by David Guymer
‘You talk of the absolute destruction of a habitable planet.’ Bryce’s eyes were wide and unfocused, but the wrath in his voice was tight as a laser. ‘There is no graver affront against the Emperor.’
Ignoring the Militarum Tempestus man, Kalkator looked Zerberyn’s beaten battleplate up and down. The warsmith noted the way he leaned against his brother, the raspiness of his breaths, and his gaze lingered on the stump of Zerberyn’s leg.
‘Neither of us wishes for a galaxy in which the greenskins dominate, mankind just one more diminished race cruising the Halo Stars or trapped within their fortresses in the Eye of Terror. Conventional warfare will not defeat this enemy. The orks are too organised, too powerful and too fast. This world could supply billions. Even if we could take it we are too far from reinforcements to hold it. The orks would have an attack moon in orbit in days. You know this. If we are to hurt the orks then we have to hit them hard.’
‘Chapter Master Thane could request an Exterminatus,’ said Zerberyn, shaking his head. ‘But even he would not authorise the ultimate sanction on a whim.’
‘Authority?’ said Kalkator, chalky features twisting in disgust, disappointment. ‘I was led to understand that your Chapter was the first of the Imperial Fists’ successors, that you carried the blood of visionaries. Your brother Chapters must despise you for your wisdom.’
‘Such is our burden.’
‘Thane is dead,’ Kalkator pressed. ‘Magneric is dead. Your founder, Dantalion, is dead. It is the way of the galaxy to renew itself to ever lesser degree and here, now, it is just you and me, cousin.’ His hand hovered over the reader. His gauntlets were locked to his hip beside his horned helm. ‘I am warsmith of a Grand Company, a rank equivalent to that of Chapter Master. I hold seniority and the larger force. By the principles of your Codex Astartes, the decision is mine to make.’
Something inside Zerberyn snapped. He shoved Kalkator back from the command console.
‘You quote the Codex to me? You are a traitor, Kalkator. Legion Excommunicatis. By Guilliman’s laws I should kill you now, and then deliver myself to the Inquisition in chains for allowing this travesty to have continued for so long.’
‘But you won’t. Not yet. Your Imperium needs us. It needs this.’
Zerberyn clenched his fists and forcibly lowered them.
Kalkator was right.
The same infernal logic that had led to the creation of the Last Wall led now to this. It felt inevitable, and no more wrong now than it had been amidst all the good intentions and necessary evils at Phall.
A pained laugh, the bubbling hurt-filled revelation of a man who had just witnessed the dark side of the universe and returned not quite sane, pulled their focus from one another.
Unnoticed, Bryce had slipped away from Reoch and had a hellpistol in each hand. One aimed between Kalkator’s eyes. The other at the dented ceramite providing incomplete coverage of Zerberyn’s primary heart. There was no indication that he faced down lords of mankind whom he had fought alongside bare moments before. He knew only conviction, the galaxy partitioned clearly into that which fell within the Emperor’s light, and all else.
Zerberyn wondered if any Exemplar had ever thought that way.
‘Move away from the controls, my lords,’ said Bryce. The honorific emerged like a term of disparagement, a placeholder that he had yet to consider an alternative to.
Zerberyn noted the other Tempestus Scions staggering out along the companionway above, groggy but disciplined. And with no uncertainty whatsoever in their aim. One of the Chosen reached for his mag-locked combi-bolter, but a wave of Bryce’s hellpistol across his warsmith’s eyes persuaded him to move his hand away.
‘Don’t fire,’ Zerberyn ordered the Iron Warriors, raising his empty hand, and turning back to Bryce.
‘Traitor, is it? Your Imperium, is it?’ Bryce laughed again, humourless, and tightened his grip. ‘What is an Imperial world filled with the Emperor’s subjects to such as you?’
‘I am no traitor,’ Zerberyn snapped.
Bryce’s burnt mouth became a disbelieving sneer.
‘One minute to mark.’
