‘You’re presuming a lot,’ said Kober, but he stepped to one side.
‘I have to.’ She walked forward, Rendenstein following. The auspex array of the doors recognised her identity and standing, and they opened before her.
The Inquisitorial Fortress made use of the caverns below the polar ice cap, but it transcended them. The honour of the Inquisition demanded more than a network of underground chambers. The Fortress’ construction had seen the excavation of grandiose spaces, some larger than a grand cruiser. In them had risen walls and spires and turrets, and the greatest towers rose through the continental crust. From the surface, they resembled another glacier-cloaked mountain chain. Some of them did rise through hollowed-out peaks, while others were peaks in their own right. Prison and mailed fist, sanctuary and labyrinth, the fortress turned secrecy and power into the architecture of stone and metal.
Beyond the doors, a vaulted corridor, short and wide, led to a great rotunda. The space was ten levels high. Primary passageways, many of them served by light maglev transport, opened off the levels towards all the wings of the Fortress. The rotunda’s roof was a dome. At its centre, a silver skull looked down in judgement. Its omniscience was represented in radiant lines, and the background of the dome was a pict feed of the sky above the Fortress. The effect was of standing outside, beneath the void, exposed before the gaze of the Emperor.
Inquisitors, serfs and servitors moved along all the stages. More than a few of Wienand’s peers stopped to look over the balcony at her arrival. A few nodded. Others just moved on. There was a lot of traffic on the fifth level, heading east towards the Iron Watch.
Wienand heard Kober’s footsteps behind her. She and Rendenstein stopped to wait. Wienand gestured to the activity on the fifth level. ‘I imagine I’m the cause.’
Kober nodded. ‘You know what has to happen now.’
‘I would have demanded it.’
‘One thing I will never question, Inquisitor Wienand, is your honour.’
‘Thank you.’ She quieted Rendenstein with a look.
‘With your permission?’ Kober asked, moving their interaction to the safe ground of formality. When Wienand made a slight bow, he led the way forward.
Stairs spiralling up the rotunda’s perimeter took them to the fifth level. From there, they travelled by maglev. The train was an open set of steel pews mounted on a simple platform. It took an hour to reach the Iron Watch, and another hour still before they stood outside the entrance to the Camera Stellata. Kober stopped, and Wienand preceded him inside.
The Camera Stellata was the Octagon writ large, with a full complement of suppressive wards and psychic field dampeners. It was the site of great conclaves, but more than free debate took place here. Condemnation, punishment and execution were the possible, and frequent, outcomes of the deliberations.
The Octagon’s shape emphasised the equality of the participants. Its centre was empty, so the focus moved from point to point with the currents of the debate. The Camera Stellata had a centre. Wienand walked along a black marble walkway and took her place where it ended, at a lectern mounted on a circular dais. The lectern was cast in bronze, its stand was the withered body of an enemy of the Imperium, bent beneath the weight of the accusation brought down by the winged skull that formed the lectern’s top. Standing there, Wienand was orator and accused.
The chamber was a great sphere. The lectern’s dais was suspended in the centre of the space. It was ringed by tiers of seats mounted into the walls. Those above the lectern were reserved for the senior inquisitors.
She turned to face her judges. ‘Good. We’re all here. We know the situation. We are out of time. The High Lords’ greatest folly yet is under way as we speak. Do any of us expect that venture to end in anything other than disaster?’ She shook her head, establishing the question as rhetorical. ‘We can now count off the hours before Terra is bereft of most of its Astra Militarum defence to go along with the absence of the Navy.’ She took a breath. ‘I have never underestimated the threat the Ruinous Powers present to the Imperium. I won’t start now. But I also know how to recognise a danger that is immediate. Fellow inquisitors, the orks are here. Now. It is clear to me, as I’m sure it is to you, that we have been left with only one option as a response. I won’t insult you by trying to convince you of its necessity, because there is nothing else left to do. So I am invoking that measure now, officially, before you all.’ She turned around, sweeping the assembly with her gaze. ‘So,’ she said. ‘We have work to do.’
