Throneworld Read online

  As teleport blur smeared his sight, Koorland saw the ork rip Malfons’ head free with one mighty wrench. Then he was in the blacklight glare of a teleport chamber, gas gushing all over him from the internal piping, and in his helm a voice announced, ‘Teleport successful.’

  The doors opened, and he clumped out. All around the deck, Black Templars emerged from other chambers. In several, dead warriors lay slumped in armour summoned back by the undeniable call of the Abhorrence’s machine-spirits.

  ‘Bohemond, Thane, Issachar, Quesadra,’ voxed Koorland. ‘Malfons is dead.’

  Twelve

  In pursuit of vengeance

  The Black Templars cruiser Obsidian Sky shook as it came out of the warp, realspace engine stacks already burning bright. Five hundred metres of burnished black metal trailing the dying energies of the empyrean, it accelerated before the rift had closed, waiting on no nicety of post-transit protocols.

  ‘Translation complete, Dreadnought-Marshal. We have arrived in the Klostra System,’ called out Shipmaster Ericus.

  The vision slit of Magneric’s Dreadnought blazed, and it stood tall, pushed upright by actuators and hydraulics. Magneric was awake in an instant.

  The Dreadnought-Marshal stumped around, the shoulders of the machine that housed his ruined body swaying. Relics of his earlier life rattled on the walker’s armour.

  ‘All hands to combat stations. Initiate full auspex scan. Open hails, send out our challenge. We shall not hide from them, call out their doom!’ His voice boomed from his vox-speakers, brash as a Titan’s war-horn.

  ‘My lord, I am receiving a large amount of transmissions–’ began the ship’s Master Divulgatus from the craft’s long vox-desks.

  ‘Excellent!’ roared Magneric. His power fist rotated in anticipation of the coming fight. ‘All brothers, prepare for battle. Master Egredorum, prepare our transports. Track the source of the enemy’s transmissions, we engage immediately.’

  ‘But, my lord!’ protested the Master Divulgatus. ‘The transmissions are not those of the traitors, they are all ork.’

  ‘I have multiple enemy contacts, half a million kilometre range and closing,’ spoke the Master Augurum at the auspex array. ‘Again, all ork energy signatures.’

  Castellan Ralstan stepped forward to stand at the elbow of Magneric. ‘Half a million kilometres?’

  ‘It is at extreme range, my lord, but there are large numbers of them.’

  ‘Marshal Magneric?’ said the castellan.

  Magneric let out a frustrated growl. ‘How many times must our quarry slip through our fingers? Orks! I was informed that the Klostra System was the base of Kalkator’s Great Company. Who shall atone for this failure in intelligence?’

  ‘My lord, if I may,’ said the Master Augurum, ‘the auspex array is picking up residual vox-echo here, reflected from the system’s radiation belts. There was a traitor presence on the planet until only a few days ago. No civilian messaging, all of it is Fourth Legion battle-cant.’

  ‘Then it is over,’ said Ralstan regretfully. ‘The orks have done our duty for us. To our next crusade, brothers.’

  ‘No!’ bellowed Magneric, his torso spinning dangerously fast. The huge block of his sarcophagus leaned over, bringing the machine’s glass eye level with the face of his second-in-command. ‘It cannot be so, the Emperor has marked out Kalkator to die by my fist and my fist alone! I feel it. We departed Ostrom hot on the heels of Kalkator’s dogs. If there is no longer sign of battle here, then they must have departed. Send for Honoured Navigator Pholax. I will speak with him as to their likely destination. In the meantime, have more power diverted to the auspex arrays. If by some small chance the greenskins have cheated us of our vengeance, I will be sure of it before moving on.’

  ‘And the greenskins themselves, Magneric?’

  ‘You would have us fear a few thousand orks?’ Magneric boomed.

  ‘A few hundred thousand, my lord,’ corrected Ralstan. He held out his hand towards the massive doors leading to Magneric’s inner sanctum. ‘Perhaps we might continue this discussion on strategy in private?’

  ‘Very well,’ grumbled Magneric.

