The Lost and the Damned

by Guy Haley

  Weapons fire from the walls zeroed in on these fledging networks, but in doing so they took pressure off the mortal servants of Horus, allowing ragged hordes of traitors deeper into the outworks. After weeks of attacks, the outworks were much disrupted, and though the arks set down close to the outermost perimeter, much was in ruin and there was little resistance to be found there.

  Physical defences were the least of the New Mechanicum’s assets. Within two hours, the framework of siege camps was in place, and growing outwards. When the excavators reached the limits of the arks’ void shields, more machines rolled out from the innards of the craft. Some bore giant shields of adamantium, others energy mantlets of varying type. They moved in precise order along newly carved roads, stopped, turned at forty-five degrees and presented their fronts to the enemy walls.

  said Penta-5.

  Clain Pent ordered.

  Penta-3 said.

  A few hits struck the hull as the void shields were recalibrated. Now was a moment of vulnerability. Through senses integrated with his ship, Pent felt the beat of activating power supplies radiating from the outside.

  The pulse built to a crescendo. Clain Pent cackled as the energy mantlets of the Ordo Reductor sprang into life across the siege camp and a wall of roseate light leapt between the machines.

  He glanced inwardly to his datacore, running a critical mind over the plans contained therein. The Ordo Reductor would be piecing together their grand cannons very soon, but he had his own work to do, a project of such ambitious scale he was daunted by it. Monumental engineering was required, and sorcery to bind an appropriately powerful soul.

  He watched the energy screens extending further out from the Pent-Ark. Soon, behind them, his grand work would begin.

  We are symbols

  Grounded Angel

  A subterranean break

  Eternity Wall, 3rd-7th of Quartus

  Forethoughts of death afflicted Sanguinius more often as the days passed. The vision of Horus, standing over him in leering triumph, leaked into his waking hours.

  Dorn had little time for him, and when he sought out the Sigillite for company he was nowhere to be found. Consumed with fore­boding, the Great Angel sent himself out upon a tour of the walls. He did not tell Dorn. He had no wish to hear another lecture about keeping himself safe.

  ‘I am more than a symbol,’ he had said to Dorn.

  ‘Your value as such should not be underestimated,’ Dorn replied.

  ‘Then I should put myself to use and be seen on the wall.’ He would be gainsaid no further, and left Dorn fuming.

  Dorn was right. All of them were symbols, and though he hated the role his father had placed upon him and which Guilliman had exploited, he took upon himself the burden of humanity’s hopes again. This time he did not fly. He went on foot, surrounded by all the ceremony his position allowed so that the people would better see him.

  Azkaellon insisted they stay upon the walls and not venture into the city wards.

  ‘The streets are not safe,’ he said. There was unrest throughout the Palace, the worst in the outlying districts close to the walls. Food and water were scarce, fear was in plentiful supply. Privation did the work of ten thousand enemy operatives, tying down troops to watch civilians when they would better serve the defence on the walls.

  Eventually Sanguinius relented, and they stayed out of the city on the perimeter defences, where the Angel might be seen by the popu­lace from afar, and the warriors of the Legions stood at guard with predictable discipline.

  He set out with a dozen standard bearers, both imagnifers and signi­fers. The serried banners of the IX Legion made an awe-inspiring sight in ranks behind the primarch, and the winged figures of the Sanguinary Guard swooped overhead, weapons ready. Their wargear glinted in the fires of the bombardment, but there was more – an inner light that shone from the primarch, so those who saw him said. To these lucky witnesses, the Blood Angels appeared as a procession of demigods passing along the walls. Wherever Sanguinius went, memories of sunlit dawns were kindled, and people remembered better times, and hoped that those times might yet return. The arbitrators and enforcers of each city block he passed reported a calming of mood, and a cessation of violence that lasted several days.

  His procession took him many days, past several areas facing various siege camps of the Dark Mechanicum, but in time he found himself staring down the Daylight Wall, on that section overlooked by the heaped massif of the Eternity Wall space port.