And she walked out.
Rendenstein was waiting outside the entrance. Her eyebrows were up. ‘So that’s how it’s done,’ she said. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the uproar that followed Wienand’s exit.
‘Authority derives a lot from perception,’ Wienand said. ‘So I used it.’ She headed down the passage towards the maglev transport. Her next stop was in another wing of the Fortress, and many levels down. She tried not to think about how much distance the Armada would have covered before she could even reach Somnum Hall.
‘We won’t be stopped?’
‘If we are, we are. If we’re not, we’re already wasting time.’
While they waited for the train to return to the Camera Stellata’s stop, Wienand thought Rendenstein looked troubled. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘After you went in, the Castellan relayed some information.’
‘Something you were supposed to pass on to me?’
‘He seemed to want me to know it. I don’t think he cared what I did with the data. It’s part of the latest briefing to have gone Fortress-wide.’
The train arrived. They boarded. They were the only passengers on this leg.
‘So?’ Wienand asked.
‘Intercepts from a Black Templar action in the Ostrom System. The intelligence is sketchy, but it appears an ork star fortress has attacked a system in the vicinity of the Eye of Terror.’
Wienand absorbed this. ‘Kober believes they’ve opened up a second front?’
‘Yes. That the forces of Chaos are now involved.’
‘Well,’ Wienand said. ‘Well.’ She nodded to herself. ‘That will be next, then.’
‘What will be?’
‘That concern, in whatever form it takes.’
‘I see.’
The train slowed as it neared a junction with another large corridor. Inquisitors waited. They’ll stop me or they won’t, Wienand thought. ‘Tell me what’s bothering you,’ she told Rendenstein. She wanted nothing unsaid between them if things went wrong in the next few seconds.
‘If the Ruinous Powers are part of this war…’
Wienand finished the thought for her. ‘Is Veritus right after all?’
The train came to a stop. The inquisitors boarded. A number of them had servo-skulls in attendance. These hovered low on the benches beside their controllers, recording muttered dictation as the train picked up speed again. Wienand recognised one of the new arrivals, Miliza Balduin. Wienand had met her during a joint investigation on Antagonis. She was inflexible, but fair-minded. The inflexibility meant she was a bad politician, and Wienand suspected this was why she wielded less influence than her age should have brought her. She sat in the bench ahead of Wienand and Rendenstein, then turned to appraise Wienand with a flat stare.
‘Well, prodigal,’ she said. ‘You’re here to stir us to desperate measures, are you?’
‘I am. Are the deliberations over?’
Balduin shook her head. ‘Not formally. But there’s no doubt how they’ll end. The word is out. The orks have won you the day.’
‘You’ll be assisting, then?’
‘No. Other duties. You’ll have all the help you need, I’m sure.’ She began to face forward again, caught herself, and said, ‘You’d better be right.’
‘I am.’ Wienand looked at Rendenstein. The other woman was stoic
in her concern. ‘Really,’ Wienand told her. ‘There isn’t a choice.’
‘I wouldn’t question–’
‘Yes, you would, and you do. With my thanks.’
‘The risks…’
‘I know them.’
‘If this goes wrong…’
‘I know what you’re thinking. I’m not discounting Kober’s information. We have to ignore it, though. It’s a distraction.’
‘I’ve never thought of Chaos as a distraction.’
‘It is now.’
Fifteen
Sol System
‘We can’t have surprised them,’ Kondos said.
‘Of course not.’ Narkissos wasn’t sitting in the bridge’s command throne. He paced back and forth before the primary oculus. The ork moon was filling more and more of the sky as the Armada drew closer. Its details resolved into mountain ranges and canyons of metal. There was no organisation that Narkissos could see. It was stone and iron come together as if brute force had a geology. It waited in the void for the human ships, silent and dark. There was no response. It was as still as it had been since the moment of its arrival. Narkissos entertained the crazy hope that the orks had somehow destroyed themselves in their journey, then dismissed it.