  The command deck shook to the tread of his armoured feet. They went within Magneric’s chamber. The doors hissed shut, and immediately they were isolated from the command deck Magneric rounded on Ralstan.

  ‘You challenge my judgement? I, Magneric, hero of the Heresy? I, who remain in command despite my entombing? Who kept my own name when interred, when all others give up theirs?’

  ‘Marshal,’ said Ralstan calmly. ‘It is my role to challenge you, as you well know.’

  ‘“Nothing worthwhile is done without challenge, best to overcome it before plans are enacted,”’ quoted Magneric.

  ‘So said Sigismund,’ said Ralstan.

  ‘I do not quote our founder in support of your case, but against it!’ said Magneric. ‘Our plan was agreed, your opportunity to object has passed.’

  ‘Perhaps. But lately you have taken against my naysaying, whenever performed.’ Ralstan paced the empty expanse of the chamber. It had been stripped of everything, right back to the metal of the understructure, to accommodate the huge sepulchre the Dreadnought occupied when resting. Magneric refused to go to the forge-tombs, wishing to remain close to the centre of command at all times. ‘I must again protest against your decision not to heed the High Marshal’s order to return. The Last Wall has been invoked, and we should lend our strength to it, not spend our time harrying these traitors. There are greater issues at stake.’

  ‘Our way is not that of the wall! Sigismund’s oath is paramount. We are crusaders, not wall troops.’

  ‘This is different, my lord.’

  ‘It is not! We have the Iron Warriors at bay, we cannot allow them to dig themselves in, or we shall never pry them from their hiding place. We have to strike now. When they are finished, we shall embark upon this new crusade.’

  ‘Magneric, your feelings are blinding you,’ pleaded Ralstan. ‘Vengeance is noble when enacted for the good of the Emperor. You seek vengeance for your own sake. You should rest. Frater Astrotechnicus Baldon told me that you are six months overdue a maintenance sleep.’

  ‘So you speak for the scullions of Mars now!’ boomed Magneric.

  ‘You do our Brother-Techmarine dishonour to speak of him so.’

  ‘And yet you question my honour!’

  ‘I speak as your friend, your pupil, your admirer, my lord,’ said Ralstan. Magneric’s choler was becoming increasingly hard to douse, and Ralstan had to fight to hide his own ire. ‘Your tomb was never intended to remain active for so long a time.’

  Magneric’s massive power fist came up and pointed threateningly. ‘You undermine me, Castellan. Do not do so again.’

  ‘At least speak with Chaplain Aladucos. If you will not hearken to me, listen to him.’

  Magneric turned awkwardly, the short legs of the Dreadnought stamping clangorously on the deck. ‘When I have Kalkator’s severed head in my fist, when I have squeezed his treacherous brain into a paste, then I shall rest. Not before! By the Emperor, no matter what you or the others say, I have sworn my oath and I will honour it!’

  The doors opened wide, and Magneric stamped back onto the bridge. Ralstan sighed with dissatisfaction, and followed.

  Dzelenic IV had once had a name of its own. Now, it was marked upon the stellar charts of the Imperium by system and number alone. Kalkator was among the few who remembered what its inhabitants had called it, for he had witnessed its destruction.

  A landscape of utter desolation slid beneath the keels of the Iron Warriors Thunderhawks, the Meratara in the lead. They flew over a dry ocean basin subsumed into the wasteland of dunes that stretched from pole to pole. The seas were long since gone, stripped away by titanic weapons during the war against the False Emperor. Kalkator remembered it as a pleasant world
, civilised and green. The forces of Terra had put paid to that.

  The exposed ocean floor took a step up, marking the position of the ancient coast. The Thunderhawks swung around to the south, following the grim cliffs, footed only by a sea of dust. Savage storms blew up in what remained of the planet’s atmosphere, turning the air orange with a perpetual haze.

  City ruins sprouted from the dunes, emerging suddenly from the blurred sky, the only signs that anything living had ever been there at all. The long rectangles of docking piers extruded far out into the vanished sea, still visible beneath their shrouds of sand.

  ‘North here, to the landing fields,’ ordered Kalkator.

