Ruinstorm

by David Annandale

  Another hand arrested the blade. It was the herald’s. Kano did not know when Sanguinius’ proxy had arrived. He had not been on the bridge a few moments ago. The Angel yanked his arm free, dropped Kano and turned, snarling, on the herald.

  He froze.

  Primarch and herald faced each other, motionless. Psychic energy burned around the edges of the Angel’s wings. The herald said nothing. Sanguinius held the blade high, but it did not descend.

  Kano saw the primarch’s face reflected in the mask of the herald, snarling fury mirrored in unchanging serenity. The Angel froze at the sight, and then the black dissolved from Sanguinius’ eyes. His breathing slowed, no longer gasps of rage. He lowered the sword. He blinked, looked around, and after a moment of incomprehension, his face contorted with understanding and grief. He went to Kano’s side. ‘Are you injured?’ he asked.

  ‘I am well, my lord,’ Kano said. ‘Do you know what happened?’

  Sanguinius paused before answering. ‘Not entirely, no. Enough to be on my guard.’

  ‘Was it the Thirst?’ Kano asked. The symptoms had been different, though the overall effect, of insane violence, was similar.

  ‘No. This was different.’

  Sanguinius returned to the command dais. He looked out at the bridge, at all the witnesses of his madness, both Blood Angels and mortal. The unaugmented officers were pale. They had seen worse on Signus Prime, but the reminder of the madness on that world was disturbing to mortals and Blood Angels alike.

  On the auspex pict screens, the position of the phantom continued to fluctuate. It seemed to be pulling away now.

  ‘By injuring one, I have done you all an injury,’ Sanguinius said. The savagery Kano had faced was gone. All the nobility of the Angel had returned, austere in its acknowledgement of pain. ‘But the attack by the enemy failed. It was repulsed.’ He nodded to the herald. ‘The foe that has destroyed our ships has suffered its first defeat.’ He paused. ‘I am not invulnerable. None of us are. We have faced this truth, and with that knowledge we are more determined, and stronger. Despair and hubris are the paths to defeat. And we will not be defeated.’

  Since Signus Prime, and during the period of Imperium Secundus, every word Kano had heard Sanguinius speak had been tinged with melancholy. The burden of his tragedies was a heavy one. Kano found it difficult to hold at bay dark thoughts about the Legion’s destiny. How much harder, then, for the primarch? He had to contemplate the reality that tainted blood was his gift to his sons. Since the victory on Pyrrhan, though, Kano thought he had detected a change. Now he was sure. Sanguinius’ eyes were still marked with care, their gaze fixed, it seemed, on a distant point, eternally considering how the present moment and a future end aligned. What was different was his voice. He sounded as if he had encountered something he had considered impossible, and he had been renewed. The weight of concerns had not lifted, but new possibilities had opened before him, and he was eager for the challenge. Though the Angel, too, was disturbed by what had just happened, the attack had run up against a core of hope that was stronger than before.

  Kano wished he felt more reassured than he did.

  Sanguinius looked at the silent crew and legionaries. His face was shadowed with concern again. ‘I will be in the Sanctorum,’ he said to Kano, and withdrew from the bridge.

  The Angel was still in meditative mood several hours later, when the fleet translated back to the materium.

  ‘I have the coordinates,’ said Mautus. ‘This is Davin!’

  At last, Kano thought. He felt a sharp stab of premonition as the shutters parted.

  Silence descended on the bridge again as the system came into view. The Blood Angels gazed upon an immensity of death…

  A grey sphere surrounded the Davin System. At first, from the point of translation, it had appeared almost featureless, except for a porous quality that made the Lion think of dilapidated stone. Its gravitational well was weak, barely pulling at the fleet.

  ‘Why do I feel like I’m looking at a grave?’ Holguin asked.

  ‘Not a grave,’ the Lion said as the fleets moved closer and the details of the sphere resolved in the oculus. ‘An ossuary.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘This thing is made of bones.’

