by Guy Haley
‘Yes, my lord.’
Felix pulled up the location of the Genesis Chapter sergeant’s comrades from the welter of tactical data flooding his helm. His own squads had emerged some distance away. There was a knot of enemies closer, and on the other side the Genesis Chapter’s Fifth Company.
‘I have them,’ he said. ‘Your brothers are that way.’ He pointed. ‘Though the enemy are nearer. Perhaps you would join me in their slaughter before you rejoin your brothers, for the glory of Greater Ultramar, and the Imperium of Man?’
They did not hesitate.
‘We will come with you, and aid you. Our brothers can wait, tetrarch. We all march for Macragge.’
‘As do I.’ Malcades’ giant frame emerged from the other side of the trench works. He shifted to retain his balance on the soft ground.
Felix surveyed the core of his little army. Other Space Marines were moving in his direction, their progress impeded by the condition of the earth. He was relieved to see they were of his command.
‘Onwards,’ he said. ‘For Ultramar.’
The battle dragged on into the afternoon. Felix and his growing group assailed the bunker nearby, slaughtering the Death Guard within, who were quickly overcome by the Centurions’ heavy weapons and Malcades’ powerful armaments.
The enemy’s resistance was dogged, but doomed. Little more than four Plague Marine companies and auxiliary cultists manned the trenches. The fighting was hard, but it could have been so much harder. Felix expected daemons, or daemon engines, but none came. For all the Plague Marines’ hardiness, they were massively outnumbered and quickly bested. The force Guilliman applied was so utterly overwhelming that they stood no chance.
The price, however, was high. Thunderhawks and unarmed lighters came and went over the battlefield, taking the dead and their precious gene-seed away. Many Space Marines had fallen. Felix wondered if any of their progenoid glands of those who had died in the mud could be salvaged without the risk of contamination.
As soon as the last Plague Marine in the trenches was killed, human cleansing teams moved into the complex and began purification by fire. Priests followed when there were transports available, and by late afternoon were chanting prayers over the trenches.
Fighting continued within the city. With the trench network’s firepoints and weapons batteries out of action, Imperial aircraft flew over the river in increasing numbers, depositing troops from all arms of the Imperium’s forces close in to the city limits. Gunfire soon crackled up from the cathedral towers of the centre, and Felix pushed on to join it. He bade farewell to the Genesis Chapter, but his small band of warriors grew ever larger. Most of his own troops had made the crossing alive and found him as the day wore on. As he reached the edge of the trenches, he joined with a second large group of Ultramarines and lost warriors from other Chapters. They had no captain with them, and deferred to Felix’s command.
Beyond the double lines, the earth was less torn up. Espandor’s abundant vegetation had been reduced by the poisons of the enemy to a few hardy species scattered on plains of cracked earth, none of them healthy-looking. Brightly coloured pools of water filled the scattering of shell craters. Clouds of flies gathered in noisy conclave over these noxious watering holes, and a chemical tang fouled the air, carried by a thin mist hanging over the blighted earth, but it was already lifting. The clouds of flies simply seemed to vanish when the Death Guard were bested, and as more Plague Marines fell, fewer flies were in evidence. The day cleared. The sun appeared wanly behind the thinning, toxic clouds.
The further the enemy were driven back, the more the visibility improved. The shattered remains of trees emerged from the departing vapours. Soon Felix could see all the way to the main highway where Astra Militarum Chimera tanks, caked in mud from their amphibious crossing of the river, cut their way across the wasteland, heading with all speed to Espandoria Tertio. Other Space Marines were landing ahead, deployed from their gunships by the score. Felix urged his men on, eager to re-engage the enemy before they were all dead.
After twenty minutes of marching, they were three quarters of the way to Espandoria Tertio’s compact centre. The group reached a mound of shattered rockcrete on the edge of a ruined habitation district with clear views out back over the river.
‘Wait here,’ he commanded his followers. He invited the group’s lieutenant and sergeants to accompany him, and together they set off up the hill.
