Dark Imperium Page 11

  The Iron Warriors’ armour was sufficiently thick that they weathered the first flurry of mass-reactive bolts. They therefore had time to register the two Primaris Space Marines flanking them, but several fell before they could return fire.

  Justinian’s left assault bolter clicked dry. A red warning sigil shone angrily near the centre of his vision, and he ducked back behind the Knight. The ammo indicator for his second gun flickered.

  ‘I am down to seven rounds,’ he informed Aldred.

  Aldred laughed drily. Seven rounds was a half-second burst.

  ‘I have only a few more.’

  ‘We need to reload.’ Justinian pulled up the location of a Primaris resupply pod almost two hundred metres away. ‘I have a location.’

  The Silver Skulls were still under fire from the Predators, but thanks to the Primaris Inceptors they were now aware of the more pressing threat. A fierce firefight had commenced between the loyalist Space Marines and the remaining Heretic Astartes.

  ‘A shame we cannot do more,’ said Aldred.

  An explosion ripped up one of the Predators, flinging its burning remains end over end.

  ‘We do not have to,’ said Justinian.

  Three Repulsor grav-tanks fell from the sky like stones, decelerating rapidly and coming to a gentle halt a couple of metres above the ground, right by the flanking Iron Warriors. Their pulsing, aggressive grav impellers knocked the traitors sideways. One of the Iron Warriors yanked a melta bomb from his side and dove under the tank, seeking to attach the charge and destroy the Primaris armour.

  The traitor had evidently never faced a Repulsor before.

  The tank’s pounding grav engines squashed him flat, leaving a silver, blurred human outline pressed into the ground, leaking blood. The grav-tanks’ anti-infantry weapons made short work of his fellow traitors, and the Repulsors flew onwards, the sand crushed to a glassy shine beneath them. The enemy Predators redirected their fire, increasing their rate of retreat as they volleyed lascannon shots at the Primaris grav-tanks, but the Repulsors were swift as well as dangerous, and they chased down their traitorous tracked cousins, blasting them apart with pinpoint accuracy. They flew over their vanquished foes, buckling the wrecks with gravitic backwash. The Silver Skulls ran after them, the jewels on their pauldrons sparking.

  A terrific roaring rent the sky, so loud that it even drowned out the pounding of the Titans approaching the wall. Hundreds more drop pods and gunships were coming down from orbit, many racing off to attack the fortress. In seconds, the wide space beyond the field of wrecks and already-landed drop pods was just as crowded with newly arrived craft. Explosive door bolts blew in miniature, rippling cannonades as the petals of the drop pods slammed down.

  Five thousand Space Marines disgorged from their landing craft as the Astra Militarum forces reached the foot of the wall on the other side. Stern-faced Titans loomed over the fortifications, raking the ramparts free of the enemy with gigantic power fists wreathed with the lightning of a hundred storms. The crackling of disruption fields powerful enough to crush a small voidship harshened the battle’s sound. A part of the wall came crashing down beneath a Titan’s ponderous blow. As the debris landed, the Titan was already turning, its carapace-mounted cannon roaring fire at some other target Justinian could not see.

  ‘It is over,’ said Justinian. ‘The battle is won.’

  To the howling of Legio Metalica warhorns, the traitors upon the wall were surrounded and destroyed.

  The fortress fell five hours later.

  Chapter Eight

  Respite on Iax

  The weeks went by on Iax quietly. As Varens’ wound healed, he took to coming out on the medicae facility balcony every evening.

  The facility was set on a rise overlooking the Hythian wetland. From the foot of the ridge, expansive marshes stretched as far as the horizon. Like everything in Ultramar, the marshes were well managed and thoroughly exploited, dotted with aquaculture facilities and helical turbines that chopped at the wind soothingly despite its tended nature, the area retained a hint of wildness. A healthy ecosystem thrived there amid the Ultramarian industries.

  The hospital was well sited. The brutality of the era had eroded much of humanity’s gentler qualities, but the medicae of Ultramar had enough insight remaining to appreciate the healing potential of calm, natural spaces.