‘Why aren’t they attacking?’ Kondos muttered. She stood midway between the throne and the helm, leaning against the cargo monitoring station as if she were contemplating leaping forward ahead of the bow.
The oculus’ field of vision was crowded with ships. Narkissos had the impression of an endless rain of metal directed at the orks. Aft of the Militant Fire, there was an even larger portion of the fleet. He had ordered Rallis to take the ship to the leading quarter of the Armada. He wanted to see what happened from the start.
So he told himself.
Hoping to get it all over with right away?
So he asked himself.
No, he answered. We’re going to fight to live and to win.
The Fire was following the great bulk of the mass conveyor Expanse of Destiny. The huge ship, carrying a hundred thousand troops and volunteers, was just slightly to port. It seemed large and solid as a planet. It would be the Fire’s shield. Narkissos felt no shame in his tactic. His duty was to reach the star fortress. He wasn’t Guard, and he wasn’t Navy. He would leave the debates about honour to them.
So far, though, his ship hadn’t needed the shield. The Armada had covered over half the distance to the ork moon. There was no response.
And then there was.
Time split, broken in half by a single moment. On the lost side, there was the calm in the void, and the grand illusion of the Proletarian Crusade in its purest, most realised form. On the other side, in the present that now unfolded with merciless revelation, was reality, and, at last, the orks took action.
At last. Narkissos realised that some part of him did respond as if something long anticipated was finally coming to pass. The knowledge made him ill. What have they done to us? he wondered.
Gaps opened on the surface of the planetoid, a sudden spread of disease. They lit up with the fire of an endless stream of launches. The orks reached out for the Armada.
‘Take us behind the Expanse of Destiny,’ Narkissos told Rallis.
The helmsman was already changing course, putting the moon into eclipse.
‘Those aren’t rockets,’ Kondos said.
The orks were sending squadron upon squadron of fighters. Some flew straight at the fleet. Others swung wide. They attacked the Merchants’ Armada from every direction, like a grasping talon. From the other side of the moon came two large ork cruisers. They followed the fighters more slowly, and though they were dwarfed by the moon, their aggressive, brutal lines, their massive armour and their arrays of guns made their approach terrible. Narkissos became acutely aware of the lack of any fighting ship in the Armada. How had he ever believed even a single ship would get through?
Evasion wasn’t going to help.
It was also the only defence he had.
‘Get us in tight,’ he said.
‘The conveyor’s engines…’ Rallis said.
‘Yes, I know. As close as you can to their wash.’ They would hide in the nova-glare of the Expanse’s propulsion.
‘And if the orks target the engines?’ Kondos asked.
‘We run.’
The ork fighters fell on the fleet. The space between the Terran ships was filled with a swarm of aggression. Multiple squadrons surrounded the bigger ships. They gathered around the Expanse of Destiny like flies to carrion.
The coherence of the fleet unravelled as the Terran ships responded to the attack. The movements looked more like a dance than combat. The Armada had no guns, and the orks did not fire.
‘Why aren’t they shooting?’ Narkissos wondered.
‘They’re going to board,’ said Kondos.
She was right. The ork fighters were larger than single-pilot ships. Narkissos had thought their bulging hulls contained bombs or torpedoes. Now he wished they did. The swarming craft around the conveyor attached themselves to its flanks. The glare from the engines hid what happened next from him.
‘Can you get us any closer?’ he asked Rallis.
‘Risky, sir.’
‘So is being cut open by the greenskins.’
Warning runes began lighting along the bridge’s control surfaces. A proximity tocsin sounded. Rallis shut it off. The conveyor’s engine flare grew brighter. The battle lost distinction. Its events became more distant.