At the summit, they surveyed the landscape. The roads out of the city were whole, and attracting a growing amount of traffic. On the other side of the sea of mud, teams of Astra Militarum combat engineers had worked with tech-adepts to raise a causeway on the site of the Oderia’s principal bridge, linking the severed halves of the main highway back together. It had recently opened, and battle tanks were coming over the river in a long column. From their vantage point, the course of the Oderia was apparent as a darker patch in the sea of mud. Heavy earth-moving machines were at work in the distance, clawing at the ground with buckets and shovel hands to clear the obstructions that had blocked it. Felix imagined that revolting mess suddenly slipping free from the poisoned land, rushing onwards and tainting the sea.
‘Wholesomeness returns,’ said Macullus Fides, one of the sergeants. He pointed at the sky. The mud on his armour was drying in the rising breeze, flaking off to reveal his cobalt-blue livery beneath.
Felix followed Fides’ finger. A solitary bird winged its way over a ruined exurb. It pumped its wings for ten beats, powering itself forwards, then dropped a little before repeating the exercise.
‘This world will be healed,’ said Felix. ‘The primarch will make it so.’ He believed that wholeheartedly.
The group left the rise and pressed on. Shortly afterwards, they gained the main highway that fed from the outlying districts into the city proper. The columns of Imperial armour ran nose to tail. Felix had his men form into two files and they broke into a rapid jog, outpacing the gridlocked tanks, Malcades’ massive clawed feet making the ground shake.
Soon the centre of Espandoria Tertio was before them.
Espandor was a cardinal world, and therefore its cities were crammed with churches and temples. Felix had still not accepted the way the Emperor was worshipped in this era. It troubled him, though there was no denying the beauty of the buildings raised in His name.
The traitors disagreed far more strongly with the worship of the Emperor than Felix did. All the fine architecture made to honour Him had been brought low, and so most of Espandoria Tertio lay in ruins.
Felix had his orders to make directly for the central cathedral. He led his company down the main street, rebuffing calls for aid and avoiding entanglement in the localised battles taking place all over the city. Bombardment damage from the invasion was evident everywhere in the collapsed buildings and broken roads, but there was a state of advanced decay visible that war alone could not explain.
Plascrete rotted on its reinforcement spars. Evil-looking vines coated buildings whose walls were dangerously tilted on sinking foundations. There were bodies everywhere; Felix and his warriors passed stacks of blackened corpses. It looked like whoever had been gathering the dead had given up some time ago, for there were a great many more individuals in the streets, all bearing signs of sickness. A deadened atmosphere stifled the avenues. Bursts of isolated gunfire echoed down empty streets. Aircraft and grav-craft raced overhead. Servo-skull probes bobbed in and out of buildings. Together, the noises of machines and the march of feet as tanks and Space Marines came into the city from the west should have been loud and sharp. But the city soundscape was dull, brittle almost. There was a feeling of something malevolent watching them. Several times they started at the sensation of unseen presences. Some of the Space Marines were all for searching the buildings, but Felix disallowed it.
‘We are not to be sidetracked. We make for the Cathedral Magnifica at the centre of the city as fast as
possible,’ he told his men. ‘We must go swiftly. Be on your guard for ambush. Do not engage in any other circumstance.’
Felix soon discovered that there were civilians in Espandoria Tertio.
Amid the filthy ruins of their homes, people survived. They were emaciated where they weren’t bloated by disease. There was not a healthy soul among them, but they lived, and they cheered amid their coughs at the warriors who had saved them. Already medicae teams pressed well into the centre of Espandoria Tertio’s prime civitas, in some cases ranging ahead of the battleforce and putting their lives in danger. Fighting was dying down, and increasingly the sounds of gunfire receded further into the east, changing from those of battle to the single shot reports of the Emperor’s Mercy.
Gaunt faces peered from windows. The civilians were starved and brutalised. But there was defiance in them.
