by Dan Abnett
Hellock doesn’t know what’s just happened, but he already senses it’s the worst thing he’s ever going to experience.
He’s wrong.
[mark: -0.18.30]
The sky explodes over Numinus City. Braellen and Androm stand up, snapping out of rest mode. They don’t speak because there’s nothing factual to state yet, but they draw their weapons without waiting for an instruction from Captain Damocles.
It’s a high altitude detonation, high altitude or low orbit. Multiple detonations, overlapping, that’s clear a second later as the flashes chop and flicker like a strobe, blooming fire inside fire inside fire.
‘We just lost a ship,’ says Androm.
‘That wasn’t just one ship,’ Captain Damocles corrects.
[mark: -0.18.30]
‘Did you see that?’ Captain Phrastorex cries. ‘Did you see that?’
‘I saw it, captain,’ replies Sergeant Anchise.
The sky to the west of their camp is rippling with light, as if someone’s moving a glow-globe behind a veil of silk. There’s a growl, a long rumble that seems to be coming from space and shows no sign of ending.
‘Get the men up,’ Phrastorex yells.
The vox is screwed up. Weird sounds spit and cough through his helmet every time Phrastorex tries to open a link. Is that screaming?
Is that… chanting?
‘Get the men up and ready!’ he repeats, and then starts to pound across the clearing to the areas marked out for the 111th. Ekritus needs to get his men moving too. Something’s going on. Phrastorex hasn’t felt an intuitive wince this bad since the firefight on Cavolotus V. Ekritus needs to get ready for whatever this turns out to be.
A strange wind is stirring the trees, making them swish. The wind’s warm, dry. It feels like something bad has exhaled.
‘Ekritus!’ Phrastorex yells.
Down on the plains below the woods, even the Word Bearers are rousing. Phrastorex can see them forming up. He can see their Army units assembling. That’s good. Damn good. Far better drill than he expected of the XVII, given their reputation as heathen berserkers. Far faster response.
Good. Good, then. They’re all standing ready, ready to face this. United as one. It gladdens his heart.
They can face this together, whatever this is.
[mark: -0.18.30]
The datashock kills Server Uhl Kehal Hesst.
It doesn’t kill him instantly the way it kills forty-six of the data moderati in the cogitation wells around him, but it bursts and fries key sections of his cerebral architecture. This is brain damage that cannot be repaired, and from which he will never recover. Synaptic junctions are burned out like faulty wiring. A brain-bleed begins in his frontal lobe.
He remains standing.
Light hits the orbital Watchtower at Kalkas Fortalice a nanosecond after the shockwave of data. The noosphere collapses like an ice sculpture in an oven. The tower’s manifold field stutters out. Hesst feels and absorbs the shared agony of several thousand deaths: his modified brethren aboard the primary shipyard, aboard docked vessels, in the tower around him. Some deaths are quick: flashes of annihilation. Others, still fast, are physically traumatic: the liquid spatter of compression, the explosive misery of decompression, the blunt fury of impact, the screaming hell of immolation.
Some deaths are slower. They take whole parts of seconds to end. The plugged men and women in the amniotic armourglas caskets around him reel as hammer blows of data assault their brains. Information overload. Sensory overload. Hypertraumatic inload syndrome.
He is almost relieved when the noosphere fails.
He sways. The windows of the tower have automatically tinted to reduce the flare of the orbital explosions. Hesst’s permanent MIU link burns like a white-hot wire through his soul. His entire bioengineered self is fatally compromised.
Only one thought, captured in simple binaric form, remains within his grasp.
Hesst surrendered discretionary mode four hundred and sixty-two minutes ago. He surrendered it to the orbital bioengines.
The bioengines, all the orbital automatics, have died.
Calth’s planetary weapons grid has just ceased to function.
[mark: -0.18.30]
Telemechrus wakes again. He wakes bolt upright awake, screaming awake, howling awake, as if from a nightmare. There’s cold sweat on his back, but he doesn’t have a back. There’s blood in his mouth, but he doesn’t have a mouth. His eyes are open, but he doesn’t have eyes.
