by Guy Haley
‘Did you see that?’
‘See what?’ said Doromek.
‘The woman… She did this. She killed it.’
Engines grumbled behind the combatants. Large shapes were heading through the smoke.
‘You know,’ said Doromek, ‘it really is time to get out of here.’
Whistles blew far back towards Bastion 16. Officers and their veteran bullies were shouting for everyone to retreat. The surviving knots of infantry gladly obliged, making way for three huge tanks coming to the battle. Anti-personnel weapons in sponsons tracked down to draw a bead on the enemy, their targeting augurs shining red in the battlesmoke.
Without realising it, Katsuhiro was running, following Doromek and the stream of men falling back from the attack. Though retreat had been called, there was no order to the withdrawal, only mad, headlong flight.
The high grey sides of the tank flashed by him, and he saw another line of infantry, this one of regular troops, properly provisioned with uniforms and winter kit, waiting in neat ranks and ready to fire. Hands pulled him through to the back even as las-beams flashed out.
He fell in a heap behind the line.
A moment later, the tanks opened fire, belching choking, acrid smoke over the infantry lines. Heavy bolters and stubbers rattled into action, drowning out all noise with the roar of micro-rocket motors and the detonation of miniature warheads in flesh. Katsuhiro got himself up, turned around to see the mutants being torn apart. All the large abominations fell to the fighting vehicles. The few lesser abhumans that got past the tanks were shot down by groups of infantry. Doromek was firing rapidly but calmly beside him, taking the things through the eyes or mouth, or hitting them squarely in the heart. When he fired, they went down, their toughness no protection against his accuracy.
The last of the abhumans fell dead. The tanks ground forwards, their blocky rears vanishing into the maelstrom of smoke and fire, still discharging their guns.
‘Cease firing!’
Jainan’s voice was a lonely coherent sound in the racket.
‘They’ve gone!’ someone shouted.
A ragged cheer went up from the conscripts. The regulars remained quietly vigilant.
‘What were those things?’ said Katsuhiro.
Doromek was efficiently changing out his power pack for a fresh charge.
‘Mutants. Abhumans. Beastmen, one of humanity’s more degenerate subtypes.’
‘But the others, the big ones, what were they?’
Katsuhiro locked eyes with Doromek. He could have sworn he saw a flash of consternation before the man’s flintiness returned.
‘Honestly? I don’t know.’ For a moment he seemed like a different man, then he smiled and slapped Katsuhiro’s arm hard enough to make him wince. ‘You survived your first battle. Well done.’
Jainan strode past them. ‘It’s not over yet. Everybody back to the ramparts.’
Doromek called something after the captain, but it was drowned out by the whistling boom of incoming ordnance and the angry buzz of overstretched void shields.
The enemy was bombarding their section again.
Daylight Wall, Helios Gate, 25th of Secundus
‘The breach of the third line of sector sixteen has been contained, only just. We have minor breakthroughs in two other places in our section.’ Thane’s report was delivered in unhurried, stolid style, typical Imperial Fist. Raldoron’s auto-senses dampened the cacophony of the attack, allowing him to hear his counterpart. ‘They will soon be dealt with. How looks the situation from the wall?’
Raldoron was on the wall walk over the gate. He cast his eye across the sweep of the battle. Only a fraction of the invasion force had made it to Terra alive, but the Warmaster had managed to land millions of men even so. They surged through the wreckage of their transports, a black tide of hatred, battering at the ramparts of the outworks.
Aircraft roared over the gate. Cannons clattered at them.
‘We still have enemy fighters and bombers making it within the aegis envelope,’ said Raldoron. ‘The shielding here has taken severe damage. I have contacted the Adeptus Mechanicus to request repair teams be sent, but many of the projection discs are destroyed, and I do not know if they will be able to accomplish much. Over the Palace, the aegis is holding, but out here, past the foot of the walls, it won’t be long until it fails.’
Raldoron turned his gaze towards that part of the battlefield where the enemy had broken through.
