‘What?’ Haas said. She leaned forward.
‘It’s too big,’ Kord repeated. ‘We’re too small.’
She understood him, then. She wished she hadn’t. He drew his confidence from his faith in the strength of the greater body that he represented. He was a terror on the streets because he felt the might of the Adeptus Arbites behind him. But now, when he acted for the survival of the Imperium itself, he did not believe it was strong enough to defeat the orks.
‘Stand up,’ she told him.
He obeyed, shame and pleading contorting his features.
She stalked out of the shuttle and down the ramp. She was disgusted, but he still wore the uniform of an Arbitrator. She would not allow him to disgrace it in her presence.
Kord followed her.
There were about five hundred souls in the cargo bay. Most of them were civilian. There was a scattering of Arbitrators from other precincts. Haas counted three squads of the Jupiter Storm. They were looking at the people who would be their charges with bemused scepticism.
The captain of the Militant Fire appeared on a platform overlooking the bay, flanked by his first mate. He started to speak, but was drowned out by the babble of conversation on the floor. The woman, her bearing marking her as a Guard veteran, put two fingers in her mouth and whistled for silence.
‘Thank you, First Officer Kondos,’ the captain said. To his human cargo, he said, ‘Welcome. My name is Leander Narkissos, and I’ll have the honour of transporting you into battle.’
His manner was easy. He struck Haas as a man who had consciously shed his illusions, and was at peace with the reality of his situation. That was a good sign, she thought. He would be less likely to panic under fire. Despite what she had said to Kord, she still liked the idea of some possibility of survival.
Narkissos continued, ‘I’m going to wager that a few – just a few – of you were a bit disheartened when you beheld the warlike majesty of the Militant Fire.’ He waited for the laughter to subside. ‘I don’t blame you. I would probably feel the same.’ He straightened, becoming more formal, his posture almost martial. ‘Let me say this. We aren’t a big ship. Our armour is weak. But we’re fast. We’re nimble. If you examined the history of the Fire by the cold light of rationality, you would have to conclude that she should have been destroyed many times over. Are the odds against us? Absolutely. There is no reason to believe we’ll live one more day.’ A sly grin crept over his face. ‘Which is precisely why I say that our odds are excellent.’
No laughter this time. Only cheers. Haas joined in.
She had never expected to take such delight in madness.
Beside her, Kord had fallen into the silent misery of sanity.
Juskina Tull, the Speaker for the Chartist Captains, rose in the Great Chamber and began to speak. Pict feeds flashed her image and her words across the planet. The speech was one she had laboured over since the beginning of the Crusade. She had rehearsed it for days. She knew that its delivery was the most important performance of her life. At an abstract level, she also knew that it might be one of the last. She knew this, but did not believe it. The destruction of Terra and her own death were impossible. She feared the loss of prestige, and being beholden to her enemies. But not extermination.
‘Fellow Lords, members of the Senatorum, citizens of Terra. We stand together in a moment of great peril and greater pride. A very short time ago, I asked for your help. You answered. You answered in such numbers and with such fervour that, did they but deserve it, I would pity the orks.’
That was how she began. She spoke for fifteen minutes. She spoke of the bravery of the individual, of the power of the many. She spoke of humility and pride. By the end, she thundered, promising that legendary doom was coming to the orks.
It was a fine speech. It addressed the fears of the populace, and sought to calm them. It articulated their hopes, and sought to stoke them. It was the greatest work of a politician who knew that oratory was an art form, and whose mastery of the medium was unchallenged.
Juskina Tull’s speech was written to shape the departure of the Armada into an event whose celebration would shake the heavens with its fervour. Was it not, when all was said and done, Terra’s last chance for hope?
When Tull spoke, her intent was to ignite rapture.
Seated on the central dais of the Great Chamber, Vangorich admired Tull’s artistry. Even he was stirred by the words, though their very potency filled him with dread. They were words of enormous meaning. Hearing them meant that the Proletarian Crusade had begun. Its consequences would be coming soon.
Lord High Admiral Lansung heard the speech from the bridge of the Autocephalax Eternal. He had come to his flagship directly from Tull’s quarters. He had no intention of being in her sight at her moment of triumph, and giving her even more reason to gloat. He was here too because of his own dread. He counted Vangorich as an enemy, but the old assassin was right – the Crusade would end in disaster. However, as he listened to the speech he found himself hoping that he was wrong. He had no wish to face the reality of attempting the defence of Terra with just the flagship and its escort. He knew how that would end.
With every word Tull spoke, Lansung’s throat dried. The conviction grew that he would see his great fear realised.
In the Fields of Winged Victory, hundreds of thousands watched the pict feed of Tull. They listened with the hunger of the starving. When she finished her speech, and the underbelly of the low, toxic clouds over the Imperial Palace lit up with a fireworks display worthy of the victory at Ullanor, the people roared. The roar was as loud as on the day Tull had announced the crusade, but it was not the same kind of cheer at all. That moment had been the rebirth of hope when all had seemed lost. This moment was when the dream of the Crusade became real. The Merchants’ Armada carried all hope with it. It was the last chance. It was the last wall. In the soul of every human on Terra, regardless of belief, was the hard knowledge of how fragile the last wall was.