  ‘As you command, warsmith,’ confirmed the pilot, Lerontus.

  A space port dominated the plain behind the city. Flat, dull grey landing aprons were swept clear by the ceaseless wind. A dry river bed wound past it towards a range of hills, exposed as the vein of a flayed corpse. Craters marred the ground, distinguishable only by their infill of windblown sand. Further cliffs edged the plain, the product of millions of years of geological processes that had been halted in an instant of fire.

  ‘There, to the west. Set us down,’ said Kalkator.

  The Meratara’s ramp opened into a covering of powder soft as silk. The planet’s death scream played still as constant gales, and over the last millennium they had worn the debris of the world’s destruction to a fine loess. Kalkator donned his helmet before venturing outside, and bade his men do the same – the air would choke them by itself, but it was one peril among many. The ozone layer of Dzelenic IV had been stripped away, and the surface was bathed in stellar radiation from its parent star.

  Behind the Meratara three other gunships squatted in the abiotic dirt of the dead world, engines cycling. The Iron Warriors had been caught too often recently to take any chances. Fifty Space Marines formed up beside the warsmith, a worryingly large proportion of his much diminished Great Company. They waited expectantly as Kalkator scanned the cliffs. The world was changed beyond recognition, its past topography a sketch in the dirt of its present. He could not see the entrance to the facility.

  ‘Are you sure it is here, my lord?’ said Caesax. ‘This place is deader than a tomb. The cache could have been destroyed, or looted, or buried in a million tons of dirt.’

  ‘Silence,’ said Kalkator sharply, for he was well aware all that Caesax said was possible. ‘You forget yourself.’

  ‘Yes, warsmith,’ muttered the other.

  Caesax was close to what Kalkator might call a friend. Friendship was weakness. Brotherhood was all. Caesax’s familiarity had encouraged him to test those boundaries recently.

  Kalkator needed to keep him under control. They were all looking at him. Since Klostra had fallen, the hostility of his Great Company had grown. Although none yet outright defied him, how many of them could he truly count on, should it come to it? Best not to consider that eventuality. Deliver them victory, and they would follow. The iron of their loyalty would not be tested.

  He finally found the worn aquila carved into the rock face, defaced fifteen centuries ago and further worn away by the ravages of the raging atmosphere. It was not where he had expected to find it. Kalkator had lived long enough to know that nothing was constant, not even stone. Not even iron.

  ‘This way,’ he said. He pointed with his left arm, the bionic. Let them see the iron in him clearly displayed. He marched through the debris of the world, a mix of desiccated biological matter and coarse sand torn from the bedrock, this material not yet aged enough to lose its sharp edges. Dzelenic IV’s death was still fresh in planetary terms.

  The sun came out from behind a flag of dirty yellow cloud, not vapour, but more detritus lofted high into the atmosphere. The star glared on them weakly, a sallow circle of light. Kalkator’s warsuit informed him of climbing radiation with a series of idle clicks.

  His men were still watching as he reached for a piece of stone. Remarkable, how the craftsmanship had held. The block stayed seated in position, its secret unrevealed.

  He grasped it with both hands and yanked hard. The stone came free from its place with reluctance. He let it fall into the soft regolith. A lifeless panel lay behind, sticky with ancient oils and caked in microscopic particles. Kalkator reached out his arm, an interface dendrite snaking from his vambrace and into the access port. The small screen embedded above the key panel flickered green, then went out.

  Kalkator stood back as a section of the cliff ten metres broad by four high receded with an almighty grinding clunk, and began a slow tracking to the right. Behind was a dark hangar, the smooth rockcrete floor and walls kept pristine by the planet’s arid air. The door got halfway open before the power failed. Stacked pallets of transit crates covered in dirty plastek shrouds receded into the shadows in neat rows.

  Dust was already snaking in from the outside when Kalkator issued his command.

  ‘Empty it. Take everything.’

