Dark Imperium Read online

  Once again, Guilliman had found his own efforts were required to make up for the shortcomings of others.

  The discipline of history, like so much else based on reason, had fallen foul of superstition, fanaticism and the High Lords of Terra’s need for iron control. Comparative and corroborative analytical techniques had given way to the recording of gossip, hearsay and folklore. All was liberally mixed with works of complete fabrication. Imperial interference in redacting chronicles, misguidedly or not, had further destroyed much of the past. War had eradicated the histories of entire worlds. Much knowledge had been burned by zealous inquisitors, often in order to suppress a single uncomfortable truth. If anything, the state of man’s knowledge was worse than it was back after the Unification Wars, when the Emperor had unified Terra before the Great Crusade. Much of Terra’s ancient history, painstakingly pieced together by the remembrancers of Guilliman’s own era, had been lost again.

  Knowledge of the warp’s true nature had been suppressed, but patchily so. The great deception the Emperor had practised had become impossible to sustain, though that had not stopped the Inquisition from trying. Knowledge of daemons or the Dark Gods was forbidden. Many innocents had paid the ultimate price for accidentally learning the truth.

  Even Guilliman, the Imperial Regent himself, faced opposition from the Inquisition in his quest for knowledge. To oppose their puritanical redactionism, he had trained his own corps of historitors. Between campaigns, he sought out inquisitive minds, exactly the sort that had long been frowned upon, rescuing them from penal servitude and impending brain wipe. The first handful he had tutored himself, when time allowed. They in turn taught more, and more still. Each one was assessed by the primarch personally. Those that passed were given the rank of historitor-investigatus. Those that failed to meet his exacting standards were given less taxing roles within the new organisation, as librarians, servants and assistants. From his reading, Guilliman had learnt that the brutal machinery of Imperial government was unkind to failures, yet another thing that saddened him about the present age. The primarch had enough blood upon his conscience, and a much finer grasp of how to get the most out of his subjects. No life was wasted.

  As the century since his rebirth wound on, the numbers of historitors grew from four, to eight, to sixteen, until now the Logos Historica Verita numbered five hundred operatives and a thousand support staff. Utilising long dead academic arts, they attempted the impossible: the construction of a reliable history of the Imperium. Against great odds, small cells of the Logos searched out ancient records. At their presentation of the primarch’s seal, forbidden vaults were opened and emptied, their contents copied and dispatched to Guilliman’s crusade wherever it was.

  The Logos’ work was a torturous, dangerous affair. Warzones engulfed half the galaxy, and his historitor teams sometimes disappeared into them without trace. Often, they were opposed. Still Guilliman would not be stopped.

  Every man needed a pastime. Even a primarch.

  He was reading a book new to his collection. Ancient leather, friable to the point of disintegration, bound a partisan work on the Chronostrife of Terra. Guilliman digested the work with a frowning countenance.

  Flickering screed passed over multiple data-slates around his desk. Dust motes danced in the light of two small hololiths either side of him. To an undiscerning eye, the primarch appeared to be ignoring them, but every iota of data that passed over them was processed by his superior mind while he read the book. There was nothing that needed his direct input, but he watched everything, annotating reports and answering the shifting stream of queries with quick scratches of a quill on an autotablet set at his right hand. The movements were so small, swift and deft that they were easily missed. His mind had such a capacity, he could organise the actions of a thousand groups working towards different aims, all while most of his attention was taken up by a book in the impenetrable dialect of an Imperial sect.

  He did not like what he read.

  One of thousands of secret conflicts conducted by rival factions in the Imperium, the Chronostrife was a bitter, ongoing internal war within the Ordo Chronos over the Imperium’s dating system. What he read made him despair. Not even his father’s calendar had survived the millennia intact.

