‘No,’ Calder said. ‘I serve Him. But I do not worship Him.’
‘Do you doubt His divinity, then?’ Eamon looked at him, his face suddenly worn and haggard looking. It wasn’t simply his recent exertions, but something else. ‘I have never been to Terra, but I can feel Him nonetheless.’ He touched his chest. ‘I feel the resonance of His voice here, in my heart. He speaks – you have but to listen.’
‘I have two hearts, cardinal-governor. Which one is it that He speaks to?’
Eamon shook his head, his eyes sad. He slumped in his chair and drained his goblet. ‘You mock me. I forgive you.’
‘I do not mock you. The Emperor of Mankind is a fixed point. Divine or not, we both serve Him. Which is why you will tell me what I need to know.’
‘I have!’ Eamon snapped. He paused, realising what he’d done. ‘Forgive me. But these vaults you speak of, these hidden paths – I do not know what they are. I cannot tell you what I do not know.’
Calder said nothing. Eamon waited, as if expecting a reply. When it didn’t come, the cardinal-governor sighed. ‘You don’t trust me, do you?’
‘Trust is earned.’
Eamon winced. ‘And haven’t I earned it, yet?’
Again, Calder said nothing. Eamon looked away, his gaze coming to rest on the great books that occupied the shelves around the chamber. ‘Have you ever read the classics, lieutenant? Govanna’s Historia Regum Terra, for instance. Or Penton’s The Riddle and the Throne? Histories of the Imperium, written by the most learned scholars of the ages.’
‘I do not read fiction,’ Calder said simply. He’d found that most of the texts written in the past ten thousand years were little more than children’s stories. A nugget of truth, in a shell of complete fabrication.
Eamon turned. ‘You would see them that way, wouldn’t you? You lived it. Do you remember the day the Emperor drove the monsters from Terra?’
Calder hesitated. He barely remembered those days. He’d been a child when the Traitor Legions had laid siege to Terra. Sometimes, he had flashes of running and hiding from purple-armoured warriors. Of his brother’s screams as they flayed him alive, so that they might have his bones and skin to wear into battle. He recalled the look on his father’s face as they dragged him into the open, guttural laughter shaking the air.
As always, he pushed those thoughts down. He was not that child any more. He was Primaris. The ultimate weapon, built for the last war. And nothing more would be taken from him. Not by traitors or daemons or xenos.
‘They were not monsters then,’ he said. ‘Not all of them.’
Eamon nodded. ‘Regardless, so much of what the Ecclesiarchy has built came from the ashes of that great conflagration. We pulled together the framework of the Imperial Creed with bloody fingers, and crafted a faith from hearsay and hope.’ He struck his chest with a fist. ‘We did it. Us. We saw what was needed, and we did it. We united mankind in its darkest hour. And we have held them together since then, whatever has come – so many times, disaster was averted only by faith and fire.’ He gestured to the shelves. ‘You call it fiction. I call it hope. We give hope, lieutenant.’
Eamon snatched up his goblet and took a deep swallow. ‘And you hate us for it,’ he continued. ‘Not without reason, I admit – some among the Holy Synod have yielded to temptation. But for every one who falls, a hundred more stand firm. Because we believe. Our belief sustains billions and yet you cannot bring yourself to trust us. To trust me.’
Calder looked around the chamber, at the great shelves of books and the ornate fireplace. At the high windows, looking out over the city. He considered his reply from every angle, remembering Suboden’s warning as he did so. Eamon was trying to divert him. To anger him, perhaps. It was a distraction. A ploy to avoid revealing whatever it was that he was hiding. What this planet was hiding.
More and more, he was becoming convinced that Guilliman had sent him here not just to defend this world, but to ferret out whatever secret it held. Whatever it was might mean the difference between victory and defeat.
He turned back to Eamon. ‘Irrelevant,’ he said firmly. ‘I do not hate you. You are a strange thing to me, for when I last walked the galaxy, you did not exist. And yet, the more I learn of you – of the Ecclesiarchy – the more I find that it is unpleasantly familiar. You are the shadow on the cave wall – a little thing, magnified by false perceptions.’
