The Lion opened a fleet-wide vox-channel, and heard the same command echoing and re-echoing. It was too late to attempt to reverse away from the fortress. But the ships might yet avoid disaster by taking the momentum into a turn, moving parallel to the barrier using a slingshot manoeuvre to break the wall’s grip. The Lion shifted his attention back and forth between the monster growing larger in the oculus, and the trajectory screens for the combined fleets. The lines were shifting, slowly. The fortress was coming closer, quickly. The prow of the Reason shuddered before the Lion’s gaze, mile upon mile of gothic majesty wrenched by forces that reduced it to insignificance.
‘Hails from the Red Tear and the Samothrace,’ said the vox-officer.
‘Private channel,’ the Lion said. His brothers wished to speak to him. As he had expected they would.
‘Where have you brought us?’ Guilliman demanded.
‘I don’t know, Roboute.’
‘Neither do I. We can’t identify the system, whatever it once was.’
‘If this is a system, it has been moved,’ Sanguinius said. ‘But the location is not as important as its nature. This is not the work of Horus. It cannot be the work of material hands, be they human or xenos.’
‘I suppose we should be grateful for that,’ said Guilliman.
‘We should,’ said the Lion. If the traitor Legions had become capable of such a feat, then the war was over. He looked at the fleet trajectories again and frowned. ‘Some of our smaller vessels are not turning fast enough,’ he said. The port wing of the formation was ragged. It was extending closer to the fortress.
‘Some of ours are struggling too,’ said Sanguinius. ‘Their engines are pushed to their limits.’
‘They should still complete the manoeuvre,’ Guilliman said. ‘But they’ll be very exposed.’
‘Then we must hope…’ Sanguinius began. Then he stopped. The Lion heard his breath catch. When the Angel spoke again, it was with the tone of one caught in the grip of premonition. ‘The structures between the towers…’ he said.
The Lion turned back to the oculus. The angle of the Invincible Reason’s approach had become oblique, though the fortress was so vast, its expanse stretched for an eternity into the void, glowing and pulsing with its unnatural fire. Conical shapes jutted out from the battlements at irregular intervals. They were the size of gas giants. They could not be what they appeared to be.
Sanguinius confirmed the madness. ‘They’re war-horns,’ he said. His tone was flat, and leaden with prophecy.
The horns blared a challenge. Across the airless void, they made their terrible, warp-created sound. It travelled the millions of miles that separated the fleet from the fortress. Perhaps the cry had come as soon as the fleets had been detected and it was only now reaching the ships. Perhaps the horns had only sounded on the instant. The laws of reality had been suspended in this star system, and the Lion knew that what mattered was not how the horns cried, but that they did. The sound smashed into the Invincible Reason, shaking the hull. It boomed through the bridge. It was deep, as deep as the heartbeat of mountains. And it was a wail, a rising, shrieking, raging wail that harrowed the soul. The Lion winced. He made himself breathe through the blast. He leaned into it. On the bridge below, officers screamed, blood running from their ears and eyes. Servitors collapsed, spines ground to powder. The electrical systems of the ship surged and stuttered, blowing out pict screens, setting control stations ablaze. The thrum of the battleship’s engines became a hammering roar, yet the cry of the horns sounded above everything.
There was a pause, as if a behemoth of Caliban’s myths were drawing a breath, and then the horns sounded again. The cry was more than sound. It cut into the port flank of the formations, culling the weak like a scythe. It pulled the Dark Angels frigate Undaunted and the cruiser Unsheathed of the Ultramarines away from the fleets. The ships, miles long, powerful enough to turn worlds to glass, tumbled like leaves in a storm, massiveness made minuscule. The nearest horn sucked them in, hauling them away faster and faster, until they were streaking at a small fraction of the speed of light towards the fortification. They crossed the event horizon of the war-horn’s cone and vanished into the darkness within. There was no explosion, no flowering of ignited plasma. There was the brutal severing of communication the moment the vessels entered the cone, and that was all.