  The Invincible Reason came within a thousand miles of the surface of the necrosphere. Auspex scans zeroed in on small areas and projected magnified hololiths on the tacticarium screens. Individual bones and complete skeletons interlaced, creating a cracked, knobby plain. There were bodies of humans, eldar, orks – of every xenos race the Lion had ever encountered, and an even greater number he did not know.

  Abyssal solemnity radiated from the necrosphere. It was perfect stillness, the quiet of the end of everything. Beyond it, the frenzy of the Ruinstorm was more intense, and the bones appeared to float in a sea of agonised colours. The materium bled around Davin, and the system was death lurking at the centre of the wound.

  The Lion ordered an exploratory bombardment. The Invincible ­Reason, the Honoured Deeds and the Intolerant fired nova cannons. It was like shooting through fog. The beams cut through the necrosphere. Vast clouds of debris rose into the void, and a chasm opened, wide enough for the combined fleets and stretching for tens of thousands of miles.

  ‘What does this barrier mean?’ Holguin wondered.

  ‘At this moment,’ the Lion said, ‘it signifies only its own weakness. Death falls before us. We will not be stopped.’

  The Lion took the Dark Angels into the necrosphere. The other fleets followed, descending into the endless grey.

  The physical passage through the necrosphere was easy. The mental one was less so. Guilliman, Prayto and Gorod marked the journey in Guilliman’s chambers. They stood before a floor-to-ceiling window. As the Samothrace journeyed through the shell, the nature of the necrosphere became clearer. Grey remains, broken from their moorings by the blast, floated past the vessels. The boneyard of the infinite contained more than the skeletons of beings that had once been alive; there were the skeletons of dead vessels, of cities and of worlds. The inanimate had turned to bone. Iron and stone, alloy and gas, everything was bone and cold and grey. Planets had ribcages now, and cities had skulls, the better to show that they had died.

  Other corpses were harder to identify. Some had the shapes of colossal beings, human and xenos. Others had crystalline forms. Still others were spheres themselves, smooth as the back of skulls.

  ‘Are those statues?’ Gorod asked.

  ‘They are still bones,’ Guilliman said. ‘They are something that has died.’

  Prayto grunted in psychic pain. ‘Hopes,’ he said. ‘Dreams. Philosophies.’

  ‘The forces we have been combatting favour symbolism in their attacks,’ Guilliman said. Prayto was speaking from a more visceral knowledge, but Guilliman could see the possible meaning in the copses Gorod had pointed out. If statues represented abstractions, the skeletons were the demises of those ideas. It was as if, in their death, they had been given flesh to rot away, and bones to mark not the promises that their existence had made, but its futility.

  ‘Contact!’ Lautenix’s voice buzzed from a wall-mounted vox-caster. Then, a moment later, ‘Correction. I was mistaken.’

  ‘Mistaken in what?’ Guilliman asked. ‘What sort of contact?’

  ‘I thought there was movement, lord primarch,’ said Lautenix. ‘There is nothing in the scans. Perhaps it was more floating wreckage.’

  Wreckage. Not remains. Lautenix was using distancing language. All the bridge officers were. They were keeping the reality of the necrosphere at bay. Guilliman understood. That was their luxury, as mortals. If they turned away from the reality, just enough to blunt its meaning, yet not so much as to create a misleading picture of what they were confronting, he would not correct them. He did not have the same flexibility. His lot was to look at the real directly. He must face all truths in all their horror, or h
e risked basing crucial theoreticals on a lie.

  He worried that he had already done so. The sin of Imperium Secundus was a heavy weight he could not set down. He had not found atonement yet on this crusade. Instead, he had found this embodiment of absolute death.

  Gorod drew his attention back to the window. ‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing to one of the dead dreams. It had a human head. A halo of spiked bones radiated from its crown. ‘What was that, I wonder?’ he said.

  ‘What it was no longer matters,’ Guilliman answered. ‘It is the ones that are not present that matter. They still live.’ He believed what he said, though he felt staggered by what he was seeing. The necrosphere was the final extension of the theoretical transformed into the practical. The ossuary took his guiding principles, and turned them into a mausoleum. ‘The dream of the Imperium is not here,’ he said. ‘It is not dead.’