Mankind’s spirit inspired Felix. These people had no special gifts, no enhancements, nothing, and yet they had survived. These ordinary men and women had suffered the worst the galaxy had to throw at them. It humbled him that he would spend his life in service to this species.
They passed through various districts. The temple quarter was the largest of all, and surrounded the centre in a thick ward four blocks in depth. Large swathes of the area had been razed, and there was not an untouched building. The streets were half blocked by the broken chunks of stone effigies and the dented remains of metal statues cast down from their plinths.
As they advanced, Felix’s Scouts and Reivers reported that the temples had been defiled with corrupted blood and fetishes. Always these were made of the vilest substances: mounds of filth and body parts, or bloody bones and the diseased innards of the innocent dead. Felix could not abide to let these things remain, though time was tight. He did not regard the Emperor as divine, but these atrocities were an affront to His majesty, and so Felix diverted some of the men accompanying him toward the destruction of such profanities. Wherever they encountered the marks of the traitors, the Space Marines broke them. Felix had meltagunners or Hellblaster squads obliterate blasphemous symbols, and when they were done he set the buildings that had housed them alight with his flamers. Materials in the city were wet through and resisted burning, but Felix ordered his warriors to persist, and they left a trail of flaming ruins behind them as they continued inwards toward the centrum.
The Cathedra Magnifica had been one hundred and fifty metres tall. One of the building’s twin towers had collapsed. The other stood, and though its steeple was full of holes and its roof had fallen in, it still dominated the centre
The city was eerily silent. The sensation of being watched grew. The deadening of sound was most pronounced around its central square. As the damaged heights of the cathedral loomed ever taller over its attendant churches and governmental buildings, the silence grew deeper, the watchfulness more unsettling
As they approached the square, Felix reordered his force, commanding them to circle the cathedral in mutually supportive fire groups. Together with a Hellblaster squad and a supporting unit of Intercessors, he and Malcades advanced across the open space, the others searching buildings or covering their commander with their weapons.
The state of rot that had hold of the city was most pronounced in the cathedral. Where the tower had collapsed, there was a fan of rubble that stretched halfway across the square. Rotten timbers pointed skywards like black teeth from the broken roof. Diseased plants hung from the crumbling facades. The clouds of flies that devilled the planet had a last stronghold there, and they rose up in droning multitudes from the building, reacting aggressively to the Space Marine’s appearance, obliterating themselves on power armour in their desperate need to bite.
The warriors picked their way over the rubble. A mix of religious buildings, departmento offices and commercial premises delineated the square. The majority were reduced to shells. Signs of deliberate destruction were everywhere. Most buildings had carried the Imperial ‘I’ or the aquila. All these emblems had been torn free or chiselled away, the gougings daubed over with unholy symbols in blood or filth.
The square was impressively sized, but cluttered with the debris of war it looked small and sad. Mouldering bodies impaled on stakes were mounted in groups of three and seven, shrinking the scale of the space with the unwelcome intimacies of torment.
Ranks of saints stood in niches on the cathedral’s double frontage. All of them were headless and their hands hacked off. Beneath the ruined gallery of statues there were three gates, their wood slimy with decay and their metal fittings corroded.
Felix slowed. He held up his hand. The Space Marines readied their weapons.
A second later, a rocket streaked down from the intact tower, blasting a Space Marine to pieces. A Primaris Intercessor raised his bolt rifle and fired. His aim was true, and the broken meat remains of a mortal tumbled from on high, landing with a bloody splash on the paving.
‘Ware!’ shouted Felix.
The Space Marines immediately dispersed, finding cover and bringing their weapons to readiness.
The three gates swung wide. From within the desecrated cathedral stormed a screaming mob of mortal humans. They were as diseased and pathetic as their fellow citizens, but their faces were suffused with a hysterical joy and they capered feebly as they ran at the Space Marines. They had few weapons, looted lasguns mostly. The few that could shoot straight must have been disappointed that their shots did not penetrate power armour.
