by Guy Haley
‘You’re soldiers,’ said the woman nastily. ‘There are things expected of you. Shutting up is one of them.’
‘I’m not a soldier, I’m a third-grade enumerator for the Eighty-Sixth Nihon nutrient complex,’ said Katsuhiro.
The woman shot him a grim smile. ‘You were. You’re a soldier now.’ She drew back, looking around at the swelling gaggle of people. ‘Now just shut up.’ She held a finger to her lips. Above the cut-off of the half-glove she wore, her nails were incongruously well manicured.
She scowled at him and turned her back.
‘Charming lady,’ said Katsuhiro.
‘Glad to see you’re recovering your sense of humour.’ Doromek lowered his voice. ‘But word to the wise, don’t antagonise the likes of her.’ He watched her carefully as he spoke. ‘I recognise bad news when I see it. That one’s a fighter.’
A whistle blew. The officials had apparently resolved their argument.
‘Green chits!’ The man was non-military, his voice unsuited to bellowing over a crowd’s noise, and Katsuhiro struggled to hear what he was saying. ‘Green chits follow me!’
Without waiting to see whether all in the group had heard him or not, the official turned about, and shoved his way through the throng towards more gates in the back of the cargo hall.
They were taken in their groups through a massive service corridor, emerging some minutes later via a side tunnel onto another fantastically decorated public platform. Hundreds of maglev trains awaited them, their insides welcomingly lit. The far end of the platform was open to the outside. The icy wind blasted in unimpeded. The bombardment’s racket roared over the trains. The firelight flicker of exploding bombs had taken the place of sunlight.
Men yelled themselves hoarse to no effect. Only those with voxmitters and vox-hailers had any hope of being heard, and then their commands battled one another into incomprehensibility. The moment of calm in the cargo hall seemed as if it had never happened. Katsuhiro was herded urgently onto the carriages. By the doors, menials with buckets collected chits, snatching them violently from people too dazed to understand what they were supposed to do. A single-sheet flimsy was thrust into Katsuhiro’s hand, and he was shoved hard from behind into the carriage.
‘Move down! Move down!’ A voice crackled over the train’s vox-speakers.
Katsuhiro stumbled his way along the aisle. The train was luxuriously appointed, each set of seats half screened from the rest by high backs and panels of frosted plastek imprinted with symbols of Unity. But there were far too many people for the seats to accommodate. Soon the aisle was full. Uniformed marshals began to physically ram people onto the train. The people behind Katsuhiro shoved at him in turn, and he was jammed into one of the nests of seats. Already, eight people sat in a space for four. If anything, it was more crowded than the monorail cargo box that had brought him from the east.
He had been separated from the few people he had spoken to, but he recognised most of the faces as being from the green chit group. They scowled as he tripped on their feet. He was forced closer to the window by the pressure of the crowd. Just when he thought the air would be forced from his lungs and he would suffocate, the doors slid shut and the train pulled out. Held aloft on a counter-gravitic field, the train accelerated quickly, blurring the innumerable people outside into a single, heaving mass.
Light flashed, and the train sped outside. The great mountain of a space port dominated his view for a fragment of a second, huge, flat-topped and covered in lights. The maglev whipped past it before he got a proper look, affording him a view of a city he had never seen for himself, but every man, woman and child on Terra knew. The artful spires and bridges he expected from the holocasts had gone, replaced by buildings more fit for war. Not all had changed. He glimpsed the soaring Tower of Hegemon and the great dome of the Senatorum Imperialis, where giant machines stood guard. Fire, Titans, glory and doom – all gone in a heartbeat as the train plunged into the side of a hab-spire, and thereafter hurried past rockcrete pilings into roots of the earth that showed him nothing but the dark.