  During the Great Crusade and the Heresy, the standard dating system had provided some idea of the order of events over time, but like everything else the Emperor had created, the calendar had become degraded by both dogmatic adherence and thoughtless revisionism. Various rival dating systems had evolved from the Imperial Standard, making a true chronicle of the galaxy almost impossible to construct. By the five main factional variants, Guilliman calculated the current year to be anywhere between early M41 and a millennium later, and that was leaving out the numerous lesser, more heretical interpretations.

  There was much useful information in the book, but it was written in a torturous, overly embroidered style. The author’s viewpoint transcended fanaticism.

  ‘Who is not a fanatic in these benighted times?’ he said to himself. Guilliman pushed away the crumbling book, his patience tested by the author’s endless calls for the public immolation of his opponents. ‘Emperor save me from faith,’ he said, and rose from his seat.

  He had been hoping to find a solution to the Imperium’s tortured dating system; he had instead found there was none. Something else, then, that required his personal attention. Already his powerful mind was working on a number of fixes.

  Musing on his ideas, he washed book mould from his fingers in a silver salver set on its own table, and he checked the endless run of report screeds a final time. There was nothing that could not wait. He required a moment’s respite, and he went to find it in the armoured cloister encircling the library’s ground floor.

  Outside the shelves, the tower’s base was a series of arches. In every archway a blast door waited to slam down. On the other side of the arches, a long gallery of armourglass looked out in every direction over the Macragge’s Honour. If Guilliman walked around the circumference of his library, he could see all the way to the massive prow and its adamantium ram. Either side on the flanks, stubby wings swept out, covered in sensor arrays and auguries. Almost directly below his spire were the main hangar decks of the vessel, while to the aft the sun-bright glow of the engines reflected around the cloister, although to see them directly he would have to walk a hundred metres.

  Off to starboard, the Pit of Raukos turned. Guilliman had a notion the warp was angered by the traitor’s defeat, and so the pupil-less eye of Raukos glared the harder at him. Once upon a time, he would have dismissed such feelings as fancy, an artefact of the way the Terran mind processed visual information. Now he knew they were not. The galaxy was a far stranger place than either of his fathers had taught him.

  At the thought of his fathers, the memory of the sights he had witnessed in the throne room a century ago intruded violently into his mind. Against the odds, something lingered on the Golden Throne. His last encounter with his true father had been a spear of light and pain whose psychic aftershocks troubled him still. The Emperor had lost His subtlety.

  Guilliman pushed the memory aside before he could begin dwelling on it. Such ruminations never ended well. He wished he could speak with one of his brothers about what had transpired there on Terra, but they were all gone.

  He sighed morosely. Seeking solitude had reminded him of how alone he was. He let his eyes drift over the void, emptied his mind and allowed his sorrow to slip away.

  Debris fields occluded some of Raukos’ violent depths. Sparkling showers of metal, clouds of frozen gas and shattered hulls drifted blackly across the sun. Work proceeded to salvage wrecked Imperial vessels. Great Adeptus Mechanicus Salvator Arks stood off at nexus points between the wrecks calculated for maximum distance efficiency. Ships flew between them and the broken vessels in precisely spaced streams. Scavenger scows crawled back and forth across space, their pro
jecting limbs and swarms of attendant drones working together with insectile efficiency. The more intact wrecks had many small salvage pods anchored to them like limpets, blue flashes sparkling all around these viable craft as they were made fit for warp transit to shipyards.

  The adamantium frames of Imperial ships were practically indestructible. As long as the reactors did not explode, they would survive to be refitted again, as some had been a hundred times over.

  Some changes had been made to Imperial salvaging policies within the fleet. Guilliman had ordered the wrecks of the traitor’s ships to be utterly destroyed. It had been the habit of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Navy to recover enemy ships. Chaos vessels were of Imperial make, and were often of older, superior patterns. The primarch stamped hard on the practice. Build new ships, he had said. Leave the past where it is. The corruption of the warp buried itself deeply into whatever it touched.