‘I am an Exemplar,’ Zerberyn shouted. ‘My word is that of Rogal Dorn himself. This is the only way.’
Zerberyn saw the man respond to his words, watched the expression on his face change as he tried to process the complex variables. He saw the expression set. He saw the tension that gripped Bryce’s trigger finger, and reacted on instinct.
Zerberyn’s gauntlet snapped out faster even than he could think, enclosing Bryce’s augmeticised right hand. A slight squeeze crushed the Scion’s bionic up to the wrist. Bryce closed his eyes and screamed, dragging his second shot wide of Kalkator’s shoulder.
‘Please, major–’
The Scion’s skull detonated before his eyes, plastering his face in sticky red gore. Half a second later, the arm went slack and slumped in Zerberyn’s grip, but he did not think to let go. Stunned, he stared past the headless corpse. Kalkator was there, his bolter up and hot.
‘No!’
Hot-shot lashed the command hub with the savagery of truth. Wires were shredded and housings scorched, thousand-year-old cogitator units going up in fountains of sparks. The Chosen stepped past Zerberyn and opened up with a thunderous outpouring of explosive rounds.
‘No!’ Zerberyn yelled again, louder, caged by red spears and noise.
Antille jerked as though electrocuted. A searing lance angled across his back spun him half around and threw him into an interface that exploded underneath him. The veteran flew back on a nimbus of charge, rolled over the outer rail and, a minute later, splashed into the super-cooled heavy water.
‘Mark.’
The announcement was a death knell.
‘No.’
Kalkator pushed his unarmoured palm to the interface and spoke a command in a language that Zerberyn had never heard. The timbre of the deeply submerged atom engine plunged, felt through longwave vibrations in the gut rather than heard. The grinding sound of deep, mechanical reconfigurations reverberated from the walls of the spherical chamber, amplified by its acoustics so that, standing there at its core, it sounded like being inside a mechanical chronometer as it geared up to strike a long-awaited millennial bell.
The gunfire ceased. Even the Iron Warriors held their bolters close and looked around with unease.
The last surviving Scion took advantage of the lull to look down over the companionway handrail to the bubbling water below. Zerberyn felt he recognised him– the vox-officer on Bryce’s command squad during the agri-plex raid.
Horror dawning, the Scion dropped back, raising a hand to the vox-boost selector behind the cheek-guard of his omnishield. ‘Sergeant Jaskólska, Menthis. Evacuate now. Now! Raise the Commissariat and tell them that the Fists Exemplar have–’
A tight burst of bolter fire drowned out the rest.
Kalkator set his bolter down on the terminal as Trooper Menthis’ remains splashed across the curved wall. ‘I have your gunship on auspex,’ he said, as though the past minute had not just consigned billions to execution. ‘On an escape vector.’ He examined the read-out of a scorched sensorium console. ‘And Guilliman inbound.’
‘Has Penitence made contact with the fleet?’
‘I do not know. How much do you think the humans heard?’
‘I do not know.’
‘If word gets out–’
‘I know.’
Avoiding Kalkator’s eye, Zerberyn thumbed the activation switch of what, though arcane in design, looked to be a vox-unit. A garbled overlay of orkoid cant and system noise scratched through. It sounded like voices. Columba. Tarsus. Leonis. Jaskólska. Ghosts, drawn to him through electromagnetic snow.
His brothers would be made to understand that the destruction of Prax had been necessary for the greater good, if they heard it first f
rom him. They shared a singular vision, a rare gift for reason. But Issachar? Quesadra? Bohemond?
The Inquisition?
His hand moved of its own volition, knowing even before he did it what needed to be done. Punching Last Wall protocols into the cryptex key, he hit transmit. Long seconds of alien traffic and accusing voices filled the line.
‘What are you doing?’ said Reoch. The metallic grille that covered his lower jaw made him look like a muzzled beast.
‘What any brother in possession of the same set of facts would have to.’
‘Are you sure, brother?’
