Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

1

An alarm sounds. A red hazard light starts to blink on a burnished copper console.

The officer of the watch, at his station on the bridge of the Samothrace, reacts swiftly but with some confusion. Are the ship’s systems notifying him of a malfunction? It is a high-scale alert.

He presses an ivory-cushioned key to access clarification. On the small glass screen, a phrase appears in luminous green characters.

[Weapons discharge, company deck]

That can’t be correct. Even if it somehow is, a weapons discharge must be accidental. The officer of the watch is, however, highly trained and well disciplined. He knows that answers, clarifications, corrections and explanations are secondary issues. They can wait. Even informing the captain can wait. He understands protocol. He reacts as he has been trained to react.

He activates the vox systems and rouses deck protection. His hands move with rehearsed agility over the keys. He sounds general quarters. He starts to systematically close the bulkheads fore and aft of the company deck space, and to lock out the through-deck access points and elevators.

Within four seconds of the alarm sounding, the officer of the watch has begun the procedure to cordon and secure the entire company deck, and to place deck troops at all access points. His response is exemplary. Within thirty-five seconds of the alarm sounding, a full, regulation lock-down would have been enforced.

But thirty-five seconds are not available.

The captain has heard general quarters sound, and has started out of his seat to join the officer of the watch and examine the issue. There is a frown on his face.

‘What’s going on, Watch?’ he asks.

His words are drowned out by another alarm. Then another alarm. Then another. Klaxons, bells and hooters overlap, screeching and booming.

The proximity alarm.

The collision warning alert.

The course defect advisor.

The detector array.

The passive auspex.

The primary orbital traffic alert from Calth System Control.

Something is coming at them. Something is moving into the dense and rigorously controlled shipping formations spread across the close orbit band. Something is sweeping through the orbital high anchorage without approval or authorisation.

The officer of the watch forgets, for a second, what he was in the middle of doing.

He looks at the main screen. So does the captain. So do the bridge crewmen.

What happens next, though they are looking straight at it, happens too fast for them to see.

The Campanile accelerates. It lights its main realspace drives, delivering main extending thrust in a position where it should be almost coasting at correction burst only. It raises its void shielding to make itself as unstoppable as possible. It fires itself like a bullet at the planet Calth.

The screams of its crew can still be heard, but no one is listening.

Main extending thrust is a drive condition used for principal acceleration, the maximum output that takes a starship to the brink of realspace velocity as it makes the translation to the empyrean. It is a condition that is used as a starship moves away from a planet towards the nearest viable Mandeville Point, a distance that is roughly half the radius of an average star system.

There is no such long run-up here. The Campanile is already inside the orbit of Calth’s satellite. There is not enough range for it to reach anything like maximum output or velocity. Even so, it is travelling at something close to the order of forty per cent of the realspace limit as it reaches the edge of the atmosphere. It is travelling too fast for anything physical, such as an eye or a pict-corder or a visual monitor, to see it. It is only visible to scanning systems and sensors, to detectors and auspex. They shriek at its sudden, savage, shockwave approach.

Their shrieks are as futile as the unheard screams of its lost crew.

It does not hit Calth.

There is something in the way.

The Campanile streaks like a missile into Calth’s orbital shipping belt. It punches through the formations of ships in parking orbit, the rows of freighters, barges and troop vessels at high anchor, the precisely spaced lines of vast cruisers and frigates, the glittering clouds of small craft, loaders, lifters and boats attending the parent ships.

It is like a bolter round fired into a crowd.

It misses the Mlatus, the Cavascor, the Lutine and the Samothrace by less than a ship’s length. It passes under the beam of the battleship Ultimus Mundi and skims the back of the gargantuan carrier ship Testament of Andromeda. Its shields graze the hull of the strike craft Mlekrus, vaporising the masts and arrays of its starboard detectors. It slices between the battle-barges Gauntlet of Victory and Gauntlet of Glory. By the time it crosses the bow of the grand cruiser Suspiria Majestrix, shredding the mooring and fuelling lines that secure the famous vessel to its bulk tenders, the Campanile has begun to swat aside small craft, annihilating them against the front of its shields. The small ships disintegrate, fierce blue sparks fizzle against the shield shimmer: cargo boats, lighters, ferries, maintenance riggers. The Campanile’s shield displacement hurls others out of the way like a tidal bore, swirling into each other, compressing them with gravimetric thrust, crashing them against the hulls of larger ships or the support cradles of the outer orbital yards.

Then the Campanile reaches the main shipyard.

The Calth Yards are orbiting islands, the fledgling beginnings of the planet’s first proper superorbital plate. There are a dozen of them orbiting Calth. This is Calth Veridian Anchor, the largest and oldest of them. It is a massive edifice of jetties and slips, ship cradles and docks, suspension manufactories, habitats, depots and docking platforms. It is a little over three hundred kilometres across, a raft of metal and activity and life.

The Campanile hits it, creating light. Void shields moving at high sub-light velocities strike physical matter, and mutually annihilate. The tender simply vaporises the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock, shredding the superstructure of the giant berth cradle, and the cruiser Antipathy docked inside it. Cut in half, the nine kilometre-long Antipathy vanishes in a ripple of rapidly expanding heat and light as its drives detonate, and six thousand lives disappear with it. The blast incinerates the two manufactory modules adjoining the graving dock, instantly killing another thirty thousand artificers and engineers, and shears the superstructure away from arrestor silos A112 and A114, both of which collapse sideways, spilling the escort Burnabus into the fast escort Jeriko Rex. Both vessels suffer catastrophic hull damage. The Burnabus crushes and deforms like a spent shell case.

The Campanile is still moving. As the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock disintegrates behind it, it punches on through Assembly 919, a hollow spheroid currently housing the Menace of Fortis, the Deliverance of Terra and the Mechanicum fabrication ship Phobos Encoder. All three ships are obliterated. The assembly spheroid ruptures like a glass ball. Propelled debris rips into attached habitat modules, voiding them to space. Part of the Phobos Encoder is flung out of the explosion and spins into the yard’s principal cargo facility, which buckles laterally. This secondary impact destroys forty-nine lift ships and one hundred and sixty-eight small lighters and ferries. Cargo pods and transportation containers spew out like beads from a snapped necklace, like grains of rice from a ripped sack. They spill, tumbling. Some start to glow blowtorch blue as they plunge into the high atmosphere.

Calth Veridian Anchor shudders. Internal explosions propagate through it, driven along by the devastating trajectory of the Campanile. Habitats and depots blow out. Jetties collapse. Manipulator cranes buckle and fold like wading birds struck by a hunter’s buckshot. The Aegis of Occluda catches fire, all seven kilometres of it, in its ship cradle. The Triumph of Iax, secured in an arrestor slip, is crippled as a storm of debris penetrates it. Its secondary drives implode, ripping the massive ship through ninety degrees like a man being swung by his ankles. The bow, still encased in its slip housing framework, encounters the Tarmus Usurper, which is being fitted out in the adjacent slip. The collision mangles them, tears them, lacerates their hulls. Atmospherics void explosively from rent hull plates, aerosol jets filled with particles that are tiny, tumbling bodies.

Light blossoms. The annihilation of matter is vast, and light is the only form in which it can escape. The battleship Spirit of Konor, seventeen kilometres long and one of the most powerful warships in the fleet of the Five Hundred Worlds, ignites, and then vanishes as critical damage compromises its power plants and vast munitions stockpiles. Huge, burning sections of the yard structure are ejected upwards, whirling, into space, or are spat down at the world beneath. The Ultramar Zenith Graving Dock suffers integral gravimetric failure and drops out, breaking and twisting towards the planet below. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, supported by that dock, rips free of its moorings and begins to slide backwards out of the collapsing cradle, in some ghastly parody of a ship launch. Its drives are off-line. It has no power to prevent its slide or stabilise its position, at least nothing that can be lit or brought to bear fast enough. It is a huge ship, twelve kilometres long. It simply slips away backwards, like a vast promontory of ice calving from a glacier into the sea.

The Campanile is still moving. Its shields finally fail and it is just a solid projectile, a mass of metal. It annihilates two more slipways, and the ships within them, cripples the anchored carrier Johanipus Artemisia, and then rams through the data-engine hub in the centre of the yard structure. All the data-engines are destroyed instantly. The automatics fail. The noosphere experiences a critical and fatal interrupt. Another thirty-five thousand individuals perish as the yard’s core is obliterated.

Impact has virtually erased the unshielded mass of the Campanile. Its structure is atomised, except for the largest chunks of it, which punch onwards as the ship breaks up, still travelling at immensely high realspace velocities, communicating billions of tonnes of force. The largest surviving piece, a part of the Campanile’s solid-core drive section, spins out like a ricochet and kills the battleship Remonstrance of Narthan Dume like a slingshot pellet to the brainpan.

The final pieces of the Campanile clear the far side of Calth Veridian Anchor and spray on out across the planet, scattering, dipping and burning like meteorites.

This entire catastrophe has taken less than a second to occur. It has been entirely silent, a light-blink in the soundless void.

All that any observers – either on nearby vessels or the surface of the planet – would have seen was a blinding flash, like a star going nova, that was instantly replaced by a propagating series of overlapping, expanding fireballs that consume the entire sky.

The lightshock overloads the resolution of the bridge screens aboard the Macragge’s Honour. They brown out, fizzling. Plugged servitors squeal and chatter. Automatic systems slam the blast shutters on every bridge window port, shutting them in a ruddy, armoured gloom.

