by David Guymer
Locking the stick down with his bionic, he fought the G-force to shift his flesh hand towards engine control. Even now, at the last second, Purple Sun needed convincing, but on the third transfer of override authorities, it accepted his increasingly urgent mash on the controls.
And fired void engines.
The sudden eruption of thrust cracked Moses' head into the canopy shield. He saw the aileron on the opposite wing shake and tear loose. Then the entire wing was engulfed in black smoke and Moses saw nothing but streaming cinders until his nose rammed into the upper armour of the Gardinaal's fuselage.
In a shriek of metal, his nose section disintegrated. His canopy armourglass struck that of the Gardinaal, and for a snapshot of time Moses stared into the dark-tinted visor of a Gardinaal pilot. The mortal wrestled with his controls. The collision had crumpled the Xiphon like a folding chair, but the Gardinaal heavy fighter was every bit as durable as the Thunderbolt on which it was modelled - had it not been in the throes of an engine overload then it might have flown away from the impact none the worse but for a little buckled plating. As it was, Purple Sun drove through it, engines white-hot, sputtering angrily where the duplicate fuel lines cross-fed, pushing the heavy fighter from its course like a steam locomotive pushing freight for scrap.
Moses saw men flash by below, With the genhanced perfection of his senses and supplementations, he marked their expressions of amazement at salvation. Alarms walled from every panel, gem lights illuminating the cockpit with vermillion and amber, black smoke hissed through the fracture his head had made in the cockpit, and he was only now aware of the larraman cells clotted to the side of his face.
Those were the least of his troubles.
There was a reason that void drives were for void and atmosphere for atmosphere. There were reasons too that both the Mechanicum and the Legion favoured the Avenger or the Primaris-Lightning in the Xiphon's interceptor role.
The first rumblings of gaseous expansion from the nacelles caused the cockpit to buckle around his seat. More alarms sounded as the underside of the aircraft simply fell away. He struggled to reopen a channel, praying that he was still transmitting.
'Her name is Purple—'
If not for the faint tremors of frustration that emanated from its towering form, a mortal observer might have believed that a statue of the tenth primarch in granite and obsidian had been erected in the centre of Fist of Iron's command deck. He glared at tactical inloads as they appeared on screens about the deck. The hum of his armour set his teeth on edge, throbbing just under the ridged skin of his temples. It was all he could do to remain where he stood and keep his hands from Forgebreaker's grip. All he desired at that moment was to draw it, to march on the nearest embarkation deck and take his Stormbird to Gardinaal Prime.
And who would dare stop Ferrus Manus?
He took a deep breath. That was what Guilliman, or Dorn, or even Fulgrim would expect of him. He would not give them the satisfaction. A long, deep breath. The nascent headache faded back into his skull. His palms still itched to feel Forgebreaker's power, but he could live with that. They were not his hands.
A warleader's place was here.
The command deck was abuzz with activity. Tactical interlocutors and junior fleet strategos hurried around the primarch's orbit, as they carried data dockets from station to station. Ticker-tape machines spat out instruction cards. At underlit sensorium tables, crowds of cartographae operating slide rules and quad-dimensional protractors called out number strings to their colleagues at the strategium cogitators. Adept Xanthus stood within a nexus of trunk cabling, submerged in a holographic bubble of his own making. Manipulators ordered the disparate data streams into a coherent sphere of pure informational binaric, its complexity of an order that surpassed even Ferrus' untaught genius, until the two dozen crimson-robed acolytes could parse it, via a second mess of cabling, through a series of heuristic transformers. Over it all, the hot-blooded counterbalance to Xanthus' calculating logic, Shipmaster Laeric bellowed orders, red-faced.
'Scythe Six is down,' someone reported, reading off the most recently translated inloads. 'The Fifth Galilean are trying to secure the wreckage and recover the pilot's body, but the Gardinaal are fighting hard in that area.'
Ferrus Manus did not grieve for his son. He was aware of the situation and had heard his final transmission. Trurakk's last art had been one of strength in sacrifice to the cause, witnessed by his father and to the shame of all his brothers. What was a father's grief to compare with that?