‘Traitor army units have taken up position outside sector sixteen. We cannot let them dig in. I recommend immediate purgation fire from the wall defences.’
‘I concur,’ said Thane.
Raldoron paused while three more fighters screamed overhead, firing on each other, too loud for his auto-senses to screen out.
‘I will send the order,’ said Raldoron, when they were past. ‘Let this be on my conscience, as commander of the Helios section, Daylight Wall.’
‘Then I shall return to my duties here,’ said Thane. ‘My thanks, brother.’
A macro cannon volley got through the peripheral shielding, slamming into the plain just beyond the outworks and killing hundreds of traitors. It wouldn’t be too long before the enemy could breach the voids more reliably, and rain death down on the fortifications directly. Raldoron doubted the aegis would fail completely for some time, but it had already been weakened. Eventually, they were going to have to trust in Lord Dorn’s walls alone.
Raldoron called his aides to him, and had them relay his command that the Palace open fire on the outworks. The bombardment would cost loyal lives, but from up there on the wall, he could see there was no viable alternative short of sending out the Legiones Astartes, and that had been expressly forbidden.
The guns were opening up as he opened channels to the other captains under his command. His kind were not made to sit and wait behind walls, and he found the duty onerous. Twenty companies, Imperial Fists as well as his own Blood Angels, looked to him for guidance, his purview covering a two hundred-kilometre stretch of the Daylight Wall.
He was in the process of hunting one of his subordinates out through a tangle of vox-relays, when one of his aides shouted out a warning.
‘Attack run!’
A void fighter was coming in at a steep dive straight for the Helios Gate. As Raldoron looked up, its cannons fired. Rockcrete burst in high cones as it strafed the wall walk. The First Captain flung himself out of the way, his battleplate ringing off the parapet as he hit the ground. The enemy fighter made a single pass and sped off southwards, loyal interceptors in hot pursuit.
Raldoron clambered to his feet, armour motors grinding. His two aides were dead, their armour shattered and the bodies inside pulverised by direct autocannon hits. The blood stirred his emotions, and he stared at it for too long.
He tore his eyes away, looking instead towards the third line of the 16th outwork section, now under fire from the Palace walls. Piece by piece, they would lose ground. It was happening faster than he had hoped. He could move inside, but he refused to hide in the Helios command centre, when he could see the battle far better from the walls.
He opened a vox-channel to his Chapter command cadre.
‘This is First Captain Raldoron,’ he said. ‘I require a new nuncio vox-specialist and logistician immediately at my position.’
Katsuhiro of the Kushtun Naganda.
In support of betrayal
I am Alpharius
Not in vain
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16,
contested zone, 25th of Secundus
Myzmadra found it easy enough to slip away from the skirmish down the third line towards the overrun zone. The attack was coming to a close, and a heavy quiet took hold where the roar of distant voices and munitions blended into an avalanche rumble, threatening but far away. Shouts were coming from the se
cond line, so she kept to the ramparts of the third, out of sight in the drifting smoke. She was more than capable of moving unseen when occasion required.
Explosion flash lit up the devastation, the harsh light more disorienting than illuminating. Dead abhumans lay strewn across the killing zone between the third and second lines, their bestial faces still twisted with the rage of battle. She almost pitied them; she knew little of their kind, but what she did told a sorry tale of a rejected human offshoot, not quite debased enough to kill out of hand, but too different to be afforded dignity. The rank chemical smells of frenzon and ’slaught rose from them, the foam around their muzzles another telltale sign of combat drug administration, but she doubted they needed much encouragement to kill. The Imperium promised peace and advancement for all mankind, except for those it didn’t. Creatures like these lived lives of abject misery.
Lies upon lies.
The baseline human corpses she saw were of both loyalists and traitors, not that those terms meant anything to her. Allegiance hadn’t spared either side the savagery of the abhumans. Both traitor and loyalist had been ripped into, and showed signs of cannibalism.