A flash-flood of data has shocked him into ignition, shocked him so hard that for a moment he is given a physical memory of his life before transformation. Not his recent transformation. From before that, from before his formative transformation by biogenetic engineering to Space Marine. For a second he was granted a memory of waking from a nightmare as an unmodified human being.
As a child.
He realises it wasn’t just a data shock. There was a significant physical shock too. His casket has been violently disturbed, thrown, dropped.
His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for a little over nine hours and ten minutes. External sensors are down. He can’t see. He can’t open the casket. There is no noosphere. There is no data inload.
His own sensors, the cyberorganic sensors of his combat chassis mount, tell him the external temperature of the casket is over five thousand degrees Celsius. His inertial locators tell him that he is upside down and falling.
At terminal velocity.
[mark: -0.18.30]
The sky erupts. Criol Fowst clutches his athame so tightly against his breast that the blade draws blood from his fingers.
Staring up at the firestorm that is devouring the sky, the Brotherhood of the Knife starts to chant the litany of the Octed.
Ushkul Thu! Ushkul Thu!
Fowst wants to join in, but he is too busy laughing, laughing uncontrollably, like a maniac.
[mark: -0.18.30]
Erebus looks up from the circle of black stones. The centre of the ritual circle, where the bodies of many of the Tzenvar Kaul processionals lie smouldering or twitching, has not been a focused reality for almost ten minutes. Matter squirms there. The membrane of the universe has turned liquid. There’s a smell like the smell of weird dreams, strong but not in any way identifiable.
Essember Zote of the Gal Vorbak mutters something as the first flash hits the southern skies. Erebus is already watching. Fire, light, first light, a dawn of sorts. Erebus understands that several clear strategic benefits will be achieved by their plan, but they are all military objectives and they count little to him. To the first of the Dark Apostles, it is the meaning that matters: the significance, the art, the context.
The light in the sky, that huge bright flare they have wrought upon this day, that is the Ushkul Thu. In the archaic language of the Holy Worlds, the words mean ‘Offering Sun’ or ‘Tribute Star’. It is hard to translate it precisely. There is a sense of sacrifice, a sense of the promise represented by dawn, and the sense of something greater to follow.
There is a greater sunrise to come.
2
[mark: -0.18.20]
Calth Veridian Anchor, the vast shipyard, is ablaze and dying. Damaged beyond the possibility of salvation or stabilisation, its giant platform structure is tipping, shredding, pulsing like a white dwarf star that has suddenly been placed in Calth’s orbit.
It is an energy fire, a nuclear fire, spherical and incandescent, throbbing. The nearby orbital platforms shiver at the series of shockwaves thumping out of the stricken orbital. Some have taken collateral damage from outflung superstructure debris or parts of exploding ships, and are now burning or holed. Along the anchorage line, ships of the fleet are combusting or crippled. Debris and ejecta continue to tumble from the underside of the foundering orbital, caught by Calth’s gravity.
It is chaos. Electromagnetic slams have crippled communication networks, and what little vox and pict remains is choked with frantic intership traffic: question
s, demands, entreaties, insistences. What has happened? What is happening? You will tell me immediately what is happening!
There is no information, no data. The Mechanicum’s throat is cut, its voice-box torn out, its brain mush. The only facts are those available to anyone with eyes, or a window port, or a functioning picter. An act of unimaginable violence has been perpetrated. Calth high anchor is a firestorm. The death toll is huge. The injury to the fleet and the yard infrastructure is unthinkable.
It is an attack. It can only be an attack. An act of war. No accident could have been so far-reaching in its effect. The Veridian system and its approaches are protected by scrupulous systems of check and countercheck, by peerless levels of redundant security. This magnitude of catastrophic damage would have required malice in order to achieve it: a deliberate and inimical intent to circumvent the secure cordon.
This is no accident. This is an attack.
