Dark Imperium

by Guy Haley

  ‘Archmagos Belisarius Cawl repeats that all gene-lines continue to operate at peak efficiency. Tested gene-seed reveals a mutational deviancy of less than 0.001% per generation. All Adeptus Astartes Chapters once again have access to the full suite of additional organs, replacing those zygotes lost through improper treatment or evolutionary variance, with the addition of the three new implants. All Chapters who have adopted the Primaris paradigm have adapted to the new creation processes with minimal wastage of recruits or mistakes in implantation. As can be expected, those new Primaris-strain Chapters founded by you, my lord, have the lowest error rate. The new equipment functions well. Requests for resupply with the new type of battle-brother and their associated weaponry have increased, suggesting a ninety-four per cent acceptance rate among the Chapters.’

  ‘What of those gene-lines with more deeply ingrained flaws?’ asked Guilliman. ‘The Blood Angels and the Space Wolves?’ Cawl’s research, and his own reading, had uncovered dangerous faults that the sons of both gene-lines in question had done their best to hide.

  ‘My standard response remains unchanged. Archmagos Belisarius Cawl understands your reservations. The corrected flaws in the new gene-stocks show no signs of regression to previous unstable states, whether in successor Chapters composed entirely of the new Primaris Space Marine type, or in already established Chapters. Elimination entirely of the more idiosyncratic traits of some gene-lines is, however, not to be recommended. They form part of the Emperor’s original vision, and are, in any case, crucial to their proper function. I will restate Archmagos Belisarius Cawl’s position on this matter. The improved gene-seed of Ninth and Sixth Legion stock is operating within acceptable parameters.

  ‘Furthermore, he has continued experimental implantation and monitoring of the thus-far unused gene-seed in experimental test subjects. That of the Second, Third, Fourth, Eighth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Twentieth Legions all show no sign of degradation or incidence of unwelcome tendencies within the recipients. All is well, my lord, Archmagos Belisarius Cawl reassures you. He is so satisfied that I am instructed to repeat his request that those gene-lines be put into full production and be allowed to serve the Imperium as the Emperor intended.’

  ‘No,’ said Guilliman firmly. ‘I cannot allow it.’

  ‘My lord, the characteristics of your brothers are too valuable to discard. The Emperor’s original schema of warriors bred to specific purposes is sound, and should be exploited. Under the current circumstances, we are operating with half our weapons unavailable to us. The plan is unbalanced. Putting the remaining eleven augmented Primaris gene-lines into production would allow far greater tactical and strategic flexibility of Space Marine forces, particularly when working in concert.’

  ‘I say again, no. Do not progress any further with this research.’

  ‘The warriors were not at fault. The science is not at fault. Their primarchs were. Chapters from your gene-line have also fallen in the past millennia, lord regent, and we do not censor them.’

  ‘I said no!’ said Guilliman forcefully.

  There was a silence full of hums and clicks.

  ‘As you command, my lord,’ said the machine eventually. ‘Archmagos Belisarius Cawl will comply.’

  Can I truly believe that? thought Guilliman. All magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus hungered for knowledge. When they had it, they could rarely refrain from using it. On this particular matter, he did not trust Cawl one whit.

  Guilliman’s manner betrayed nothing of his thoughts.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘That concludes the selection of responses engendered by today’s code reception.’ said the Cawl Inferior. ‘I shall prepare myself for encoding of your orders to Archmagos Belisarius Cawl,’

  Things clacked and turned somewhere, awaiting Guilliman’s words. Another simple code would be projected to a second ghoulish mind aboard Cawl’s Ark ship. In the same way that Cawl’s message had been delivered to Guilliman, pre-set responses would activate within this other unit in response to the code. Or so Cawl insisted.

  ‘Here are my orders.’ Guilliman had no time nor any need for the preamble the Cawl Inferior had subjected him to. ‘The enemy fleet at Raukos has been crushed. The Indomitus Crusade is over. I will shortly return to Macragge to face my brother Mortarion, who has come forth from his lair. You are to continue your efforts to unravel the secrets of the pylons. We will persevere in this war, but ultimate survival of mankind can only be assured by undoing the damage Abaddon has inflicted on the fabric of reality. Concentrate on this above all else.’

