by David Guymer
‘He did what? Has he completely lost his mind?’
‘Perhaps. But for once, leveller heads prevailed. Only Tobris Ekharth and Mesring backed it.’
‘The Ecclesiarchy I could almost understand supporting a move like that, but Ekharth?’ Vangorich swore. ‘Does that man even have a nervous system of his own?’
‘The Lord Commander was most aggrieved.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘The High Twelve is fracturing, Drakan. They could be coherent, at least, when they knew that Udo could pander to their interests, but now there is that.’ Veritus pointed skyward. He didn’t put a name to it, as though it was a daemon that could be summoned by stating it. ‘The paralysis, the disbelief – it was no different when Horus brought the armies of Chaos to Terra. No one, perhaps not even the Emperor Himself, believed that it could happen, even after it had already begun. Terra survived the Siege that followed only because Rogal Dorn united a factionalised military, and wielded them with one will.’
‘You’re talking about a primarch.’
‘I am talking about strong leadership. The High Lords would back it if they saw it.’
Vangorich shook his head sadly. Another age, another class of man. One could not simply replace a demigod. There wasn’t one man amongst the Imperium’s countless trillions who could even come close.
But who said it had to be a man? What if it could be something more?
‘We can speak more at the Senatorum tomorrow,’ said Veritus tiredly, angling his body pointedly to open a path to the door. ‘I trust that you can find your own way out.’
‘I did find my way in,’ said Vangorich, surfacing from his thoughts and making to leave. He paused inside the doorway and turned back.
‘Where is Wienand?’
‘You betray your care, Drakan.’
‘Or reinforce your preconceptions.’
A genuine smile stretched at Veritus’ face. ‘She works towards the common end, as the Emperor’s Inquisition always will.’
‘And your… guest?’
The suite was cloaked with a counter-surveillance manifold, both technological and arcane, and was covered by a psychically generated blanket of silence. But even with only Veritus in the room and Krule outside who could possibly overhear, it felt unwise to mention their xenos captive by name. It was like Veritus and the ork moon. Naming the thing gave it a life beyond one’s control.
‘Helpful,’ said Veritus, simply.
Vangorich let it go. He had more pressing matters on his mind.
Beast Krule was waiting in the foyer, sitting on the edge of a woven aluminium chair. He unfolded himself as Vangorich walked towards him.
‘Problems?’
Vangorich shook his head. ‘Does Esad Wire still have his uniform?’
‘He’s been off duty for a long time. Even in KVF Sub Twelve that kind of absence without leave gets noticed.’
‘You won’t be going back to Tashkent. I want you to find the Provost-Marshal.’
‘I can do that, sir. What made you decide on him?’
‘Nothing so terminal. I need you to deliver him a message. Tell him he has my guarantee that he’ll want to be at the Senatorum tomorrow.’
Ten
Sycrax Cluster – unknown
First Captain Zerberyn came round to the squeal of plasma tools and the smell of sparks. The emergency lighting was low and sporadic, the shadows long. Wired multilaser cradles hung from their rails, limp and unpowered, and flecked with white specks of flame-retardant spray. The rough shape of Marcarian’s head passed between Zerberyn and Dantalion’s ceiling. The light nicked the shipmaster’s steel frame.
‘We made it,’ Zerberyn croaked.
His throat was bruised. Talking felt like trying to swallow a rank pin.
He grunted and rolled his head, his eye at floor level, and looked along the deck plates to one of the command turrets. Sparks sputtered from torn electrics. A team of serfs in full-body protective gear and rebreather kit attacked a fallen bulkhead with a plasma torch. Charged filaments of waste plasma crackled and sprayed. The stuttering light silhouetted a robed figure casting cleansing oils around the cut site, reciting a psalm for the ship’s forgiveness and fast healing. A giant amongst those lesser mortals in his unmarked battleplate, Veteran-Sergeant Columba was bent into the heart of the plasma spray, pulling away chunks of debris in his gauntleted hands and hurling them over the edge to clang in the cogitation pit below.
‘Vox,’ Zerberyn recognised. ‘The last thing I remember… I was at Operations. Your crew allowed the dorsal void bank to overload.’