The fleets continued their turn, still picking up speed, the angles of approach changing as slowly as the erosion of monuments. At last the Invincible Reason was parallel to the wall, and then at last its speed became the strength it needed to pull away. The collision alarms fell silent.
The Blood Angels cruiser Excelsis did not complete the manoeuvre. The curve of its turn was too long. It came too close to the fortress and fell against it. It did scar the void with its end. It became a long streak of flame against the fortifications. The death flare was brief and barely noticeable against the infinite expanse of the wall.
‘Brothers,’ Sanguinius said as the combined fleets began to increase their distance from the fortress, ‘can any of you return to the warp?’
‘No,’ said Guilliman. ‘Warp drives are functional, but the distortion of the materium and the empyrean is too great here. That structure has a gravitational pull in the warp as well as here.’
The Lion thought about demanding that Tuchulcha take the fleets back to the immaterium. He reminded himself about the futility of giving that order. Tuchulcha had warned him about the barrier. Tuchulcha could not cross it. ‘Then we have only one choice,’ he said. ‘We have to breach the wall. If we can’t go around, we must go through.’
‘Our options for making such an attempt are limited,’ said Guilliman.
‘If the options are few,’ Sanguinius said, ‘then each must be pursued with the greatest rigour.’
‘Do any of us think we can destroy it?’ the Lion asked.
‘We are all agreed that we must try,’ said Guilliman.
The greatest single naval barrage in human history occurred less than an hour later. Hulls vibrating from the strain of engines pushing back against the pull of the fortress, the formation closed to firing range with the construct. The wall filled the oculus of the Invincible Reason completely. The Lion could see nothing but the iron, the brass, the flames and the thorns resolving themselves into guns taller than Olympus Mons.
The weapons systems of the Imperium powered up. When they were ready, when the synchronisation of fire was arranged, when the speed of torpedoes was calculated against the immediacy of lances, so that every hit would strike the wall at the same moment, then the Lion, in concert with his brothers, said, ‘Fire.’
Fire.
The fire came to burn the void. More than a hundred ships opened up with every weapon. Macro-cannon batteries, ranks of lances, nova cannons, cyclonic torpedoes and more unleashed the anger of humanity against the obscenity before them. The raging of the Ruinstorm faded before the searing light of purest, purging destruction. It was an act of war on a scale that had never been witnessed before. If there had been remembrancers aboard any of the vessels, they would have felt compelled to record an event so monumental in song and in verse.
The barrage struck the fortress, and then it did not matter that there were no remembrancers. The action would not be remembered. There would be no songs. The immense became the insignificant. The explosions that erupted on the face of the battlements lit up the view in the Invincible Reason’s oculus. But the Lion made the mental adjustment, and understood how tiny the site of the impact was in relation to the wall as a whole. It might as well have been invisible, a momentary glint on the brass. We aren’t trying to destroy the barrier, he reminded himself. We need to pass through it. That is all.
The flare of the blasts faded. Geysers of molten metal extended into the void. Burning gas dissipated. A crater as wide as the fleet appeared. It glowed from the heat of its creation.
&nb
sp; ‘Our auspex readings put the depth of the breach at approximately four thousand miles,’ Guilliman said.
‘It might as well be nothing at all,’ the Lion muttered, disgusted. The crater was a meaningless blemish on the barrier. The wall could be millions of miles thick. There was no return fire. The fleets did not even register as a threat for the things inside the fortifications.
‘This is futile,’ Sanguinius said. ‘We must find another way through.’
‘If there is one,’ said Guilliman.
‘A fortress is a barrier on a path,’ the Angel insisted. ‘Its existence means we must cross it. This is the road we must take.’
‘I will not smash my fleet against this wall to no purpose,’ Guilliman said.
‘We will cross it,’ Sanguinius told him. ‘We do not end here. I must face Horus.’ Sanguinius spoke with the same certainty the Lion heard in Curze’s voice. Both of them lived only partially in the present. The other part of them existed in the inexorable reality of their future deaths.
