Other summoned khans were making their way through to the chamber beyond. Their shoulder-guards carried their brotherhood emblems: a double-headed arrow, a falcon, a dawn sky. At the sight of the last one – a golden sun with spear-tip rays – Torghun’s gaze met Hibou’s.
Torghun nodded his head fractionally in greeting. Hibou did the same.
Once they were through, the blast doors shuttered closed behind them. The chamber glistened from reflective white walls. Bronze-caged lumens hovered above head-height. Perhaps seventy White Scars stood on the tiled floor, though some outlines flickered with the crackling aura of hololithic projections. A low murmur of expectant discussion rippled across the gathering.
Jemulan entered the room last and ascended the dais at the far end. The noyan-khan was as imposing a presence now as he had been when he had presided over Torghun’s Ascension. The many intervening decades had only hardened his ravaged, hawk-sharp face, making the zigzag scar on his face even whiter. His battleplate was ancient, reverently maintained but carrying its own sets of cherished burns, chips and dents.
‘Brothers,’ he said, turning to face the crowd and bowing perfunctorily. His face looked haggard. ‘My earnest thanks for attending at such notice. I know you are diligently preparing for the next stage of the Crusade, wherever that might be.’
Torghun and Manju exchanged brief glances. Jemulan sounded exhausted, as if fresh from combat. His voice, for the first time Torghun had ever heard it, gave away the old warrior’s age.
‘I would not have called you together had it not been of signal importance,’ Jemulan continued, sweeping his weary eyes across them all. ‘I wish the news I have to give were better. I wish it were not…’ He faltered, then recovered himself. ‘I have come from the Swordstorm. I have spoken to the Khagan. He wished me to tell you all how proud he is of your achievements here. He knows how much blood you have shed. He told me it will be remembered.’
Something has happened, thought Torghun, narrowing his eyes. He can barely bring himself to tell us.
‘As you know, the astropaths have been out of contact with the Imperium. The darkness is lifting now, though only partially. For reasons we do not understand, star-speakers on the flagship are receiving visions again. Our interpreters have been working hard to decipher them. Some images are still hard to discern, but at least we are getting them.’
Jemulan paused, seemingly unsure how to continue.
This is good news, surely. Why is he so reticent?
‘I hardly know how to tell you what we discovered,’ said Jemulan. ‘Since there is no way to tell it well, I will tell it plainly – the Great Crusade has been split. Treachery. The unthinkable has happened – a primarch has fallen into madness. A world lies in ruins and loyal warriors have been butchered. We do not know how many Legions are involved. We do not know why this has happened, but we are being asked to intervene, to leave Chondax.’
Jemulan’s words were as heavy as lead ingots. No one in his audience spoke, no one responded. Torghun, just like the rest, stood dumbfounded. A collective paralysis seemed to grip the chamber.
‘As I speak to you, others across the fleet are being told this news. Our orders are to accelerate the muster and bring the fleet back to a war-footing. There is much we do not know yet, but this much is clear – heresy has emerged among the Legiones Astartes. The only remedy is to root it out. This means war. This means going after those who until this day we called brothers. Their guilt is clear. They are murderers. They are faithless murderers.’
Jemulan spat the final words out with venom. His gauntlets clenched, trying to still hands trembling with fervour.
The crowd began to murmur again. Their initial shock gave way to a terrible curiosity – the basic mortal need to have questions answered, to know in all details what had taken place. Some instincts had not been quelled by the rigours of their transhuman conditioning.
‘Who?’ rose from the floor – first in lone voices, then as a chorus. Torghun found himself joining the clamour almost by default, adding his voice to those raised in outrage and disbelief. ‘Who?’
Jemulan raised his hands, stilling the tumult. His expression remained dark.
‘This is what we know,’ he said as the chamber fell quiet again. ‘The home world of the Thousand Sons has been destroyed, the Legion annihilated. Magnus the Red is slain, his back broken and his city lain waste.’
Jemulan looked as if he half disbelieved what he was saying.
‘These tidings come from the hand of the Warmaster himself, bearing his signs of surety,’ he said. ‘They are the first authenticated sendings we have received since the veil fell, and though much remains to be determined, at least now we know the name.’