The roar was painful. It made throats ragged. It was the refusal to fall into a final night, and it was the fear that the end was inevitable. It was the holding on to a belief with a fatal, slippery grasp.
It was, in a word, desperation.
The people cheered, and they kept cheering. Many of them were weeping. Some wished they were on the ships, heading for battle, but there was no more room. Others were relieved to be where they were, and cheered because doing so held off, for a little bit longer, the awful experience of waiting that would follow next.
The masses in the Fields of Winged Victory tried to draw strength from their numbers, and from the volume of their shout. But the sky had cleared again towards the end of Tull’s speech, and they could see the stars, and the lights of the fleet, and they could see the ork moon, and they felt the awful hollowness of hope. So they shouted even louder, shouted until they were hoarse, shouted until they fell to their knees, gagging over the pain of a simple breath. They did not find strength in each other. They saw and heard and felt only their own fear reflected back at them a hundred thousand times. They shouted as if that might help them stay afloat in the wave of desperation.
But they sank. And they drowned.
In the shadow of the Tower of the Hegemon; in the corridors of the administrative complex, larger than a nation state, of the Estates Imperium; in the tangled warrens of the Opifex hive districts, where the uncountable legions of architects, stonemasons and other Palace artisans dwelt; half a world away, at the base of the Eternity Gate; across the millions of square kilometres of the Imperial Palace, the people stopped in their tasks and their prayers and their tears and listened. On the other side of the globe, in the vastness of the Ecclesiarchal Palace, they listened. Even in the Inquisitorial Fortress, Tull was heard and seen. In every corner of Holy Terra, singly or in groups, the people sought comfort in the words and in Tull’s magisterial, triumphal bearing. Singly
or in groups, they came face to face with their desperation.
The planet resounded with a cry as fierce, as expressive of the collective pain as the scream that had greeted the arrival of the star fortress. This was not terror, but it was the fear of terror’s return. It was the dying patient’s clutch at the chimera of a cure. It was the shout that would serve as battle cry for all the billions who would not be in the war until the war came for them.
It was desperation.
It was sinking.
It was drowning.
On the thousands of ships that made up the Merchants’ Armada, the crews and volunteers and Astra Militarum heard the speech too. They did not pay it quite as much heed. They had other matters to draw their attention.
The ships were moving. They were powering up engines. They were leaving anchor. They moved in a rough formation. They were heading into battle. For the volunteers, the reality of their choice had come. Many of them experienced the vertiginous sensation of running off a precipice, and feeling the sudden absence of firm ground beneath their feet. Some of them were sick.
In the Militant Fire’s observation dome, Galatea Haas looked out into the void as vessels beyond counting began to travel in concert. The ork moon was straight ahead. It was not drawing closer yet. Even so, it seemed larger. She looked at its surface, and pictured fighting there. She tried to will the Fire past the ork defences to the commencement of the invasion. Until moonfall, there was no action she could take that would at least give her the illusion of mastery over her fate. For now, she had to wait, and place her life in the hands of Narkissos and his crew.
There was no sign of Kord. He had barely set foot out of the cargo bay since their arrival. Haas exchanged a look with the soldiers a few paces to her right. They wore the mustard uniform and red sash of the Jupiter Storm. Beneath her armour, so did she. All the Crusaders aboard the Militant Fire had been inducted into that regiment. Braylon Gattan was a captain in the 546th Jupiter Storm, and the lone officer of that rank on the Fire. Beside him was his commissar, Deklan Sever, quite a bit older. They nodded to her. They were feeling the same hard impatience. At least she was here, she thought, on this ship. At least she was part of a massive move against the orks. She was glad. She had no regrets.
Behind her, the speech continued. Tull built to a crescendo of fervour. The ship moved faster, as if it too were responding to her words. The Armada, brought into being by the determination of the Speaker for the Chartist Captains, gathered momentum. Its formation became more and more defined. It was no longer a confusing cluster of disparate vessels. It took on the shape of a wide spearhead. The ships became the components of the great weapon.
‘The strength of Terra approaches the enemy, carrying dread before it,’ said Tull.
It left dread behind it, too.
On Terra, the people knew that many, perhaps most (but by the Throne, please, not all) of the heroes of the Proletarian Crusade would die. But if those deaths were exchanged for an end to the hellish moon, then they would be celebrated. It was not the deaths that were dreaded. It was their futility.
The fleet did not carry dread within it. There was too much determination.
But it did carry desperation.
Desperation given the shape of metal, given power, given impetus, given speed – but little armour and few weapons – the Armada moved away from its orbital position. The greatest civilian mobilisation in Terra’s history swept towards the orks.
Fourteen
Terra – the Inquisitorial Fortress
Wienand and Rendenstein approached the main gates, striding along the centre of the Sigillite’s March. The time for secrecy was past. Even if their arrival was not expected, trying to gain access to the Inquisitorial Fortress by any means other than the direct one would be suicidal. What was more, Wienand was clear on the message she wanted to send. She had nothing to hide. She was not a fugitive. She, and no one else, was the Inquisitorial Representative to the Senatorum, and it was in that capacity that she was here, beneath the polar ice cap, in the vast caverns that housed the concentrated might of the Inquisition.