'The Oden Spear has landed, lord.'
Librarian Amar stood a safe distance behind him. His armour was searingly bright under the spotlamps of a full operational alert, glittering as though lapped with rubies. His gauntlets and vambraces were damascened with white gold, as if wired, and the psyk-reactive nanoconductors of his psychic hood were stark gold on iron black. A white cerecloth headdress softened the hard edges of his metal hood, depicting upright felidae and other Prosperean deities and monsters. Despite the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree illumination, or perhaps because of it, there were deep shadows under his eyes. His dome was bald, his cheeks sunken, and the Apothecaries had told Ferrus that any one of the dozen or so inoperable cancers in his body would almost certainly kill him yet.
Though he would be the last casualty of the Gardinaal.
'Clans Sorrgol, Morragul and Avernii are deploying,' he said, his voice a whisper heard through armoured glass. A grimace of anticipation stretched his deathly pallor. Ferrus suspected that the Librarian would allow his body to perish only once the entirety of the Gardinaal capitolis was glass. Ferrus admired that. 'Clan Vurgaan are already down. They advance on the capitolis ahead of schedule.'
As if answering to the primarch's will, the primary displays called up schemata showing the advance of the Iron Hands Orders.
Already the Avernii Clan formations under Akurduana were catching up to their bitter rivals from Clan Vurgaan. Which was why Ferrus had deployed them to adjacent sections. Let mutual antipathy goad them to feats neither could achieve alone. He was pleased to see that Akurduana had been able to marshal the Avernii Clan's competitive fervour, and that Santar had managed to inculcate the same into the III Legion's Second Company. Both performed to a level approaching his expectations. Whenever one looked to be pulling ahead, the others would up their pace. It was beautiful to watch, and yet doing so infuriated him.
He wanted to be there.
'Relaying secondary objectives now,' said Amar.
Ferrus shifted his statuary repose to nod. 'Release the second wave.'
The Librarian gestured and cogged brackets swirled across the tactical displays like snowflakes before locking over coordinates for drop strike. Grain silos. Water pumps. Distribution centres. Power relays for habitation zones. Enforcement precincts. With each order packet went the personal seal of the Gorgon - that the first to level their objective set would be lauded above all others, and that all who fell short would suffer his enduring rancour.
'Many civilians will suffer or die,' Amar observed. He did not protest too sternly.
'The Emperor desires the conquest of a world with its industry and resources intact. This is how that is done.'
He glowered at the screens as Legion markers poured through the capitolis walls. He would show the Gardinaal the cost of defiance. He would show them all.
EIGHT
Sylvyn Dekka had been here before. The jumble of decaying tenement blocks and wire-coiled transformer spires was black with age, scabbed with industrial residue, cracked and broken under the shelling directed towards adjoining, less valuable capitolis districts. It looked like the inside of a blast kiln. Glass from the worker habs' tiny windows had been blown right across the rail tracks, ankle-deep in places, obscuring the signal markings that should have glowed from the rail-side had there been power. Pinched faces stared out from dull basement-grade caste uniforms, apathetic expressions that only two hundred generations of eugenic husbandry could engender
. They clustered in doorways wedged open with coat stands or filing units, around sputtering, crank-driven heat lamps.
It could have been anywhere. Perhaps that was why it looked so familiar. Even before the coming of the Imperium, everywhere had looked like this.
The pacifier corporal that Venn's papers had garnered them as an escort fired a short burst into the air from his semi-automatic baton pistol. Like the polyps that grew on the base of an aquifer, the dull homogeneous bodies shrank into their doorways.
'What was that for?' asked Dekka. The gunshots slipped effortlessly through the cracks in the towers, fading into echoes of the artillery' and air strikes that fell just a few hundred metres in whichever direction one chose.
'They need to remember their place.' said the pacifier to the expired illegal. But then his pedigree was hardly known for its imagination. 'Are we almost there? I haven't the legs I once did.'
'Almost,' said Venn, staring glassily ahead. Tertiary processing-one-one-three.'
'My first consular posting was near here. Administration-one-one-four.'
Venn nodded without lifting his dead eyes from the rails.