Jemulan’s dark visage swept the chamber, animated by pure fury – the fury of a betrayed comrade in arms.
‘Only death awaits the traitor,’ he proclaimed. ‘So shall it be for Leman Russ, betrayer and heretic.’
IV
Bjorn planted his feet apart, compensating for the sudden tilt of the bridge deck. The Helridder’s grav-structure coped well with sudden shifts but it wasn’t perfect. His assembled pack – Godsmote, Urth, Eunwald, Angvar and Ferith – adjusted stance automatically, eyes fixed on the tactical readouts.
‘Come about, five points zenith,’ Bjorn commanded. ‘Take it out.’
Shudders ran down the chamber’s walls, the kind of ripple-vibrations that might have a shattered a less robust structure. Already the armourglass forward blisters were cracked and two servitor-manned stations had lost power from ruptures below.
They were being hit hard. They were hitting back hard. Such was voidwar.
Every screen filled with signals. Twin fleet profiles sprawled across the void in a clogged swarm of eerily silent explosions, radiating out from the skeletal corpses of burning starships. Escorts died like firecrackers, igniting in blue-white flares of detonating engine cores and shooting through formations of the battle cruiser giants. Bigger warships – frigates, destroyers – powered through the debris, backs aflame, broadsides flickering with a thousand pinpricks of las-discharge. Then came the leviathans, their void shields smeared with feedback splashes the size of asteroids, their lances vomiting crystalline beams of killer energy.
No communications had been received from the Alpha Legion flagship – no demands, no challenges, just a wall of white noise, followed by the first volleys of las-beams across the vacuum. The Wolf King had no need to give any further orders. His Legion responded with the frustration born of enforced inactivity, launching itself at the enemy like baresarks of the old ice.
‘More speed,’ growled Bjorn, watching the carnage unfold, plotting lines of evasion and attack, his gold-pinned eyes shining.
Another shudder ran through the deck as the lances fired. The forward scanners disappeared for a fraction of a second, lost in a white-yellow blaze, before clearing.
The target lay ahead and above them, burning hard to escape the Helridder’s pursuit. It wasn’t much smaller than its hunter – a sapphire wedge of burning adamantium, limned with bronze swirls and carrying a ragged-edge wound along its ventral hull plating. Squadrons of gunships buzzed around its outline, some of them as grey as slush, some gleaming like jewels in the night. Coronas of las-fire surrounded them all, whiplashing against the prey’s half-buckled shields and slicing through the solid armour beneath.
The target was haring for the cover of an Alpha Legion cruiser formation up ahead and the Helridder went after it, engines swelling. Both ships had taken damage, and every second spent in the maelstrom of venting plasma and raking las-spears added to the tally.
‘Can we get it?’ mused Godsmote eagerly, bracing himself against another yaw of the bridge.
‘Ten more seconds,’ snarled Bjorn, desperate not to see it get away. He would have to pull out before they came within range of the cruisers, and that would anger him.
‘Incoming Stormbirds to port,’ reported one of the servitors flatly.
/> ‘Losing port void seven,’ intoned another.
‘Lances at ninety per cent.’
‘Diverting C-deck lumen power to drive relays.’
The information washed over Bjorn, just part of the incoming barrage of tactical data. He felt the tremble of the ship beneath him, shivering like an animal, adjusting course on his every command.
‘Getting a lock…’ reported the master gunner, his half-augmetic head buried in a wiry nest of pict screens.
Ahead of them the target bucked and wheeled. The Helridder followed it tightly, corkscrewing through the backwash of a dying mass conveyer before shooting clean ahead and gaining space.
‘Now, gun-master,’ warned Bjorn, leaning forwards, bracing himself against a granite wall. ‘Now or never.’
‘Got it,’ the crewman confirmed, yanking a control column and swinging round in his swivel-mounted seat.
The Helridder’s forward lances opened up. Twin lines of coruscation impaled the enemy’s blazing engine-quarters.
‘Hjá!’ roared Urth, cracking a fist into his gauntlet’s palm.
The target exploded, blasted apart by one chain-linked detonation after another, and its ship-corpse keeled over, spinning out of control as fuel chambers were sucked into the destructive orgy.