She passed through a platoon of dead traitor soldiers. On the line, the loyalists spoke of scum and dregs, but despite the symbols of dark gods sprayed onto their equipment and the fetishes hanging from their kit, these were professionals from once loyal regiments. Scum wouldn’t undertake such a suicide mission; you needed discipline for that kind of sacrifice. You needed belief in the cause.
Activity on the second line was increasing, risking her discovery, so she skidded down the outer face of the rampart. A shell had come down at the foot of the wall, laying out men and body parts in a pattern of gory regularity. Her eyes caught on the stock of a lasgun on the fringes of the crater. Upon it was etched a crude octed, painted red with recent blood.
The icon was a blasphemy in a world that was supposed to be beyond such things. Myzmadra didn’t believe in Horus’ cause. He was a puppet of awful powers. She didn’t think the Alpha Legion believed in him either, though they hid their purpose behind a hedge of deceit. The Alpha Legion could be trusted to be untrustworthy, that was all. It was enough. In her experience, that was about as much assurance as any human being could get about anything.
After the Battle of Pluto, before the Legion had cast her and Ashul back out into the void, she’d prodded at the legionaries. Myzmadra wasn’t likeable, but she was good at getting people to talk. Legionaries, however, were not people. She’d exerted herself, she really had, asking why they fought and received the same answer she always did, if she got any answer at all.
For the Emperor.
They said that to her over and over again. Even when their actions could only be construed as being directly contrary to the Imperium’s survival.
For the Emperor.
She’d heard that maybe a dozen times, which was a lot, coming from so secretive a group.
Maybe she was being foolish, but she chose to believe it.
Her thoughts went back to the first time she’d heard it.
‘For the Emperor.’ He’d said that to her, when she was recruited. Alpharius, he said his name was, but they all said they were him. Was he Alpharius? Was he the warrior who fought at Pluto, truly? Maybe they all were Alpharius. There were stranger things in the universe now than a Legion of clones.
How long ago was it? A decade? Fifteen years? Time was one of those bedrocks of civilisation that didn’t have anything sensible to say once you interrogated it. Time was like money, a convenient, mutually agreed fiction. It wasn’t real, not in the way people thought. It was a human construct. A collective delusion.
Nobody liked to hear things like that. When she was young, she’d said that and similar once too often. Finding her opinions unwelcome, she’d tried to go as far away from humanity as possible, fetching up in the back end of nowhere on a planet that was itself at the back end of nowhere, cosmically speaking. Out there, in the dry maquis, there was nothing to do but scratch a living and drink. She did the former desultorily, and the latter with great enthusiasm.
She still didn’t know why she’d been chosen.
One night, exactly when was not important enough to remember, she returned from the local taverna to find a stranger in her tatty hab-module. There were precisely one hundred and fifty-nine people in her village and the scorched hills around about it. As soon as she saw the silhouette of her visitor in the dark of her living quarters, she knew he was not one of them, primarily because none of her neighbours were warriors of the Legiones Astartes. He was big, even for one of their breed, perched precariously on one of her chairs. His knees were too far off the ground to go under the table, and he had arranged it so it was in front of him, with the only other chair she owned set aside for her to sit upon. Despite his incongruous size, he somehow contrived to be unobtrusive, a trick all the Legion seemed to have.
Intelligent eyes glinted in the depths of a camouflage hood. Throughout their entire meeting, he did not take it down.
‘Lydia Myzmadra,’ he stated. He didn’t ask. She had her gun in her hand before he could blink. That seemed to entertain him.
’Shoot me if you like,’ he said. ‘If you do, you will never know why you came home to find me in your hovel.’ He looked around, finding great amusement in the piles of dirty clothes and the unwashed utensils spilling from the sink. ‘A reduction in circumstances, for a woman of your background. I doubt your family would be impressed with your living arrangements.’
‘My family’s none of your damned business,’ she said. She waved the gun barrel at the door. ‘Out,’ she said.