Dekka felt the strangest and most inappropriate of smiles as he looked through the dark, unlit units in what he thought must be the direction of Administration-114. It could have been anywhere. And yet there was a flutter of excitement in the frail bleating of his heart, a spring in his step that had not been there when he had last walked on the Eleven Worlds. There was no power. No door spirit would bar his entry. No state bureaucrat would scan his electro-cue and summon an enforcer. His sneer deepened. Now he had a state bureaucrat and a pacifier of his own. This was how the world looked when all the little rules that had been built to keep it right side up fell away, and he found that he liked it.
Neither of his unlikely companions found fault with his expression. The pacifier had been bred to be oblivious. Venn had been bred to be politic enough to avoid comment,
'Do you require further assistance?' The administrator paused by a signal point a few metres ahead, eyes listless but impatient still as he looked back. Eugenics was far from perfect.
'You will know what I require when I ask for it,' he said, still wearing that stretched grin, and lengthened his stride. He marvelled at how easily it came.
The rails led to a large forecourt, a commuter platform on a circular rostrum surrounded on all sides by huge buildings fronted by huge warehouse doors. Ordinarily the platform would have rotated ferry workers and materiel to the manufactories, but with power cut it was currently set in an awkward position between two sets of tracks. Several well-armed squads of pacifiers were ensconced amongst the benches and barriers, and had bulked up its defences with plasterbags. Deliberately upturned trains had been used to block the other rail routes onto the forecourt, and several additional squads in stab carapace and maximum-suppression gear patrolled the one still open.
The High Lords had realised early on that the Imperials were sparing Gardinaal's industrial districts, and had reorganised their forces accordingly.
The bloated rockcrete dome of the quadrant fission station emerged from behind the jutting wall of the manufactory to the right. A lifeless tangle of transmission coils hung about it like a shroud, high-power spot lumens and heavy tracers decorating the air around its bulk. Pacifier transports rumbled down the adjoining habwalks, and Dekka thought he could hear the patient growl of something with a deeper throat rolling along beside them. One of the superheavy relic tanks of the war caste, perhaps? Dekka had never seen one. And why would he have? The Gardinaal had not faced a military threat in twenty-five hundred years.
The big warehouse doors were all shuttered tight, with the exception of one, wedged open with a breezeblock to about the width of an armoured man. The spirits were dead. Not even a tickle of challenge in his cheek.
A tremendous leveller, the collapse of civilisation.
'I will go first.'
It felt good to say it.
The processing plant was smaller than he would have judged from outward appearances, cluttered with lifeless servo-lines, clamps and spray hoses. The air was thick, hard to breathe. Dekka put one hand over his mouth and, feeling suddenly dizzy, the other to a static conveyer. The pacifier lit a hand lamp. Even its light felt crowded out by the fog of dusty grey particulates hanging in the air.
'This facility was used to paint the body section of bullet trains prior to assembly.' Venn stifled an awkward giggle, his streamlined psychology possessing no defence whatsoever against the gleeful emanations of Dekka's subconscious.
'It may again,' Dekka answered. His response was ambiguous, his feelings on the matter more so.
'The High Lords know how to win a war,' said the pacifier, with utter conviction.
Dekka was in a position to know that the High Lords had absolutely no idea how to win a war. The Undecimus Breach, when green-skinned invaders from beyond the systems' edge had briefly occupied Gardinaal's outermost world, was the only such encounter on record, from a time when even the most deep-frozen of hybridex warrior-constructs would have been centuries unborn. The Imperium represented an entirely different order of threat.
What would this war be called twenty-five hundred years hence? He smirked in the darkness, and unseen, Venn and the pacifier limply mirrored the expression.
The Fall of the Lords of Gardinaal, perhaps.
'From whom do these orders come?' he hissed to Venn.
'Above.'
A cursory probe of Venn's mind confirmed that he knew nothing more than he was saying. The hierarchy of the state apparatus was less a chain than a grid. Everyone knew the apocryphal tale of the Datum subconsul and the Militarum vice-navarch who, on discovering that each technically outranked the other, starved to death whilst attempting to establish precedence.