Marius Gage rises from his seat.

‘What the hell was that?’ he demands.

No one answers.

‘Find out!’ he roars.

The shockwave hits.

There is a blink. Ventanus knows what it is. Instinct identifies it in a fraction of the time it would take his conscious mind to explain it. It’s the electromagnetic pulse that precedes a major explosion.

He has time to see that Selaton has sensed it. The seneschal has not. Her human senses are too modest to register the blink. She’s saying something.

Ventanus grabs her and pulls her down. Arbute cries out, not understanding at all. He knows his armoured fingers are breaking some of her ribs. There is still a chance he can shield her with his body.

A brand-new sun fills the heavens above Numinus starport.

Light sears, then fire fills the sky over the fields and the estuary at Neride like a roasting surge from god’s own flamer.

Oll Persson flinches, though the heat and wind are still half a minute away. He’s seen ships explode in orbit. He’s never seen anything this big.

The twilight flushes orange. Evening shadows stretch behind them. The crop workers look up, baffled, horrified.

‘Trooper Persson?’ Graft asks, unable to frame a more complex question.

‘God save us all,’ Oll says.

The swartgrass stirs, swishes.

The wind hits, hot, as though a furnace door has opened nearby.

A thunderclap. That’s what it sounds like to Hellock.

‘What the bastard shitfire is–’ he starts to say to anyone near enough to hear him, plucking his latest smoke out from between his lips. Trooper Rane is right in front of him. Rane is suddenly a silhouette, so are the stacks and spires of the city over the river: black shapes against a sky that’s turned white, like some excess of dawn, like sheet bastard lightning, but as bright as the forked stuff.

Hellock doesn’t know what’s just happened, but he already senses it’s the worst thing he’s ever going to experience.

He’s wrong.

The sky explodes over Numinus City. Braellen and Androm stand up, snapping out of rest mode. They don’t speak because there’s nothing factual to state yet, but they draw their weapons without waiting for an instruction from Captain Damocles.

It’s a high altitude detonation, high altitude or low orbit. Multiple detonations, overlapping, that’s clear a second later as the flashes chop and flicker like a strobe, blooming fire inside fire inside fire.

‘We just lost a ship,’ says Androm.

‘That wasn’t just one ship,’ Captain Damocles corrects.

‘Did you see that?’ Captain Phrastorex cries. ‘Did you see that?’

‘I saw it, captain,’ replies Sergeant Anchise.

The sky to the west of their camp is rippling with light, as if someone’s moving a glow-globe behind a veil of silk. There’s a growl, a long rumble that seems to be coming from space and shows no sign of ending.

‘Get the men up,’ Phrastorex yells.

The vox is screwed up. Weird sounds spit and cough through his helmet every time Phrastorex tries to open a link. Is that screaming?

Is that… chanting?

‘Get the men up and ready!’ he repeats, and then starts to pound across the clearing to the areas marked out for the 111th. Ekritus needs to get his men moving too. Something’s going on. Phrastorex hasn’t felt an intuitive wince this bad since the firefight on Cavolotus V. Ekritus needs to get ready for whatever this turns out to be.

A strange wind is stirring the trees, making them swish. The wind’s warm, dry. It feels like something bad has exhaled.

‘Ekritus!’ Phrastorex yells.

Down on the plains below the woods, even the Word Bearers are rousing. Phrastorex can see them forming up. He can see their Army units assembling. That’s good. Damn good. Far better drill than he expected of the XVII, given their reputation as heathen berserkers. Far faster response.

Good. Good, then. They’re all standing ready, ready to face this. United as one. It gladdens his heart.

They can face this together, whatever this is.

The datashock kills Server Uhl Kehal Hesst.

It doesn’t kill him instantly the way it kills forty-six of the data moderati in the cogitation wells around him, but it bursts and fries key sections of his cerebral architecture. This is brain damage that cannot be repaired, and from which he will never recover. Synaptic junctions are burned out like faulty wiring. A brain-bleed begins in his frontal lobe.

He remains standing.

Light hits the orbital Watchtower at Kalkas Fortalice a nanosecond after the shockwave of data. The noosphere collapses like an ice sculpture in an oven. The tower’s manifold field stutters out. Hesst feels and absorbs the shared agony of several thousand deaths: his modified brethren aboard the primary shipyard, aboard docked vessels, in the tower around him. Some deaths are quick: flashes of annihilation. Others, still fast, are physically traumatic: the liquid spatter of compression, the explosive misery of decompression, the blunt fury of impact, the screaming hell of immolation.

Some deaths are slower. They take whole parts of seconds to end. The plugged men and women in the amniotic armourglas caskets around him reel as hammer blows of data assault their brains. Information overload. Sensory overload. Hypertraumatic inload syndrome.

He is almost relieved when the noosphere fails.

He sways. The windows of the tower have automatically tinted to reduce the flare of the orbital explosions. Hesst’s permanent MIU link burns like a white-hot wire through his soul. His entire bioengineered self is fatally compromised.

Only one thought, captured in simple binaric form, remains within his grasp.

Hesst surrendered discretionary mode four hundred and sixty-two minutes ago. He surrendered it to the orbital bioengines.

The bioengines, all the orbital automatics, have died.

Calth’s planetary weapons grid has just ceased to function.

Telemechrus wakes again. He wakes bolt upright awake, screaming awake, howling awake, as if from a nightmare. There’s cold sweat on his back, but he doesn’t have a back. There’s blood in his mouth, but he doesn’t have a mouth. His eyes are open, but he doesn’t have eyes.

A flash-flood of data has shocked him into ignition, shocked him so hard that for a moment he is given a physical memory of his life before transformation. Not his recent transformation. From before that, from before his formative transformation by biogenetic engineering to Space Marine. For a second he was granted a memory of waking from a nightmare as an unmodified human being.

As a child.

He realises it wasn’t just a data shock. There was a significant physical shock too. His casket has been violently disturbed, thrown, dropped.

His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for a little over nine hours and ten minutes. External sensors are down. He can’t see. He can’t open the casket. There is no noosphere. There is no data inload.

His own sensors, the cyberorganic sensors of his combat chassis mount, tell him the external temperature of the casket is over five thousand degrees Celsius. His inertial locators tell him that he is upside down and falling.

At terminal velocity.

The sky erupts. Criol Fowst clutches his athame so tightly against his breast that the blade draws blood from his fingers.

Staring up at the firestorm that is devouring the sky, the Brotherhood of the Knife starts to chant the litany of the Octed.

Ushkul Thu! Ushkul Thu!

Fowst wants to join in, but he is too busy laughing, laughing uncontrollably, like a maniac.

Erebus looks up from the circle of black stones. The centre of the ritual circle, where the bodies of many of the Tzenvar Kaul processionals lie smouldering or twitching, has not been a focused reality for almost ten minutes. Matter squirms there. The membrane of the universe has turned liquid. There’s a smell like the smell of weird dreams, strong but not in any way identifiable.

Essember Zote of the Gal Vorbak mutters something as the first flash hits the southern skies. Erebus is already watching. Fire, light, first light, a dawn of sorts. Erebus understands that several clear strategic benefits will be achieved by their plan, but they are all military objectives and they count little to him. To the first of the Dark Apostles, it is the meaning that matters: the significance, the art, the context.

The light in the sky, that huge bright flare they have wrought upon this day, that is the Ushkul Thu. In the archaic language of the Holy Worlds, the words mean ‘Offering Sun’ or ‘Tribute Star’. It is hard to translate it precisely. There is a sense of sacrifice, a sense of the promise represented by dawn, and the sense of something greater to follow.

There is a greater sunrise to come.

2

Calth Veridian Anchor, the vast shipyard, is ablaze and dying. Damaged beyond the possibility of salvation or stabilisation, its giant platform structure is tipping, shredding, pulsing like a white dwarf star that has suddenly been placed in Calth’s orbit.

It is an energy fire, a nuclear fire, spherical and incandescent, throbbing. The nearby orbital platforms shiver at the series of shockwaves thumping out of the stricken orbital. Some have taken collateral damage from outflung superstructure debris or parts of exploding ships, and are now burning or holed. Along the anchorage line, ships of the fleet are combusting or crippled. Debris and ejecta continue to tumble from the underside of the foundering orbital, caught by Calth’s gravity.

It is chaos. Electromagnetic slams have crippled communication networks, and what little vox and pict remains is choked with frantic intership traffic: questions, demands, entreaties, insistences. What has happened? What is happening? You will tell me immediately what is happening!

There is no information, no data. The Mechanicum’s throat is cut, its voice-box torn out, its brain mush. The only facts are those available to anyone with eyes, or a window port, or a functioning picter. An act of unimaginable violence has been perpetrated. Calth high anchor is a firestorm. The death toll is huge. The injury to the fleet and the yard infrastructure is unthinkable.

It is an attack. It can only be an attack. An act of war. No accident could have been so far-reaching in its effect. The Veridian system and its approaches are protected by scrupulous systems of check and countercheck, by peerless levels of redundant security. This magnitude of catastrophic damage would have required malice in order to achieve it: a deliberate and inimical intent to circumvent the secure cordon.

This is no accident. This is an attack.

Someone, somewhere, gabbling in the flash flood of unfiltered vox traffic, uses the word ‘ork’ or ‘greenskin’. The enemy has got wind of the Veridian mobilisation. It has received warning of the force poised to launch at it, and it has struck first.