Someone, somewhere, gabbling in the flash flood of unfiltered vox traffic, uses the word ‘ork’ or ‘greenskin’. The enemy has got wind of the Veridian mobilisation. It has received warning of the force poised to launch at it, and it has struck first.
Within ten or twenty seconds of the first impact, ships across the high anchorage have desperately begun to power drives and weapon systems. Some are generating power in the hope of raising shields, or even preparing to slip authorised moorings so that they can reposition.
Then a battle-barge opens fire. The massive barge is known to the Ultramarines as the Raptorus Rex, but it has been renamed, with as little notice as the Word Bearers gave when they changed their battledress colours, the Infidus Imperator.
The Infidus Imperator is the barge of Kor Phaeron.
It discharges all of its primary lance weapons at the battle-barge Sons of Ultramar and reduces it to a whizzing cloud of metal chaff carried outwards in all directions by an expanding ball of fire.
The Infidus Imperator chooses its next target. In formation behind the mighty craft, the Crown of Colchis starts to fire too. So does the battleship Kamiel. So do the Flame of Purity and the Spear of Sedros.
And so does the flagship of Dark Apostle Erebus, the battle-barge Destiny’s Hand.
[mark: -0.17.32]
Shipmaster Ouon Hommed, captain of the heavy destroyer Sanctity of Saramanth, sees the Infidus begin its merciless prowl along the anchorage line. He understands precisely what the vast Word Bearers barge is doing. It’s executing the ships in the line beside it the way a man might execute a row of helpless prisoners.
He’s done it before himself. At Farnol High Harbour, after the Ephigenia Compliance, he crawled the Sanctity along the slipways, scuttling the captured enemy ships so they could not be reactivated and re-used. It was a graceless, unrewarding task, utterly pragmatic. The ships were too dangerous to leave intact.
As a shipman, as a person whose life has been dedicated to the service of the great starships, he’s never taken pleasure in scuttling duties.
Why does it seem like the Infidus is relishing it?
Hommed is screaming at his command staff, demanding yield of power, weapons, shields, data… anything they can give him. The Sanctity was sitting at slip cold, drives tamped down. With the best will in all the worlds, it will take fifty minutes to rouse the ship to operational readiness.
This is true of the entire fleet. The starships of Ultramar were sitting cold at high anchor for the conjunction. All of their power plants were at lowest yield for the purposes of maintenance, loading and embarkation checks. None of them needed ready drives or weapons or shields. They were all under the protective aegis of the planet’s weapon grid.
‘Power!’ he yells. ‘I want power!’
‘Yield is rising, sir,’ his first officer replies.
‘Nothing like fast enough. I need active condition!’
‘The Drive Room says we can’t hope to raise the yield any faster than–’
‘Tell the bastards in the Drive Room I want power, not excuses!’
There’s no time. The Infidus is coming. Whatever has happened, whatever outrage has occurred, the ships of the XVII clearly believe it to be an attack, and clearly regard the ships of Ultramar as a threat. They’re killing everything they can pre-emptively, killing everything before…
Hommed stops. He forces his mind to clear for a second. He realises how stricken he is with panic and extreme stress. Everyone is. The bridge around him is pandemonium. A clear head is the only hope he has to salvage anything, anything at all, from the situation.
The Infidus is coming. That’s the point. That’s the point. The thrice-damned Infidus is coming. Every ship was powered down at the time of the attack, which is why they’re all helpless and shield-less now.
Except the Infidus is coming. It’s moving. So are other ships from the Word Bearers fleet. It’s not that they’re responding hastily. It’s not that they’re taking wild shots at imagined targets before finding out what’s really going on.
It’s the fact that they’re moving at all.
They weren’t powered down. They were sitting at anchor hot.
They knew what was coming.
They were ready.
‘Those bastards,’ he breathes.
The Infidus closes. It’s firing callous broadsides; the whole length of it lighting up with multicoloured fury. Each salvo causes the counter-active gravimetrics to tense and brace the ship against the monumental discharge.