The pacifier gripped his baton pistol tightly. The rattle and boom of the battle for Gardinaal creaked through the ranks of sullen machinery like a careless whisper.
Dekka led the way in.
Following the servo-lines brought him to an assembler station, a hub platform of hydraulic clamps and pressure hoses, surrounded by regulator consoles and the tinted glaze of oversight galleries from which officials could assess their workers' productivity. To Dekka's surprise, the consoles were lit, gem displays glittering in the haze, drawing power from a series of portable generators that trembled and shook as though their driving spirits sought not only to power the station but to mimic it too.
The clamps were engaged. They held something down. Something big.
Dekka scratched down the upturned corners of a smile. 'Someone wake it.'
DuCaine's trigger finger ached. The pinnacle of Imperial genescience and power support to his gauntlet flexors, and the bastard ached. The bodies were piled twelve deep, some in featureless black carapace, some not. Even the 'dozer blade on the vanguard Vindicator was having difficulty clearing it, the tank complaining like a suction cleaner over a nail as it forced a way through. The Lord Commander ducked under the armoured housing of his Land Raider transport, itself reduced to a geriatric crawl, as a Gatling beamer lashed down on the armoured column.
He rose stiffly from cover, the massive back-mounted power-pack depleted, his movements sluggish. His bolter chewed up the wall around the slit window, then pulled sharply back as the beamer kicked up again, lancing through the Land Raider's paintwork and into metal, drizzling DuCaine's bowed head with adamantium shavings.
He could smell the lead in the black paint. Solid shot pat-pattered on the hull the other side. Hard bangs of bolter-fire. Slow as his own. Conserving ammunition now.
There were no roads in the capitolis. Too susceptible to the vagaries of individualism or chance. Instead, networks of wide-gauge tracks for bullet trains and the narrower footbridges that ran between the transit substations and the buildings provided the only way of entering the city, condensing the fighting and allowing the Gardinaal to flood the routes with fighters. They weren't much, enforcers and up-arm
ed civilians mostly, but there were millions of them. It was slaughter, repackaged into an endurance exercise. As though the battle plan of the Lords of the Gardinaal was to cripple the Iron Hands' tanks with the flesh and bones of their citizens and to drown the legionaries in bodies until every bolt-round and joule of power was spent.
Give them their due. It was working.
With a despairing bang, something in the Vindicator's motive plants gave out. Black smoke rose off it like a flag of surrender. DuCaine's Land Raider and the long strung-out line of tanks ground to a halt.
'Damn it!'
'We're never going to make the transit nexus this way.' Rab Tannen shimmied round the rear of the idled Land Raider on his haunches. His armour whined with the effort of movement. His servo-arm hung limp to save power. 'We're already falling behind the other clans. The primarch won't be pleased.'
DuCaine grunted. When was he ever?
'And nor will the clan if we fall short,' Tannen continued.
'This is a damn fool exercise anyway.' Claiming the transit nexus was supposed to hamper the Gardinaal's ability to move their troops, but their troops were already everywhere, and they knew their own city, 'if it were me, I'd have had the entire outer districts carpet-bombed, and then ploughed over what was left with the superheavies we've got parked outside the walls minding the supply shuttles.'
Tannen shrugged. His armour's complaints became increasingly audible. 'The primarch wants the city taken whole.'
DuCaine snorted. But Ferrus Manus got what Ferrus Manus demanded, and it would be an authority higher than a Lord Commander - higher than most right-thinking primarchs if this particular Lord Commander was honest - that would gainsay it. 'I'd leave him a little bit, brother.' Turning down the line of impatiently snarling vehicles crowded with impatiently snarling warriors, he sighed. He'd not been born Clan Sorrgol. In fact, he'd found Medusa's feudal customs positively medieval, but what Ferrus Manus demanded…
'Give me an overview of the area.'
Tannen briefly powered up something he'd deliberately opted to power down and squirted a packet of coded binary towards DuCaine's receivers. The rudimentary systems of his Mk I armour decrypted and assembled it, a map of the city splaying across his visor to overlay with his antiquated battleplate's limited auspectoria.