There were dreams the Emperor had for all of mankind.
They were not the same dreams that his subjects had.
Olivier suffered through his least favourite nightmare. He looked on as iron giants slaughtered crowds of faceless people, whose abstracted forms suggested they were not human. They were angular, with pointed feet and hands, as if they were models folded from sheets of paper. But they were people. Their screams and their blood left no doubt of that.
Olivier was recording the event. How many paper people killed here, how many artfully slaughtered there. He wrote as fast as he could. For some ridiculous reason his pen was an antiquated quill, an actual feather, rather than the autoscribe he used in the course of his work. Paper spilled in an endless spool from his lap. He tried to record all he saw, racing across the paper to capture every nuance of the massacre. He couldn't. It was impossible, but he couldn't stop. There was something menacing behind him. Its disapproval of his work hung over him. Olivier sobbed; his handwriting became an illegible scrawl, he wrote so fast the pen split and his hand ached, but he could not get down what the presence desired. The paper people died in their droves, bludgeoned apart by steel fists. Their blood ran like ink.
The thing came closer. It meant him harm.
'Look at it - isn't it beautiful!'
He couldn't get it all down!
'Olivier, wake up!'
Olivier came awake with a jerk and a gasp. His wife's bland expression greeted him, her mild eyes expressing query.
'Are you all right?' she asked.
Olivier wiped sweat from his face. 'I'm fine. I'm fine.'
'Nightmares?'
'I said I was fine, Marissa,' he said sharply.
She looked at him strangely. He didn't think she knew how much he had come to resent her, though he had tried his best to show her. That annoyed him too. Everything about her annoyed him.
'Look,' she said. 'We have arrived.' She pointed out of the viewport by their seats.
They were man and wife, Marissa and Olivier, bonded under his patronym of LeBon thirty long years ago. Life had been good to them. They were of high social class, better fed and cared for than the common man of the Imperium. Their status was such that even the transit yacht carrying them from voidship to world was luxurious.
Through armourglass dulled by the impacts of interplanetary dust, a planet was visible. Reflected light glowed from myriad lakes and snow caps. There was nothing that could be called an ocean. The almost contiguous landmass that covered the majority of the surface was predominantly green-brown and wrinkled all over with mountain ranges. If a planet were a human face, this one was an old woman. Olivier and Marissa had travelled to dozens of worlds. He had become inoculated against the marvels of planetary approach. Repetition rendered the wondrous banal.
Marissa retained her joy. Her childish wonder irritated her husband. Another thankless task awaited them on the surface, another pointless runaround trying to achieve the impossible, engaging with beings who did not care what they were trying to do. Olivier was sick of it all. But Marissa got more evangelical about their work with every frustrating assignment.
It was a great honour, that's what the Order of Remembrancers had told Olivier when he and Marissa were given their role. They weren't married then, and Olivier had believed his masters.
Biographers to the primarchs. There were a select few of their kind given that title. They had accepted proudly. After four decades of chasing demigods who did not want to speak with him, Olivier saw the pride of his younger self as hubris. He had wasted his life.
Marissa never lost her enthusiasm.
'Olympia!' she said with breathless awe. 'Home world of Perturabo, primarch of the Iron Warriors. See Olivier, it is a beautiful world. Beautiful.'
'Yes,' he said without conviction. 'Beautiful.'
For Marissa, a near holy duty drew closer. For Olivier, a punishment.
She kissed her aquila pendant when she thought he wasn't looking. The ship began its descent.
'The Emperor protects,' she whispered.
Consciousness builds in the developing brain scrap by scrap. Imagine the accretion disk around a star. Through time and gravity's influence a planet is born. Who could foresee the dust would make a world? The line between dust and planet is ill-defined. At what point does one state become another? When do the cells of a developing foetus change from a collection of individual living things into an aggregate that functions as an organ? At what moment does a new heart take its first beat? When do chemical reactions in a warm pool cease to be driven by external factors, and instead become self-perpetuating? When does chemistry become life? What is the line between each stage; what moment is the boundary to the instant before; what marks the boundary to the instant after? There are self-evident moments where something is one thing or another. But what of the moments between? How can these liminal stages be defined?