  ‘That is all?’

  ‘That is all.’

  ‘I shall deliver the coding to activate those elements of the message.’

  ‘The next time we speak, I shall provide a time and coordinates for Archmagos Cawl and I to meet, by lithocast if not face to face. It has been twelve years since our last direct consultation.’

  The machine was silent. The flapping mouths of the heads hung still.

  ‘The Cawl Inferior?’ said Guilliman. A machine coughed under the floor. The red light shone brighter, tinting the golden light of the mind circuits orange.

  ‘That may not be possible, my lord.’

  ‘Where exactly are you, Cawl? What are you doing?’

  The servitor was silent. Cogitator datawheels chattered behind the walls of the chamber. The red light glowed brighter. The gold faded.

  ‘This unit does not possess that information.’

  Guilliman stared at the servitors. Dead eyes in dead heads stared back, oblivious to his suspicions. Could they see him? Could the thing lie?

  ‘I have no more information to impart,’ said the Cawl Inferior. ‘Good day, my Lord Guilliman.’

  The machine shut off. The glimmering light in the channels died. With one last spastic jerk, the heads went slack in their tanks. The doors slid shut over each armourglass compartment. Suddenly, the painful pressure of the machine was reduced back to its merely uncomfortable background level.

  Guilliman breathed hard through his teeth. These consultations made him tense.

  For all his usefulness and his desire to save mankind, Guilliman could foresee a time when Belisarius Cawl became a problem.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Triumph at Raukos

  Upon the martial square of 108/Beta-Kalapus-9.2, the whole of the Indomitus Crusade was arrayed in full. They faced the August Victorium, the vast edifice, framed by gigantic statues, carved into the remodelled hills solely for this day.

  A single cannon boomed. The bell on the highest tower began to toll one hundred and twelve times: one for each year of the Indomitus Crusade.

  At this signal, a bizarre flock burst from the pillared upper gallery of the August Victorium. Servo-skulls, cyber-angels, elder prelates on grav-powered sermonisers and vat-grown gene-constructs flew out over the square. They emerged in a fog of incense, the banners they carried stirring the scented mist into curling vortices. A dozen different hymns, sung all at once and with varying degrees of loveliness, competed with shouted exhortations to worship. As this aerial flock dispersed to soar over the martial square, down the steps of the August Victorium floated, walked, crawled, rode and sang priests of every kind, accompanied by all their attendant devices. There were hundreds of them, from the richest to the poorest, from moderate cardinals to firebrand preachers. Between them, auto-preachers crabbed sideways on clanking legs, the mouldering brains of the martyrs within roaring out religious epithets through primitive augmitters. Behind the priests, unruly hordes of flagellants beat at themselves. Every sect of the Adeptus Ministorum with any pretension to power had members present at the Triumph of Raukos. They followed Roboute Guilliman like flies followed cattle, and no matter how often he swatted them away, they always came back.

  The stream of holy men went on for an hour,
as if the carved range of hills were full to bursting with them. They filled the avenues between the warriors standing to attention, though they set no foot on the carpet running down the very centre aisle. None dared do that, for that was Guilliman’s alone to tread.

  They sang and mumbled and prayed. A dozen bishops and all their aides and servitors and whispering confidantes stalked after the priestly horde in pompous parade, each vying with the others in displays of opulence or contrary poverty. Finally, there came a veritable wagon train of sacred arks bearing the bones of dead saints and fallen heroes of the Indomitus Crusade, these also accompanied by immense throngs of the faithful.

  In their pageantry, in their sheer number and bombast, the priests almost overshadowed the arrival of the primarch.

  Almost, but not quite.

  Frater Mathieu was the only priest looking down upon the arrival. He was stood upon on a wide prominence over the steps, carved from the flesh of the land earlier that week. There were twenty cardinals up there, too, somewhere at the back in the crowd, but they affected a lack of interest in the lower orders of clergy. They were closer to the Emperor; they had no need to watch the devotional display of their inferiors.