  The night drew in, fragrant with the damp smells of falling leaves and the last seasonal growths before winter. Out over the marshes, birds wailed shrill laments for their summer homes as they wheeled away towards the equator. Meadows fringed the reed beds and children ran through them waving switches, driving bovids home for the night. Their shrieks were as piercing as the birds’. The hot breath of the cattle snorted out in miniature, short-lived storm fronts.

  Peace reigned. It was bizarre to behold. Varens thought never to see peace again.

  Varens leaned on the parapet, letting himself relax. His fear was lessening. He no longer expected death to come at any moment, though he wasn’t sleeping well. Nightmares had him screaming himself awake in the late watches.

  The balcony sat atop the hospital portico before a recessed entablature, an unusual arrangement that did not, to Varens’ eye, quite work. Although the site was well chosen, the architecture of the hospital did not respect Iax’s garden beauty. The architect’s interpretation of Ultramarian aesthetic mores was somewhat clumsy, and the hard lines of the hospital stood out jarringly on the soft landscape. The marble’s cold luminosity added to the chill of the evening, further setting the building apart from the damp, wide landscape of muted browns and greens.

  Varens shivered in his hospital shift, but he didn’t want to go back in, not yet. The cold of the tiles through his thin slippers reminded him he was still alive, and the itchy tightness in his wound, until recently so hot and sore, told him he would soon be whole again. Out on the balcony, he felt like a man, not like a patient as he did when he was in the healing halls, or worse, like a number. To the logisticians of the Departmento Munitorum, all men were numbers, as dispassionately expended as bullets. Varens relished those rare moments when the war and the needs of the Imperium retreated a pace from the forefront of his mind, those times when he might simply be.

  Once healed, the men had a few days of peace before they were returned to the war and became numbers again. Numbers transferred from one column on the balance sheet to another, from sick to well, from resource drain to asset.

  Few had many months of life left beyond their return, for no one lived long in these awful times. Upon the fringes of Ultramar, monsters stalked. Worst of all were the Heretic Astartes and their lords, the traitor sons of the Emperor Himself.

  A mortal man cannot triumph against beings who had lived for millennia nourished by hatred. Miraculously, Varens had faced them and lived. The chances were that his next encounter would see him dead.

  He had never known any other reality. He was fully aware of the brevity of his life, so Varens enjoyed the view and the cold in a way that a man from a more peaceful age would not. Someone whose life was full of pettier concerns would take far less from the experience. Had he considered this, Varens might have taken comfort in how rich every moment was for him, but he lacked the individualism of men from those impossible years. He took pride in Ultramar and what he fought for. He looked at the view and was prepared to die for what it represented.

  ‘Humanity finds a way to live, even in the face of death,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘What was that, my friend?’ said a gruff voice.

  Varens started from the balcony rail. The speaker was a barrel-chested man, with a thatch of red hair peppered grey sticking up from his shift front. An unruly beard covered his chin, matching the band of hair circling his bald scalp.

  ‘Didn’t hear you coming,’ said Varens, ‘and that is a surprise.’ The man had a heavy build.

  ‘Don’
t be fooled by this.’ The man slapped his ample belly with both hands. ‘No one ever hears me coming – it’s a knack I have. What were you saying there?’

  ‘Something our priest says a lot,’ Varens said. The newcomer looked at him for elaboration, but Varens was embarrassed to be caught in so personal a moment, though the sentiment was an approved one, and offered nothing more.

  ‘I am Varens,’ he said, ‘of Prandium II.’

  The man grunted his disappointment at Varens’ reticence, but he was friendly enough.

  ‘Garstand is the name, Four Hundred and Fifty-Fifth Calth.’

  He extended a beefy hand, its back thick with reddish hair. Varens shook. Garstand’s hand was warm in the cool evening.

  ‘Like the view?’ Varens asked.

  Garstand pulled a face.

  ‘Do you not?’

  ‘Can’t say I care for all this open space,’ said Garstand. ‘I grew up in the arcologies, way underground. A view like this gives me agoraphobia. No roof!’