  He wondered, despite himself, if he might see Imperium Secundus entombed here.

  This is the death of all dreams. The voice was authoritative, proselytising. It did not feel like his. It felt like the whisper he had heard in the fight against the Word Bearers. Past and present and to come, all the hopes are here. Their murder has happened, the promises are over. This is their silence. The end of words.

  ‘Lord primarch,’ Altuzer broke in on the vox. ‘Lautenix has seen the intruder again. I have as well. The auspex readings are too fragmentary to be of use, but that may be due to the material of the sphere limiting the reach of the scans. The sighting is definite. We are being shadowed.’

  Guilliman looked out into the grey tunnel down which the fleet was travelling. There was a flare in the distance as the Lion’s vessels fired again, punching deeper into the shell. He could see as much as a few miles into the sides of the tunnel. The bones were loosely clumped together. The fabric of the necrosphere broke apart easily. It revealed nothing but more skeletal remains, the grey stillness extending forever until lost in the shadows.

  ‘Where is it?’ said Gorod.

  ‘There must be other passages through the shell,’ Guilliman said. ‘Sanguinius’ warp phantom is in the materium now too.’

  ‘If that is a single ship,’ Prayto said, ‘it travels with suspicious ease. The Blood Angels have been encountering it since they left Macragge.’

  Guilliman stared at him. Prayto’s choice of words made pieces of the dark mosaic fall into place. ‘It travels,’ he repeated. ‘A pilgrim.’

  ‘You think it might be the cause of the constructs we’ve encountered?’ Prayto asked. ‘If so, can it be fought?’

  ‘Maybe not the cause,’ Guilliman said, thinking over the tales Sanguinius had described hearing in the refugee camp. ‘Perhaps a catalyst. The witnesses said its arrival marked the beginning of ruin. It brought change with it. They saw that. None of the survivors of Pyrrhan mentioned the fortress – that happened after they fled. After the Pilgrim had passed.’

  ‘I like that theory better than Titus’,’ Gorod said.

  ‘So do I,’ said Prayto. ‘We still don’t know what it is, or how to fight it.’

  Or even if it’s here, Guilliman thought. Only the Blood Angels had had any true contact with it. It was a ghost, cruising through warp and minds. Its being was indefinite. It hovered between myth and threat. The Pilgrim was uncertainty itself, neither real nor illusion, lurking just beyond the horizon of the observable. From there it spread doubt.

  Guilliman wondered if it had already targeted him. He pushed the question aside. It was another trap of uncertainty. He would not construct theoreticals on an absence.

  A shadow. A phantom.

  The bridge became an assembly of sentinels. The word went out across the fleets to watch for the Pilgrim. The scans were continuous. The guns of three Legions pointed at the depths of the surrounding tunnel walls. The hours passed. Guilliman stood at the pulpit, staring into the grey sepulchre. The stillness went on and on and on. There was nothing but the bones of life and hope and reason. The universe beyond ceased to exist. The temptation arrived, insidious as it was insistent, to believe that there never would be anything except the grave. The fleets had willingly entered the trap. There would never be anything to fight. The Legions would journey through the infinite grey until they too became still, became bone.

  Quiet crept onto the bridge. The hum of the engines, the whine of servitor joints and the clatter of keys at data stations became a fading background. The voices of the mortal crewmembers as they queried and answered each other fell below murmurs. The quiet was grey. It was dust falling, burying light, burying hope.

  Guilliman watched the bones. He did not waver. If this was the last thing he witnessed, then he would stand guard until death.

  The grey did not go on forever. It was, in the end, what it had appeared to be, a shell. It was a few million miles thick, a hair’s breadth in comparison to its diameter. The fleets emerged into the encircled void of the Davin System. For the first time since it had begun to rage, the Ruinstorm was invisible, hidden behind the necrosphere.

  We’re in the eye of the storm, Guilliman thought. The calm here was a lie.

  Ahead, centred in the oculus, glinting in the grey darkness, was Davin. The shine of its reflected light was the cold of the most profound death.

