She reached over to the bowl again with a six-fingered claw. As she did so the link from the Mechanicus heavy engine-carrier Erasmus fed through to the hololith pillar. A wavering outline in translucent green spun into existence over the ivory. It flickered, sheared, then stabilised into a man’s face.
<Welcome, princeps,> Ys canted, chewing.
The face of Firax Lopi, commander of the Praxes battle-formation of Legio Astorum, nodded. His eyes looked a little glassy.
<How are you?> asked Ys.
<Tired,> canted Lopi. <Apologies – translation from Cyledes was uncomfortable.>
<I am sorry to hear it. Shall we do this another time?>
Lopi shook his head.
<No, no. I am grateful for you taking the trouble.>
<I will be brief, then. This is what you need to know.>
Ys blinked a report of the current Imperial deployment into the noosphere, fed directly from the ship’s war-data collation facility.
<The Contqual subsector is still contested,> she canted. <Rauth’s strategeos are confident of bringing the suppression to completion during your tour. Orentas and Valon capitulated during the last standard month, freeing up resources for the final assault on Shardenus.>
<Shardenus?> asked Lopi, sending a sceptical glyph along with the databurst. <Already?>
<Indeed,> canted Ys. <Rauth has marshalled his forces effectively.>
Lopi ran his hands through his cropped hair. The movement made his hololithic outline flicker.
<Commander Arven Rauth,> he canted. <The Iron Hand.>
Ys indicated a positive.
<What is your assessment of him?> asked Lopi. <My data is inconsistent.>
<I am not surprised,> canted Ys. <He divides opinion. Have you fought alongside the Iron Hands before?>
<No.>
<Then you will quickly determine the issues. The Iron Hands are an interesting subject for psychological study, and Rauth conforms to type. Do not expect flexibility. He is careful with his objectives but careless with his assets.>
Lopi frowned, and couched his response in a disapproval-formation.
<He will not be careless with mine,> he canted. <Perhaps it might be worth reminding him just what it takes to deploy a battle-formation at such notice.>
<We could,> she replied, <but it would make little difference.>
Ys felt the stirrings of what she might once have recognised as amusement.
<This is all you need to know about Rauth,> she explained. <He will never stop. Once set on his course, he will neither deviate nor slacken. I do not believe this to be a trait unique to him; I believe it to be a characteristic of the entire Chapter. A result, perhaps, of over-reliance on augmetics.>
The last point was delivered with an irony indicator, to which Lopi responded with a smile.
<Understood,> he canted. <Though, in my limited experience, that sounds like most Chapters.>
Lopi blinked and suppressed a yawn. Ys could see the fatigue lying heavily on his features and decided to bring the briefing to a speedy close. There would be much work ahead of them both before the Praxes formation would be ready for deployment, and bringing five Titan war engines and nine mechanised skitarii battalions to theatre amounted to a significant logistical headache.
<The forces for the Shardenus operation are set,> she canted. <Rauth has overall command of the Territo battlegroup and also leads a full clan of Iron Hands.>
<Clan?>
<Chapter-specific designation, analogous to a Codex company: 136 Space Marines and 23,451 mortal auxiliaries deployed on five vessels including the strike cruiser Kalach. Four other clans are engaged throughout the subsector on other suppression missions, though from what I can gather they engage in little communication with one another.>
Lopi absorbed the information carefully.
<And the rest?> he asked.
<The Guard contingent is led by Lord General Raji Nethata. As we speak he is in the process of landing 127,000 troops, mostly drawn from the 126th Ferik Tactical. He also has command of two battalions of Harakoni drop-troops and seven battalions of heavy armour, plus the usual Naval support. I have uploaded the details to the core.>
<What do we know of Nethata?>
<A long service record, marked with seven distinguished commendations. Seventeen engagements are recorded with Martian involvement, and the tech-priests registered no complaints. Aside: I find myself admiring his mettle. He stood up to Rauth on several occasions during pre-deployment, and that is, I suspect, not easy for an unimproved human to do.>
Lopi raised an eyebrow.
<No doubt. So they have been at odds.>
<Sporadically. As I said, Rauth is careless of those he serves alongside. Casualty rates among the Guard have been several points higher than normal.>
<But Rauth’s methods,> canted Lopi. <They obtain results.>
<Undeniably,> replied Ys. <Nethata appears to display concern for his men. He does not like seeing them used as expendable adjuncts to Rauth’s enthusiasm.>
<How touching.>
<Is that sarcasm, princeps?> Ys reached for another polberry. <That is not like you.>
<Apologies. Perhaps I do need some rest. I will digest this information carefully, though – it has been useful. I see that, as ever, our Imperial brethren have their little issues to work through.>
<We all do, Firax.>
Lopi looked directly at her.
<That is true, magos,> he canted. <You will have your work cut out keeping an eye on them all. Let us keep in close touch, the two of us; we may find ourselves awkwardly positioned if we are called on to adjudicate.>
Ys sent a complex prefix to her response which indicated that there was no need to worry, and that she had already given the political side of her assignment a great deal of thought, as had the hierarchy back on Mars, but that she understood his concern.