  In form, the promontory of the August Victorium was, Mathieu supposed, a sort of balcony, with a balustrade and doors that led to the rooms within the hill, and the long colonnade above it whence the cyber-angels came. It had all the appurtenances of a balcony, but it was so immense that the word did it no justice. It ran for almost a kilometre, and was crammed with officials of every kind. There were few warriors upon it. All but the mightiest leaders stood with their soldiers upon the square, many upon raised platforms or standing within the cupolas of enormous command vehicles so that their importance was understood.

  Well, thought Frater Mathieu, perhaps not so few warriors.

  He had counted them as they arrived, before the crowds got too thick. There were thirty-six Chapter Masters, a further eighteen Space Marine lords, all the upper leadership of the remaining Chapters of the Unnumbered Sons and their larger supra-Chapter groupings, six Adeptus Custodes, three canonesses of the Adepta Sororitas, five generals, various warlords and others of similar rank, Captain Felix, Captain Sicarius, all twenty of Guilliman’s Victrix Guard, the Commissar General, the Admirals Primus, Secundus and Tertius, several rear admirals, dozens of commodores, more dozens of shipmasters – including Brahe – and scores of other men and women of war.

  But numbers were relative.

  The warriors were two hundred amid a sea of thousands of other Imperial servants. Navigators, psykers, astropaths, tech-magi, bureaucrats, High Lords or their representatives – although a few hundred of the lesser lords of the Senatorum Imperialis had come in person, hoping for advancement, only three of the High Twelve had dared make the dangerous journey – planetary commanders and other potentates.

  Not so long ago, thought Mathieu, this gathering would have represented the very apex of Imperial power.

  Not anymore – not when a primarch walked among them and led them. A son of the Emperor had returned. Everyone else was at best an assistant, at worst an impediment, to the efforts of the Imperial Regent, may the Emperor forever bless him.

  Faith suffused Mathieu from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. It held him upright like a scaffold. Without faith, he thought he might collapse, a boneless man, overwhelmed by the glory of the Imperium ranged before him. Such colours there were, and so many great engines of war. So much faith!

  He could not imagine himself without faith. It gave him strength, and it gave him purpose. When he was with Roboute Guilliman, that faith burned in him so hot that his skeleton seemed afire like molten iron. Miraculously, the heat did him no harm but instead filled him with powerful energies. When he felt like that, he would gladly have shot down the entire chattering mass of bureaucrats flocking on the balcony if it would have allowed the Emperor’s son a freer hand.

  He hid these feeling from the primarch, of course. His role in the Emperor’s plan meant he had to. There was no shame in that.

  Reason was Frater Mathieu’s gift. He was no stranger to introspection. He knew himself better than most men did. In the scholum missionaris, he had questioned his faith, and it had nearly ended his life. When his teachers saw that he questioned it because he marvelled at it, and not because he doubted it, he was let be, though still discouraged from probing too deeply. He had continued to do so, of course, because to Frater Mathieu the one thing better than faith was its affirmation. In the library, he had learnt lessons that the Frateris did not intend to teach. He kept his thinking to himself, but through his youthful explorations he came to the philosophy that shaped his beliefs.

  The Emperor had a plan for him. It was obvious. Guilliman had chosen him because of that plan.

  He had tested his faith and found it sound. He could not fault it. The Emperor was real. He was a god. He was a force for good in a galaxy of horrors, and Mathieu had pledged himself fully to His service. Faith was real; faith was power.

  Long after he had reached this conclusion, he had seen the miracles of the Emperor with his own eyes. The first time, in that glorious moment, he had wept.

  But he could fault his hope.

  There was no rational explanation for hope. The Emperor was powerful, but the enemy was more powerful still. The galaxy was beset like at no other time. For every miracle Frater Mathieu had witnessed, he had seen ten thousand sorrows. How, he wondered in the dark watches of the night, could the Emperor save them?