‘By your logic,’ the Lion said, ‘a wall must have a gate.’
‘Yes. This is not a blank wall. This is a fortress. We see its features. We must find the others. Our long-range scanning shows a different heat signature to port and in the direction of the wall’s base.’
‘A base with what foundation?’ Guilliman asked.
‘Perhaps none. But the shape has meaning. The turrets declare that we are looking at the peak of the fortifications. Their existence implies the presence of a base, foundation or not.’
‘Agreed,’ said the Lion.
‘We are relaying the coordinates of the heat bloom,’ Sanguinius said.
A few minutes later, the fleets began to move, descending the infinite heights of the wall. The search target was as distant from the Invincible Reason as Mars was from Terra. The ship shuddered as if it were passing through an atmosphere, straining to hold its position against the gravitational pull.
Stenius looked back up at the Lion as the ship passed the unending expanse of the wall, its apertures flickering with infernal red, a million eyes staring out, mocking and hungry. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘what is this thing?’
‘It’s the future,’ the Lion answered. The longer he gazed at the fortress, the more the shock of its size wore off, and the more the implications of its being sank in. ‘This is what the galaxy will become if we do not win this war.’ Did you foresee this, Horus? he wondered. Greater powers are using you. You have opened the door to this horror. I hope we have the strength to close it.
‘Can we destroy this?’ said Stenius.
‘Not this form. Our task will be to end its possibility.’ If we can. Father, you should have warned us.
The Lion experienced a glimmer of hope when he saw the first sign that Sanguinius’ theory was correct. Roboute would congratulate you on the precision of your theoretical, he thought.
There was a gate. It came into view as the fleets travelled towards the galactic east. As far as the Lion could tell, it ran the entire height of the wall. By this time, the peaks of the battlements were long out of sight. The gate extended above and below the Invincible Reason’s position to the limits of perception, a universe of daemonic might. The fleets increased the angle of descent, heading for the promised base.
For much of the journey, the gate seemed endless, but it had a design, and so the Lion knew it must end. It took a long time for him to make out the engraving in the middle of the portal. This close, it resembled a mountain chain, a topography as big as a thousand worlds pressed together. The mountains had lines, though. They were constructed, they were art, and so they had meaning. The Lion watched the portions of the design as it passed by the oculus. He held the fragmented visions in his head, and assembled the pieces into a whole. It was an eight-pointed star. It was a brand upon the universe. It was a wound in reality, and it was a declaration of rule. As soon as the Lion understood its contours, it seemed to look back at him, an eye more monstrous and knowing than any of the red glows in the wall. It gazed at the dust motes of the fleet, and it looked upon the Lion from inside his mind.
His lip curled in defiance. He focused on the progress of the Reason’s journey. He promised the symbol destruction as he stared forwards. We will hurl you from the galaxy. By whatever means necessary.
The gate and the star slid by. The pace was agonising, though the fleet moved at full speed. The heat bloom detected by the Blood Angels became more intense and more defined in the long-range auspex scans. At last, its source became visible.
‘Sanguinius,’ the Lion voxed, ‘we have located your foundations.’
The eastern hinge of the gate was anchored to a world. As it came into sight, the planet was tiny, barely an excrescence at the bottom of the wall. But the intersection of gate and planet flared with enormous energy, far more than the disparity in size would suggest. The bloom originated in the planet, and travelled, spreading out a long way up the height and breadth of the gate before it faded.
‘So pitiful a foundation for so immense a construct,’ said the Lion.
‘We have nothing to boast of,’ Guilliman said, angry regret breaking through. ‘I declared the Imperium Secundus with even less of a foundation.’
‘That is gone,’ said the Lion. ‘Let us bring an end to this, too.’
Seconds later, the monster guns of the fortress opened fire.