<Noted,> was all she explicitly canted. <Everything, as always, will be kept under review.>
Fires still raged across the Helat. The wide ash plains east of Shardenus’s principal hive cluster burned with a web of crimson trenches, making it look as if the crust of the planet had been scored open to expose the magma beneath. Skeletons of downed troop carriers and tangled tank-traps smouldered amid the torn-up earth, fanned by the warm wind that carried the ash.
New structures were already being built among the wreckage. Massive constructor vehicles had been landed – mobile gantries, corkscrew-nosed excavators and earthmovers with segmented tracks and swaying extractor claws. Pits were dug, power plants installed, medicae facilities erected, blast walls lowered, artillery points established. Constant streams of atmospheric landers descended from the orbital carriers bringing munitions, stores and troops with them. Among the columns of lifters wheeled the attack craft of the Imperial Navy – blunt-nosed Marauder bombers trailing with gouts of smog, Lightning fighter escorts screaming along in tight formations, Vulture gunships lurking over construction sites with their fuselage lights blinking in the gloom.
With the first-stage assaults over, the Imperial commanders were gathering the enormous forces at their disposal in readiness for the assault on Shardenus’s hive spires. Planetfall had been achieved with acceptable losses, mostly due to the fire unleashed by Navy destroyers from orbit as well as clinical strikes launched by Iron Hands tactical squads.
No one was under any illusion that the next stage would be as easy. The spire cluster of Shardenus Prime was void-shielded, ringed with artillery-studded walls and stuffed with millions of defenders. That fortress was the principal target, the nexus of the entire campaign, the linchpin upon which the fate of a dozen worlds and billions of lives rested.
view swept across kilometres of territory, seething with troop movements, before rising up from the plains to the Helatine Massif, across the industrial wasteland of the Gorgas Maleon and finally halting at the gates of the spire cluster itself.
Gigantic turrets rose high into the smoggy atmosphere of Shardenus. They looked less like human dwelling places and more like immense, fractured mountains of iron. Each gothic pinnacle of the conurbation reared up, terraced and pitted, in jagged lines of black against a rust-red sky.
It was a vision of hell, a smog-choked nightmare of hyper-industry and contamination. Even on maximum augmentation, his magnoculars revealed little detail on the flanks of the distant spires, but Nethata knew full well what went on within the dark metal walls of those gargantuan structures. He knew that millions of men and women lodged there, rammed into hab-units like rats stuck in a sewer. He knew that they worked fourteen-hour days in humming, clanging manufactoria, churning out lines of munitions and machine parts. He knew that they retired after those periods, exhausted, for scant rest in tiny rooms that stank of stale urine and were illuminated by flickering, insect-choked lumen-bars.
Above all, he knew that the core activities of humanity – eating, sleeping, making love, laughing, dreaming – were only fitfully remembered in there. Those people lived a half-existence of stress and drudgery, sustained in life only by the Imperium’s endless, ravenous need to keep them on their feet long enough to produce more raw material for the galaxy-wide war machine.
Such souls had ceased to be individuals worthy of pity or consideration. They were components – ingredients – in the eternal feast, a feast upon which mightier forces gorged themselves.
Nethata knew all that. He’d seen the same acts played out across a hundred worlds, all wreathed in smog like Shardenus, all home to nothing more than toil and despair.
What lifts a man above that station? he thought to himself, peering through the lenses at the far-off object of his army’s coming wrath. What makes his life more than a futility?
He put his magnoculars down and snapped the lens-covers closed. From his high vantage point on the command post’s observation platform he looked out over the slowly forming shape of his army. Men, thousands of them, marched in columns across the ash plains, each one clasping a lasgun to his chest.
When he takes up a weapon. When he resists. Then, he is exalted.
‘Sir?’
Nethata snapped out of his introspection to see Slavo Heriat standing before him.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Rauth desires your presence,’ said Heriat. ‘Within the hour, if possible.’
Nethata clamped the magnoculars to his belt and turned away from the view. He faced Heriat, and said nothing for a while.
The two figures looked very different. Nethata was a short, vigorous man, still powerfully built and bullish despite two centuries of active service. His skin was the colour of burnt umber and his hair was as black as oil. His chin jutted forwards, giving him a belligerent, officious air, though when he spoke his voice was soft. His accent was that of his home world, the high-gravity planet Moal, something he’d not lost in all the years of campaign across the void. He wore the olive green uniform of the Ferik Tactical, neatly adorned with an array of Imperial decorations across his broad chest. A heavy urlwool cloak hung down his back, pinned at the shoulder with a stylised bronze aquila.
Commissar-General Slavo Heriat stood nearly a head taller than Nethata and was as lean and taut as a hunting hound. His flesh was a smooth pale grey, except around his eyes and nostrils where the skin had sunk into redness. Sores indicating the congenital condition skietica clustered at the edges of his thick-lipped mouth. He wore the long black leather coat favoured by his peers in the Commissariat, complete with orthodox high-peaked hat and iron-grey chest aquila.
A casual observer might have expected two such men to be at odds with one another, driven to disagreement by their obvious divergence in character and disposition. Such an observer would have been entirely wrong; for reasons that never strayed far from either of their minds, they were inseparable. For a hundred years they had been like hilt and shaft, like blade and scabbard, like trigger and barrel – just two parts of the same weapon.