He remained where he sat. His smile hardened, just a little. ‘Let me rephrase what I was saying before. You can try to shoot me. I will kill you.’
‘Who are you?’ she said.
‘I am Alpharius,’ he said.
Her gun lowered a fraction. ‘The twentieth primarch? Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant, it is how you will address me,’ he said. ‘Otherwise “my lord” will do.’
Could it have been him? So many of the Legion looked like their genesire.
‘What do you want with me?’ she said.
‘Straight to the meat of the matter.’ He appeared pleased. ‘My Legion likes people like you, Lydia.’
‘Nobody calls me that,’ she said. ‘Not ever.’
‘We like competent people. We like people who get things done. People we might use.’
‘Who says I want using?’ she said.
‘Please,’ he said. He held out an enormous hand. The skin tone was unusual, coppery to the point of metallic. ‘Sit.’ Despite his politeness, it was not a request. She obliged, but kept her gun up.
‘I am looking for someone Terran-born, but who is not too attached. Someone who believes in what the Emperor is doing, but not the way it is being done. Someone who suspects that things are not what they have been told.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You’re not frightened, are you?’ said Alpharius. Once more, he was pleased. ‘The psychological effect of the presence of legionaries on some mortals can be overwhelming. It’s worse for we primarchs – I’ve seen people piss themselves when I walk in the room. But you don’t care, do you? You’d shoot me, right now, if you didn’t want to know why I was here, and you see my threat is good, that you’ll die if you try, so you’re not rash. You don’t panic. That’s good. That’s very good.’
‘Get to the point, or get out of my house.’
White teeth grinned in the shadow of his hood. ‘Very well. The Imperium is doomed. Horus Lupercal, the Warmaster, will fall under the sway of forgotten gods and betray the Emperor. This will happen in a few years. The fate of the galaxy and everything within it is at stake.’
She snorted. ‘Nonsense. Is this some kind of
test?’
‘No.’
‘You’re going to stop him then?’
‘Not exactly. If Horus loses,’ said the man who called himself Alpharius, ‘the Imperium will be crippled. It will allow these gods to prosper, to the extent that they will eventually overthrow the laws of reality, leading to a catastrophic blending of the warp with the material universe.’
‘Surely that would happen if he won?’
‘We have… sources that tell a different story. Should Horus win, humanity will burn itself out in an orgy of violence, fatally weakening these entities, these gods.’ He made a face at the word. ‘Please be aware I use the term loosely. Eventually, it will allow for their destruction, saving all reality. The Emperor has known of these things since the beginning.’
‘He lied?’ she said. She wasn’t surprised.
‘Perhaps with good reason,’ said Alpharius with a shrug. ‘His design is to keep mankind safe. The primarchs, Unity, the Imperium, all of that, but He will not succeed. In trying He will make the problem worse. Apocalyptically so.’
‘If you know this now, why don’t you stop Horus? Why don’t you warn the Emperor?’
‘The events cannot be stopped. Even if they could, the result would be the same, or similar – they would happen a few thousand years later, and that is the end of the universe. In simple terms,’ he added.
She waved her gun at him. ‘What’s this got to do with me?’
‘We need people to help us. I would like you to help me.’
‘Marvellous. Assuming this is all true, why would you tell me? How do I know you’re not lying?’
Alpharius shifted. The chair, comically small under him, creaked dangerously.
‘Most of the people I speak to don’t hear the truth. Some of them believe we are working against the Emperor because we wish to rebel, or that we hate Him, and because they hate Him and wish to rebel themselves they are only too glad to join us. We tell people what they need to hear. Everyone has a lever. For most, it comes down to money or power, or a combination of them. Most people are simple. But someone like you craves neither money nor power. You had both, and walked away from them. Only the truth will do for you. You want to mean something, Lydia Myzmadra. I am offering you the chance to spend your life in pursuit of the worthiest cause of all – the protection of…’ He paused, and smiled, as if they were sharing a private joke. ‘Of everything,’ he concluded.