‘An inevitable consequence of going into battle with a numerical, strategic, and technological disadvantage, lord captain,’ slurred Marcarian, stumping clumsily into his field of view. ‘An emitter overload when we translated out threw you down the walkway and struck your head on the rail. You’ve been out for just over an hour.’ He shrugged apologetically, or tried to. ‘I’m not sure exactly how long. The chronos are out.’
With a groan, Zerberyn made to pull in his elbows and draw himself up.
Nothing moved.
In consternation more than concern, he jerked on his arms, then his legs, but neither moved a millimetre. He could feel them, a pins-and-needles tingle across his various points of contact with the ground, but he couldn’t command a single muscle to twitch. It was as though the servo-muscular connections to his armour had been severed. Without power assistance and nervous control, half a tonne of bonded ceramite was little more than an ornate null-sensoria tank, the kind used to prepare neophytes for the experience of mucranoid hibernation.
Indignity piled upon indignity.
‘I cannot move.’
Marcarian gestured across his body with an open palm. Zerberyn rolled his head the other way, and met the leering half-skull of Mendel Reoch.
The Space Marine’s armour was bone-white and bore the modified double-helix of the Apothecarium on the shoulder pad. All well within the diktats laid down in the Codex Astartes, and Zerberyn therefore felt obligated to approve, but, as with the Chaplaincy black, it seemed inimical to the Exemplar spirit. An alternative variable was that Zerberyn simply did not like Reoch. And he did dislike his Second Company brother, with a self-sustaining passion. Binoptics glowered dully from the eye-pits of the organic upper half of the Apothecary’s face, the lower part constructed by the ugly fusion of an iron grille to the son of Dorn’s once-noble cheekbones. The reconstructive work was so extensive, so obtrusive that given the Apothecary’s long service and skill its unsightliness could only have been intentional, as if Reoch had deliberately cut back his face to bare cold metal, and a darkness he no longer wanted to conceal.
‘You will heal. Your paralysis is induced and temporary.’ His voice was a grizzle of vox-corruption. His optics glimmered with every intonation. ‘I have noted an alarming tendency amongst our Chapter brothers to not lie still when commanded to do so.’
Zerberyn held Reoch’s unblinking, back-lit stare.
‘Flush it out of me. Now.’
Reoch sighed. ‘I blame Oriax Dantalion. He persuaded the primarch-progenitor to adopt the Codex Astartes and now every Exemplar believes himself a martyr to his own special wisdom.’
‘Except for you of course, brother.’
‘I am an Apothecary,’ said Reoch. The diamantine drill-bit of his narthecium gauntlet revved and reversed. A spring-loaded injector attachment clicked out of the reductor, cycled through various combinations of syringes and needles until a hyperfine carbon tip slotted into a slender glass vial, locked, then extended forwards. The plunger drew back into the apparatus, slowly filling the syringe with a milky fluid as the Apothecary leaned in. ‘I always know best.’
Zerberyn clenched his jaw and tilted his head to expose the vulnerable fibre bundles and cabling hidden beneath the gorget ring. He felt a sharp p
ain as the hypodermic squeezed between the vertebrae at the top of his spine, and then a rush of cold. He gave an involuntary gasp, then shuddered as the sensation passed down his spinal cord and dispersed into his peripheral nervous system. He wriggled his fingers and this time they moved, gauntlet servos whirring as armoured digits rolled clumsily in and out, up and down. On impulse, he shifted his hand to fumble over his weapons belt.
His fingers closed around the grip of his bolt pistol and squeezed. Fingers, wrist, shoulders: the sensation of being bundled up in a skin-tight carapace of thick wool began to recede. An Umbra-pattern bolt pistol’s uncompromising menace left no place in its proximity for that kind of uncertainty.
He sat up slowly.
A tangle of twisted and torn walkways crisscrossed the command deck, smoke and dust rising from the cogitation pits with each slow grinding whup of fans. The strategium display was static, the encircling image-boosters and visual feeds hissing noise. The main viewer crackled with electromagnetic distortions, flickering with augur traces and warp energy residuals that stained the eye with afterghosts. Everywhere the frail bodies of crew serfs lay under blood-lashed metal.