Zerberyn did not answer.
He was a descendent of Oriax Dantalion: the answer was obvious.
The comm link hissed open, butchered by static, but the direct voice on the other end was recognisably that of an Eidolican serf.
‘Guilliman receiving. Last Wall codes recognised. Is that truly you, lord captain?’
‘It is, and–’ He silenced the pickup and turned to Kalkator. ‘How long do we have?’
‘Five to six hours before it is done. Thirty minutes before we no longer want to be standing on this planet.’
Zerberyn nodded and reactivated the unit. ‘And requiring immediate extraction. Repeat, immediate.’
‘Understood, lord captain. Thunderhawks are undergoing final flight checks now. I will transmit the pilots your coordinates.’
Eyes locked to Kalkator’s unflinching gaze, Zerberyn spoke again into the receiver.
‘Penitence has been commandeered by local traitor militia. Do not establish contact, and under no circumstances are they to be permitted to board.’
Kalkator nodded. He knew what it meant to betray a brother.
Zerberyn closed his eyes.
‘Shoot them down.’
Twenty-Two
Prax – orbital
Zerberyn stood at the viewport of Palimodes’ starboard observation gallery, a hand’s width from his own dead-eyed reflection, and forced himself to watch the planet die.
Grey-brown continents and green seas were now wreathed in smoky black. The stratosphere had already burnt off as surface temperatures passed a hundred Celsius and carried on climbing. The thin band of residual atmosphere stuck to the riven crust like tar. A hex-like grid of magmic fractures smouldered through the pall, fault lines, the crust splitting, less a world now than rocky islands floating apart from one another on a molten sea. Bouts of volcanism racked the major continents on which mountains still stood, each an event of epochal destruction rendered into a non-event by the periodic eruptions that ejected billions of tonnes of mantle into orbital space. A glowing cloud shrouded the planet, metals, minerals, voidship fragments, churned by its hundred-thousand-kilometres-per-hour flight and its own increasingly erratic spin. Its nickel-iron core was destabilising. Magnetic distortions caused rocky accretions to blast apart at random, like targets on a practice range, and sent the massive ork container ships caught up in the destruction spiralling between orbits with plasma tails streaming in their wake.
Kalkator had spared no detail of the likely progression. Had he not been as forthcoming, then Zerberyn would have insisted.
The planet-cracker had been fired directly into the planet’s mantle through a kilometres-long shaft sunk a thouand years before for this sole purpose. From there the warhead had slowed, drilling through a further thousand kilometres of semi-molten rock to its long-programmed detonation site at the interstitial layer between core and mantle.
Within that narrow variance of pressure and density, it had detonated.
Zerberyn had never devoted much prior thought to the complete destruction of a planetary body, but he could see that it had been enacted with a ruthlessness and a precision of detail the equal of anything that he could have brought to the task. A detonation within the core itself would only have wrecked the world’s magnetosphere, rendering it uninhabitable for decades, while at a shallower site in the mantle the resultant tectonic recoil would have been a slap on the wrist compared to what was taking place now.
The boundary layer. It had to be there. And it had taken exactly the thirty minutes that Kalkator had said it would.
The core’s greater density reflected the seismic shockwaves back upwards like sunlight hitting an ocean’s waves. The effect on the surface was cataclysmic. Tremors had become quakes and quakes upheavals that tore the world asunder, crust and core between them amplifying the seismic waves and rebounding them until the entire globe rang like a bell and the crust was a shattered ruin.
That was what Zerberyn was watching now: the penultimate phase.
He wondered how many souls had been on Prax. Ten billion? A hundred billion? It was the one variable amongst the specifics of time and forces, and it ate at him.
‘Back from me, abomination,’ he snarled, kicking back with the stump of his leg.
