face. Looking at it, you could see where flesh had run, where it had resolidifed as he beat the greenskin witch to death with his bare fists, and the new form it had taken.
Koorland was not above a slight feeling of intimidation. Whatever he felt was amplified in the mortal soldiery tenfold. The idea that they might offer any protection at all against even the one Space Marine was laughable.
The High Marshal carried Sigismund’s sword in one gauntleted fist, drawn, the long blade angled away from him and towards the ground. The other hand he presented, palm up, and waited for half a second while a warrior bondsman in bone-coloured flak armour and black surplice slapped a data-slate into it. It looked as though he was about to launch into some kind of prepared speech.
But Koorland had come to know him better than that.
‘The last coordinates of every Black Templars, Crimson Fists, Excoriators and Iron Knights ship in the blockade fleet, and the codes to our defensive installations in the base’s interior.’ Bohemond’s mouth no longer closed properly and the expression he made was a loathsome sneer. ‘I advise you to memorise them. By the High Lords’ decree, there remain enough orks in the deeper levels to occupy your surface teams.’
Bohemond looked from Benzeine to Leshento, waving the slate back and forth in his giant’s hand as though hoping the two men might fight each other to be the one to have it. Neither would have dared. With a scowl, the High Marshal tossed the slate dismissively into the hands of one of the Royal Barque soldiers.
The information could have been delivered by data-burst, but the wheels of Terran bureaucracy were greased by such petty ceremonies.
The skitarii and Navy men filed out. The single Adeptus Arbites enforcer guarding the steps down to the fifth tier battlements saluted the magos explorator and the rear-admiral. Koorland was uncertain what she was there for. He smiled slightly.
His protection, he presumed.
As the last of the men disappeared down the steps, Bohemond strode across the platform and clasped Koorland by the forearm. Koorland returned the pressure on the High Marshal’s elbow guard.
‘It is good to see a friendly face, brother.’
‘Is that a joke?’
Koorland grunted, amused, but no longer seemed to feel like smiling. They released each other’s arms and stepped back, almost wary. ‘You have not come around to Udo’s edict, I take it,’ Koorland said.
‘If he wishes to disperse the Chapters, then I say let him try and make us.’
‘Mind what you say, brother. Your anger at the High Lords’ ingratitude is understandable. I share it. But it is because of thoughts like these that we must disperse.’
‘I do not care about their ingratitude,’ Bohemond muttered darkly. ‘It is their ineptitude that concerns me.’
‘If it will keep the Council on my side then having you and the others join the Fists Exemplar at Phall is a small price.’
‘And if the orks simply lie in wait for such an opening? There could be millions yet in the attack moon’s core, biding their time, and as the Mechanicus did not permit us to delve deeper we cannot say for certain that we destroyed the only teleportation device they have.’
‘Phall is little more than a month away at worst, and fifty Space Marine veterans is no token force.’
To be counted amongst a Space Marine Chapter’s finest was no small thing, and from the First Companies of the Fists Exemplar, Black Temp
lars, Crimson Fists, Excoriators and Iron Knights, Koorland had reconstituted the shield corps. Daylight. Hemisphere. Tranquility. Bastion Ledge. Ballad Gate. Zarathustra. Lotus Gate. He meant no disrespect to the Lucifer Blacks, who had stepped up to fill the Imperial Fist-sized breach in Fortress Terra, but they were not Space Marines. War would undoubtedly come again to the Imperial Palace, and when it did, then like the Arch-Traitor before them, the orks would meet walls defended by the sons of Dorn.
‘Can you hold for that long?’ said Bohemond.
‘It is ground, brother. I can hold it.’
Bohemond revealed his twisted grin, as if he were showing off a knife, and he nodded across Koorland’s shoulder. The enforcer had approached and halted about two metres away and threw a salute.
‘I know you, enforcer,’ said Koorland.
The part of the woman’s face that was visible between her chinstraps and visor seemed suddenly to glow. It was a look that Koorland had become wearily familiar with amongst the Palace’s mortal defenders. The sort of look reserved for saints and saviours. ‘Galatea Haas, lord, and,’ she rolled her shoulder to show her rank stripes, ‘it’s proctor now.’ She bit her lip, as though worried she might have offended her transhuman lord by wasting his time with something as trivial as mortal hierarchies, then added, tentatively: ‘You remember me?’
‘I seldom forget,’ said Koorland. ‘Thank the Emperor for designing me thus.’
‘I… I will.’
‘Praise be,’ Bohemond murmured.
‘Can I help you, proctor?’
‘Yes, lord.’ She snapped another salute and held it. ‘The provost-colonel demands the return of Daylight Pad Theta to the Adeptus Arbites.’
‘Tell her no.’
Haas smiled. ‘Thank you, lord.’
With a growl, Bohemond turned his back on the woman who reached barely as high as his elbow and made to head back to his shuttle.
‘They demand your protection, but only so long as you do not inconvenience their little fiefdoms. I leave you to it, brother, and may I never find myself embroiled in politics again.’