  Sanguinius’ stride was the speed of a legionary’s jog, which was the speed of an unmodified human running, so they travelled many kilometres in a few hours, and by the closing of the day, by which point Sanguinius had been on the Daylight Wall for seven hours, they had covered nearly a hundred, and so made their way through lesser league-castles to the Helios Gate.

  The party headed directly for the command centre at the tower’s heart. A thousand men and women laboured in a modest recreation of the Grand Borealis Strategium. Emergency lumens saturated the spherical room with threatening red, and though thousands of ­hololiths and other displays provided illumination of other hues, they were too weak to banish the bloody glow.

  Once more Raldoron greeted him.

  ‘My lord,’ he said.

  ‘The section where the first tower was brought down has been repaired?’ the primarch asked. His eyes went to screens showing the enemy siege camp on the horizon, aglow with active shielding and flashing with the work of construction.

  ‘Thane’s men did as they pledged,’ said Raldoron. ‘Truly, they can work miracles with false stone. The wall there is plugged, and the walkways reconnected. They have repaired most of the damage so far inflicted on my section, my lord, while Salamanders repair ruptured power networks and bring guns back to life. It is good to see our kindreds working together. I thought not to see the like again, there has been so much suspicion bred between Legions.’

  ‘But there is still damage.’ Sanguinius did not criticise. There was damage everywhere, worst on the far north of the Dusk Wall on the opposite side of the Palace, where a score of major towers had been reduced to rubble by arcane energy cannons, and the wall only held at great cost.

  ‘Eighty-seven way castles from the five hundred in my protection are damaged, four lost entirely,’ said Raldoron. ‘The Helios Gate comes under protracted attack with each aerial foray. The aegis here is failing. Every attack sees more void blisters scoured from their mountings, though the Emperor’s squadrons make them suffer for it. I fear what Horus’ Martian lackeys have in store for us behind that energy screen.’

  ‘We have been lucky thus far,’ said Sanguinius. ‘The walls are holding past Dorn’s more optimistic estimates.’ He ran his gaze over the displays, away from the live feeds covering the siege camp. ‘The outworks less so,’ he said, gesturing to the images of scarred, twisted lands where trenches, walls and men had been only a fortnight before. ‘The enemy continue to test our defences, and taunt us with their intent.’ He pointed at the shimmering energy fields of the siege camp. ‘This is a ritual. The Palace is the epicentre. I imagine whatever they plan will be fuelled by blood.’

  All the Blood Angels present had been at Signus, and at Davin. What had been consigned to the realm of impossibility was now a matter of course.

  ‘Sorcery must be accounted for strategically like any other factor of war. We help them by fighting, we lose if we stand back. We are damned if we do and damned if we do not.’

  ‘An ancient saying,’ said Raldoron.

  ‘But apt,’ said Azkaellon.

  ‘The conscripts fight bravely,’ said Raldoron. ‘They hang on, and repulse the enemy every time, though they dwindle in number daily and I am forced to order the wall guns activated more frequently t
o bombard compromised sections. I regret we cannot go down to aid them ourselves, but I understand my orders,’ he added.

  ‘Lord Dorn forbade me from fighting outside the walls,’ said Sanguinius. He turned his sad, noble eyes onto his equerry. ‘He did not forbid us to venture outside.’

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘Let us go down outside the wall. I want to go among them. I want to see the troops. I want to tell them their heroism is valued.’

  ‘There is no attack at the moment,’ said Raldoron thoughtfully, and no enemy near the gate, but the bombardments come without warning.’

  ‘There are other considerations.’ Azkaellon stepped in front of his primarch. ‘There have been mutinies on the line.’

  ‘You suggest that I, a son of the Emperor, have something to fear from my father’s subjects?’ Sanguinius said.

  ‘You are not immortal, my lord,’ said Azkaellon quietly. As Sanguinius’ death approached, all the Blood Angels had a foreboding that their lord might leave them soon. They felt it in their hearts and in their humours. Azkaellon’s words hung over them, like the dying echoes of a funeral bell.