The servile construct screwed back on its single caterpillar track, trailing the measuring tape with which it had been sizing his foot for prosthesis. Its head was a small human skull with a parchment covering of mummified flesh, suspended above a whining motive unit by an articulated metal spine. Its ears were large, encouraged to grow along a cartilage matrix the better to receive spoken commands. Its eyelids had been removed, its mouth stapled shut. It stared at him blankly until Zerberyn, unnerved by the emptiness he saw reflected in its eyes, turned back to the viewport. With half his weight on an iron crutch, he allowed the servitor to return to fuss about his foot as if nothing had transpired.
‘My Apothecaries could furnish you with an augmetic far superior to anything your own might have access to,’ said Kalkator.
Zerberyn chose not to reply. Bad enough to have been picked up by the traitors’ gunships in the first place.
‘I will think about it. But not now.’
‘Does watching make it better, or worse?’
‘It is an act of penance.’
He could feel the warsmith’s sneer. It had a vibration all of its own that carried it across the rigorously atmosphere-controlled viewing gallery.
‘One day, Kalkator. One day you and I will be called to account for every life we destroyed here today.’
‘Not destroyed, little cousin. Sacrificed.’
In absolute silence, a flash of amber light rose up from the planet’s core and engulfed it. It happened in a split-second. Zerberyn grunted, eyes narrowing against the sudden, short-lived glare. By the time his vision recovered Prax was gone, a fading red stain on his retinas.
Sacrificed for the Imperium.
He hoped that the reward would be worth it.
Twenty-Three
Terra – the Imperial Palace
The vid-recording was grainy and poor, the field dark, the capture soundless. The borders fluctuated, spawning flurries of black snow that intermittently cloaked the figures in central view.
There were two of them. The first was clothed in heavy vestments, the skin grafts and bionic attachments of his face swollen out of proportion and stretched around a curve to fill the round of the visual feed recorder’s lens. The second was standing back, visible in profile as she glanced intermittently over her shoulder. She was a woman, slighter than the first figure, robed in Martian red and bodiced with bronze plates, her face masked by filtration tubes and optic sensors. One arm was appended with a bionic brace that twitched with digital manipulators and beam cutters and in the other she handled an arc pistol with uncommon adroitness. She looked tense. Her rebreather apparatus made it impossible to make out her lips, but from the movement of her exposed cheekbones and neck, it was clear that she was saying something. The distended curvature of her companion’s mouth opened and closed in response.
Green bars tracked the movement of his lips. Runes flickered, superimposed over the bottom of the screen, as linguistic algorithms struggled and failed to provide a translation.
The
front figure turned slightly, a digital black ghost image hanging in the air for several seconds after. He said something more. The woman replied.
‘–recording yet?’
Audio as bitty as the image scrunched up from nothing to fill the feed. The laboured in-out rasp of the man’s breathing, too close to the pickups, the rhythmic sigh of industrial machine noise.
‘I… I think so,’ he said, tapping at a console.
The woman drew him back. Their afterimages mingled for a moment, before the uncooperative recording device cleared the bandwidth confusion and showed just two figures once again.
‘Grand Master. This is Clementina Yendl of Red Haven, transmitting from Pavonis Hive. With me is Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex.’ She gestured behind her. The figure nodded at his name. ‘I regret that this will be my last report. The Mechanicus know where the orks are coming from. They have had a good idea since Ardamantua at the least and probably before that.’ She glanced over her shoulder, then turned back, speaking more urgently. ‘My attempt to extract the magos and bring this information to you has failed. I can only hope this transmission reaches you before the Mechanicus shut down this section. Urquidex.’
The magos looked up sharply. The fear in his face defied the resolution quality.
‘Tell them what you know.’
He stepped forwards, then checked back as a phosphor flash lit up the background image and a loud bang crumpled through the audio.
‘They’re h–’
Koorland studied the frozen image in the data-slate: the magos looking over his shoulder in horror, the woman blurred in the act of aiming her pistol. He set the slate face down onto the large, figured wooden table, pushing aside the stack that had accumulated there over the course of the morning. Without the slightest change to his grim expression, he glared into the imagined distance.