The starboard-facing oculus flashed as three ork ships opened fire on a small yacht. The ship could only carry five passengers, but even its owner had stepped forward to play a part in the great adventure. It was the first ship to die, its cargo the first casualties. It was too small, Narkissos thought. It wasn’t worth boarding. So the orks cleared it out of the way.
‘If we’re boarded…’ Rallis began. He hesitated.
‘What are you asking?’ Narkissos could guess.
‘We’re faster than the conveyor. I can take us all the way in. It will be quick.’
‘No,’ said Kondos. ‘We fight.’
‘Until they take the bridge,’ Narkissos said. He was already choosing his preferred defeat.
The hull of the Expanse of Destiny was shaking. Colonel Erich Lanser knew the sound. Breach points. He looked at his command: multiple squads of his Granite Myrmidons surrounded by a sea of volunteers. The civilians were holding weapons. At least there was that. But they were also terrified. The Crusade of their imaginations had not encompassed the possibility of fighting orks before reaching the moon.
‘Rifles forward!’ He stood on a raised level at the rear of the cargo bay, where he could be heard and seen. The vibration of the hull grew worse, but he couldn’t tell where the break would come. ‘There are thousands of us. Nothing can get in without being shot!’
He wasn’t lying. What he didn’t say was how little that might matter. Sergeants Bessler and Parten, closest to his position, gave him significant grins. They knew. The irony was, the regiment’s last action had been against the greenskins. It had been just another suppression exercise on the Eastern Fringe, and it was the Myrmidons who had been boarding the orks, taking apart a ramshackle raiding fleet. The fight had been one-sided. Just like this one.
There was no strategy possible. There had been no time to train the civilians in much beyond how to pull a trigger. So be it. The principle, after all, was to overwhelm the orks with numbers. They could do that here too. How many troops could the orks send in at one time?
The sound of the attack became a monstrous grinding. The ork ships were using something with a blade to cut through the Expanse of Destiny’s shell. The noise filled the cargo bay. Lanser felt the blood drain from his face. He wasn’t just hearing the vibration of attacks all along the hull. Many of them were on this section alon
e.
Too close together for even the most reckless boarding parties. They couldn’t know if there were bulkheads sealing off one breach from another.
But if they didn’t care…
The orks weren’t breaching this section of the hull. They were removing it.
Lanser whirled. He ran to the rear wall, to the central interior bay door. He slammed his palm against its controls. The door groaned upwards.
‘Out!’ Lanser shouted. ‘Now!’
The grinding scream of tearing metal drowned him out. Bessler and Parten saw him, though, and pushed the troops and volunteers near them towards the exit. Movement in the right direction began, sluggish, far too slow, then picking up speed as more people saw him gesture, and saw the beginnings of flight.
The terror-stricken noise of the assault spurred them on.
The corridor on the other side of the door was wide, large enough for the servitor-operated loaders to travel to and from the bays. The crowd ran past Lanser in a steady stream, the bottleneck minimal.
Too little, he knew. Much, much too late.
Hundreds had reached the corridor. There were thousands still in the hold. The civilians were panicking now. Nearest the outer hull, Lanser could see Myrmidons still holding position, still training their guns in the enemy’s direction. The gestures were symbolic. There would be nothing to shoot. There would be no evacuation for them, either. There wasn’t time. So they stood their ground, choosing honour over pointless flight. Some looked back at Lanser over the vast space of the hold. He saluted them.
A monstrous serpent hissed.
Lanser hit the controls again and threw himself into the crush out of the bay. A great wind began to blow in from the corridor. The grind reached a peak of agony. Then there was a pop that was larger than sound. Almost half the bay’s wall vanished. Slabs of the ship’s hull spun away. The atmosphere blasted out into the void. It scooped up the Crusaders in the hold and scattered them into the great and cold nothing. Two ork fighters hung in the opening. Articulated arms extended from their noses, wielding circular saws four metres in diameter. They were spinning, but the grind was gone. There was only the blank roar of the wind.
The Last Wall Page 13