‘Away now!’ commanded Bjorn. ‘Away and down.’
The Helridder plunged into a steep dive. Fresh targets hove into view, interspersed with incoming enemy markers. A three-dimensional tumult raged unabated about them, swirling and interlocking.
‘Ship-kill,’ reported the gunner, grinning like a child as he ran sensor checks on the target’s spreading debris. ‘By the Allfather, a fine ship-kill.’
‘Stormbirds still closing,’ repeated the sensorium servitor. Its voice sounded more suitable for reporting a minor fuel leak in the bilge-level redundancy coils.
‘How many?’
‘Twenty-four. Close formation. Firing imminent.’
Bjorn cursed under his breath. Stormbirds were a threat to a vessel the size of the Helridder – fast, heavily armoured and carrying all sorts of imaginative payloads. ‘A broadside, gun-master. Do not let them get in tight.’
The Helridder jerked in mid-trajectory, kicked by a sudden burst from the sub-warp drives. Like a wounded dog it tumbled over itself lengthways, falling into what looked like a terminal dive. At the last minute it righted, some hundred kilometres above the heaving carcass of a crenellated battle cruiser in Fenrisian livery, and thrust hard to starboard.
The escape figure had been expertly performed, angling the port gun batteries up at the incoming lines of Stormbird gunships.
‘Flay them,’ ordered Bjorn coldly, watching the enemy scream in closer.
The Helridder’s ranked guns erupted, peppering the blackness with a barrage of torpedo trails. Stormbirds crashed through it, some erupting into blazes of ruinous fire-trails, some weathering the conflagration and powering clear.
‘Again.’
A Stormbird blew apart on the attack run, its debris flung out in a wild, tumbling arc. Another ran head-on into a projectile cluster and dropped away sharply, engines guttering out. One of them got a clean shot off, overloading one of the Helridder’s rear voids with a single precision strike.
Then, just as abruptly, the squadron altered course, angling up and thrusting in unison across the Helridder’s dipping prow.
‘Track them,’ ordered Eunwald.
Bjorn spun around to the sensorium operators. ‘Belay that. Keep close sensor sweep.’
One of the command staff – a woman with flame-red hair and iron-cast eyeballs – swivelled to look up at him. ‘We have boarding torpedoes incoming. Nine.’
Godsmote cursed. ‘They were screening them!’
‘Guns to port,’ ordered Bjorn, glaring at the gunner.
The gunner was already in action, coordinating the close-range cannons, filling the danger-zone with a dense thatch of crackling las-beams. The boarding torpedoes exploded in a ragged line, the flashes of their demise lighting up the Helridder’s scorched armour-plates starkly.
‘Did we get them all?’ Bjorn demanded, grabbing a cable-mounted pict screen and swinging it round.
His answer came in the form of five heavy hits somewhere far below, punching like bullets through leather. The ship shivered as its skin was broken.
‘The only gap in our void shields,’ breathed Godsmote appreciatively as he looked at the glowing impact markers. ‘What an aim.’
Bjorn unlocked his axe from its back-strapping and flicked the disruptor field into blue, glimmering life.
‘You have the bridge, shipmaster,’ he said, his voice already descending into a battlefield growl as he addressed the senior officer on the bridge. ‘Run those gunships down, then look for cover from Ogvai’s battle group.’ Then he turned on his heels, beckoning to the pack as he did so. His movements were loosening, gearing up for the close work he’d been bred for.
‘Come, brothers,’ he snarled. ‘We have snakes to skin.’
Shiban looked down at the excavation site. He would have to speak to Hasik about it, but needed more information; all he had at the moment were half-formed suspicions, none of them convincing.
‘Khan!’
The hail came from the far end of the site, a few metres from Shiban’s vantage point and down in the pits carved by his warriors. A dozen of them still laboured at the lava-face, drilling into the semi-cooled and glowing rock with plasma weapons and heavy chainblades. They had found a few more elements from the slain White Scars patrol – fragments of armour and jetbike components. Above them the sky glowered like a hot oil slick.