Anger, real anger deep in his transhuman belly, filled him with excoriating fire.
A Chapter-strength deployment, the might of the Fists Exemplar fleet, had been brushed aside. Ship to ship, man to man, the Adeptus Astartes would always triumph, but the weapons and technologies that the Beast could call on were just too powerful. Dantalion transported the bulk of the First Company, a few squads of the Second, Seventh and Tenth. What had happened to the rest of the fleet? Bulwark, Faceless Warrior? Alcazar Remembered? Could the Fists Exemplar have been reduced to little more than the First Company and a handful of squads from three others?
There had been no other option. Any other commander of the Fists Exemplar would have taken the same decision as him.
‘How did this happen?’
‘We were not as worthy as we considered ourselves to be,’ answered Reoch, clenching the reductor back into his narthecium as he turned and walked away.
Marcarian stepped back to allow Zerberyn to stand up, the Space Marine’s genetic gifts just about compensating for the dizziness and slight lack of motor control that lingered in his system courtesy of Mendel Reoch. The bruising round his neck restricted his range of motion, but breathing at least came easier now that he was upright.
‘What is our status?’
‘The orks took out the system. The whole damned system. We were lucky, if you’d call it luck. We were already heading out, and were able to make an emergency translation before we suffered too much heavy damage.’ A ruptured power conduit running through the ceiling sprayed the walkway with sparks and made the shipmaster flinch. ‘The rest we suffered during,’ he shouted, as the hiss of sparks died down. ‘I saw the Interdictor make it out ahead of us. I also saw Grey Ranger crushed like she was nothing.’ He was silent a moment. ‘My first ship.’
‘Did any other ships manage to escape?’
‘No sign yet, but it’s only been ten minutes or so since we emerged. Systems are still coming back online and we’re still assessing the damage. And…’
He gestured to the wreck of the vox-turret.
‘Suggestions?’
The Fists Exemplar hierarchy was no different to that of any other Codex-compliant Chapter, but the lines were enforced with a stringency seldom seen elsewhere. They were notoriously free and independent thinkers in their founder’s mould: not the barbaric affectation of the Wolves of Fenris, nor the solitary temperament of the hunters of Mundus Planus, but a mentality born of absolute conviction their personal infallibility. It was, when properly managed, their greatest strength.
‘The Codex would suggest we resume our original heading,’ said Marcarian. ‘If anyone made it out of Vandis then they could be anywhere in the subsector. Rejoining the Last Wall at Phall would be their most logical destination.’
‘I doubt the ship would survive such a journey,’ Zerberyn grunted as he stood. ‘Walk with me to Vox.’
There was not a lot to see. Zerberyn picked up a headset from a console. Foam covered it. The loop of wire by which it was plugged into the terminal pulled taut as he drew it to his face, a child’s toy in his massive gauntlet.
‘Where is the woman that was stationed here?’
Marcarian nodded to the work crew. Their plasma torch was making rasping, shallow cuts into the bulkhead that had sliced the section in half. And Marcarian’s vox-liaison too, by the looks of it. The hiss and whine of spent plasma was strangely reminiscent of the white noise leaching from the transceiver set, as if there was some cosmic confluence of which Zerberyn, for all his gifts, could never be anything but unaware.
‘A shame,’ he said, and meant it. She had been competent.
Marcarian toed aside the twisted aluminium frame of a console chair, taking the ivory sliders and brass dials and deftly recalibrating the board. Zerberyn pushed the left headset earpiece up against his corresponding ear and listened.
White noise whispered from the set. Static. Which was a misnomer in many ways. It implied a steady state, something unchanging, but the sound crying through Dantalion’s receiver arrays was anything but steady. It crested and fell, hissed and crackled, and precipitously dropped or rose in pitch. It was cosmic background noise, stellar radiation, energy bleed from unshielded power sources – which, on the command deck just then, must have numbered anywhere in the high thousands. It was almost like voices, whispers at the very edge of straining.
‘Stop!’
A horrible sensation chased down Zerberyn’s spine, similar to the feeling of the counteractant that the Apothecary had injected into him but a hundredfold worse for having no discernable material source. As if a soul could feel rotten. As if static had the taste of copper and smoke. He tightened his grip on the physical surety of the headset and turned to Marcarian.