Survival of the species
Council of war
A further enemy
Grand Borealis Strategium, 13th of Secundus
The pit of the Grand Borealis Strategium shimmered with hololiths. False worlds hung in frozen orbits, each a copy of Terra pasted over with differing iterations of disaster. Slabs of text scrolled relentlessly down. Numbers indecipherable to the untrained circled around them in illuminated bands. Excepting the maps overlaid with their thousand blinking points of data, the displays were abstract. There were no vid-feeds or picts of the falling bombs. Perhaps the lack of informational immediacy contributed to the calm in the strategium. The hundreds of people on its many galleries worked so quietly that the noise of the bombardment was audible, muffled though it was by the bastion’s thick walls and further tamed by aural dampening. Even so deep within the bastion, the air carried a charge from the ceaseless activities of void shields. Metal brought near metal generated leaping sparks. The cold plasmas of foxfire clung to hard edges.
Officers from dozens of organisations operated as a seamless whole, each responsible for a small section of the overall strategic picture, but though serenity was the order of the day, most of the personnel were well informed enough to piece together a broad view of the situation from the data cascading down the pit. The future of humanity was suspended on a thread. They all knew it.
Absolute concentration was a tonic for fear, for though all had faith in the Emperor’s Praetorian there was not a mortal within the Palace walls who was not afraid. Those in the strategium could usually take comfort from Dorn’s golden presence. They felt his eyes pass over them as he scanned the displays from his platform above the giant central shaft.
But at that moment, he was not there.
Thuria Amund was one among the many. An in-system traffic controller drafted in to aid the war effort, she considered herself a civilian, even though the demarcation between combatant and non-combatant had vanished under the needs of total war. Her specialisation was etheric monitoring, a narrow discipline in which she excelled. She watched the void to see where reality split to allow ships passage to and from the warp. Once upon a time, her station had been high above the world in a dedicated orbital, but that orbital was gone. Gutted of its original equipment to take a battery of Lord Dorn’s guns, it was now almost certainly lost to the enemy. She was lucky, she supposed. Her grading was high, and she had been taken down to the nerve centre of Imperial command. Her less fortunate colleagues had found themselves manning the guns that replaced their equipment. They would have died where they had worked, deafened, choking on fyceline, attacked by warriors who were made to protect them, bewildered that the galaxy could turn on them so.
Thuria’s new world was a tiny sliver of the strategic whole. Sol’s etheric monitoring network was gone, forcing her to rely solely on sensing machines that were situated directly on Terra. With so limited a source of input, her devices, like many others in the strategium, were practically blind. She did her duty as best she could, using what resources remained at her disposal to watch the place behind the sky for further enemy intrusion.
To her left, a bank of lights in neat, crescent rows blinked off and on in patterns only someone from her caste could understand. Slightly offset from them, a cascade of hololithically projected numerical data ran on, silvery as a waterfall, offering cross-checks and correctives to the pattern of the lights. Seven screens in front of her, all either gel or active glass, displayed dancing sines and swirling motes of abstracted fact. To her right, a tall cabinet, open at the front, contained an intricate device somewhat like an orrery, whose whirling spheres ran on tracks representing orbits not found in the material realm. The visor she wore projected more data directly onto her retinas, adding to and enriching the flow of information. Each instrument had its own sound, a soft, repetitive signifie
r of its function, either electronically generated or as a consequence of the motion of its mechanisms, such as the gentle clicking of brass gears emanating from the etherscope, or the pulsing, white-noise hiss of the holo-cascade. It was hypnotic, soothing away her concerns and aiding her concentration. The collective orchestra induced a meditative state, where the sleep she so desperately needed ceased to be so pressing.
The size of the Warmaster’s fleets terrified her. The size of the warp rift they’d entered by more so. A child of the secular Imperial Truth, she started her career thinking of the warp as nothing but a passage through time and space; indeed, she had been taught so. Despite the hegemony’s best efforts to enforce that point of view, rumours escaped into the population as the war dragged on, that the warp was not a simple place of energy, but a deadly ocean swimming with creatures inimical to humanity. She knew enough to guess the rumours were true.