  Thirteen

  Scorched Earth

  The primarchs gathered in one of the smaller strategiums aboard the Invincible Reason. The chamber was dark, and despite its narrow dimensions, it seemed to Sanguinius that the walls withdrew from the tacticarium table, draping themselves in secrets and shadows.

  The table’s hololithic display was of a massive crater on Davin’s surface. It was surrounded by a jagged mountain chain. In its centre stood a temple. The fane was the largest construct the scans had detected, and its position within one of the most distinct geographic features of the planet signalled its importance. The reports sent from Davin by the XVI Legion, the sanitised, misleading records, called the structure the Delphos.

  A narrow gorge ran from the crater, cutting through the mountains. The scans had picked up other human artefacts along its length. Statuary, Sanguinius deduced. The gorge looked like a processional avenue to the Delphos.

  At the edge of the mapped region, a lone, conical mountain rose from a plain, like an inverted image of the crater’s formation. It had a building of some kind on its peak. The construction was smaller, though, making it a secondary target. Pict screens on the periphery of the table summarised the auspex readings of the rest of the planet.

  ‘There is nothing down there,’ the Lion said.

  Sanguinius pointed to the temple. ‘I hardly call that nothing,’ he said. ‘We know the Davinites were primitive – the ships you found were proof of that. They had to rely on poor salvage. This temple is a work of monumental construction.’

  ‘Granted,’ said the Lion. ‘But there is nothing unnatural about it. After what we’ve encountered, how much weight are we going to place on something built of stone, by human hands?’

  ‘Are we going to ignore it?’

  ‘No. My point is the absence of any activity. The planet is deserted. All evidence points to a total exodus.’

  ‘To Pandorax,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘At least in part. Perhaps elsewhere too. But there is no one here. That makes our course of action clear.’

  ‘Does it?’ Guilliman asked.

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t already proposed it, Roboute. We should launch cyclonic torpedoes without delay. If we destroy Davin, we open the way to Terra.’

  Sanguinius shook his head. ‘It cannot be that simple.’

  ‘It was in the Episimos System.’

  ‘You don’t pretend the situations are identical.’

  ‘Identical, no. Comparable, yes.’

  ‘Because of the necrosphere? Because there are huge daemonic constructs in both cases?’

  �
��Other than size, the nature of the objects is quite different,’ Guilliman pointed out.

  ‘The principle stands,’ said the Lion. ‘We have seen it twice already. We cannot destroy the objects themselves, but on the correct target, the devastation we unleash must be total.’

  ‘I disagree,’ Sanguinius said. ‘You think we should have destroyed Pyrrhan rather than assault the manufactorum?’

  ‘With hindsight, yes.’

  ‘No,’ said Sanguinius. ‘No.’ He leaned his fists on the tacticarium table. He stared at the hololithic representation of the Delphos, willing it to reveal its secrets to him. ‘If we had done that, we would still be trapped on the other side of that gate, or vaporised by its defences.’

  ‘You sound very sure,’ said Guilliman. He was being unusually reserved, holding back his own tactical views. For the time being, he seemed to be limiting his role to that of the doubter.

  What troubles you, brother? Sanguinius wondered. It is something that runs deep, I think.

  ‘I am sure,’ he said to Guilliman. He felt the muscle memory of the sword blow that had carried him through fate and destroyed the manufactorum. He had severed the ties of destiny and darkness. ‘What I experienced in the forge…’ He thought about what he could say, even to his brothers. ‘We did not triumph through brute force. We have been confronting the symbols. Our successful attacks have been symbolic too. They have been the only ones possible, and targeted at the heart of what opposed us. This war has taken us far beyond the realm of the rational. And think about why we are here at all. Why do you think destroying Davin will defeat the Ruinstorm? Because this is where Horus fell, and this is where the war began. The logic is symbolic. Very well, then. We must follow the symbolism to its end. We must stand on the spot where Horus fell.’

  ‘I accept your argument about Pyrrhan,’ said the Lion. ‘The nature of what happened in the manufactorum escapes me.’ He was clearly displeased by the mystery. ‘That it played a critical role is clear, though. But there was an enemy on Pyrrhan. This planet is deserted.’