  Yet still his faith kept his hope alive. Nothing could extinguish it. Not reason, nor experience. It was irrational. He should have been wailing out the cry of the end times, but he did not. Provided he did his part, he had a sincere belief all would be well.

  Is hope foolish? he asked himself. He looked upon the serried ranks of Imperial might, and he thought perhaps it was not.

  He prayed he could bring the mercy of hope to the primarch also.

  A fanfare brayed, brassy and short in the Macraggian way. The horde of priests fell as silent as the assembled soldiery. Roboute Guilliman emerged from the carved face of the hill into stillness. He ascended steps up to a pulpit fashioned in the form of a giant crouching aquila – the double-headed eagle that was the badge of the Imperium – and surveyed the army before him.

  The primarch was imperious, commanding, his face an ideal of nobility. Mathieu smiled in the depths of his hood. From Guilliman’s expression, no one could guess how much the parade of priests irritated the primarch, but he took no pains to hide that from Mathieu, so the priest had been genuinely surprised when the primarch had accepted Mathieu’s idea for the Procession of Faith.

  The priest was shrewd and a fine judge of character. Already, he had formed an opinion of Roboute Guilliman as a man who was guided by principle above all else; but one of those principles was pragmatism, and that often trumped the others.

  If the primarch is willing to grit his teeth and allow the Ecclesiarchy to trumpet his divinity, thought Mathieu, he will change his opinion eventually.

  Mathieu was a complex, patient creature. He did not care what Guilliman did, nor how he did it. The faithful part of himself deemed whatever the primarch did to be right, even while the reasoning part of him picked apart his motivations. It didn’t matter to Mathieu why the primarch did what he did now; what mattered was where what he did led him to eventually. The priest knew, absolutely, that one day Roboute Guilliman would see the light and accept his own divinity.

  There, faith again. He smiled at the thought.

  Mathieu tensed, suddenly alert. Guilliman was about to speak.

  A score of silvered skulls buzzed about the primarch, recording his image for posterity. From what Guilliman had told him, these recordings were meaningless, as history could be rewritten as easily as the notes for a sermon. The primarch looked at the flying skulls, and his regard made them r
etreat in dismay. The son of the Emperor did not see his own power. To Guilliman, the skulls were morbid mementos, machines nestled in the hollowed-out heads of the worthy. To Mathieu, they were more. Clinging to the mortal remains, the spirits of the faithful remained, serving the Emperor beyond death. They felt the primarch’s scorn – that is why they veered from him. Why could he not see that?

  It is not my role to convince the son of god that he is the son of god, Mathieu scolded himself. It is my role to serve him, and to guide him through his own efforts to the truth. I cannot tell him. He must see.

  He resolved to shrive himself, by confession or by whip, for his presumption. Still, he could not extinguish his hope, nor his ambition.

  If I am the one to open his eyes… he thought. If it is me who convinces him openly…

  That was enough. He squeezed the button hidden in the flesh of his palm. Sparking pain burst within his groin and behind his eyes. He gritted his teeth and swayed, close to collapse. But the implanted electroflail was not enough to break his immodest ambitions. He would have to punish himself harder later. Only in agony was there atonement.

  The aftertones of the last toll of the bell hummed across the gathering. Guilliman addressed the crowd.

  ‘The Indomitus Crusade has lasted one hundred and twelve years.’ A lesser leader might shout, or posture; Guilliman spoke clearly and calmly, and his words carried the power of a thousand guns out across the martial field. ‘You look to me, and say “See! He is the son of the Master of Mankind! He has come to save us! He has brought low the lords of Chaos. He has crossed the stars when all ships founder in the storms of the warp!”’ Guilliman paused for effect.

  Mathieu saw his tricks; he was no stranger to addressing crowds. Knowing the art made it no less effective.

  ‘I say to you, I did not do this. It is not I who has liberated hundreds of star systems. It is not I who has provided reinforcement to dozens of our Chapters, or relieved beleaguered armies that they might fight again. It is not I who has driven back the dark. I am but one man, and yes, I say I am a man, though primarch I may be. For my soul is human, and my heart, and my blood.