  The Martians had not been happy with that. They had looked upon the older marques of vessel with greedy eyes. Examples had been made.

  The rest of the fleet hung against the raging Pit, set into a box defence pattern. Thin lines of lights passing between the battleships marked out the flight paths of inter-ship traffic, as officers and repair crews shuttled back and forth between vessels. Every craft bore some sign of damage, from this or prior engagements, and over them all flickered plasma torches. They were strong still, even wounded, and Guilliman took an immense pride in the scale of the Indomitus Crusade. The Navy had been disunited when he had returned, and understrength. Guilliman had turned the efforts of many systems to producing new ships.

  Behind the wall of vessels nearest to the Pit of Raukos, the Null Ships of the Sisters of Silence waited, their arcane weapons ready to obliterate any uncanny foe that dared entry to the material realm. He did not expect any. The fane was gone. The system’s sole viable world belonged to the Imperium now.

  Beyond Raukos was the smallest part of the Cicatrix Maledictum. The Great Rift was a broad band of energies stretched across space from one side of the galaxy to the other. It divided the Imperium neatly in two, shrouding the dense yolk of stars at the heart of the galaxy completely. The light was painful to observe. Though it appeared to be a natural stellar phenomenon, to look into it for any length of time showed a man things that he would rather not see.

  What Guilliman saw was a tragedy, the latest play in a war millions of years in the fighting. The last ten millennia, though an age in the lifetime of mankind, was a heartbeat of time, a single summer’s campaign. The magnitude of the war against Chaos, the empires lost and the peoples damned, awed the primarch. He had learned these things from the aeldari, though they were unwilling to tell him the complete story. But he knew far more than he had, of the War in Heaven, and of the conflicts between the ancient races.

  Against this all-devouring cosmic evil that had consumed species after species and brought man’s first stellar empire low, Guilliman’s father had set Himself. The scale of His self-appointed task was yet another thing the Emperor had not deigned to share with His sons.

  We constantly battle the sins of the fathers, thought Guilliman. That is no less true on an eternal scale than it is within the history of a single world. We suffer because of those that have gone before.

  Guilliman looked upon the ruins of the Emperor’s dream in despondency. He would never give in to his feelings, and he would never show them to another, but they were there nonetheless. Even after the Emperor had fallen silent following the Heresy, there had been the promise of something better, the possibility of realising his dream for him. But Guilliman had been pursuing the wrong dream. The Imperium had been the means to an end, not the end in itself.

  He could never have foreseen this future, where pain and ignorance were the universal lot of ordinary citizens. Superstition had overtaken reason. There was no hope, only blind faith in the Emperor, trillions of souls united in frantic pleas for salvation, and now the lion’s share of that desperate expectation was his to bear. The eyes of all mankind looked to him. He would never complain. But in these moments when he stopped, when the need for strategy and planning slackened for a second, the despair was there, waiting for him to give in and drown.

  ‘I will not give in.’ He spoke to the Pit of Raukos through gritted teeth. ‘I will never, ever, stop until this is set right. I defy you, as my father defied you.’

  Father. The word caught on his lips. The habit of ten thousand years was hard to break.

  He unclenched his jaw. His hands had formed themselves into tight fists without him noticing. Rage. Good – that kept him on the correct course. That would see him through.

  He uncurled his fingers, and let out a long, calming breath.

  A soft fanfare announced the intention of Captain Felix to speak with him. A cyber cherub clattered in a clumsy search pattern around the scriptorium on metal wings. Such things were grotesque, techno-alchemy far removed from the purer machinery of his day. The madness of Mars had infected everything. Guilliman let it flap about pathetically, its underpowered ocular senses gridding the scriptorium as it searched for him.

  The pallid flesh of the cherub’s torso and arms was sore where steel cables plunged into the skin. The rest of it was mechanical, with metal wings and legs. A bare child’s skull made in perfect silver capped a neck of woven copper.