‘I have an observation, Heriat,’ said Nethata.
‘Do you, sir?’ asked Heriat.
‘I do. The men we kill on this world believe, fervently, that they are fighting for the Emperor.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen the same reports,’ said Heriat.
‘What do you make of it?’
Heriat’s expression was uninterested.
‘They are mistaken,’ he said. ‘Such error is fatal.’
‘So it is proving,’ Nethata said. ‘And yet, it is strange, all the same.’
Nethata looked back out across the ash plains, over to where his forces were mustering ready for the assault to come. Huge areas of cleared land were covered with prefabricated barrack-complexes. Columns of armoured vehicles, stained black from the ash, crawled slowly to the front.
‘This world is governed by powers who wish the ruin of humanity,’ he said. ‘My psykers froth at the mouth and warn me of horrors growing in those spires, and even I can feel it.’
He looked back to Heriat.
‘Why do they not sense it?’ he asked. ‘Why can’t they see what masters now rule over them?’
Heriat maintained his chilling, impassive stare. His eyes, red-rimmed and ringed with darkness, were as empty as a dead man’s.
‘It takes time to corrupt a world,’ he said. ‘And do not fool yourself – how many of our men understand why they fight? They follow orders. They believe what we tell them. I make sure of it.’
Nethata frowned.
‘I do not like that,’ he said. ‘The death of heretics brings me joy; the death of the ignorant does not.’
‘I have agents in the hives, already working,’ said Heriat. ‘If we can persuade them, they will rise up and join us; if not, we will kill them. In either case, their souls will be saved.’
Nethata smiled.
‘So clear,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘So clear.’
‘That it is, sir,’ Heriat said. ‘Better the ignorant die than the guilty live.’
The commissar glanced down at the chrono lodged in the armour of his forearm.
‘Rauth is waiting,’ he said.
Nethata lost his smile.
‘Yes, you said,’ he replied, remaining where he was and looking over to the spires on the horizon, knowing what horrors would be necessary to break them. His expression was bleak. ‘He can wait a little longer.’
Several kilometres south-west of Nethata’s command headquarters, a cluster of buildings had been raised from the ash. Like everything else on the Helat, they were prefabricated units – created in the forges of void-going starships and lifted down to the surface by a procession of landers. The buildings were unlike the ferrocrete bunkers of the Imperial Guard – their surfaces were clean and finely tooled, unmarked by regimental devices or fleet designations. No windows marred the symmetry of the outer walls, which glistened darkly in the dull red light of Shardenus’s smog-wreathed suns.
Though each structure had stood in place for less than a local diurnal cycle, they looked as if they had been there forever. Ash blew against the heavy foundations and slipped over the molecule-smooth outer finish.
A flyer descended sharply towards the largest of the buildings, its landing lights whirling through the smoggy air. The flyer was as black as the structures below it, and was also without insignia or decoration.
With a single belch of neon-blue flame it slowed its descent and hovered over a bleak landing strip. Squat landing braces extended smoothly from their sheaths, flexing as the flyer made contact with the ground. Its main engines cut out, and a wash of smoke and steam slewed across the apron.
As
soon as it was down, a number of figures emerged from the surrounding buildings. None of them were fully human. Some had traces of visible flesh in isolated patches; others looked entirely metallic. All moved on tracks and had complex motive units strapped to their backs. Most had more than two arms, each of which terminated in a variety of tools, weapons and interface nodes. Before the flyer’s engines had fully wound down they began to fuss and tinker all over it, opening up service hatches and attaching refuelling tubes. Their impassive faces – little more than riveted plates of steel – gave nothing away as they worked.
In the wake of the servitors came five much larger figures – all over three metres tall and clad in the gigantic curves of Terminator armour. Four of them wore matt-black battle-plate with signs of heavy use on the ceramite. They carried double-barrelled boltguns and their helm-lenses glowed rust-red. Each wore a skeletal white hand device on their left shoulder guard and a skull-inset cog-wheel on their right. Imperial aquilae had been picked out in gunmetal-silver across their chests.
The fifth figure, in the lead, was clad similarly. His servos let out a low, grinding machine-hum as he moved. Like the others, every facet of his plate was painted a dull black, only relieved with stark white Chapter markings. Coils of tubing and clusters of pistons nestled amid the smooth curves of ceramite. Its armoured shell had been stripped back in several places, exposing panels of polished metalwork beneath.
None of those figures displayed any flesh. They looked like immense mobile statues, cast from chunks of black onyx and augmented with steel.
They came to a halt as a hatch in the side of the flyer opened, sending fresh gouts of steam tumbling across the ground. A single figure emerged from the hatch. He was clad much like the others, though his battle-plate was a dark blue – almost nightshade – rather than black. He carried the white hand device on his left pauldron alongside the skull-and-coronet sigil of a Chief Librarian. His head was buried under an iron cowl, encrusted with dark crystals and an array of slender probes.
He nodded to the lead warrior – a brief gesture, barely perceptible amid all the interlocking layers of ceramite and cabling.