‘Dial it back.’
The shipmaster did so. The noise dropped away, to be replaced by a sound in his head like knives on the wind. It was a voice.
Dantalion… Dantalion, respond.+
‘The system is fried,’ Marcarian was saying, a vox-wraith in his other ear. ‘It’s the receiver. It can’t distinguish signal from noise.’
‘Do not touch the controls,’ Zerberyn snapped. He felt sick. Not physically of course – his gifts prevented that – but he felt spiritually spoiled. He twisted around the headset’s microphone bulb and spoke into it. ‘Is that you, Epistolary? Is this Guilliman?’
A sound like laughter prickled the static.
My name is Kalkator, Warsmith of the Fourth Legion, in command of the cruiser Palimodes.+
Zerberyn froze. He wanted nothing more than to tear the headset from his face, but it was as though the absolute cold of the void had soaked into Dantalion’s antennae, run through her wires, and iced the muffler to Zerberyn’s ear.
‘I do not speak with traitors,’ he hissed.
Then just listen. You are in danger here. Your jump has not taken you far from the ruins of Vandis. Your vessels Paragon and Intrepid are in the Corus System. Paladin of Rubicae is in Randeil and Vindicator in Quaillor. Guilliman and Excelsior are in the Ooran System. None more than an hour from an ork fleet. And trust me, Dantalion, they are coming.+
‘Trust you…?’
Marcarian was looking up at him, uncomprehending. Some horror in his eyes made the bruised skin at the back of Zerberyn’s neck creep. He spoke again into the pickup.
‘How do you know the coordinates of our ships? How are you reaching us?’
Favours given, favours owed. Do you really want those kinds of answers, Exemplar?+
‘What of the rest of the fleet?’ he said after an uncomfortably extended pause. ‘What of Alcazar Remembered? What of the Interdictor?’
You are the last to emerge and I had almost given up on the p
ossibility of any more of your ships making it from the warp intact. My ship made it to the Mandeville point and was primed for translation when Vandis was destroyed. The empyrean buffered her systems against the star’s death throes.+
‘An escape paid for in the blood of my brothers. No depth of space could obscure from me the warmth you show your allies, Iron Warrior.’
The voice dropped into the seethe of static. Zerberyn could hear the crackle of emotion.
There was a time when Magneric and I were thought closer than brothers. Our bond was stronger than I expect you to understand, forged by the glories of an age you cannot conceive. I found his faith contemptible, his obsession with me pitiable. Magneric would be even less fulsome in his remembrance of me were our fates reversed, but I will remember him as a brother. Do you think your Imperium the sole proprietor of a finite store of grief? We are not so different, you and I.+
‘How so?’
Did pragmatism not lead you to abandon your own Chapter Master?+
‘We did not see the Alcazar Remembered destroyed.’
I did not see the Emperor slay Horus, but I know that it was so.+
Zerberyn snarled. ‘Do not ever forget it.’
For one who chooses not to speak, you are as lyrical as any scion of Sanguinius. I asked you to listen, now listen. There is a system less than three hours from you – Prax. It was a garrison world of the Iron Warriors at the height of the Great Crusade and if there is a single world within ten light years that the orks’ advance into Segmentum Solar has not already destroyed, then it will be that upon which sit Perturabo’s walls. If we can muster our assets over Prax, then we might all have a chance of going our separate ways.+
This time, Zerberyn managed to pull the headset off.
His chest felt tight, but hollow, as if his armour plate was wrapped like a mummy’s bindings around an over-inflated skin. He smothered the headset pickup in his gauntlet, and turned to Marcarian.
The cruiser Paladin of Rubicae transported the Fifth and the Ninth, while the mighty Guilliman held the bulk of the Second as well as elements of the Third, Fourth, Tenth and most of what Dantalion didn’t carry of the First. Three, maybe three hundred and fifty brothers. Add the firepower of the aegis frigates, Paragon, Intrepid and Vindicator, and the support frigate Excelsior, and it was clear that one run-down traitor cruiser presented little by way of a tangible material threat.