  It wove jerkily under one of the arches into the cloister, and thereafter found him soon enough. It came to a halt and hovered, wings noisily beating.

  ‘My lord, Guilliman.’ The thing’s skeletal jaw was cast shut, and Felix’s voice crackled out of a brass trumpet stitched into a dead hand. The cherub’s emerald eyes flashed at each word. The sensibilities of this age did not appeal to Guilliman. Hateful art for a hateful time.

  ‘I am sorry to disturb your work,’ continued Felix, ‘but the priest is here.’

  ‘He is early,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘He apologises, my lord – he merely wished to be on time.’ Behind the tinniness imparted by the cherub’s augmitter, Felix’s voice was unnaturally deep: a mark of the Primaris type. ‘He says he is happy to wait, my lord, but I thought it best to inform you.’

  ‘There are many vices, Felix. Earliness is not one that troubles me,’ said Guilliman. ‘I will see him now.’ Guilliman looked into the eyes of the cherub. ‘I am taking a short respite from the tedium of other men’s ramblings. Send him in. I will be glad of the change that conversation will bring.’

  ‘Even with a priest?’ It was a rare wry comment from the seneschal. Captain Felix was a serious creature who never made light, as was to be expected from a man who had spent ten thousand years in and out of stasis.

  ‘Even with a priest,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘As you wish, my lord.’

  The light went from the cherub’s eyes. It flew off, motor buzzing. The primarch watched it go back to its roost with critical eyes. The wings were more than adornment; from the sound of it, there was not enough lift in the gravity impeller to keep it aloft. The machines of this millennium were crude. The engineers among his brothers would probably have caught the thing in a net and rebuilt the motor; he was close to doing so himself. Either that, or tossing it out of an airlock into the void and replacing it with something less ghoulish.

  He refrained from acting out his thoughts. Consideration, evaluation, action. That was his way. Roboute Guilliman was not a slave to impulse.

  Thinking on the cherub brought another unwelcome flash of what he had seen behind the Eternity Gate: the corpse in the ungentle embrace of Mechanicus technology, part meat, part machine, and the terrible screaming of the soul syphons…

  He shook his head to quash the memory. He could not fix everything. Not all at once. Guilliman deliberately put the grotesque device from his mind and returned to his desk. He did not sit, but pulled out a new book and stood flicking through it. He was unwilling to continue reading the chronolog’s
ranting today. The man was a thousand years dead. His words could stand another day’s wait.

  Three minutes later and he had absorbed half the book’s contents. Nothing interesting – another small world of small deeds and small men.

  The door to the library opened with a soft whoosh of equalising pressure. Voices too low for even Guilliman’s superior hearing to catch blunted themselves on his books. The primarch looked up. He resolved to avoid judging the priest until he saw him in person, but previous experience had coloured his perceptions of the adepts deeply. Would the man start to wail like the last one, or collapse into religious ecstasy? The possibilities were as irksome as they were limited.

  Lorgar, thought Guilliman. He would have enjoyed crowing about this.

  The soft slap of sandals on marble echoed around the library. By this humble sound was the next militant-apostolic prelate to the primarch announced. It was far better than the herald cherub’s synthesised warbling.

  Frater Mathieu was a slight man. His crossed arms were buried in the sleeves of the plain cream robes of the Acronite Mendicants he wore. Guilliman doubted he would have recognised his habit without the information he had gathered on the priest. The sub-orders of the Adeptus Ministorum were so numerous even he had no hope of memorising them all.

  Mathieu’s thick hair was cropped to a flopping quiff that clung to the forefront of his skull. The rest was shaved down to stubble-blued scalp. He appeared calm and healthy. If anything surprised the primarch about Mathieu, it was his seeming youthfulness. Guilliman had, of course, extensive files on those who had made his shortlist for the role of militant-apostolic, but his natural prejudices assumed the priesthood to fall into a small number of categories: old, mad, dissolute, fanatical or a delightful combination of any of them.