  ‘Then why come out?’ asked Varens.

  ‘I need a break from the groaning of sickly men,’ said Garstand ruefully.

  Varens nodded. ‘It’s quiet out here.’

  ‘Too quiet.’

  ‘It’s better than the war.’

  ‘Maybe for you,’ said Garstand. ‘I want to get back to the fighting. I don’t like kicking my heels while good men are dying. It doesn’t seem right to be taking in the view when my lasgun could be burning hot in my hand. All this looks pretty enough, but nothing’s right here. Nothing’s been right anywhere since that.’ Garstand jerked the crown of his head skywards without looking up.

  ‘The Rift?’ Varens glanced at the sky. The Great Rift was visible a third of the way up the heavens as a purple smudge. The Rift was light years away from Iax, but its baleful influence was felt everywhere across Ultramar, and to look upon it too long hurt the eyes.

  ‘Don’t look at it, boy!’ said Garstand. ‘No one should willingly look.’

  Varens frowned.

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘It’ll be there whether we look at it or not. War goes on like it always has. We’re still fighting. The primarch leads us. I don’t see the Rift makes much difference. When I was a boy, my great grandfather told me about the times before it opened. He was an auxiliary. He served all over the segmentum with the Astra Militarum.’

  ‘When we still sent regiments out, you mean. We don’t do that anymore, do we?’ said Garstand. ‘Too much going on here in Ultramar for us to spare the men.’ He shuddered. ‘Just don’t look at the Rift. It’s forbidden.’ Garstand made the sign of the aquila hastily over his heart.

  ‘Everything’s forbidden,’ said Varens. ‘Who’s to see whether I look at it or not?’ He peered pointedly up and down the balcony, letting the chirring of insects take the place of speech for a moment.

  ‘It’s not the sanction of the commissars you should be afraid of. Look at it too often, you’ll have nightmares – bad dreams.’

  ‘Everyone has nightmares,’ said Varens. ‘I do every night.’

  ‘Not like the ones you’ll get here if you stay too long,’ said Garstand nervously. ‘I’ve heard things, talk of bad dreams that have whole wards of this place waking up screaming. Things aren’t right. The eye of evil is upon this place.’

  Varens had not wanted company, especially not of this sort. His mood was spoilt. He had nightmares enough to contend with, without hearing talk of more.

  ‘Goodnight, Garstand,’ he said.

  ‘Wait!’ said Garstand. He caught Varens by the upper arm. ‘I’ve fought them you know, the Heretic Astartes. They have some plan – they always do. The warp looks here, and hungers. We should not look back. Never!’

  ‘You fought the plague lords?’ said Varens.

  Garstand nodded. ‘I did! Believe me. Awful things I’ve seen. Out near Tartella, before that fell…’

  ‘I fought them too.’

  Some of Garstand’s previous bonhomie returned. ‘Then you’re a member of select group. They do not show themselves often, you know. There’s not so many of them. They prefer the dead or those whose minds they have turned to do their work for them.’

  ‘I have seen that too. The walking dead. But after a time on Espandor, the plague lords came more frequently. Small groups at first, then in greater numbers. The last time there were twenty or more. I thought they would kill us all, but when they got into the trench, they… well, they disappeared.’

  Garstand nodded along with Varens’ words in agreement. How could he know? Varens felt a stab of annoyance at him.

  ‘The same happened to us. There were only seven of them. They attacked, they slew, then they vanished.’ His eyes widened. In the lumen light spilling out from inside, Varens saw the whites had an unhealthy yellow cast.

  ‘Just like on Espandor,’ Varens said uneasily.

  ‘Were there any Adeptus Astartes near your unit? Space Marines?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘The same!’ said Garstand. ‘And I met another man, Rusen, with a similar story. He was on Efor. He said the plague lords came at his position, and they fought, and just before they killed everyone in his building, they just disappeared. Why do you think they did that?’

  ‘What?’ said Varens. Thinking about it made his head spin. He wanted to be left alone, but Garstand was oblivious to his quickening breath and shaking limbs.