Within ten or twenty seconds of the first impact, ships across the high anchorage have desperately begun to power drives and weapon systems. Some are generating power in the hope of raising shields, or even preparing to slip authorised moorings so that they can reposition.

Then a battle-barge opens fire. The massive barge is known to the Ultramarines as the Raptorus Rex, but it has been renamed, with as little notice as the Word Bearers gave when they changed their battledress colours, the Infidus Imperator.

The Infidus Imperator is the barge of Kor Phaeron.

It discharges all of its primary lance weapons at the battle-barge Sons of Ultramar and reduces it to a whizzing cloud of metal chaff carried outwards in all directions by an expanding ball of fire.

The Infidus Imperator chooses its next target. In formation behind the mighty craft, the Crown of Colchis starts to fire too. So does the battleship Kamiel. So do the Flame of Purity and the Spear of Sedros.

And so does the flagship of Dark Apostle Erebus, the battle-barge Destiny’s Hand.

Shipmaster Ouon Hommed, captain of the heavy destroyer Sanctity of Saramanth, sees the Infidus begin its merciless prowl along the anchorage line. He understands precisely what the vast Word Bearers barge is doing. It’s executing the ships in the line beside it the way a man might execute a row of helpless prisoners.

He’s done it before himself. At Farnol High Harbour, after the Ephigenia Compliance, he crawled the Sanctity along the slipways, scuttling the captured enemy ships so they could not be reactivated and re-used. It was a graceless, unrewarding task, utterly pragmatic. The ships were too dangerous to leave intact.

As a shipman, as a person whose life has been dedicated to the service of the great starships, he’s never taken pleasure in scuttling duties.

Why does it seem like the Infidus is relishing it?

Hommed is screaming at his command staff, demanding yield of power, weapons, shields, data… anything they can give him. The Sanctity was sitting at slip cold, drives tamped down. With the best will in all the worlds, it will take fifty minutes to rouse the ship to operational readiness.

This is true of the entire fleet. The starships of Ultramar were sitting cold at high anchor for the conjunction. All of their power plants were at lowest yield for the purposes of maintenance, loading and embarkation checks. None of them needed ready drives or weapons or shields. They were all under the protective aegis of the planet’s weapon grid.

‘Power!’ he yells. ‘I want power!’

‘Yield is rising, sir,’ his first officer replies.

‘Nothing like fast enough. I need active condition!’

‘The Drive Room says we can’t hope to raise the yield any faster than–’

‘Tell the bastards in the Drive Room I want power, not excuses!’

There’s no time. The Infidus is coming. Whatever has happened, whatever outrage has occurred, the ships of the XVII clearly believe it to be an attack, and clearly regard the ships of Ultramar as a threat. They’re killing everything they can pre-emptively, killing everything before…

Hommed stops. He forces his mind to clear for a second. He realises how stricken he is with panic and extreme stress. Everyone is. The bridge around him is pandemonium. A clear head is the only hope he has to salvage anything, anything at all, from the situation.

The Infidus is coming. That’s the point. That’s the point. The thrice-damned Infidus is coming. Every ship was powered down at the time of the attack, which is why they’re all helpless and shield-less now.

Except the Infidus is coming. It’s moving. So are other ships from the Word Bearers fleet. It’s not that they’re responding hastily. It’s not that they’re taking wild shots at imagined targets before finding out what’s really going on.

It’s the fact that they’re moving at all.

They weren’t powered down. They were sitting at anchor hot.

They knew what was coming.

They were ready.

‘Those bastards,’ he breathes.

The Infidus closes. It’s firing callous broadsides; the whole length of it lighting up with multicoloured fury. Each salvo causes the counter-active gravimetrics to tense and brace the ship against the monumental discharge.

Each salvo murders another helpless vessel.

The Constellation of Tarmus disappears in a clap of heat and metal.

The Infidus closes.

‘Power?’ Hommed asks.

His first officer shakes his head.

The Infidus shivers and looses another broadside. Enough firepower to scorch and split a moon.

The Sanctity of Saramanth, struck amidships, bursts asunder.

Magos Meer Edv Tawren registers her own hyper-elevated adrenal levels. She has survived the great data-death that has ripped through the orbital Watchtower. Hesst saved her. Basic operational procedure saved her.

She does not want to think about that irony. That happenstance. That kindness.

There’s too much to do. They are in the middle of an unthinkable crisis. A disaster. She has to rescue the situation.

She has to save Hesst.

The tower’s elevators and lifting platforms are out. She hauls up the skirts of her long robe and rushes up the main spiral staircase. Smoke hangs in the air. The buzz of alarms. Voices echo from above and below. Outside, the sky is unnaturally luminous.

She passes servitors that are stumbling and mindless, trailing torn plugs, drooling. Some have slumped. Some are whining or replaying bursts of their favourite data like nursery rhymes. Some are smacking their heads against the staircase wall.

Toxic-data. Data-death. Overload.

Let Hesst be alive.

He was plugged in. He would have taken the brunt of the shock–

Don’t think about it. Just get upstairs.

She trips over the sprawled body of a high-grade servitor. A hand steadies her arm.

‘Do not fall, magos,’ a meatvoice requests.

Tawren looks up into the menacing face of Arook Serotid, the master of the tower’s skitarii brigades. Arook is a creature modified for war, not data. His ornate armour is part ceremonial, part ritual, a deliberately baroque throwback to the eras of threat-pattern and fear-posture.

‘Indeed, I will not,’ she agrees. He helps her up the stairs, moving blind and mindless servitors out of her way. He is a metre taller than her. His eyes are hololithic crimson slits in his copper visor. She notices that one of them is flickering.

‘We took a hit,’ he says.

‘A major datashock,’ she says. ‘Hypertraumatic inload syndrome.’

‘Worse than that,’ he replies. ‘Explosions in orbit. We’ve lost ships, orbitals.’

‘An attack?’

‘I fear so.’

They’re both using fleshvoice mode. She’s painfully aware of it. It’s so slow, so painstaking. No canting, no data-blurts. No simultaneous and instant transmissions of ideas and data. She doesn’t believe she’s ever spoken to Arook in fleshvoice before, and he’s clearly not used to talking at all.

But the mannered effort is necessary. They were both insulated from the datashock. They must stay insulated.

‘I need to reach the server,’ she explains.

He nods. That one red eye is still blinking. A malfunction? Arook has taken some damage. Like all skitarii, he would have been linked to the noosphere, so the datashock would have hit him like everyone else. However, the skitarii also have their own dedicated emergency manifold, a crisis back-up. Arook has been hurt by the inload shock, but he’s switched to the reinforced, military code system of his brigade.

He leads the way up.

‘You are undamaged, magos?’ he asks over his shoulder.

‘What?’

‘Are you hurt, magos?’

‘No. The data shock missed me. I was unplugged.’

‘That was fortunate for you,’ Arook says.

‘It was. There was a scrapcode problem. Server Hesst switched from discretionary to deal with it.’

Arook glances at her. His visor looks like a raptor’s beak. His shoulders and upper body are huge, like a bull simian. He understands. It is simple protocol. When dealing with a significant scrapcode problem, a server will have his second-in-command unplug so that there is no danger of the second-in-command being compromised by the scrapcode. It is an operational safety measure.

It has saved Tawren from far more than just a scrapcode infection.

‘Might the scrapcode be an issue?’ Arook asks.

Tawren has already thought of that. A serious noospheric failure brought on by a critical code corruption… that might have caused orbital collisions or accidents. It might have even caused the grid to misfire, or a ship to discharge weapons in error.

They reach the command deck. There’s a pall of smoke in the air. Technicians are struggling to free injured moderati from broken amniotic pods. Servitors hang limply from their plug sheafs. The screens are fizzling with blizzard noise.

Hesst is crumpled on the platform.

‘Out of my way!’ Tawren cries, shoving through the hesitant servitors and sensori clustered around him.

There’s a pool of dark fluid beside his head. She can smell the toxic hormones and excess chemicals that have seared through his bloodstream and ruptured his vessels.

‘We must disconnect him,’ she says.

Arook nods.

A technograde servitor blurts something.

‘In voice, damn you!’ Tawren snaps. ‘The noosphere’s gone.’

‘Disengaging the server could result in extreme cerebral trauma,’ the technograde clacks. ‘We need a cybersurgical team to properly detach him from the MIU.’

‘He’s dying,’ says Arook, looking down at the server. Arook has seen death many times, so he knows what he is looking at.

‘He is severely injured,’ the technograde clicks. ‘Expert disengagement may save him, but–’

‘We understand,’ says Tawren. She looks at Arook.

‘We need the specialists,’ she says. ‘If there’s any chance of saving him, we have to take it.’

‘Of course.’

She kneels beside Hesst, getting blood on her robes.

‘I’m here, server,’ she says, leaning in. ‘I’m here. It’s Meer Tawren. You must hold on. I’m ready to relieve you, but we need a surgical crew. Just hold on.’

Hesst stirs, a flicker of life.

He murmurs something.

‘Just hold on. I’m here,’ she says.

‘Unplug me,’ Hesst gurgles, flecking his chin with blood.

‘We need a surgical crew first, server. There has been a major incident.’

‘Never mind me. The grid is off. It’s off, Tawren. Unplug me and take over. You have to see if you can get it restarted.’