‘Lieutenant–’ Eamon began.
Calder continued, not giving him a chance to speak. ‘This debate serves no purpose, save as a distraction. I do not care what you have done, or why you have done it. I do not care why you seek to hide it from me. I care only that you hinder me in the performance of my duty. Thus far, I have allowed it. But the time is coming when I will not take no for an answer, cardinal-governor.’
Eamon went still. ‘Is that a threat?’
‘It is a promise.’
Calder left without waiting to be dismissed. As the doors to Eamon’s chamber closed behind him, he activated an encrypted vox-link. ‘Karros, brother. Meet me in the strategium.’
Karros responded almost immediately. ‘Is everything alright, brother? You sound almost angry. Very unusual, for you.’
‘I am fine. But we have matters to discuss.’
Calder cut the link. He realised that he’d stopped again before the statue of Sebastian Thor. He stared at it for a moment, before the whirr of tiny wings alerted him to an observer. He turned, slightly. Almost a dozen cyber-cherubs watched him. The tiny automata were perched on the other statues, or in the corners. Their eyes whirred and clicked, capturing his image for unseen observers.
Calder held those blank gazes for a moment.
Then, deliberately, he turned and continued on his way.
Karros sat back on his haunches. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured. He crouched on the ledge of a cathedral spire, overlooking a wide avenue colloquially known as Fell’s Triumph. The eastern reaches of High Town spread out below him in splashes of grey and gold. Clouds of industrial smog and incense drifted over the buildings, obscuring much of the street below. A sudden rush of birds agitated the clouds, as they spilled upwards into the sky above.
‘Brother?’ Solaro, a Reiver, crouched behind him. Karros glanced at the Primaris. Like the Imperial Fists, his command was split roughly fifty-fifty between new and old. The Chapter believed in integration where possible. Then, they had always been adaptable. Solaro was the only one of his kind here. The other five Raven Guard perched at various points on the roof were, like Karros, of a more traditional bent. Solaro normally commanded his own squad, but Karros wanted to observe him in the field.
‘Calder is losing his patience for the cardinal-governor’s games,’ he said, answering Solaro’s question. He stretched discretely, flexing each muscle in its turn, easing the flow of fatigue-poisons. It would be some time before he had to rest, or even cramped up. He’d once perched on a similar rooftop for close to a week, awaiting the perfect moment to end the life of an ork war-leader. He closed his eyes, remembering the oily taste of the rain that day, and the rough, bellowing speech of the greenskin as it addressed its followers in crude mimicry of an Imperial commander rousing the troops.
He’d taken the creature’s head off with his first shot. Its followers had succumbed to raucous infighting some minutes later. Orks were nothing if not efficient when it came to establishing a new chain of command. Luckily, it made them easy prey.
‘Why has he indulged the mortal for so long?’ the Reiver asked. ‘At the first sign of deceit, we should have removed him from power.’
‘Ah, Solaro. I forget sometimes that not all of you Primaris are as old as Calder. You are barely three decades into your duty.’
‘Long enough to know better than to indulge such foolishness.’
‘Not foolishness,’ Karros said. ‘Wisdom. Deposing Eamon would result in increased civil unrest.
And other than his unwillingness to discuss certain matters, Eamon is more useful where he is. He provides a necessary buffer between us and the Ecclesiarchial bureaucrats who rule this world.’
‘He’s a wall, you mean,’ Solaro said.
Karros glanced. ‘Was that humour, brother? How unexpected.’
‘A slip of the tongue,’ Solaro replied.
‘It wasn’t a reprimand, Solaro. Even the sons of Dorn make jokes on occasion. I– ah. There we are. Right on schedule.’ Karros turned as one of the sensors he’d placed on the street below registered movement. The avenue was lined with bulk warehouses, linked directly to an array of transit lifts. The lifts were ancient technology – gravimetric suspension systems that could carry a void-hardened cargo platform to the orbital docking spires above the city. Once the platform had its load, it would descend at speed, until reaching the base of the lift.
In peacetime, the lifts made the journey hundreds of times a day. They had been rendered inoperable until the current crisis was past by teams of civilian engineers. Or, such was supposed to be the case.