Scrambled readings crawled across her displays, all sense ripped out of them. The warp rift was of such a size that it blotted every signal that Terra’s limited, fixed-point ether-augurs might detect. In looking at it, even as neutral data, she was confronted second by second with what they were facing. She doubted she would see anything through the spikes of energy which crawled in jagged graphics across her immersion visor. She pleaded with gods she had been taught did not exist that the ragged static, full of screams and half-heard whispers, would go away, and her world would return to the placid sensibilities of understandable notification bleeps and mathematically sound ingress and egress plots.
She was not naive enough to believe that would ever happen.
Thuria spared what little attention she had to glance upwards from time to time, seeking Dorn’s return, daring to lessen the opacity of the display in front of her eyes in case the son of the Emperor was hanging back a little in the shadows. Each time she was disappointed. She saw instead the sweep of the monitor banks curved around the strategium pit, stern supervisors, battle group liaisons, army officers and transhumans of half a dozen Legions poised to relay any information of import to their respective commanders. Members of the regiments from the Old Hundred predominated, but there were a multitude of others. They fretted near their stations, waiting for something to happen.
An air of tension so pronounced it bred a peculiar lethargy hung over everything.
When Dorn finally strode onto his observation pier, the atmosphere changed immediately. He arrived unannounced, which was unusual. Thuria found herself looking up when he arrived nevertheless, without being aware why she chose that moment to do so. The primarchs were like that, exerting an influence on the human psyche that at once drew and repelled.
The hundred metres between her station and Dorn’s pulpit did not diminish the Praetorian’s presence. If anything he seemed larger above her like that, his golden battleplate carved into planes of blue and silver by the upwelling of the hololight. Lit from beneath, his noble features appeared indomitable, his hair startling white. He was as hard and cold as his native world of Inwit.
As he surveyed them, his eyes passed over Thuria, and she felt herself diminished, as if he found her wanting, not for lack of effort or of skill, but simply because she was what she was: human, fallible and frail.
She remained dismayed and exulted when his gaze swept on. He finished his survey, and leaned forwards to address them.
‘Servants of the Imperium. Loyal subjects of the Emperor. Believers in Unity,’ he began. His voice resonated with something drawn from beyond mundane human existence, sending shivers up Thuria’s spine. ‘We come at last to the striking of the final hour. The Warmaster encircles the Throneworld. During the first thousandth this day, at one minute past midnight by the old reckoning, his bombardment began.’
They knew this. They’d heard the shells. Those making their way to and from the strategium for their duty shifts had seen them lighting up the void shields. They all felt the explosions shaking the world; they all suffered the crawling sensation in their brains from the active warp tech of the aegis. Another man, even another primarch, might have made a humorous aside to this effect, how obvious his statement was. Drollery was not a characteristic that factored large in Lord Dorn’s make-up.
‘We have planned for this moment. We have striven to anticipate the traitors’ plans. We stand now upon the brink of annihilation, but do not despair!’ He raised his voice. ‘We do not seek to overthrow Horus’ armies. We must only endure. Let the defences of Terra be the cliffs Horus breaks himself upon. Let him fritter away his power seeking our end, and then, when he is exhausted, and drained, and his strength bled away, shall the revenging blow fall and wipe his perfidy from the stars!’ Once more he swept his eyes across the pits. ‘Not all of you will survive to see that day, but know this – we stand as a race upon the precipice of extinction. It may seem that in the equation deciding the survival of our species your lives do not amount to much. But your efforts, though they may seem small to you, are vital, one and all. I call upon you now, in the Emperor’s hour of need, to put away your terror, to seal up your dread, and exert every fibre of your being towards our inevitable victory! I am a primarch, made by the Emperor’s own hand and yet it is for you and you alone, the men and women of the human race, that all this undertaking was begun. Ours is not an Imperium of gods or monsters as Horus would impose, but a state of unity to shelter and protect our species from all the evils of this universe and beyond. Think not of yourselves as the bombs fall. Think not of your survival as the enemy comes. Think instead of continuance, of persistence, of the endurance of mankind.’ His voice rose again to great volume. Thuria had never heard a voice so pure, or so terrifying. ‘Keep in mind the coming generations of humanity. Keep in mind the peace that will follow the victory. Hold yourselves true to your purpose, do your duty to your Emperor, and we shall be triumphant!’