‘Wait,’ she soothes. ‘The surgeons are coming. Wait.’

‘Now!’

‘You’ll die, server.’

His eyelids flutter.

‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. The orbital bioengines have gone, Meer.’

Her eyes go wide. She glances at Arook.

‘They’ve gone,’ Hesst repeats, his voice a sigh. ‘You have to plug in, Meer. You have to take my place, plug in, and see what can be salvaged. See what control can be re-established.’

‘Server–’

‘You have to reconstruct the noosphere. Without the grid, Calth is defenceless.’

Tawren looks at the heavy cable-trunking of Hesst’s permanent MIU link, coiled on the floor under him like a dead constrictor snake. She can’t detach that without killing him, surely? Especially not with him in such a fragile state–

One of the sensori cries out.

They look up.

Debris is falling from the clouds from the orbital explosions. The first scraps of metal are raining down across the river valley, trailing fire like meteorites. She sees them strike the river in columns of steam, or scratch across the rooftops of Kalkas Fortalice. Some heavier chunks strike like rockets, exploding buildings. Something smacks against the command deck’s windows, crazing the armourglas.

The hail of debris is just the beginning. Larger objects are falling. Parts of ships. Parts of orbitals. Parts of docking yards.

Tawren sees it before the sensori do. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, twelve kilometres from bow to stern, falling backwards into the atmosphere from its ruptured drydock in a cloud of micro-debris, falling slowly and majestically, like a mountainside collapsing.

Falling, stern first, towards them and Kalkas Fortalice.

‘I don’t care what there isn’t, show me what there is!’ Marius Gage roars.

Zedoff, master of the Macragge’s Honour, starts to argue again.

‘Show him,’ a voice booms.

Guilliman is on the bridge.

‘Better still, show me,’ he growls.

‘Assessments! Everything you’ve got!’ Zedoff yells at his crew.

Impact was less than two minutes ago. The flagship’s screens are blind. There’s no data, no noospheric link, no contact with the grid. What comms traffic exists is a stew of screaming voices.

‘We’re blind,’ the Master of the First Chapter tells his primarch.

‘Some impact in orbit?’ Guilliman says. He casts a look at Magos Pelot, who is seizing on the deck. Most of the other Mechanicum personnel are faring no better.

Crewmen start handing the primarch data-slates. He scans fragments of the record. Gage knows that Guilliman is putting them together in his mind. A line of data from here, the last snatch recorded from there, a pict, the most recent auspex scan…

‘Something hit the yards, we think,’ says Gage. ‘Scanners are down, screens are dead.’

‘Use your damned brain, Marius,’ Guilliman says. He turns to the bridge crew.

‘Open the shutters! All of them. All the window ports!’

Servo systems begin to raise the blast shutters that have sealed the bridge’s vast crystalflex panels. Some of the wall protective shutters have to be hand-wound back to reset. Deck stewards rush to find the crank handles.

The main shutter crawls up. An alarming quality of light, unsteady and flickering, spills in through the opening gap.

‘In the name of Terra,’ Gage murmurs.

‘Shipmaster,’ Guilliman says, turning to Zedoff. ‘Your priorities are as follows. Power up. Shields up. Restore our sensory ability. Restore the vox. Inform me as any of these are achieved, and if any of them are going to take more than five minutes, I want an accurate time estimate.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Once we have vox, I want links to the following: each ship of the line commander, the server at the Watchtower, the ground commanders, the orbital station masters, not to mention my dear brother. Then–’

He stops as he hears Gage curse.

The shutters are raised high enough for them to see out. The bridge is bathed in firelight. They are looking out across the planet, across the vast and explosive destruction of Calth’s primary yards. Ships are on fire everywhere they look. Some are shaking and exploding, like live rounds left too close to ignition.

It’s an image Roboute Guilliman will never forget. It is more terrible than anything he could have imagined when the shockwave rattled him in his compartment and sent him running for the bridge.

It’s about to get worse.

‘That’s ship fire,’ he says, pointing at a blink of light.

‘That’s definitely ship fire,’ Zedoff agrees, a break in his voice.

‘Who the hell is firing?’ Guilliman asks. ‘What the hell are they shooting at?’

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He strides to the main detection console and pushes the bewildered staffers out of his way. They are so transfixed by the scene beyond the open shutters, they stumble aside like sleepwalkers.

‘Any auspex? Any at all?’ Guilliman asks.

One of the detection officers remembers where he is.

‘The pulse,’ he says. He coughs. ‘The electromagnetic pulse, my lord. It has rendered us insensible for a moment. Automatic restoration programs will–’

‘Take time,’ Guilliman finishes.

‘We could…’ the man stammers. ‘That is, I could authorise a restart of the detection array. But it might blow the links.’

‘And we’d lose everything and need a month in the yards to have the array refitted?’

‘Yes, my primarch,’ the man says.

‘Do it anyway,’ says Guilliman.

The man hesitates.

‘For your own good, hurry,’ Gage whispers to him. The officer jumps to work.

‘If this is a fight and you blow the array, we’re no use for anything,’ Gage says quietly.

‘We’re no use for anything already,’ Guilliman responds. He is staring at the view, absorbing every detail he can. He’s already mentally logged the names of several ships that have been crippled or destroyed.

‘The ship fire,’ he ponders. ‘It’s coming from… from the southern dayside. Close in, too. That’s not coming in from interplanetary space. That’s in amongst the anchorage.’

Gage says nothing. He’s not quite sure how the primarch is determining this from an eyes-only view of distance, space, burning gas, energy flares and backscattered light.

‘I think so,’ says Zedoff, who is more used to the view from a bridge window. ‘I think you’re correct, sir.’

‘Someone could be trigger happy,’ Guilliman says. ‘Firing because they think it’s an attack.’

‘It may be an attack,’ Gage says.

Guilliman nods. He’s still staring at the scene.

His calm is almost terrifying. Gage is transhuman: both bred and trained to know no fear. The acceleration of his own hearts and adrenal levels are simply a response to the situation, a readiness to act faster and more efficiently.

But Guilliman is at another level entirely. He is watching a critical disaster unfold on one of his most beloved planets: the miserable loss of a vital shipyard facility, the collateral damage, the destruction of ships, a portion of the fleet crippled, surface locations caught in the debris rain…

Even if it’s an accident, it’s a dire turn of events. And on this day of days, when so much prestige and statecraft was to be achieved.

It’s not an accident. Gage knows in his gut it’s not. And he knows the primarch knows it too.

But the primarch is considering things as though he’s contemplating the next move in a game of regicide.

‘Hurry with that auspex!’ Gage yells.

‘Put the vox on speaker,’ Guilliman tells the shipmaster.

‘It’s a jumble, sir–’

‘On speaker.’

A cacophony screeches across the massive bridge. Static, pulse-noise, code squeals, voices. There’s overlap, interrupt, distortion, bad signal. It’s as if the whole universe is screaming at them. The only voices Gage can hear with any clarity are the ones screaming for help, for answers, for permission to leave orbit or open fire.

Gage watches Guilliman listening.

‘They’re not speaking,’ Guilliman says.

‘What, sir?’ asks Gage.

Guilliman is listening intently. He’s teasing out every piece of detail from the uproar.

‘They’re not speaking,’ he repeats.

‘Who are not speaking?’ Gage asks.

‘The Word Bearers. The traffic, it’s all us.’

‘How do you know?’

Guilliman shrugs lightly, still listening. He’s recognising ship names, voices, keel numbers, transmission codes. Would that the Mechanicum could design a bioengine half as efficient as Guilliman’s mind.

‘We’re the ones requesting help, requesting clarification,’ he says. ‘We’re the ones asking for instructions, for permission to fire back. We’re the ones dying.’

He looks at Gage.

‘The Word Bearers are shooting at us,’ he says.

‘No. No, they simply would not–’

Guilliman silences him.

‘Whatever this is, whatever has happened, they think it’s an attack, and they think we’re part of it. Everything they believe about us has just appeared to come true, Marius, and they’re shooting at us.’

He turns to Zedoff.

‘Forget the auspex. Activate the lithocast and show me Lorgar. Nothing has greater priority.’

The first object hits. It’s a piece of debris. Oll Persson doesn’t know what it is exactly. He scarcely cares. A lump of ship. A piece of orbital.

It’s the size of a habitat; it comes down out of the burning sky at a forty-five degree angle. It’s blazing superhot like a meteor. It punches home like a rocket strike.

It hits the scrub land on the far side of the estuary. The impact shock throws them all over onto the ground. The swartgrass in the field around them is shredded up like chaff. Heat and air smack them, tumbling Oll and the workers, and then dust, and a storm of particulate debris. Then it rains. The rain is scalding hot. It’s river water from the estuary thrown up to steam and back by the hit.

A second later, another few million gallons of river hit them. The impact has thumped the river out of its bed, and driven a two-metre-high tidal bore up across Oll Persson’s land.

‘Get up!’ Oll yells to his paid-by-the-day workers. ‘Get up and run!’

The wave swallows him, sweeping him under.

He hits a fence post, grabs on, choking, dragged around by the ferocious surge, and then back as the water recedes in a sucking rush.