Such thoughts as these floated without anchor. One day they would inhabit the exceptional mind of a being who approached the divine, just then, they were scraps drawn to other scraps, making from themselves something greater, like a world from dust, or a child from cells, or life from elemental broth.
So is consciousness born.
Outside the being's body was only warm dark, and the mechanical rhythms of an artificial womb. There had been voices, and a presence that touched and moulded, but they were gone.
In the process of transition between two states, can the object changing be said to be either of the discrete objects it will be and has been? How many states exist between? An infinite shading, or infinitesimally small slices of differing existence?
The being felt the slow, greedy tug of a giant object so massive it bent space time around itself.
Gravity, thought the being. Gravity exerts influence. Influence effects change.
There was a shifting in the being's centre of mass. A shaking and a bouncing around the core of itself. The intrusion of outside stimuli defined for the being the shape of its body, and he knew that he was male. Before, he had not been aware of having a body at all. Now he was: four limbs, a torso, a head. Smooth skin felt vibrations through liquid and the heat it conveyed from beyond.
The being had considered all these things to be a part of himself. The increase of stimuli prompted him to divide himself from other things. Body, liquid, shell. That was his universe. The shell thrummed with stress harmonics. The liquid moved in sluggish tides.
High density alloy, he thought of the shell. He recognised its strength. He felt the same strength in himself.
Acceleration pressed him upwards. Articles that were not part of his body but which interfaced with it tugged at him. He was apart from his casing, but he was integrated with it, he realised.
He also realised, I am falling.
Sound returned as a dull rumble. Then a greater heat. Gravity pulled at him, acceleration pushed. A gaseous medium objected to his passage through it.
Atmosphere, he thought. Planet.
The descent lasted minutes, until terminating violently. The impact of his arrival boomed through his confined world. Light poured in through rents in his casing. The liquid that warmed and protected him rushed out.
Coughing violently, he discovered he had lungs.
In his few minutes of consciousness, the casing had gone from being part of him, to a protective externality, to a trap. Its dying machines wailed out their myriad malfunctions. The being ripped at the slippery tubes penetrating his skin, and fought his way free through the metal.
Cold air chilled him. White light blinded him. His body was as exceptional as his gathering mind, and rapidly adjusted itself to the change in environment.
He looked upon a rugged landscape.
Stone, he thought. Sedimentary formation. Mountain. Tectonic upheaval. Sky. Planetary atmospheric envelope. He knew the names and nature of all things as he experienced them, as if a parent whispered the words in his ear the moment he set eyes upon them.
H
e rolled onto his back. Steam rose from his naked body. His casing, his conveyance, his womb, stood upright on the mountainside bleeding oily fluids. The silver skin was blackened, and yet the large numeral 'IV' stencilled on the side was still visible.
The being lay on the cold hard stone and stared at the machine.
What am I? thought the being. Am I this number? Am I… four?
He was not a number. He was adamant. He had a name. It came to him unbidden.
He clenched fists slick with amniotic gels, and stood on legs never used before.
'I am Perturabo,' he announced to the mountains.
Predictably, the primarch was not at Olympia.
Vox communications with the traffic control towers were confusing. They continued to be so long after their craft had landed. It transpired that they had arrived at the worst possible time; Dammekos, the Imperial governor and Perturabo's father, was recently dead, and the state was in upheaval. How they had managed not to hear this before landing was moot. The effects on their mission were disastrous. Olivier assumed Perturabo's adoptive sister, Calliphone, would inherit the office, but Olympian politics were anything but simple, and the LeBons were caught in the midst of ferocious disputes.