Someone had ignored the edict. According to the warriors he’d set to watch, the lift in Warehouse 32-Omega had been active fifteen times in the past three days. That was more than merely suspicious, given the circumstances. It was potentially treasonous.
Karros had decided to investigate, while there was still time to indulge in such amusements personally. Calder lived for his way of war – of numbers and strategies. But Karros enjoyed taking a more active role. He’d never lost his taste for shadow war.
Down below, a civilian transport had come to a stop on a side street behind the warehouse. It was a heavy vehicle – rugged, built for mountain travel. Whatever they were bringing down from orbit, they were planning to take it out of the city.
Five men climbed from the vehicle. There were thirty more in the warehouse. Karros blink-activated an augur-rune on his display. The rune controlled the feed from the pict-recorders Solaro and the others had surreptitiously mounted around the outside of the warehouse. The feed, filtered through his helmet picter, filled a corner of his display. Activating a second rune, he isolated the faces of the men who disembarked, and ran them against the list of persons of interest Calder had put together. ‘Interesting,’ he said.
‘Heretics?’ Solaro said.
‘Maybe. They’re also criminals, at least according to Calder’s files.’ Karros raised a hand, signalling the other Raven Guard. ‘They’re armed, but nothing that should trouble us. I want prisoners, if possible. Chayn, Deron – I want that orbital lift out of commission. Permanently. The rest of you, especially you, Solaro, follow my lead. We’ll conduct a standard smash and sweep. Don’t bother giving chase if they run. Concentrate on the ones who stand and fight – or try to hide.’
Solaro nodded. ‘When you say prisoners…’
‘I mean in one piece.’ Karros stood. ‘Go.’ Without waiting to see if the others were following, he leapt from his perch and slid down the slope of the spire. Ancient tiles splintered and cracked beneath him, but he paid them little heed. Instead, he concentrated on the sudden drop ahead, and the necessary calculations for what came next.
When he hit the edge, he leapt, angling his body just so. The others did the same, one after the other. Between their enhanced frames and the strength-augmenting fibre bundles of their power armour, there were few leaps that a Space Marine could not take on faith.
Ordinarily, he would have employed stealth. It would have been easy for him and his men to infiltrate the warehouse and subdue those inside. But sometimes it was preferable to make a statement. Whoever was inside thought that they could flaunt their crime under the noses of the Emperor’s chosen. Such hubris could not be allowed to go unchallenged.
Thus, the leap.
The roof of the warehouse was made from recycled sheet metal – a local variety. Thin, but durable. Not durable enough to survive the impact of a fully armoured Space Marine, travelling at high speed, however.
Karros barely felt the moment of impact. The sheet metal buckled around him, and the support frame bent away from its contact points. It barely slowed his descent, and he plummeted towards the ferrocrete floor below in a cloud of torn metal and busted frame. He landed with a crash, the gyroscopic stabilisers built into his armour keeping him upright. The floor cracked around him, and dust geysered.
Two point three milliseconds after impact, he was already moving. His armour’s auto-senses built a map of his surroundings as he ran towards the closest identified target. The warehouse was a massive square of space, broken up only by walkways and storage berths. The transit lift rose from its centre – it was a derrick-like structure mounted on a flat plinth, stretching upwards through the roof and high into the air.
There were men scattered about the lift, and mountains of crates. Most of the men were busy unloading the transit lift, but the rest turned – slowly, so slowly – as Karros raced towards them. He drew his bolt pistol and fired, letting the targeting runes guide his aim. Three shots and three men fell, not dead, but perhaps wishing they were. Around him, Solaro and the others fired their own weapons. Precise bursts hammered the air. Men dived for cover as crates of contraband were chewed to flinders.
Karros slid to a halt, firing again, driving men back from the transit lift. A mortal, desperate or perhaps simply optimistic, came at him with a blade. The sword was the sort hive gangers might carry – a chopping blade, with none of the grace or balance of a proper weapon. Karros caught the blow on his forearm and swiped the blade from its owner’s hands. Before the man could run, Karros caught him by the throat and sent him flying into a knot of his fellows. He pivoted, firing, forcing the rest of them to keep their heads down as he turned his attention elsewhere.
