by Guy Haley
A clarion followed shortly, sharp and loud enough to be heard by mortal and transhuman alike. The servants of Ultramar stopped what they were doing and stood to attention.
A towering figure clad in the famous Armour of Reason strode through the archway. On his left hand he wore the Hand of Dominion. Belted at his waist was the Gladius Incandor. The bearer of these weapons was taller by far than the Invictarus Suzerain guard escorting him. He exuded a power and purpose that halted the breath of mortals in their throats.
‘First Captain Andros! Second Captain Thiel! Are your companies ready?’ the giant called.
The two captains crossed the floor to meet their lord. Second Captain Thiel was helmetless in power armour heavy with honours, while First Captain Andros was completely enclosed in a hulking suit of Terminator battleplate. They saluted their father the Ultramarian way, one fist across their chests – the old symbol of unity.
‘My Lord Guilliman! Your veterans await your command,’ said Andros, his voice ringing from the voxmitter set below his helm.
‘We stand prepared, my primarch,’ said Aeonid Thiel. His voice, rich and soft, was unmoderated by machinery. It was not so very long after the Heresy, and Thiel was still young for a Space Marine, though his face was lined with cares.
Guilliman looked down upon his captains resolutely. The primarch overtopped even Andros in his massive Terminator armour. He was a living god, humanity’s might captured and moulded as flesh.
Thiel gazed back, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the face of his gene-sire. Thiel was a good warrior, tested in battle many times, unafraid to voice his mind and modest enough to hide the love he had for his lord, but it shone in his face like a light.
Such devotion they bear me, thought Guilliman, even as I fail them.
There were so few of his original Legion left alive, and their replacements were born of a different, less certain era. Thiel’s regard was tempered by long friendship, and he had never lost his rebellious streak. The younger Space Marines were another matter. Guilliman remembered when his warriors had been less reverent. They had been better times.
‘We depart immediately,’ he said, his voice uncompromising. ‘The traitor will not escape again. The warriors of six Chapters stand ready to aid us. We shall not fail. To your stations – prepare for mass teleport.’
‘My lord, we are prepared,’ said Andros carefully. ‘But the enemy will outnumber us greatly. I am concerned for our chances of success. What is the practical action should resistance prove overwhelming? It is Second Captain Thiel’s and my opinion that you should remain here. We shall occupy the enemy, while the Gauntlet of Power withdraws. We cannot–’
The Avenging Son cut Andros dead with a look.
‘Too much blood has been shed on my behalf. I will not shy from this fight,’ Guilliman said, and his tone would brook no disagreement. ‘There can be no retreat until the Pride of the Emperor is crippled. I must face my brother and occupy him while these tasks are done. And if I must fight him, I will kill him, or I will die in the attempt. I cannot let him escape unpunished again. My sons,’ he added, his voice softening, ‘it is the only way to escape this trap.’
Andros bowed his helmeted head. Thiel paused a moment, uncertain, before doing the same. Sure of their agreement, Guilliman took his own helm from a grav-platform pushed by two mortal men. He mounted the teleport platform – stepping directly onto it with no need of the steps that led from the deck – and turned to address his sons.
‘Now, my warriors, let us show my brother the consequences of turning upon the Imperium of Terra!’
‘We march for Macragge!’ they bellowed, and their combined voices were enough to drown out the thunder of battle.
Guilliman’s Invictus Suzerain guard followed him onto the teleport pad. They formed a protective ring around him, their shields and power axes held up in a shield wall in preparation for teleportation directly into the jaws of battle.
To those around him, Guilliman was an infallible leader, his abilities supernatural. Even to the rational Ultramarines, who believed the Emperor of Mankind to be a man and not a god, and likewise His primarch sons, a sense of near-religious awe had crept into their attitude towards him. It had only become more pronounced since the last days of the Heresy.
But Roboute Guilliman was not infallible.