They sent data bursts containing all their documentation three times to three different authorities. Conversations devolved readily into arguments. Eventually, a representative of the Legion was called for. Their discussion with this human servant was terse, and promised nothing.
They were kept waiting for several hours. That was always how it began. They were never expected.
The LeBons stayed with their ship. Transit to and from orbit was necessarily controlled on most civilised planets, especially on Legion worlds. Under the circumstances, it was possible they might not be able to leave the space port. On the other hand, if they tried, the authorities might just let them disappear into the cities, where they would become someone else's problem. While they were at the port, they were a thorn, and thorns were rarely left in situ. So they stayed and remained an intentional irritation.
'Someone will come to get rid of us,' he said. There was no need to say it; it was what had happened many times before Marissa had once respected him for his wiliness, until association with the Legions made all his qualities appear too anaemic. Men cannot compete with gods.
I am a small man, he thought, and I am too tired to grow further.
They waited at the foot of the voidship's single ramp. Gases burst from vents as the engines cooled. It was early evening, and the clouds of pollution coming off the space port were brown in the last of the light. A pale blue band of sky to the west backed silhouettes of mountains with sheared-off peaks. To the east, stars struggled out through the brume.
All space ports had similarities. They had open plains of hard standing divided into landing fields and aprons. They housed all kinds of craft. Short range vessels like theirs were nearly always grouped with surface to orbit lighters and purely atmospheric vehicles away from the serious business of transportation. Elsewhere giant lifters, troop ships and cargo haulers, bigger than buildings, crowded the artificial plains. Too big, really, to fit into the human mind. Their existence was undeniable, but the idea that they might fly brought on Olivier's vertigo. Like the mountains ringing the port, the ships seemed part of the landscape, not conveyances.
Space ports differed in the detail, most notably in what had been done to the landscape in order to accommodate them. The Dammekos Space Port was particularly dramatic. Olympia had virtually no flat land, so a mountain range had been cleared to provide it. Mountains were levelled, and their rubble used to fill the valleys between. Two peaks had survived in altered form, carved into gigantic statues of Legiones Astartes standing guard at the entrance to the space port.
'He's over-compensating.' Olivier nodded towards the colossi. They were marvellously realised, set in action poses full of motion and dynamism. 'Hundreds of millions of tonnes of stone balanced so they do not fall. And look, they are fortifications as well as adornments. Cannons for eyes. How quaint,' he said.
Marissa took exception to his sarcasm in her aggravatingly serene way. 'They are amazing artworks.'
'Are they? Doesn't it look to you like he's trying too hard?'
'You should have a little more respect,' she said.
You have too much, he thought.
'Be cheerful. We have a new book to write, a new adventure!' she said. 'Think of all we're going to learn about Perturabo. We shall write the official history of his life. There is no greater honour than that.'
I don't want that honour any more, he thought. 'This is not what I imagined spending my life doing,' he said instead.
'You should be glad. Do you remember Fulgrim?'
Olivier nodded. 'He was the only one that spared us an adequate amount of time.'
'He understood why this is so important,' said Marissa. 'It could happen again.'
He glanced at her. 'I don't think so.'
'Then tell me what you think, my dear husband. You tell me so little these days.' Was that a flash of annoyance with him? He hoped so; it excused his own petulance.
Olivier took a sharp, nasal breath. 'Fulgrim was vain. He was too eager to tell us how marvellous he was. Like a child, showing off all his precious things.'
'You can't liken the primarchs to children!' she said.
But they are children, he thought. He remembered Fulgrim's preening self-satisfaction. For all his supposed perfection he had seemed desperate they see it too, and praise him. He was superficial. Olivier became distant as he remembered the meeting.
His moments of distance occurred more and more often.
'Are you listening to me?' she asked.
Often he answered her mentally. To reveal what he truly thought would lead to argument. He forgot that no one but him heard his internal remarks. He had left her waiting again. He supposed he must have looked rude.