The Space Marines returned fire. Ten seconds of fully automatic bolter fire was all it took to sweep the area clear.
Felix surveyed the resultant carnage. The humans had been blown apart into scraps of meat and cloth. He felt no emotion at their end. They had made their choice. He set his vox channel to central command.
‘This is Tetrarch Decimus Felix,’ he voxed. ‘Inform the primarch the Cathedral Square is clear. We shall hold as ordered.’
Felix arrayed his men around the cathedral perimeter. They waited. The clouds began to split further, allowing the sun to shine through in its fullness. The day grew muggy, and the thick smell of putrefaction grew worse.
Guilliman arrived half an hour later, escorted by his Victrix Guard, the Adeptus Custodes and ten Sisters of Silence. Codicier Maxim and Lexicanium Gerrundium were among a host of Space Marine psykers that followed, led by Chief Librarian Tigurius of the Ultramarines, summoned back from the southern marches to Espandor. In Guilliman’s shadow, they seemed small as pages dressed whimsically as adult warriors to honour a visiting feudal lord.
‘Tetrarch,’ said Guilliman. He dipped his helmet at his one-time equerry. Without slowing, he and his entourage walked directly through the main gate. ‘No one is to enter.’
A pair of Sisters kicked the remains of the dead traitors away, and closed the door behind the party.
Felix watched the gate a moment. The feeling of a malevolent beast watching him was so great he had the urge to run. He wished he had gone within, to be at his lord’s side once more. To protect him, as ridiculous as that seemed. Roboute Guilliman needed no protection from anything.
Felix turned his back, facing out into the city. ‘Keep watch while the primarch is inside,’ ordered Felix.
‘Gladly, tetrarch,’ said Macullus Fides, ‘though I do not fear for him. There is nothing but ghosts and whispers here now.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
Theologica
Guilliman walked under a carved stone motif proclaiming the divinity of his creator and into a space constructed entirely around that belief. The cathedral enclosed a huge volume to fit the enormousness of the faith the people had in the Emperor. The stonework was encrusted with decoration and statuary; it was almost frenzied in its devotion, a plea in stone to be noticed and saved. But like the truth it purported to encompass, the space within the walls was empty.
If only they knew, thought Guilliman. He looked upwards through the ro
of towards the clearing sky. Beams dangled from rotting ligaments of iron. The floor was slippery with mulchy timber and fallen tiles.
The statues were broken, the windows smashed and anything that bore witness to the Emperor’s divinity had been damaged. These were the least of the harms done to the building. The desecration of the cathedral was more fundamental than the mere destruction of art, for the warping effects of Chaos had been forced deeply into its fabric. An unwholesome foetor filled the cathedral wall to wall. It had similarities to the scent of decay found in the lower reaches of a forest – a loamy, deep smell, though this had little of renewal to it. The promise of new life it offered up was a lie.
The entourage of Adeptus Custodes, Sisters of Silence and the Victrix Guard fanned out, weapons ready. The Librarians remained at his side. Hard sounds clattered through the ruin. There were two major transepts at either end of the long knave. A third minor transept crossed the middle of the church. Like many holy buildings, the cathedral’s plan when viewed from above made the single barred ‘I’ of the Imperium.
Guilliman surveyed it all disapprovingly. Worship of his creator had become the bedrock of the Imperium. It was as pernicious as the efforts of Chaos, in its way. He did not understand it, but as he looked around this cathedral, one like many hundreds he had seen all across the Imperium, he doubted his own convictions regarding the Emperor’s divinity.
Theoretical, he thought. The Emperor is a god and denied His own divinity to protect humanity. Practical, He is a god.
Or, he continued to himself, Theoretical, the Emperor was not a god, but became one. Practical, He is a god.
He dismissed the idea angrily. These theoreticals had trooped through his thoughts so many times before he had grown weary of them, but his mind would not stop generating counter-arguments to his beliefs.
Theoretical, the Emperor was always a god, but was unaware of it. Practical, He is a god.