More objects are hitting. Two more big pieces strike on the far shore, like missiles. Vast plumes of fire spit into the sky. Smaller pieces of debris are hitting all around, like shells, like shots from light field guns. They blow holes in the ground like grenade blasts: shell bursts of mud and water and matted vegetation. Whizz and whistle, crump, ground-shake, backspatter of mud. It’s as if he’s back on Chrysophar, on that last tour from hell. He feels the old fear return, and prays to his god. His lungs are full of water. He’s covered in mud, black mud, that good, black alluvial soil.

The thunder is like the guns of Krasentine Ridge. A boom like sheets flapping in the wind. The shudder inside your ribs as the pressure hits you, quivering your diaphragm.

Dear god, dear god, let me live, let me live, I am your servant…

Not shells. Not shells from field guns in flak-sacked redoubts. Not shells. No stink of fycelene. But just as bad.

It’s raining on them now, raining burning debris. Pelting. Each hit is like a bomb.

‘Find cover!’ Oll yells.

Stupid. How stupid. Where is cover going to be in this? The sky is falling in.

Some of his workers are already dead. He sees a man clutching the squirting stump of an arm, writhing in the black mire, screaming. He sees parts of a woman he quite liked protruding from the steaming lip of an impact crater. He sees one boy dead, crushed, and another dragging himself along, his legs blown off.

Like Krasentine, just like Krasentine. The ridge. He came to Calth to leave that life behind, and it’s found him again.

Something burning like a falling star hits one of the fusion plants at Neride, and the ground leaps.

This time the tidal wave is four metres high and feels like a rockcrete wall.

Seneschal Arbute comes to. She looks at Ventanus as if he has attacked her. There’s a graze on the side of her face and she’s clutching her torso with both arms. Broken ribs.

‘Wh-what did you do?’ she asks.

She still has no idea.

‘Listen to me,’ Ventanus says. He kneels in front of her, towering over her even so. ‘Seneschal, listen. We’re going to find you a medicae and–’

‘Why did you hurt me? You hurt me!’

‘Seneschal, you must listen to me. There’s been–’

What has there been, Captain Ventanus? What should he say to her?

He has carried her into the shelter of an underpass walkway. The tiles are cool, but they can feel the heat of the fires at ground level. The sidelong light falling into the underpass is twitching orange.

‘What has happened?’ she asks. She’s starting to realise the extent of the situation.

Selaton approaches, herding some of her staff and a few dock workers. They’re bloody and dazed. One of them is hurt quite badly.

‘I can’t reach the company or the Chapter,’ Selaton tells Ventanus. ‘Vox is scorched out.’

Ventanus nods. Information is what they need right now. Information is victory. To get that, they’ll need a high-gain transmitter, a primary caster, something robust enough to have survived the electromagnetic shock.

He hears a noise. It vibrates the rockcrete beneath him. He strides to the mouth of the underpass.

The sky is a firestorm, ruddy and bright. Spikes and fronds of searing yellow and orange spit across it. There’s lightning too, massive electrical discharge. Burning debris is hurtling down. It’s as though they’re caught in a meteorite shower.

The starport is in chaos. Parts of it, especially the masts and higher gantries, have been damaged by the air-blast or the rain of debris. Heat-sear and overpressure have blown down cranes, rigs, loaders and illumination towers. Thick plumes of black smoke are rising from promethium tanks and sundered refineries.

Many loading vehicles, including two heavy lifters, have been brought down by the shock, and their crash sites are ablaze. Personnel are running in every direction. Ventanus sees bewildered crash teams and fire fighters. He sees bodies on the ground.

The noise is coming from a bulk transport. Trailing smoke and flames, it is passing low overhead, so low he feels the urge to duck. Fragments of debris are tumbling off it. It’s struggling to rise, but it’s never going to get enough lift. Two missiles of debris streaking down from high altitude spear into its back, exploding, causing it to lurch.

It ploughs on, engines howling, ground shaking, and crawls out of sight behind the towering hive habs and the outer docks.

There’s a blink of light. He feels it hit. How far away? Six kilometres? Seven? It feels like an earthquake. The air turns gritty and the vibration is so intense his vision blurs for a second.

Behind him, Arbute screams. The scream is so sudden, it makes Ventanus jump slightly. She’s limped up to join him at the mouth of the underpass, and she’s just seen everything else.

‘What is this? What’s happening?’

‘Stay calm. Please,’ Selaton says, reaching them.

‘Is this an attack?’ she asks.

The heat is intense. The smell of burning is dry and caustic. She has to shield her eyes from the glare. They do not.

‘No,’ says Selaton. ‘An accident. It has to be.’

Ventanus doesn’t know what to say.

‘Sir!’

An Ultramarine has appeared. He’s spotted them. He’s got a kill team with him. It’s Amant, a squad leader from 7th Company.

‘Do you know what this is?’ Ventanus asks.

‘No, captain.’

‘How many are with you?’

‘I’ve got three squads on port protection detail,’ replies Amant. ‘We can’t find or contact our sergeant.’

‘Do you have vox?’

Amant shakes his head. ‘Nothing working.’

‘There’s a listening station on the far side of the concourse,’ Arbute says. Ventanus looks at her. She’s leaning on Selaton’s arm to get up, wincing at the pain.

‘A listening station?’

‘Part of the port’s original traffic control system, before the upgrade. It has old but powerful casters.’

Ventanus nods at Arbute.

‘Good. Let’s find out what’s going on.’

‘Maybe we can find out about this gunfire too,’ says Amant.

‘What gunfire?’ Ventanus snaps.

‘Reports of shooting along the western perimeter, sir,’ says Amant. ‘I think it’s most likely a payload of munitions that’s been set off by fire, but it’s not confirmed yet.’

‘Let’s move. Quickly,’ says Ventanus. ‘I don’t think this is an accident at all.’

The moment it’s out of his mouth, he regrets saying it aloud.

‘Why not?’ asks Selaton.

‘Because I’m a pessimist,’ says Ventanus.

Selaton looks at him. They start to help the injured seneschal along.

‘Look,’ Ventanus tells his sergeant, ‘I couldn’t have caused this much disruption to Calth’s transport network if I’d tried.’

Amant glances at them.

‘Of course it’s an accident,’ he says. ‘What else could it be?’

Ventanus isn’t listening. He can feel a tremble in the air.

Everything turns black. A deep shadow has swept over them. He hears Arbute and her aides exclaim in mortal fear.

A ship is falling backwards across the sky. A grand cruiser. It’s immense. To see something so big and space-borne in scale comparison with a world’s surface is fundamentally shocking. It makes the ship look like the biggest object any of them has ever seen.

It is falling so slowly. It is sliding down the sky, spilling clouds of debris, trailing the disintegrating remains of its drydock. It’s as though Calth’s atmosphere is a deep lake and the ship is a tree trunk sinking gracefully into it. There is a primal majesty to such destruction. The descent they are witnessing feels mythical. It is like a moon that has slipped from the firmament. A god that has forgotten how to fly. It is like a fall from the old fables. Good’s plunge into evil. The bright to the dark.

‘The Antrodamicus,’ Ventanus whispers, recognising the lines of the cyclopean shape.

It seems as if it’s hanging, but it’s only moments from impact. It’s going to crush the world. The fires of its demise will scorch the continent.

‘Back,’ he starts to say. ‘Back!’

3

Brother Braellen assumes they’re going to head for the city. Captain Damocles has already ordered the transport crews to get ready. Whatever’s going on, it’s bad, and the people in Numinus are going to need help. Disaster control. Lock-down. From the Ourosene Hills, they can probably be there in two hours.

No one’s giving any orders. No one’s giving any anything. There’s no coordination.

So the captain is the ultimate authority 6th Company has. That’s fine with Braellen. They’ll move in, deploy, secure. Rescue and secure, they’ve trained for that.

And if it’s not an accident, if it’s an attack… They’ve trained for that too.

He’s thinking that when things change and their plans change with them.

It starts raining main battle tanks.

The first impact is surreal. Braellen sees it plainly. A Shadowsword superheavy, almost perfectly intact apart from one trailing track section, drops out of the stained sky about sixteen hundred metres ahead of him. The tank’s hull plating is faintly glowing pink from re-entry.

It hits. Hammer blow. Blinding light. Shock-wash.

The impact creates an explosion akin to a primary plasma mine. Battle-brothers are thrown through the air like toys. Some bounce off transports or stacked freight. Braellen’s squad is at the edge of the blast force. They stay upright as their power armour auto-locks and braces, sensing the explosion. Inertial dampers straining. Braellen feels grit and micro-debris spattering off his armour like small-arms fire.

The shock passes, the auto-lock relaxes. Discipline wavers for a second. No fear, just bemusement. A tank doesn’t just fall out of the–

A second one does. A Baneblade, this time. It’s tumbling end over end. It hits the company shelters a kilometre west, and causes an impact blast that splits the ground and triggers a landslip on the facing hill. Then two more, both Fellblades, in quick succession. One crushes a pair of parked Thunderhawks. The other hits just off the trackway a split-second later and punches a crater, but doesn’t explode. It actually bounces, disintegrating. It bounces and tumbles through a scattering line of battle-brothers, mowing them down, shedding torn plate and wheel assemblies.

More fall, all around. Like bombs. Like impossible hail. Like playthings tipped out of a child’s toybox. Some explode. Some fracture on impact and bounce. Some bury themselves in the open ground like bullets in flesh.