His picter-unit was linked to those worn by Solaro and the others. He saw what they saw. His warriors had spread out through the warehouse and were following his example. They fought to disable, rather than kill, but it didn’t make much difference. Mortals fell, bones broken, bodies pumping blood from wounds that would eventually prove fatal without medical attention. Karros paid them little attention. If they lived, they would be questioned. If they died, they died. What mattered was that his warriors were following orders.
Autoguns roared and crude explosive rounds bit into his armour, momentarily rocking him. He turned, back-tracking the trajectories. His bolt pistol boomed in response, and runes flashed, signalling that the targets were down. His auto-senses focused on a group of men heading for the transit lift, trying to escape perhaps. He stalked after them, signalling Solaro with a vox-click as he did so. Through his picter, he spotted the Reiver racing across the top of a nearby stack of crates, combat knife in hand. There was no need to give an order – the Primaris knew what to do.
Solaro vaulted from the crates and crashed down, knife flashing. Men fell, their hamstrings sliced clean through. Their screams scattered the rest. Only one continued towards the transit lift – a heavyset man, clad in a silk jacket and battered military fatigues. A name flashed on his display, as his armour’s sensors identified the man – Kormas Belloq. One of the gang leaders Calder had wanted to see. Karros cycled through the frequency band. When he found the one used by the enforcers he sent a coded data-pulse containing a pict of Belloq, and their current location. He estimated that the enforcers would arrive by the time he and his warriors had done what they’d come to do.
Belloq carried a heavy autogun with a bulky ammunition drum, and he laid down a withering field of suppressive fire. Solaro was knocked sprawling. His battleplate was lighter than Karros’ own, and while it protected him from harm, it wasn’t as good at absorbing impacts. He rolled away from the gunfire, seeking cover. Karros pressed forward, drawing the gunman’s attention. ‘Good shot,’ Solaro voxed.
‘He’s had training,’ Karros said. That wasn’t in the files, but it didn’t surprise him. He moved quickly, but
without haste. He was curious as to Belloq’s plan. Where was there to go?
Belloq backed away, retreating towards the transit lift. Karros laughed. The man had courage, at least. Not everyone would risk an orbital ascent. Then, not everyone had Space Marines chasing them. ‘Chayn – status,’ he said.
‘Mission accomplished.’
There was a dull boom as a plasma charge went off. Metal groaned and smoke rose up and boiled outwards, flooding the area around the transit lift. Belloq spun, eyes wide. He cursed and turned back as Karros approached.
The autogun roared, spitting high-velocity rounds. Karros walked through the fusillade, his battleplate registering and recording the impacts. The rounds weren’t heavy enough to punch through his armour, but they were far in advance of the usual ganger trash. ‘A good weapon,’ he said. He boosted his vox, so that his voice boomed out like thunder. ‘How did you come by it?’
‘I paid for it,’ the mortal spat. He emptied the ammunition drum, and made to eject it. Karros sprinted forward, and slapped the empty weapon from the man’s hands.
‘I’m sure,’ Karros said. He caught the man by the throat, hoisted him up and propelled him backwards, against a crate. ‘You are a smuggler.’
‘I’m a–a businessman,’ the mortal choked out, as he clawed uselessly at Karros’ forearm. Karros observed him for a moment, slightly impressed by the man’s defiance. Unaugmented humans were normally terrified of Space Marines. Then, perhaps this man had seen worse in his time. Perhaps it was simply hubris. Karros slammed him back against the crate, knocking the wind out of him.
‘You were using the transit lift to smuggle in weapons? Why?’
Belloq glared. ‘To sell. Why else?’
‘To who?’
Belloq looked at him as if he were insane. ‘Everyone. We’ve heard the rumours. The system is under attack. Weapons make people feel safe. Every two-bit aristo and deacon is looking to gun-up their bodyguards.’ He stopped his struggles. ‘Why haven’t you killed me yet?’
Apocalypse - Josh Reynolds Page 20