He knew this course of action to be fraught with risk. Andros had been right to raise the possibility of defeat. The primarch only wished he could praise his son for his insight rather than dismissing his concerns. His campaign against the Emperor’s Children had, to all purposes, failed. Fulgrim had the initiative. Guilliman’s choices had been made for him. The pieces were set on the board, there was only one option: they had to withdraw.
Currently, withdrawal was impossible. If the Gauntlet of Power broke off from the fight, then the Pride of the Emperor would inflict massive damage upon the battle-barge. Fulgrim would then most likely attempt a boarding assault of his own once their defences were shattered. Guilliman could not allow his brother to do that at a time of his choosing.
The primarch’s powerful mind had examined all possibilities. His own strategic treatises would have him retreat quickly, forming a fighting rearguard so that he might withdraw those of his ships that he could, minimising the damage to his flagship by sacrificing many of his others. Expending the lives of other men to save his own was not to Guilliman’s liking, especially when he saw a slim chance for true victory. He could not ignore this opportunity to slay his treacherous sibling. Guilliman had come to the conclusion that by defying his own tactical orthodoxies, he might surprise Fulgrim.
It was a slender chance. Fulgrim might well have dropped his ship’s shields on purpose, a mocking re-enactment of Horus’ last gambit to lure the Emperor aboard his ship at the end of the siege of Terra.
Guilliman had his own plans. Several boarding forces with independent but mutually supportive objectives would teleport in simultaneously with his own force. Teams drawn from multiple Chapters were tasked to head for the enginarium, the command deck, the navigatorium, the magazine, the subsidiary command deck and the main gunnery control. If only half of his strike teams were successful, they had a good chance of crippling the Pride of the Emperor from within. His warriors had orders to withdraw immediately once their objectives had been achieved. He would make sure as many survived as possible; he would not let his sons pay the price for his mistakes.
He had to settle the reckoning for his own errors.
Guilliman could not deny he had been hooked and played like a fish. All he could do was struggle free and bite the one who had snared him.
‘Make ready! We go to war!’ he called.
At his signal, the machines of the teleport deck hummed into life. Giant reaction columns crackled with immense power, feeding the focusing arrays that would tear open the veil between realspace and the warp. They glowed with painful light. As they shone brighter, curls of materialising corposant were leached from initiation prongs and fed into containment flasks, where it twisted as if alive.
So many of my brothers are dead, fallen to Chaos or lost, thought Guilliman. We assumed we were immortal. We are not. My time must come, but not today. Not at the hands of Fulgrim.
The arcane machineries of teleportation whooped and hummed, the deck vibrating with their activity. The tumult built to a crescendo.
A booming crack and flash of actinic light whited out the teleport deck. Suppressant vapours gushed from wide-mouthed tubes in anticipation of fires from over-stressed machinery. Human armsmen raised their shotguns in case of warp breach and daemonic incursion.
None came. Signal strobes blinked: red, red, red, then blue.
‘Teleport success, teleport success,’ droned a mechanical voice.
The lumens came back on. Corposant flasks emptied to the sounds of half-formed screams. Atmospheric vents drew smoke away, r
evealing empty pads. Adepts consulted vid screens and paper cogitator strips, and relief crossed their faces at the readouts.
Roboute Guilliman and his warriors were aboard the Pride of the Emperor.
Chapter Two
The Pride of the Emperor
There was always a moment of enlightenment for Guilliman during teleportation, when he hung in a state that was neither life nor death.
In those moments, when his soul straddled two worlds, he knew himself for what he truly was: not a being of matter alone, but a creature of both realities. And in those moments, he was convinced – no, he knew – that he was spun from warp stuff and matter both. Though the feeling faded and became absurd after his deliverance to his destination, at the time it was profound, as if an understanding of the mysteries of creation awaited his discovery if he had but the courage to accept his nature and look a little deeper.
He had the courage, but he never looked. Damnation lay that way.