  ‘Why did they come in such small numbers. Why did they vanish? Did you kill any?’

  ‘Several,’ said Varens. ‘I think. I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s something to it, don’t you think?’

  ‘A soldier sees coincidences in everything,’ said Varens. ‘Death makes us suspicious.’

  Garstand pointed to the Great Rift, his beard bristling. ‘There are no such things as coincidences. Do you want to meet him? I think it would be a good idea. We could compare our experiences. There’s something going on here. How can the plague lords raise the dead so easily? Sorcery, Varens, sorcery! And it is everywhere.’

  Garstand looked conspiratorially about.

  ‘Up there,’ he said, pointing at the Great Rift without looking at it. ‘All through Ultramar,’ he added, waving his hand vaguely at the sky. ‘And here.’ He slapped his hand on the balcony’s balustrade. ‘Rusen’s got a theory. Darkness on many worlds. Things slithering through the warp. This is no war of ships and men, though they make it look that way. He knows! They can, he says… They can get in your head. That they can use us somehow.’ Garstand went pale at the thought, his gaze distant and eyes furtive. ‘Come and meet him.’

  Varens felt light-headed, like he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Garstand wasn’t making any sense. ‘Meet who?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Rusen!’ said Garstand. ‘Meet Rusen! Perhaps there are more like us, those who have faced the plague lords and lived. Perhaps we can find them. Perhaps we can figure out what’s going on.’

  Varens wanted nothing to do with the idea. There were plague lords everywhere. The Death Guard, an ancient hatred from ancient days. They had ships. They sailed the void and the warp. That was how it worked.

  A memory overtook him, of a monstrous man, corrupt with disease that should have killed him many times over, his face covered by a rotting respirator, his armour leaking pus. Varens had fought him, and others, others that had vanished into thin air.

  ‘No!’ he said, far more loudly than he had intended. He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to enjoy this brief peace. Time would come soon enough to face the enemy again. He had no desire to revisit his memories. Any more of this and he would end up like Bolus.

  He could not articulate any of this. His throat wouldn’t let him.

  ‘Goodnight, Garstand,’ he managed, the words coming out far harder than he had intended.

  The frien
dliness went from Garstand’s face. He let go of Varens, and stepped back.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said quietly, and there was something absent in his slack face. For all his dislike of the view, he tucked his bearded chin into his chest and looked away from Varens out over the marsh.

  Varens hurried back inside, suddenly weak.

  Chapter Nine

  Imperator Gloriana

  When the demands of war retreated, Roboute Guilliman was not idle. He worked like he always had, ceaselessly toiling for humanity, even if now he struggled for the species’ survival rather than its advancement.

  Roboute Guilliman’s chambers were better stocked than most libraries, and far better ordered. At the heart of the primarch’s palace upon the Macragge’s Honour was his scriptorium. Most of the material originally within had been removed to the Library of Ptolemy on Macragge after the ship had come home. Guilliman had been quick to replenish it upon his rebirth. Beneath the scriptorium’s soaring dome, at a desk surrounded by circular walls of shelves that stretched seventy metres up, was where he spent what little free time he had.

  Old paper made the air smell tart. Mouldering scrolls lay next to data crystals and magnetic tape. Runic inscriptions on crumbling bark lay on top of hololith cylinders containing true-pict tri-D representations of forgotten wars. Graven copper cubes, wherein languished thoughts captured from living brains, shared desk space with yellowed cardboard boxes full of images on simple chemical film that was brittle with time.

  Thousands of years of history recorded upon every device employed by mankind surrounded the primarch, and this was but the smallest part of his collection. Much more he had studied, digested, processed and recorded onto more permanent data-capture systems to be filed back on Macragge.

  A century on from his rebirth, Guilliman had not yet grasped all the events of the ten millennia since he fell. Belisarius Cawl had provided the primarch with painful but necessary machine-moderated engrammatic updates, but Cawl was a secretive creature, detached from the wider galaxy while he pursued his quest to create the Primaris Space Marines. His records were incomplete, sometimes highly fragmentary, and all of them were short on detail.