Nine
The Harrowing of Pyrrhan
The daemon flames reached out for the fleet. Eruptions of warp energy lashed at the void. They burned and slashed, a storm and a web. The Blood Angels battle-barge Lineage of Virtue was the first caught in the nexus of the crossfire. Its void shields collapsed in seconds. Writhing beams of warp fire cut through the centre of the hull. Conflagrations raced across all decks. The starboard engine exploded, blowing out a fifth of the hull’s length, venting thousands of crew and scores of legionaries into space. Captain Athaniel’s last vox-transmission was a vow to his brothers and to the Angel.
‘Our pyre shall be your shield,’ he said, and the Lineage of Virtue began its turn, exposing more and more of its port flank to the fortress, taking on the barrage, blocking at least some of it from the vessels in its lee. It kept turning, becoming a torch, and as the rest of the fleet pulled further away, racing for the shelter of the southern hemisphere of the planet, one last burst from the Virtue’s port engine sent the ship plummeting towards the gate.
By will or chance or fate, the Virtue held together until it crashed into the gate. The plasma sun of its explosion destroyed hundreds of square miles of daemonic turrets. The effect was a pinprick, yet the pinprick was enough to save at least the Blood’s Son and the Encarnadine, which had been closest to the battle-barge.
Four more vessels from the combined fleets died before the expeditionary force put the planet between it and the turret fire. They died too suddenly even to vox a farewell.
‘We have identified the planet,’ Khalybus voxed the primarchs. ‘Enough of the topography of the southern hemisphere is unchanged. It is the forge world Pyrrhan. We had refugees from it on Thrinos. It was visited by the Pilgrim.’
Sanguinius walked across the Red Tear’s bridge, taking in the portrait of the planet emerging from the combined rapid scans of the fleet as they developed on the arrays of auspex screens. It was a small, rocky world, not much larger than a planetoid, less than three thousand miles in diameter. Steep mountain chains dominated much of the south, diminishing as they approached the equator. Tens of thousands of years of intensive mining in the once-inhabited northern hemisphere had worn the peaks down. The composite images of the north showed the traces of human civilisation and industry, now twisted almost past the point of recognition. Manufactoria taller than the mountains they had replaced belched fire and smoke into the world’s eternal night. A spiral pillar, five hundred miles wide, linked the north magnetic pole of Pyrrhan to the
bottom of the gate. It emerged from the greatest manufactorum, a jagged monster that rose from the surrounding terrain like two gigantic, clawed hands clasped in prayer. There was no clear division between manufactorum and pillar. They flowed into one another, and the pillar flowed into the gate. The pillar shone with the light of molten matter.
Sanguinius took what he saw with him to the hololith chamber. ‘Matter,’ he said to the images of his brothers. ‘Matter is being created at this juncture. We can observe it happening. The pillar grows from the manufactorum. The gate’s being is forged here.’
‘It cannot be the planet’s own matter,’ the Lion said. ‘It is a speck compared to the gate. It would have been consumed a million times over by now.’
‘There is nothing about what we are seeing that is rational,’ said Guilliman. His jaw was set with frustration. He said rational with something like bereavement. ‘This fortress is already impossible a million times over.’
‘Yet Pyrrhan is somehow necessary to it,’ Sanguinius pointed out. ‘The impossible has attached itself to something real.’
Guilliman’s eyes widened in the hope of reason. ‘An anchor,’ he said. ‘The fortress needs to anchor itself in the materium. Maybe Pyrrhan’s industry, in the new configuration, is a gateway, funnelling in the warp’s substance, making it into stable matter.’
‘That conforms to what we are seeing,’ said Sanguinius. ‘The intensity of the energy suggests an important nexus of some sort. Brothers, I would thrust a sword into that heart and sever the connection.’
Guilliman nodded. ‘Destroy the forge. Shut down the flow of matter. Perhaps that might destabilise the gate.’
‘We are under attack,’ said the Lion. ‘So we must now constitute a threat. The enemy does not want us on Pyrrhan.’
‘We can’t move close enough to the target zone to stage a drop,’ said Guilliman. ‘The defences will take the fleets apart before we could launch even a fraction of the ground forces we’ll need.’
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