Temptation passed. The sense of enlightenment fled. A blaze of light delivered him and his warriors back into ignorance and to their target. The afterlight was slow in dispersing, putting them at risk of attack while they were half blind. Guilliman tensed, ready to fight, but no challenge came. Greasy wisps of warp energy contorted themselves out of existence, leaving the boarding party in darkness.
It was darker than a terrestrial night, but systems in his helmet aided his superior eyes in creating a grainy image of the voidship’s interior.
For a second, Guilliman thought himself lost, cast into the empyrean itself. He looked upon a scene drawn from lonely nightmare. In the century since the end of the Heresy, Guilliman had fought daemons, he had trodden the surface of worlds changed by the unclean touch of Chaos, he had seen through windows of flesh conjured by sorcerers into depthless dimensions of evil. The interior of the Pride of the Emperor was of similar ilk.
As intended, the boarding party had emerged within the Triumphal Way, the great corridor running the length of the Pride of the Emperor. Once, the massed Chapters of the Legions had marched its length in celebration of Fulgrim’s victories for the Imperium, but those days were lifetimes dead, and the derelict avenue was empty. The warriors of Ultramar were a lonely island of blue.
Guilliman’s Invictarus Suzerains scanned their surroundings, shields and Legatine power axes held in anticipation of an attack that did not come. Hand-held auspexes whined and chimed out the all clear. Lamps stabbed out from suit mountings, their pools of bright illumination dancing over vile shapes.
Thiel was first to break the silence.
‘The Triumphal Way,’ he said. ‘It has changed.’
‘A century of years is more than enough time for evil to do its work,’ said Guilliman.
‘The Emperor’s Children have fallen far,’ said Andros.
Cogitator systems built into the Armour of Reason highlighted points of interest and threat for Guilliman automatically. He examined them all cursorily. The primarch’s engineered brain was capable of processing a phenomenal amount of information; that had always been his special talent. He listened in to the battle chatter of the fleets and the quiet order exchanges of his squads as they spread out. He scanned the frequencies for notification from his other strike teams, all while he examined the avenue and read multiple datascreed readouts scrolling down his face-plate display with equal attentiveness. He formulated plans, gave brief orders via vox and databurst, but it was the ship that absorbed him most.
The Triumphal Way had changed beyond all recognition. Where once was splendour, darkness held court. The little light that the Ultramarines brought was swallowed quickly, reduced to a dismal silver that took the edges from everything, smearing all features into an uncertain blur where distance was difficult to judge and the darkest areas could prove to be anything but shadows.
The primarch remembered the Triumphal Way as it had been, when it was a showcase for all that was fine in human art. Gone were the bronze heroic statues that had lined its broad path, as were the masterpieces painted by the artists of the 28th Expeditionary Fleet that had hung between them. In their stead were hideous abominations, contorted sculptures of a shocking nature and artworks that depicted the profane and the obscene. The latter had been rendered in pigments derived from unclean fluids which, left alone, had sprouted thick mats of mould.
No attempt had been made to place these new adornments carefully, or to clear away the old. Shattered frames were heaped like driftwood. The bronze scrap was scattered across floors obscured by a clotting of filth. The marble cladding of the walls was pitted all over, and black liquid oozed sluggishly from wide cracks. Onyx columns had been wrenched from their settings and lay broken, the engraved list of past victories on them reduced to a jumble of letters. The paving was shattered in many places, and where the metal of the deck should have been visible there were only black, watchful pits.
Worst of all was the silence. Sound was unnaturally muted. Battle raged outside and the ship was under heavy bombardment, but unlike the Gauntlet of Power, whose halls rang to explosions and the howls of overworked machines, the Pride of the Emperor did little but shiver from time to time, like a giant stirring in its sleep. No light flashed through the high armourglass windows at the avenue’s apex; only darkness was visible. Discordant music drifted from somewhere. Three screams issued from another direction, shockingly close.
Guilliman had seen more overt horrors wrought by the minions of Chaos, often on a stupefying scale, but there was a pregnant doom to the Triumphal Way that overtook even the goriest displays, and unsettled his mind.