  Collustrax pushed his way through another corroded door. Away from the hangar the complex was in bad shape, exhibiting seismic damage from the world-death. He passed down a stretch of corridor whose walls were shivered by cracks, his suit lights picking out ribbons of dust. He paused by a dessicated corpse dressed in the Imperial Army uniform of a regiment a thousand years forgotten. The bones of the man were still cloaked in skin, but so tight and dried they appeared to have been wrapped for transport in flaking plastek. When he toed the corpse the head rolled free.

  He looked at the skull a moment, then stamped it flat.

  ‘Section Lambda-8 clear,’ he voxed. ‘Nothing to report.’

  The next door was jammed shut. He kicked it to pieces, his heavy boots powering through the corroded metal. It became loose, and he wrenched it free. An avalanche of dust poured out around his knees.

  The corridor beyond was wider, an antechamber to a larger hall perhaps. It was also bathed in light, and three-quarters full of sand. He raised his bolter and carefully covered the room. The ceiling was cracked from side to side by a wide crevasse that evidently reached the surface, for daylight penetrated all the way into the complex here, and dust whispered down in sheets. The door on the far side was buried in it.

  ‘I cannot proceed further, the roof is breached and the corridor blocked with sand. It would take a day or more to dig through. No sign of supplies here.’

  The vox crackled in response. ‘Return to the hangar, brother.’

  ‘Confirmed, sergeant,’ said Collustrax. He keyed his vox off. ‘A waste of time going further.’

  He turned about and headed back the way he had come, deeper into the base. Doors he had opened before in his sweep hung wide. Most rooms were empty, those that were not held nothing useful to the Iron Warriors. Corpses, paper that fell to pieces when disturbed, dead cogitators.

  He strode on with purpose, making no attempt to go quietly. There was no one to hear him.

  Suddenly he stopped and backed up. He looked down, the lights attached to his suit bathing the floor in wan yellow light. The dust was scuffed by his passage, but there was something else.

  Another set of footprints overlaid his own.

  He shut his light off, brought up a thermal overlay on his helm display. The corridor reappeared as a grainy pict of false colour. His own footprints were a dull blue against the near black of the floor. The interloper’s were a fading green, more recent.

  ‘Sergeant Ostrakam. Collustrax. I’ve found something.’

  ‘Report.’

  ‘There’s something in here with us. Footprints. Booted, large.’

  The second line of footprints went into a room Collustrax had investigated on the way up. He moved against the wall, and leaned in, bolter first.

  ‘Nothing there.’ He stood back again. ‘I will–’

  A ringing blow against his helmet sent him sprawling into the wall. A blackened knife blade skidded of
f the metal. Collustrax jerked his shoulder back, meeting a solid body that barely gave. He swung around, but a meaty hand grabbed his pauldron and hurled him against the opposite wall. A huge ork stood over him, a pair of primitive light-intensification goggles strapped over its eyes. With calm efficiency Collustrax brought his bolter up to blow out its heart and lungs, but his assailant grabbed it and ripped it out of his hand with amazing strength, stamping Collustrax into the ground as he sought to rise.

  ‘Orks! There are orks in the complex. There are–’

  The ork drove down with its knife, a piece of metal as long as a man’s torso and thick as three fingers. For all its unwieldiness the ork used it deftly, and the ridiculous breadth of it was ground down on one side to a wicked edge.

  The point caught in the seal where his helmet joined his breastplate and was driven through it by brute strength, into the space behind Collustrax’s collarbone. The ork threw itself forward with its full weight, pushing the sword-length knife in with both hands so that it pierced both the Iron Warrior’s hearts.

  For Collustrax, the Long War was over.

  Sergeant Ostrakam saluted Kalkator. ‘My lord Kalkator, Brother Collustrax is slain by orks. The complex is compromised.’

  Kalkator regarded the emptying hangar. They had recovered perhaps half of the supplies, armour spares, bolt-rounds, weapons. Most of it was sealed in oil-filled containers, and perfectly serviceable. Kalkator tallied what they had recovered mentally, deciding if they could afford to leave the remaining supplies.

  ‘Any word from the Palimodes?’ he called to his master vox-operator. ‘What news from orbit?’

  ‘I cannot raise the ship, my lord.’