Braellen looks up into the sky. It’s almost blue apart from the smoke stains from the city. It’s full of falling objects: tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, troop carriers, cargo pods, lumps of debris. They turn in the air, catching the sunlight, glinting, spinning, some fast, some slow. Ash and metal-fibres rain down with them. Strands of cable. Wire. Optical leads. Pieces of haptic keyboard. Pieces of data-slate. Glass and brass splinters. Flakes of ceramite.

Somewhere, far above, a low orbit depot has broken up and the packed contents have spilled out like treasure from a sack. Enough war machines and equipment for a full division have been thrown down to be smashed by gravity. They’re too low to fully burn up. Air friction is simply heating them.

To his west, amongst the impossible skyfall, Braellen spots the flashing delta-shape of a Stormbird, rotating as it falls.

Then he sees falling bodies too.

They have not endured the drop as well as the machine parts. They have scorched and cooked. They land like bundles of wet branches, and burst.

They do not gouge vast craters and explode like the falling armour, but their impacts are somehow far more devastating.

The Watchtower sensori start shrieking in anticipation. Even half-blind, unplugged and shock-numbed, they can feel the immensity of the material objects sweeping towards them, the radiation flood, the momentum, the displacement of atmosphere, the distortion of gravity.

The Antrodamicus looms through the tortured sky, electrical discharge clinging to its hull like a neon spiderweb. It comes through the vast palls of smoke spreading horizontally from the burning starport, and parts the bright plumes of volcanic flame that are suddenly emanating from a fusion plant on the estuary. Coming through the thick and wallowing smoke, it looks like a galleon from Old Terra running aground, a great barque of the sea, gilded with fretwork and figureheads, coasting through foamy breakers onto the foreshore.

It fills the windows of the Watchtower. It is as tall as them, as high as them. It is like a city swinging towards them on a slow pendulum arc. Shooting-star chunks of falling debris streak down around it, tiny bright specks, fast moving compared to the starship’s slow descent. Some debris meteors strike the ship, producing flowers of flame. Others whizz past and hit the ground, the city, the river.

Tawren knows each one of those strikes would, on another day, be a civic disaster, a hab block or a street area laid waste by a massive impact blast.

Today they are minor and extraneous injuries.

‘Arook!’ she yells. She holds up a stretch of Hesst’s permanent MIU link like a coil of mooring rope.

The skitarii looks at her. One red eyeslit fizzles.

His tulwar is drawn in a second. The blade slices clean through the plaited cables. Sparks crack and spit. Hesst goes into a grand mal seizure.

Arook sweeps the server up, flops his jerking body over one massive shoulder. He grabs Tawren’s left hand in his right fist and starts to run. Around them, on the server’s platform, the sensori and magi are shrieking and weeping. Some are fleeing to the stairs. A few have jumped to their deaths from the shattered tower windows.

The massive engine ducts of the Antrodamicus, cold and dead-black, their fires unlit, dwarf the windows, growing bigger and still bigger.

Hesst is dead. He has stopped spasming. Bloody matter is streaming from his mouth and nose and down the master of skitarii’s burnished back plate. Tawren scoops up her skirts so she can run. Arook is so fast.

Where does he hope to escape to? She trusts him, but she has no idea. She has no idea what she was hoping he could do when she got him to cut the MIU. There’s not enough time. Not enough time for anything. Is he trying to reach the tower-top landing pads? A shuttle? A lighter? There isn’t enough time to unseal a hatch, let alone fire its engines and lift off.

No. No. He’s making for the escape pods. There are concussion caskets in bays around the tower-top. They are intended to let senior magi descend to the armoured bunkers under the Watchtower’s foundations. They’re crude things, just counterweight mechanisms.

Would they be enough? Is there even enough time left to reach the bunkers? The bunkers might protect from an air raid, but this? A starship is falling on the city!

Arook yanks open a pod hatch. He throws Hesst in, then hurls Tawren after him.

The Antrodamicus hits. Its dipped tail strikes first, biting into the land just short of the north curtain wall of Kalkas Fortalice. The keel and hull are designed to withstand the stresses of the empyrean. They only slightly deform on impact.

They dig in. The starship, all twelve kilometres of it, continues to move, sliding backwards, cutting a groove in the planet’s crust five hundred metres deep. The keel splits the earth like a giant ploughshare, turning it up on either side of the immense furrow. Soil and subsoil rip open. The furrow rips across arterial highways and a memorial park. It hits the curtain wall, annihilating it. Still sliding, the Antrodamicus demolishes a path through the teeming city of Kalkas Fortalice, a path two and half kilometres wide. Meteoric debris is still slicing down from the sky all around it, bombarding the city and the landscape. The starship’s impact is lifting a wall of dust higher than the Watchtower, a smog of particulates from atomised buildings.

The planet’s crust is shaking, a long, drawn-out vibration of the most apocalyptic sort. There is a tearing, screeching shriek in the air as hull and city grind each other apart.

Now stress fractures win. The Antrodamicus starts to crumple. Its entire mass lands, belly down, splitting its massive frame across the waist and the prow. Hull skin rips. Command towers and masts buckle and topple. The remnants of the drydock cage, wrapping it like a garland, slough off.

Internal explosions begin to riddle it. Upper plating sections blow out. Ribs are exposed, backlit by nuclear coals in the starship’s stricken heart.

It is still moving. It is still grinding backwards, disintegrating, ploughing the city in half, uprooting hab towers and hive stacks, flattening steeples and palaces. The quake-shock of the impact is levelling parts of Kalkas Fortalice that the ship hasn’t even touched.

The orbital Watchtower shivers as the mounting vibrations begin to overwhelm its structural integrity. Pieces of it start to splinter and fall off. It begins to sway, like a tree in a typhoon wind.

When the sliding tail-end of the starship finally reaches it and rams it down, it is starting to fall anyway.

The Antrodamicus ploughs it into the ground so hard that no trace of its proud structure remains whatsoever.

At Barrtor, they can feel the earth quaking under their plasteel boots. Aftershock. Calth’s tectonic system shivering from the appalling blow. The forest is thrashing, shaking loose leaves.

‘Theoretical?’ Phrastorex asks.

Ekritus is utterly cold and focused.

‘A major orbital incident. Accident or attack. Considerable fleet loss, considerable loss of support infrastructure, catastrophic collateral damage suffered on the surface due to the orbital destruction…’

He pauses and looks at Phrastorex.

‘The starport’s gone. All comms are out. No link to the fleet. No link to other surface units beyond anything we can establish. No data feed. No estimation of the type or extent of the situation.’

‘Practical?’ Phrastorex asks.

‘Obvious,’ replies Ekritus.

It is? thinks Phrastorex.

‘We form up. Everything we have. Your company and mine, the Army, the Mechanicum, the XVII. Everything that’s this side of the river and still intact. We form up, and we pull it back east into the Sharud Province. All hell’s falling out of the sky and this world is turning, Phrastorex. If we sit here wide-eyed, we could end up in a debris bombardment. Or worse. Let’s salvage everything we can from this muster point and pull it east, out of harm’s way, so it remains intact and battle ready.’

‘What if this is an attack?’ asks Phrastorex.

‘Then we’ll be battle ready!’ Ekritus barks.

Phrastorex nods. His instinct is to run towards the danger. To know no fear and advance into hell, but he knows the younger captain is right. They have a duty to preserve what they’ve got and re-form. The primarch will be expecting no less. Between them, he and Ekritus and the captains of the Word Bearers companies in the valley command an armed force that could crush a world. They have a duty to move it out of harm’s way into a holding position, so that it’s ready and able to do whatever Guilliman needs it to do.

‘Start leading the disposition out through the forest,’ Ekritus begins. ‘I’ll link up with the Word Bearers and the Army and–’

‘No,’ says Phrastorex firmly. ‘You lead the march. Get the men behind you, literally. Show them the way. I’ll order the XVII around, the Mechanicum too. Go. Go!’

Ekritus holds up an armoured fist.

‘We march for Macragge,’ he says.

Phrastorex punches the fist with his mailed knuckles.

‘Always,’ he agrees.

He starts away down the slope, through the ranks of his own men and Ekritus’s cobalt-blue warriors. Behind him, he hears Ekritus, Anchise and the other officers of both companies calling the men to order, getting them mobile. The aftershocks keep coming. Light-flash and thunder rattles the sky.

He sees 23rd squad.

‘With me!’ he yells. They fall in with him, moving fast. Phrastorex wants an escort. If he’s going to order around Word Bearers officers and Army stuffed shirts, he needs an honour company to emphasise his authority.

‘What’s the order, captain?’ asks Battle-brother Karends.

‘The job right now is to salvage and preserve as much of this fighting strength as we can,’ says Phrastorex. Ultramarines units are moving past them on both flanks, heading in the opposite direction. Down on the floodplain, tank engines have hit start-up. Lights are coming on. Phrastorex is surprised how impressed he is by the Word Bearers’ response time. Maybe he needs to revise his opinion of the wretched XVII.

He sees figures in red armour. They’re advancing up the hill. Word Bearers, moving already. That’s good. Maybe they won’t be so hard to persuade.

Phrastorex raises a hand, calling out to the nearest Word Bearers officer.

A boltgun fires.

Battle-brother Karends explodes at the waist and collapses.

The second bolt blows the fingers off Phrastorex’s raised hand.

Coming uphill at the hindquarters of the Ultramarines companies, the Word Bearers form a line. They’re advancing through the dry, ferny brush, weapons raised, firing at will.