‘Be on your guard,’ he said. ‘Things are not as they seem. The Pride of the Emperor no longer wholly occupies realspace.’
‘Yes,’ voxed Thiel. ‘This place stinks of the warp.’
A Space Marine’s mind is robust, altered during his apotheosis from human to superhuman, and hardened against fear by years of training. Guilliman’s veterans had seen much of what their primarch had, and took the disquiet in their stride. They arrayed themselves for battle: shield-bearing breacher teams taking up station near ingress points; Terminators forming up into squads; his own Invictarus Suzerain honour guard taking up position to maximise the protection their slab shields could provide their lord. The disruption fields around their axes shone palely in the gloom.
Guilliman set his vox to encrypted wideband. ‘We have arrived. Taskforces, inform me of your status.’
Garbled static laced with laughter and screaming burst into his ear. Half a minute went by before a voice resolved itself painfully from the cacophony.
‘My lord primarch, can you hear me?’
‘I have contact with you, Master Ludon,’ said Guilliman.
‘I have been attempting to reach you for several minutes, my lord. The Aurora Chapter stands firm. We are meeting minimal resistance. There are–’ The Chapter Master’s voice blurred out for a moment, replaced by wild shrieks. ‘–only fourteen. Mostly bodies. All of them mutilated. We are proceeding towards our objective.’
‘Strike Group Wrath, my lord,’ said another voice. A rune blinked in Guilliman’s display marking out a position on his cartograph twenty decks below. The report came with a background of banging bolters and the roaring sound of atmosphere flash-heated by melta weapons.
‘Master Corvo,’ said Guilliman with a smile. There were too few veterans left from the times before.
‘The Novamarines are engaged on three fronts, my lord,’ the Chapter Master shouted. ‘Enemy numbers are higher than expected. Estimated arrival at target zone twelve minutes after intention.’
‘Keep me informed,’ said Guilliman. His own group remained unharried. He switched through to the other taskforces; all but that of the Aurora Chapter had been engaged by large numbers of the enemy. There were Emperor’s Children everywhere, but not on the Triumphal Way.
‘Advance!’ Guilliman ordered. His guar
d broke into a swift stride as he set out, heading into the night that had hold of the Pride of the Emperor. ‘We will meet no enemy here.’
‘We cannot be undetected. This is another trap,’ said Andros.
‘My brother is challenging me,’ said Guilliman. ‘Fulgrim always was too enamoured of theatrics.’
‘We must be on guard for ambush,’ said Andros.
‘Do not expect it, brother,’ said Thiel. ‘This dismal corridor would not suit Fulgrim. Where else would he be but on his greatest stage? We will find him in the Heliopolis.’
Combat reports came through with relentless efficiency. Guilliman cycled through each of his sub-commander’s direct vox feeds one after the other. The Pride of the Emperor continued to shiver minimally from the bombardment it suffered from Guilliman’s fleet. Reports from the Gauntlet of Power said their foe was taking heavy damage, but there was scant evidence of any of that inside Fulgrim’s ship. The two ships had passed each other, their escorts fighting rapid duels to clear the way for the two flagships to lumber about and make another pass. Lesser ships succumbed to concentrated firepower as other vessels lent their might to the struggle. Guilliman’s fleet was fighting well, but it was heavily outnumbered. He did not have much time.
The Second and First companies ascended stairs as tall as hills. The atmosphere became cloying with the scents of sweat and perfume and blood. An overpowering musk that derived from no mundane body penetrated the Space Marines’ respirator grills, though they had sealed them tightly enough to defy hard vacuum.
The last time Roboute Guilliman had walked the Triumphal Way, it had been as an honoured guest. The Emperor’s Children had lined the stairs and landings in their hundreds, and bright light had sparked from their artistry as they saluted him. His brother had greeted him warmly.
Guilliman felt a pang of sadness for what might have been. Now, in the murk, he returned like a thief in the night.