Each salvo murders another helpless vessel.
The Constellation of Tarmus disappears in a clap of heat and metal.
The Infidus closes.
‘Power?’ Hommed asks.
His first officer shakes his head.
The Infidus shivers and looses another broadside. Enough firepower to scorch and split a moon.
The Sanctity of Saramanth, struck amidships, bursts asunder.
[mark: -0.17.01]
Magos Meer Edv Tawren registers her own hyper-elevated adrenal levels. She has survived the great data-death that has ripped through the orbital Watchtower. Hesst saved her. Basic operational procedure saved her.
She does not want to think about that irony. That happenstance. That kindness.
There’s too much to do. They are in the middle of an unthinkable crisis. A disaster. She has to rescue the situation.
She has to save Hesst.
The tower’s elevators and lifting platforms are out. She hauls up the skirts of her long robe and rushes up the main spiral staircase. Smoke hangs in the air. The buzz of alarms. Voices echo from above and below. Outside, the sky is unnaturally luminous.
She passes servitors that are stumbling and mindless, trailing torn plugs, drooling. Some have slumped. Some are whining or replaying bursts of their favourite data like nursery rhymes. Some are smacking their heads against the staircase wall.
Toxic-data. Data-death. Overload.
Let Hesst be alive.
He was plugged in. He would have taken the brunt of the shock–
Don’t think about it. Just get upstairs.
She trips over the sprawled body of a high-grade servitor. A hand steadies her arm.
‘Do not fall, magos,’ a meatvoice requests.
Tawren looks up into the menacing face of Arook Serotid, the master of the tower’s skitarii brigades. Arook is a creature modified for war, not data. His ornate armour is part ceremonial, part ritual, a deliberately baroque throwback to the eras of threat-pattern and fear-posture.
‘Indeed, I will not,’ she agrees. He helps her up the stairs, moving blind and mindless servitors out of her way. He is a metre taller than her. His eyes are hololithic crimson slits in his copper visor. She notices that one of them is flickering.
‘We took a hit,’ he says.
‘A major datashock,’ she says. ‘Hypertraumatic inload syndrome.’
‘Worse than that,’ he replies. ‘Explosions in orbit. We’ve lost ships, orbitals.’
‘An attack?’
‘I fear so.’
&nb
sp; They’re both using fleshvoice mode. She’s painfully aware of it. It’s so slow, so painstaking. No canting, no data-blurts. No simultaneous and instant transmissions of ideas and data. She doesn’t believe she’s ever spoken to Arook in fleshvoice before, and he’s clearly not used to talking at all.
But the mannered effort is necessary. They were both insulated from the datashock. They must stay insulated.
‘I need to reach the server,’ she explains.
He nods. That one red eye is still blinking. A malfunction? Arook has taken some damage. Like all skitarii, he would have been linked to the noosphere, so the datashock would have hit him like everyone else. However, the skitarii also have their own dedicated emergency manifold, a crisis back-up. Arook has been hurt by the inload shock, but he’s switched to the reinforced, military code system of his brigade.
He leads the way up.
‘You are undamaged, magos?’ he asks over his shoulder.
‘What?’
‘Are you hurt, magos?’
‘No. The data shock missed me. I was unplugged.’
‘That was fortunate for you,’ Arook says.
‘It was. There was a scrapcode problem. Server Hesst switched from discretionary to deal with it.’
Arook glances at her. His visor looks like a raptor’s beak. His shoulders and upper body are huge, like a bull simian. He understands. It is simple protocol. When dealing with a significant scrapcode problem, a server will have his second-in-command unplug so that there is no danger of the second-in-command being compromised by the scrapcode. It is an operational safety measure.
It has saved Tawren from far more than just a scrapcode infection.
‘Might the scrapcode be an issue?’ Arook asks.
Tawren has already thought of that. A serious noospheric failure brought on by a critical code corruption… that might have caused orbital collisions or accidents. It might have even caused the grid to misfire, or a ship to discharge weapons in error.