  ‘Nothing truly is.’ Sanguinius smiled sadly. ‘But I do not die today. Gather additional legionaries if it will make you feel easier, Azkaellon, but I am going outside the wall.’

  Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus

  Katsuhiro was there when an angel came down from the distant heights into the mudscape of the outworks. He arrived without warning, passed among them like something from a dream and was gone before they could acknowledge his reality.

  Sanguinius was gold and he was glory. Familiarity can lead a man to accept the worst circumstances as normal. In the blood and the destruction, where flesh was pounded into the pulverised stone, Katsuhiro had forgotten what purity looked like. In the person of Sanguinius he was reminded.

  The first Katsuhiro heard were shouts of amazement, and he looked back from no-man’s-land to see a soft glow, then Sanguinius himself. He stood behind the broken rampart in full view of the enemy. There were snipers in the drop-craft wrecks, but he forgot them.

  The guns on the walls were firing, aimed at the siege camp and the contravallation that grew day by day around the city. Counter bombardments answered from the enemy lines; the orbital batteries had not ceased, nor had the fleet bombardment, and shells periodically broke the flickering voids to blast up craters among the defensive lines. The roar of the siege was at its worst, save for those times the foe made direct attempts on the outworks, when all became a bedlam of flashing light and terror.

  A hush descended. Though the guns continued to fire, their violence was somehow lessened by the primarch’s presence.

  Men and women fell to their knees as Sanguinius passed along the line. His entourage of aides, standard bearers and the gold-armoured and winged elite that guarded him were almost as affecting as the primarch himself. Grumbles were silenced. Fear ebbed. Filthy hands reached out to touch the Lord of Angels. His warriors moved to push the soldiers back, but Sanguinius raised his hand, just slightly, and the guards moved away. A female soldier was the first to dare to hold out her fingers to his wings. The feathers twitched, but Sanguinius stood firm, and allowed her to caress him.

  Another person came forwards, then another, until a crowd was around the Great Angel, arms radiating inwards like worshippers from less enlightened times stretching for their idol.

  Sanguinius was uncomfortable, Katsuhiro could see. The primarch kept his perfect face as neutral as he could, but it was there in the set of his lips, and the way he looked upwards, away from the supplicants around him. Like all the rest, Katsuhiro was captivated, and moved towards him, his feet dragging through the mud of their own volition. The Angel’s radiance touched Katsuhiro. He felt a peace in his heart, a calmness in his mind and a stilling of fears. The aches and chills that sickened him were alleviated briefly. For a moment, he felt whole again.

  Surrounded by the dirty and the desperate, Sanguinius shone as pure as sunlight reflected from snow.

  Then it was over. The light dimmed. The Great Angel’s guards moved forwards and, gently as they could, pushed back the weeping crowd so Sanguinius could address them.

  ‘Be brave, children of Terra,’ he said. ‘Your courage and your fortitude are most needed in this war, and I, on behalf of my brother Rogal Dorn, and the Emperor of Mankind, thank you.’

  With those words he moved on, his crimson-armoured sons marching in wary perimeter. Their boots were smeared with the muck of the field, but Sanguinius was pristine, or so it seemed. He was as much a vision as a solid being, and as a vision he was untouched and untouchable by the filth of the mundane world.

  Katsuhiro watched him go, joy and awe overwhelming him.

  ‘You there!’

  A man with a sergeant’s rank insignia stitched to his civilian clothes accosted Katsuhiro. The man was trying too hard, probably angry at his own awed reaction to the primarch. Not one man had continued his duties while Sanguinius was there.

  ‘Stop your gawking. Captain Jainan is looking for volunteers.’ He looked Katsuhiro up and down. ‘A little small, but I think you’ll just about do.’