The March ran in a straight line through a cave big enough to swallow a battleship. They were too far underground for the endless cold of the surface to reach them. Even so, the air in the cavern was icy. Wienand’s breath misted. The sound of her boot heels was hollow with chill.
The Sigillite’s March was a hundred metres wide, and a thousand long. The wiring embedded in the flagstones formed a massive interlocking system of hexagrammic wards. The density of the sigils was such that the path as a whole functioned as a gigantic null generator. Iron pillars rose every ten metres, their powerful lumen globes turning the March into a shining road through darkness. There were no barriers on either side, only the shadows of the cavern. The brilliant light of the March was another primary defence. It made conventional weapons pointless. The individuals who walked the March were blind to anything beyond its edges, but eyes in the dark watched them. To travel the kilometre of the March was to be vulnerable at every level: psychic abilities shut down, in the open, unable to see potential attacks.
For Wienand, the fifteen-minute stroll was a declaration of faith in her position. She was announcing to the many who watched that she was confident about reaching the doors unharmed. Rendenstein walked one step behind her, arms at her side, hands open. She didn’t have to be carrying a weapon to be considered a threat. She had to keep her movements as innocuous as possible.
‘This is difficult for you, I know,’ Wienand said when they were halfway along.
‘I don’t like being neutralised. There’s no way for me to protect you here.’
‘This is the one place I don’t need protection.’
Rendenstein grunted, sceptical.
‘That wasn’t a lie,’ Wienand reassured her. ‘If something was going to happen, it would have already.’
‘That makes me feel so much better.’
‘It should. It means we have arrived safely, and that there is a solid chance that the purpose of the journey will succeed.’
Rendenstein didn’t reply. Wienand glanced over her shoulder. Her bodyguard looked thoughtful.
The main doors to the Fortress loomed ahead. They were built into a wall that extended into the cavern’s night in both directions. The doors expressed both the Inquisition’s power and its secretive nature. They were massive, wrought iron in appearance, though those were plates fixed to adamantium. The rosette of the Inquisition occupied the centre of the two doors, bisected by the seam between them, and extended to their full ten-metre height.
There was no practical reason for the doors to be so monumental, so authoritative. No one would ever see them except the inquisitors, or those rare prisoners, as unfortunate as they were privileged, whose sight of the door was their assurance of execution once their usefulness was at an end. The Inquisitorial Fortress was a keep that not only had never been stormed, it had never been besieged. But it was prepared. And it would announce to any foe the folly of attack, and the respect that was due to the servants of the Imperium within.
A lone figure waited for Wienand, standing before the base of the rosette. He was in full dress plate. His ceramite carapace armour was draped by a cloak of crimson and black. A sash of the same colours crossed his chest from left shoulder to the sheath of his sword. Gold wards marked his pauldrons and chestplate, and there were more on his plasma pistol’s holster.
‘Greetings, Castellan Kober,’ Wienand said.
‘Inquisitor Wienand,’ he answered. His stance, his expression, his tone and his words were neutral.
She had expected Henrik Kober to be her main obstacle. He wouldn’t deny her entry, but he might have the clout to block anything she tried to accomplish. The position of Castellan was a rotating one, changing every year or upon the death of the serving inquisitor. The office had no formal political power over other
inquisitors. Its mandate was the defence of the Fortress. The administrative authority that followed from that was considerable, and so, then, was the indirect influence wielded by the Castellan. The yearly rotation ensured that none of the holders of the appointment had the time to establish personal dominance to any degree that couldn’t be undone by the next Castellan. But for that year, there was clout.
Wienand decided to force the issue immediately. There wasn’t time for subtlety. She had heard Tull’s speech during the final leg of her journey. ‘Are we going to be in conflict?’ she asked.
‘There have been serious questions raised about you.’
‘But no charges,’ she said, noting that he hadn’t answered her question.
‘Not yet,’ he admitted. Then he said, ‘Inquisitor van der Deckart is dead. Inquisitor Machtannin has been assassinated. And there has been an attempt on Inquisitor Veritus’ life.’
‘And on mine,’ she pointed out. She was startled to hear about Machtannin. She guessed Vangorich had been at work. ‘I make no accusations,’ she continued. ‘I have no interest in a pointless battle. And if you think I organised assassination missions while making my way here, then I must be very formidable.’
‘I don’t think what happened was at your command,’ Kober said. ‘I do think the deaths had something to do with you.’
‘If they did, and I am responsible, and acted in a criminal fashion, then I will have to answer for my transgressions. But I have not been charged, and I have not been stripped of my rank. Events are moving fast. We need to react to them. Or would you rather the Inquisition follow the model of the High Lords and disable itself through internal politics?’
‘I’m aware of current events. Can you appreciate the reasons for Inquisitor Veritus’ concerns? A wrong move now could doom the Imperium.’
‘Agreed. That is why I am here. Have you examined Terra’s tactical situation lately? Now by your leave, Castellan, we will proceed. I have work to do.’
The Last Wall Page 12