'Olivier!'
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm tired.'
'You're irritable!' Marissa laughed. The noise grated. 'My husband, you cannot have it both ways. You are annoyed when our subjects are unforthcoming. You are annoyed when they speak with us. You must have liked some of them.'
'I liked Vulkan. He was no nonsense. Right-headed.'
'We had barely an hour with him.'
'It was enough,' he said. Maybe it wasn't sufficient to write an accurate book - though when had they ever written one of those? - but it was more than sufficient for Olivier. He couldn't have survived another five minutes under the regard of those burning red eyes. Vulkan was otherwise a ponderous fellow, overly serious.
'What of Dorn? Did you like him?'
'No,' he said. 'How could you like any of them? The primarchs might be awesome beings, but they are awful people.'
'They are not there to be liked.'
'What are they for then? To be worshipped?' he said harshly.
She looked stung. That had bitten close to home.
'Olivier, I do not know what misery has hold of you. We have had a marvellous life. We have collaborated on five of these books.'
Five tomes of half-baked supposition, he thought, arduous yet fruitless research and tedious speculation presented as fact. Lorgar had refused point blank to see them. Leman Russ hadn't even allowed them to set foot on Fenris. He didn't have it in him to be involved with a sixth.
'And though some have been hard,' she went on, 'we have met with some of the most marvellous people in the galaxy, perhaps ever to have lived.'
She took his hand. He tried not to flinch. He did not like her touching him any longer.
'Surely you can be happy with that?' she said.
Happy? He thought. Happy to spend my life presented to beings who could crush me without a thought. Beings who speak with us only as an indulgence. Beings who you, my once dear wife, worship?
He felt inadequate. What man can judge his own achievements well when set against those of the primarchs? The statues at the space port were a c
ase in point. Olivier could never do anything like that. The Lord of Iron's abilities were on another plane altogether. Was it any surprise at all that these gods would not speak with them? He and Marissa were ants before them.
Marissa squeezed his hand. He glanced at her. Her skin was loose. Her eyes were lost within the folds around them. She had been beautiful once. He had loved her then.
'You are happy, aren't you?'
He hadn't been happy for a long time. He made an equivocal noise. She seemed satisfied with that.
'Look,' he said. He used the distraction as an excuse to extricate his hand. He pointed. 'A Land Speeder in the Legion colours. Someone's coming for us.'
The shepherds were pursuing Perturabo when the jalpida came upon them. In the shepherds Perturabo saw echoes of himself, but he was different to them. He knew that even then. He thought about it while he jogged ahead of them.
They knew nothing about him. They only wanted to kill the strange feral boy whose teeth were reddened with the blood of their flocks, and whose limbs were clad in stolen skins.
He outpaced them easily, springing up the sheer slopes as easily as the caprids he poached. His agility seemed to worry them. His superior eyes could read their tiny faces from far away. They were afraid, but they still came after him. He admired that.
His pursuers were falling behind when Perturabo heard the first screams. He continued on, heading ever upwards towards the reaches where the shepherds could not easily go. Sure of sanctuary in the cold, thin air, he grinned. The screams grew quieter the further up he went.
He was about to reach a ridge that would hide him from sight, when he hesitated. The cries of the shepherds were getting desperate.
He turned back to look.
Down the slope, the shepherds were under attack by a feathered serpent fifteen metres long. Its body was thick, coming up to the human waist. Its fanged maw was wide enough to swallow a man whole. The mouth was closed protectively around a bundle. Its neck was distended. Curious, Perturabo waited until the snake swung around so he could see what it had, and glimpsed the head and shoulders of a boy protruding from the mouth. He was being drawn inch by inch down into the snake's gullet and would soon be swallowed. The other shepherds beat the snake with sticks and stabbed hopelessly at it with their long knives. They were agitated, upset. The serpent would not release the boy.
Sons of the Emperor Page 9