There followed a moment of silence in which no human sound was heard, only the workings of machines. Then first one pair of hands began to applaud, then another, and another, until every man, woman and transhuman in the strategium was clapping and shouting. Jubilation overcame fear. For a brief moment, Thuria saw what victory might feel like.
Dorn nodded once in satisfaction, turned his back upon the shaft and departed.
Bhab Bastion, 13th of Secundus
The primary defence council met in a room already steeped in history. The Bhab Bastion dated from before the Great Crusade, before the Wars of Unification. How far back, no one knew for certain, nor was its original name or builder known. It was built for war, and when the architects of the Palace had come to remove it in favour of finer buildings, it had refused to die.
Dorn admired its tenacity, and so he had adopted it and adapted it to be his nerve centre. Such a place suited his temperament perfectly.
The Praetorian stepped into a room muffled with old carpets and tapestries of forgotten victories. Its wood and cloth were steeped in tabac smoke and the scents of ancient wines, faded perfume and dust. Beneath mellow glow-globes the four most powerful people on Terra, save the Emperor Himself, waited for him.
A pair of Imperial Fists Huscarls shut the doors behind their lord. The thick wood cut down the noise of the bombardment further, but could not silence it.
‘Brothers,’ said Dorn. ‘Captain-general, Lord Malcador.’
The greetings between them extended no further than a few return nods. Sanguinius, Jaghatai Khan and Constantin Valdor were all armoured. Malcador sported his usual plain, green robes, but he had protection none of the others could boast. He alone sat at the room’s central feature: a large, round wooden table scaled for giants. He perched upon a tall stool sized to bring baseline humans level with the top, and though he exuded an aura of power even within this faintly ridiculous chair, he was more drawn and ancient seeming than ever.
‘The situation deteriorates,’ said Sanguinius.
‘It does,’ said Dorn grimly. As he approached, a
small-scale hololith of the Solar System blinked on. He joined the company, and they spread around the table.
‘The last pockets of resistance on Luna fell two days ago. All our orbital forts and the sky fortresses adapted from the orbital plates are taken or destroyed. Horus has complete command of near-Terran void space. We are cut off.’
‘You dealt with the orbital guns of the forts before they were overrun, I assume,’ said Malcador.
‘Rendered inoperable. In some cases we were able to convince the enemy to destroy them rather than take them. In other cases my Imperial Fists and Sanguinius’ Blood Angels left nothing useable,’ said Dorn.
‘It took too long. We both lost many sons ensuring it would be so,’ said Sanguinius.
‘It is enough that they cannot fire upon us,’ said Dorn.
‘Regrettable that the tactics you employed at Uranus could not be repeated,’ said Malcador. ‘I suppose we were fortunate Horus fell for the ruse in the first place.’
Dorn shook his head. ‘Horus would not. Perturabo’s arrogance can be relied upon, if nothing else can be,’ he said. Only when he spoke of the hated Lord of Iron did his delivery take on a hint of emotion. ‘But you are right, we cannot rely on the same tricks twice.’
‘Neither can the enemy,’ said Jaghatai Khan. ‘Here we are up against the truth of will. No more running, no more manoeuvring. It is time for stone and steel to speak.’
‘You sound eager for the fight,’ said Sanguinius.
‘Even the wind grows tired of running,’ said the Khan.
‘Stone and steel will speak,’ said Dorn. ‘Horus’ armies are…’ He paused, as if he could not quite believe what he was about to say. A flicker of uncertainty passed behind his eyes. ‘They are almost incalculable in size. There are representatives from every Traitor Legion within the Solar System. He commands thousands of regiments of traitor soldiery, hundreds of Knightly houses, dozens of Titan Legios, which though they were diminished at Beta-Garmon,’ he indicated Sanguinius, ‘still outnumber our own. Now the inner-system blockade has been swept aside, the unified forces of the Dark Mechanicum are heading for Terra from Mars. We are beset on all sides.’ He gestured at the display, bringing a section of Terra’s high orbit into focus.