Phrastorex has fallen to one knee. His ruined hand hurts, but the wounds have already clotted. He tries to draw his weapon with his left hand. His mind is where the real pain lies. Sheer incredulity has almost crippled him for a second. There is no theoretical, there is no comprehensible practical. They’re being fired on. They’re being fired on by the Legiones Astartes XVII Word Bearers. They’re being fired on by their own kind.

He’s got his gun in his sound hand. He’s not sure what he’s going to do with it. Even under fire, the notion of firing back at Space Marines is abhorrent.

Phrastorex looks up. Bolter rounds are exploding in the ranks of the Ultramarines, blowing blue armour plate apart, throwing men into the air. Plasma beams, searing like blatant lies, rip through his company. Ultramarines fall, shot in the back, in the legs, split open, sliced in half. Men topple face down, the backs of their Praetor helms caved in and smoking.

It’s a massacre. It’s a slaughter. In seconds, before the main strength of the men can even turn in surprise, the ferny slope is littered with dead and dying. The leaves of the nodding fern brush are jewelled with blood. The trees shiver and hiss in disgust. The ground heaves as though it cannot bear to touch the proof of such infamy, as though it wants to shake the Ultramarines dead off itself so it is not implicated.

Heavier guns open fire. Lascannons. Graviton guns. Meltas. Storm bolters.

Rotary autocannons wither the rows of men in the forest space, shredding the brush cover into a green haze, spattering tree trunks with blood and chips of blue metal. Splintered trees collapse alongside splintered men.

The brothers in the squad accompanying the captain are mown down around him. A broken fragment of armour, outflung from a toppling Ultramarine, gashes Phrastorex’s right eye socket, damaging the optics. The impact snaps his head sideways.

It snaps him awake, out of his stupor, out of his shocked daze.

He rises, aiming his weapon.

The crimson Space Marines are advancing towards him, up the blood-soaked slope. He can hear them chanting. Their weapons are blazing.

‘You bastards!’ he yells as a headshot slays him.

At the top of the slope, in the deeper forest, Ekritus turns as he hears the gunfire.

He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing.

Around him, other men turn and stand, dumbfounded. They watch the slaughter unfolding as though it is some trick or illusion that will be explained later.

Men in the stunned formation around Ekritus start getting hit. Heads snap back. Carapaces explode. Brothers are flung backwards. Others sag, life leaking out of them.

Ekritus shakes, too stunned to make a decision. What he’s seeing is impossible. Impossible.

He sees Phrastorex, far below.

He sees him rise, gun in hand. In the wrong hand.

Then he sees him smashed backwards, headshot. Dead.

Ekritus roars in fury. He starts down the slope, into the hail of gunfire. Anchise grabs him and stops him.

‘No,’ the sergeant shouts. ‘No!’

He shakes Ekritus and turns him.

Titans advance through the forest to their right. Trees crash down, uprooted or snapped by the massive fighting engines. War horns boom. Ekritus smells the stink of void shields.

The Titans begin to shoot.

Sergeant Hellock shouts orders. No one is listening.

Bale Rane stands, open-mouthed, dazed by the overload of shock. Men run in all directions. Fireballs scream down out of the blood-clotted sky and explode all around them. Rane tenses and ducks as the pieces of orbital debris swoop over and hit. A kitchen tent explodes on the far side of the parade ground. The medicae section is thrown into the air as though mines have been triggered beneath it.

Each blast makes Rane flinch, but his eyes never leave the main wonder. A ship just crashed about thirty kilometres west of them. A whole ship. It’s sitting there now like a newly raised mountain range, broken, smoking. Ripples of explosions fire-cracker across its fractured hull.

It’s beyond anything he can imagine. It’s too big to be real.

All he can think of is Neve on the far side of the river. She’ll be scared. She should be alive; he reassures himself of that, at least. The starship fell on the Kalkas side of the river. Numinus was spared, though debris is fireballing the whole region. Whoever knew there was so much stuff up there in space that could fall out of it? She’ll have gone to her aunt’s, most likely. She’s a smart girl. She’ll have gone to her aunt’s and got in the cellar. Safe as houses.

Rane swallows hard.

He realises he doesn’t love her. He probably never did. He sees that with clarity, suddenly. It was all so easy, so romantic. He was going to be a soldier, and go off with the Army muster, so their time was precious. They’d probably never see each other again. So it was easy. It was easy to commit. It was easy to make grand gestures when nothing had to last. Everything was romantic. Everything was poignant. Everything took on a significance because they had so little time. They got married. It was like a huge send-off. Everyone cried. So romantic. So romantic.

So unreal. As unreal and unlikely as a broken starship sitting where Kalkas Fortalice used to be. As unreal as this whole day.

It’s as though he’s gone from a daydream into a living nightmare where everything makes more sense.

Krank knocks him over.

‘What the hell–?’ Rane gasps.

Something that is almost definitely a wheel from a battle tank, glowing red hot, has come bouncing across the compound, flattening tents and water bowsers. It would have mowed him down, but for Krank.

‘We’re moving!’ yells Krank.

‘Where?’

‘The dug-outs!’ Sergeant Hellock is shouting. ‘Get into the dug-outs!’

That makes no sense either. There are several thousand troopers in the immediate zone, and a few dozen dug-outs, constructed for air raids as per regulations. And if another starship falls on them, a bastard hole in the ground isn’t going to save them anyway.

‘Look!’ Trooper Yusuf calls out. ‘Look at the wire!’

They look at the fence dividing their compound from the Army auxiliaries serving the XVII. They were chanting earlier. Now they’re up against the fence. They’re pressing pale hands and woeful faces against the metal link. They’re calling out. Rane can see flames licking on the far side of the neighbouring compound.

‘They’re trapped,’ Hellock says. ‘Bloody bastards. They’re trapped in there. They can’t get out.’

Some of the men run forward to see if they can open the connecting gate.

‘Wait,’ says Rane. ‘Don’t.’

They’re too close. His squad mates are too close to the wire, too close to the pale, staring faces.

The fence goes down. It’s been cut in places, and it simply falls flat on the ground, jingling and rattling. The foreign auxiliaries spill over into the compound of the Numinus 61st.

‘What the bastard hell is this?’ Hellock says.

The foreigners have guns. Rifles. Side arms. Blades. Hafted weapons. They’ve got bastard spears.

The first shots take out the nearest Numinus troops. They buckle and drop. The heathens are howling as they charge in. One rams a spear through Yusuf’s gut. Yusuf screams like no one ought to ever have to scream, and the scream carries on, in broken sections, as the heathen twists and jerks the haft. Seddom, another man Rane has got to know, takes a las-round to the cheek, and his head goes a peculiar shape as he falls over. Zwaytis is shot as he turns to run. Bardra is stabbed repeatedly. Urt Vass is shot, then Keyson, then Gorben.

Rane and Krank start to run. Haspian turns to flee with them, but he trips over Seddom, and then the heathens are on him, pounding him to death with spears like washer women using beetles at the river side.

Hellock screams out a curse, draws his autopistol and fires. He makes the first active loyalist kill of the Battle of Calth, though the fact is not remembered by posterity. He shoots a heathen with a spear and puts him down dead.

Then a spear goes through his arm and another splits his thigh, and he falls. He’s screaming as they pin him to the ground, screaming every insult he can dredge up.

The Ushmetar Kaul pour past, slaughtering his men. Hellock, through his rage and pain, realises they are chanting again.

One of the bastards pinning him bends down to slit his throat with a knife, but another bastard stops him.

Criol Fowst looks down at the man his soldiers have pinned. An officer. Rank has value, ritual significance.

He can use the wounded sergeant. There are things that will have to be fed, after all.

Ventanus carries Arbute through the burning port complex, but she directs the way. Selaton and the seneschal’s aides follow them, escorted by Amant and his squad.

‘This way,’ she says. ‘Down that ramp. Down there.’

There are two huge listening pylons ahead of them, scaffold-frame monsters with a dish receiver set between them. It’s old stuff, very basic, probably constructed by the first pioneers when they began the Calth colonies. It’s military grade, though. No frills. Built to last.

‘My father worked the port for thirty years. I spent time here. This was part of the original port authority traffic system, before the Mechanicum arrived and set up a proper manifold. It should have been scrapped a century ago, but they kept it serviced.’

‘Why?’ asked Vantanus.

‘Because it’s reliable. When the solar storms kick off, every fifteen years or so, they’re much more resilient during the radiation flares than the manifold systems.’

‘Good,’ says Ventanus.

Flaming debris bombs are still slicing overhead. None of the party has quite got over the sight of the Antrodamicus hitting the surface. Some of the aides are tearful.

The pylons are built on a platform in the middle of a rockcrete basin beside landing platform sixty. It’s a natural shelter. About two hundred port workers and cargo-men have huddled there, under the lip of the platform. It’s not much of a refuge, but it’s better than nothing. Hot ash is raining down, burning scraps. Every now and then something small but heavy, like a sheared mooring bolt or an airgate handle, hits the ground like a bullet.

The sheltering personnel move forward when they see the Space Marines. There are questions, a lot of questions, and pleas for help.

‘We don’t know anything,’ Ventanus tells them, putting Arbute down and raising his hands. ‘A state of emergency is now in force, obviously. I need to get that listening post operational. Maybe we’ll get some answers that way. I need vox operators.’

Several men step forward as volunteers. He chooses two.

‘Let’s move,’ Ventanus says.