  Jainan was sick. Katsuhiro was not the only soldier feeling ill. A host of minor ailments had swept through the defence force. Coughs, colds and digestive complaints to add to the misery of rad poison­ing. Nothing immediately fatal, but every sickness wore down the resolve of the men and women in the outworks, making their condition that little more insufferable, and every misery increased the chance that they would run. But Jainan was genuinely afflicted. He was propped up in a makeshift bed occupying the shell of a bunker. Part of the roof had been blown in by a direct hit. The gap was covered over with corrugated sheeting. The walls were blackened. Katsuhiro couldn’t stop looking at the marks. Much would be the soot from incinerated human bodies.

  It was shelter, and Jainan needed it. His eyes were red and puffy, and his nose ran. His skin had turned an even unhealthier stage of grey. Sores spotted his mouth, and his breath was rank; though ­Katsuhiro was never nearer than an arm’s length away, the stench of it filled the enclosed space.

  Katsuhiro arrived to find Doromek, Runnecan and the woman present. She and Doromek were drawn with hunger, but less afflicted than the others.

  Jainan coughed before he spoke. A light tickle that grew into heaving, rib-punishing hacks. When it subsided, he spoke quickly, in case it began again.

  ‘Acting Lieutenant Doromek here has come up with a worrying possibility. There are tunnels… There are…’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘Doromek, you explain.’

  ‘I’ll keep this simple,’ Doromek said, shifting his gun on his shoulder. ‘There are supply tunnels under the battlefield running out from the second line to the bastions. Some of them have been opened by bombardment. They might give the enemy a way behind our lines. I think we should check them out.’

  Jainan’s eyes closed. ‘You’re a good man, Doromek, a real find. There we have it. I need someone to go into the tunnels to see what’s left. To…’ He swallowed. His pale lips trembled. ‘To see if they’re a risk.’ He was struggling to speak, and coughed again. Through spluttering breath he managed, ‘Dismissed. Be about it,’ before he curled in over himself, a bowl was brought and he bent double to vomit up a stream of red-streaked phlegm.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Katsuhiro asked Doromek. ‘It’s not rad poison­ing, is it?’ he added. They all suffered that to a degree. Anti-rad pills kept the worse effects at bay, but Katsuhiro lived in terror of the day they stopped working.

  ‘Nah, it’s the camp sickness,’ Runnecan said.

  ‘What do you know about it?’ Doromek said. He strode easily through the mud. The woman, Myz, he’d heard Doromek call her, was even more assured. Thin-faced Runnecan scampered, rodent-like, his small feet pit-pattering. Only Katsuhiro was struggling, needing to w
rench his boots from the sucking ground with every step.

  ‘You’ve never been in a war before, Runnecan,’ said Doromek.

  ‘I have. I’ve fought on five worlds for the Emperor.’

  Katsuhiro looked at him in mild astonishment.

  ‘I was born hive scum, and I am hive scum, but I was a soldier in between,’ Runnecan said proudly. ‘I’ve seen people get sick, all the time!’ He sniggered. ‘Then they die.’

  ‘Nasty little piece of work,’ Doromek said. ‘You are a hive rat. In this place, awful as it is, we have medicine. That’s the reason why you’re not all dead from rads yet.’

  ‘They’re stopping the rads but what about everything else? The medicae aren’t doing any good!’ said Katsuhiro.

  ‘Do you know, Katsuhiro, I like you but you take forever to catch on. Exactly, the medicae aren’t doing anything. These sicknesses are coughs and sneezes and upset bellies. Nothing any anti-viral or bacteriophage shouldn’t stamp out. But they’re not working.’

  They were walking away from the front, towards the second line. Bastion 16 loomed large to their right.

  ‘Is Horus using germ war on us?’

  ‘Now you’re getting it,’ said Doromek. ‘Could be.’

  ‘I feel dreadful, why are you still healthy?’ Katsuhiro said.

  ‘Natural resilience,’ Doromek said humourlessly.

  ‘Be quiet, all of you,’ Myz snapped. She pulled ahead, heading for a gap blown into the second line. Twisted lengths of plasteel ­reinforcement writhed up like briars around the breach.

  ‘Why do you let her speak like that to you?’ said Runnecan. ‘If my woman spoke to me like that, I’d give her a hiding.’