Shiban scrambled down the slope. Time was short. If they didn’t turn anything up soon then he’d have to call off the operation and return to the Kaljian.
‘Tell me you have found something useful, Chel,’ he said, approaching one of his warriors stooped at the foot of a slope of semi-cooled lava.
Chel turned towards him. ‘Perhaps.’ He held up the mangled remains of detonation charge casings, and a few shrapnel fragments. ‘These were buried further up.’
Shiban looked them over. He’d used similar devices himself, many times; they might have been used to collapse the walls of a lava channel, redirecting the flow. Perhaps the patrol had used them, prior to their final battle. It was impossible to tell for sure – the pieces were little more than blackened shards.
‘And this,’ said Chel, extending his gauntlet.
Shiban took up a metal disc less than half a palm’s width. It was heavy, ridged at the edges. He turned it over, then back again. One side was blank and the other had a hawk’s head engraved on it. The workmanship was not sophisticated – it reminded of him of tribal ritual images from home, although the style was not recognisably Chogorian. The surface was pitted and tarnished, and he couldn’t identify the metal from touch alone. Whatever it was, it was clearly robust to have survived the heat.
‘Where was this?’ Shiban asked.
Chel pointed up the slope. ‘Where we found the last body. The auspex nearly missed it.’
Shiban looked back at the medal. It seemed innocuous. The dull light of Phemus reflected from its mottled silver face like an echo of old blood. His skin, insulated beneath the ceramite of his gauntlet, pricked with sweat.
‘Seen anything like this before?’ he asked.
Chel shrugged. His body language gave away his doubtfulness – he wanted the excavation over and saw no purpose in digging more ground away from the bodies of slain brothers.
Shiban turned to the rest of the squad, holding the medal up. ‘Any more of these?’
No answers came. They gazed at it blankly, their demeanour much the same as Chel’s.
Shiban closed his fist over the medal. ‘So be it. Not much of a return.’
He glanced up the slope to where the hunchbacked outline of the Stormbird waited for them. As he did so, his comm-link crackled into life.
‘Khan,’ voxed Jochi. ‘Transmission from t
he fleet.’
‘Relay it.’
Jochi hesitated. ‘It might be better if you come back up. They want us back. Everyone back to Chondax. No exceptions. Something has agitated them.’
Shiban felt a chill. That sounded familiar. He remembered how the Khagan had stood amidst the ruins of the greenskin fortress on Chondax, bending his head to listen to some troubling tidings from his keshig.
Something has agitated them.
But that was some time ago, and he couldn’t say that he’d be sorry to see the back of Phemus.
‘Understood. Ready the Kaljian for transit.’ He cut the link and turned back to the squad. ‘We are done here, brothers. Our next assignment, heavens willing, will be more rewarding.’
They started to move out, and Shiban gazed over the site one last time. It was a poor graveyard for those who had fallen. He looked down at the medal again. He liked nothing about it – something about the way it had been made offended his aesthetic senses.
‘Hateful world,’ he muttered, trudging back up the slope to where the Stormbird waited to take them back to Chondax.
Bjorn jogged down the Helridder’s transit corridors, closely followed by Godsmote and the others. The six Wolves were followed by two ten-strong units of kaerl ship-guards, each wearing carapace armour and hefting a heavy autogun. The clatter of massed boot-falls echoed messily in the confined spaces – this far down, the capillaries were narrow, poorly lit and hanging with cables.
Bjorn’s glowing axe lit the way in stark, pale blue. Its energy field rippled and snarled, already eager to tear into ceramite. The weapon’s name was Blódbringer, and he carried it in his right hand, his left still being an unfinished matrix of gears and metal spurs.
One-Handed, he thought grimly. This will be interesting.
Godsmote loped close by carrying a chainsword in his left fist and a bolt pistol in the right. His armour looked devilish in the flickering blue light.
‘They’re close,’ he said.
Bjorn grunted. He didn’t need to be told that – he could hear it from the bolt-clashes and screams up ahead. The boarders had worked fast, not bothering to fight their way up to the bridge but heading down as quickly as they could, going for the sub-light engines. If they stopped Helridder moving then they’d have killed it as surely as if they’d let off charges in the heart of the warp engine ducts.
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