He’s getting edgy. It’s been almost ten minutes since the disaster struck, and he still knows absolutely nothing.

The control rooms for the post are a trio of standard pattern module habitats mounted thirty-five metres up on the girder-work frame of the pylon array. An open switchback staircase of grilled steps leads up to them.

Ventanus picks up Arbute again, and leads the way. The vox volunteers follow, along with a couple of the seneschal’s aides, Selaton and Amant. Amant’s troops spread out to quell the agitated crowd.

They open one of the modules. There’s still power. The technicians get to work warming up the station’s main caster grid. Ventanus takes a data-slate and records the channel frequencies he wants to raise. Erud muster control. Fleet command. His own company command.

The vox operators sit down at the main caster desks facing the module’s windows. Whooping static and radiation distort sobs through the old, hefty speakers.

‘Was that gunfire?’ Selaton asks.

‘Not that I heard,’ Ventanus replies. ‘Probably more debris hits.’

He goes out onto the narrow gantry outside the module. The view is excellent, though what he can see is not. Large sections of the port facility are now ablaze. The sky over both sides of the river is blacked out with smoke. Meteoritic streaks still stripe against the darkness, like las-bolts. It’s hard to see the huge shipwreck any more, though the pall in the direction of what used to be Kalkas Fortalice is throbbing red like the mouth of hell.

There’s definitely a distant sound, a booming. It’s almost like a planetary bombardment. Ships firing from orbit.

He’s still clinging to the notion this is all an accident.

There’s a shout from far below. Three more squads of Space Marines have entered the basin at the foot of the pylons. They’re dressed in red. XVII. That’s good. Good to get a little collaboration going in this hour of dire need. Maybe the Word Bearers’ comms networks have come through the incident a little more intact.

He sees Amant’s men and the crowd of port workers moving to greet them.

Ventanus steps back into the listening station module.

‘I’m going back down,’ he tells Selaton. ‘Reinforcements just arrived and I want to find out what they know.’

He looks at the vox operators, hard at work.

‘The moment they get anything, call me back up.’

Selaton nods.

Ventanus turns. Pauses.

‘What?’ asks Selaton. ‘What’s the matter, sir?’

Ventanus isn’t sure. He opens his mouth to reply.

No warning. No damned warning. Just a nanosecond prickle, a sting of intuition, that something isn’t right.

A nanosecond. Too little, and too damned late.

Mass-reactive rounds slam into the floor and front wall of the listening station module. Mass-reactive rounds fired from below.

The floor and front wall shred. Disintegrating metal plating becomes splinters and lethal tatters. Light and flame compress upwards into the module through its ruptured shell from the blast points, driving the splinters in with it.

The air inside the module fills with expanding flame and whizzing fragments. The forced pressure of the strike blows out the window ports and annihilates the vox-caster desks. Seneschal Arbute is knocked backwards. The head and shoulders of one of her aides become red mist as a round strikes and detonates. White-hot spalling and jagged shrapnel from the floor macerates the two vox-operator volunteers. The other staff aide, a clerk, is thrown into the module’s ceiling by the upward pressure of the blasts. His broken body then falls back and drops out through a floor that is no longer intact.

Selaton sees the murdered clerk fall, cartwheeling away, dislocated and loose. His corpse disappears down through the girder work of the pylons, just one more chunk in a hailstorm of spinning debris and burning fragments.

The deck begins to break away from the front wall.

‘Back! Back!’ Ventanus orders. The entire module is already shrieking and tilting, as if it is about to shear clean off its mounting. Part of the metal cage supporting the entry staircase rips away and topples.

The unseen killers fire again. Another rain of explosive rounds brackets and punishes the module. Ventanus assesses frantically, his weapon drawn. The attack is coming from positions down below, on the pylon base.

Mass-reactive. Detonating on impact. Legiones Astartes munition. Not possible. Not possible. Unless–

‘Error,’ exclaims Selaton beside him. ‘False fire. Error. Someone has made an–’

‘I said get back!’ Ventanus screams, grabbing Selaton and pulling him towards the rear of the module.

Ventanus and Selaton start to return fire, blasting down through the hole created as the floor section collapses and peels away. There is only smoke below, no clear target, no true thermal print. They fire anyway. Discouragement.

Armour inertials don’t lie. The module is slumping backwards. It is going to separate from its mountings and fall.

Arbute is dead. There isn’t a wound on her, but Ventanus knows that the overpressure and kinetic slam of the mass-reactive strikes will have pulped her human organs. Amant has been dropped. Two, perhaps three mass-reactive rounds have taken him from below. He is lying on his back on the rapidly perishing deck. His feet are gone, and the blasts have sliced the armour and flesh from his shins and thighs, his torso and his face. He is still alive, clotting blood filling the cavities of his wounds.

A few moments to stabilise, and they could get him clear. Get him to reconstruction. Even with the front of his body skinned and scourged away, a month or two in biotech conditioning would see him fighting again.

The module doesn’t have a few moments.

They don’t have a few moments.

Ventanus sees Amant’s eyes, wide in a mask of blood and broken visor, staring in helpless disbelief. Ventanus understands what he sees there. Amant knows it’s the end, not just of his own existence, but of the galaxy as they understand it.

Ventanus kicks out the rear hatch with one savage thump of his heel. The support staircase is gone. There is nowhere to go. The module starts to fall, like a boat rolling over in a rush as the water it is taking on suddenly hits the tipping point.

‘Jump!’ yells Ventanus.

An order is a damned order.

They jump.

Guilliman is almost rigid with fury. He’s got a stylus out, a pen, and he’s at the bridge windows, recording everything he can see on his data-slate. Ship losses, dispersement. Formation.

The moment the flagship’s system reboot and power comes to active yield, he wants data he can act on.

‘I want that link!’ he yells over his shoulder, sketching the relative placements of the Cornucopia and the Vernax Absolom.

‘Do we raise shields?’ asks Gage.

‘The moment you have them,’ Guilliman replies. ‘Communicate that to the whole fleet the moment we have capability.’

Gage nods.

‘Do we return fire?’ he asks.

Guilliman looks at him.

‘This is a tragedy. A tragedy, a mistake. As soon as we can protect ourselves, we do that. But do not make this worse. We do not add to the death toll.’

Gage’s jaw tenses.

‘I would kill them for this,’ he says. ‘Forgive me, but this is a crime. They must know this is wrong. They shame us–’

‘They are hurt,’ Guilliman says. ‘They believe they are under mortal threat. All their fears are real to them. Marius, we do not compound their folly. We do not add our mistake to theirs, no matter what the cost.’

‘We have a link!’ Zedoff cries.

Guilliman turns. ‘Lithocast?’

‘Barely. Principally audio.’

Guilliman shoves the data-slate to Gage and moves to the hololithic platform.

Light blooms around him again. It is not as healthy as it was before, not as stable. There are figures that aren’t quite there, crackling phantoms at the edge of resolution. Guilliman sees only the outline of Argel Tal, the shadow of Hol Beloth, a skeletal sketch of light that might be Foedral Fell.

Only Lorgar is visible. His resolution is black and white, jumping and interrupted. His eyes are in shadow, his head down. Wherever he is standing, there is a very local light, a glow just above him that casts his face in inky darkness.

‘Stop this,’ Guilliman says.

Lorgar does not answer.

‘Brother. Cease fire now!’ Guilliman says. ‘Cease fire. This is a mistake. You have made a grave error. Stop your reprisal. We are not your enemy.’

‘You are against us,’ Lorgar whispers, his voice made of white noise whine.

‘We have not attacked you,’ Guilliman insists. ‘This I swear.’

‘You turned on us once. You shamed us and humiliated us. You will not do so again.’

‘Lorgar! Listen to me. This is a mistake!’

‘Why in all the stars would you presume this to be a mistake?’ asks Lorgar. He still does not look up.

‘Cease fire,’ Guilliman says. ‘We have not attacked you, nor allowed you to be attacked. I swear this, upon our father’s life.’

Lorgar’s reply is lost in a crackle of noise. Then the image of him vanishes too, and the hololithic platform dies.

‘Contact lost,’ Zedoff announces. ‘He’s refusing our attempts to restore the link.’

Guilliman looks at Gage.

‘He’s not going to back down,’ Guilliman says. ‘He’s not going to stop this unless we stop him.’

Gage can see the pain in Guilliman’s eyes, the enormity of what this means.

‘What was that thing he said, my primarch?’ Gage asks. ‘That last thing?’

Guilliman hesitates.

‘He said, “I am an orphan”.’

Gage straightens up and glances at the senior crew.

‘Your orders, sir?’ he says firmly.

‘Issue the instruction as best you can,’ Guilliman says, stepping down from the platform. ‘To all XIII Legion units and auxiliaries, upon my authority code. Priority one. Defend yourselves by all means at your disposal.’

Gage clears his throat.

‘My primarch, I need your confirmation. Have you just authorised actions up to and including return of fire?’

There is a long pause.

‘Return of fire is so ordered,’ says Guilliman.

Zedoff and the senior gunnery officers start barking orders. Gage turns to the rubricator waiting ready at his station beside the shipmaster’s throne.

‘Officer of record,’ he says. ‘Start the mark.’

The rubricator nods and activates his cogitator.

‘Initiating XIII Legion combat record, elapsed time count,’ the rubricator says. ‘Count begins. Calth mark: 00.00.00.’