Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

1

‘My brother, hear me. Warriors of the XVII Legion, hear me. This violence is against the code of the Legiones Astartes and against the will of our father, the Emperor. In the name of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, I implore you to cease fire and stand down. Open communication with me. Let us speak. Let us settle this. This action is an error of the most tragic kind. Cease fire. I, Roboute Guilliman, give you my solemn pledge that we will deal with each other frankly and fairly if these hostilities can be suspended. I urge you to respond.’

Guilliman puts the speaker horn down and looks at Gage and the Master of Vox.

‘As soon as we are able,’ he tells them, ‘transmit that message on repeat. Cycle transmissions. No interruptions.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says the Master of Vox.

Leviathans stir. Bigger than the human mind can comfortably conceive, starships move through the burning clouds of dust above Calth. Their dark hulks emerge from glittering banks of debris, through swirling flares of ejected energy, like marine monsters surfacing for air.

They are flying blind. They are fighting blind. They scream challenges and threats into the burning void through shorted vox systems and blown speakers. They detach themselves from the super-massive gantries, derricks and anchorages of the yards, some shearing cables, lines and airgates in their desperation to run free.

A moving target is harder to hit. That’s the logic. In truth, a moving target makes itself alone and vulnerable.

The warships of the XVII Legion make the kills appear effortless. Coasting, almost stately, they run forward, shields lit, creating bright halos around their hulls as dust and particulate matter burns off the fields. Their snarling gunports are open, their primary weapons extended in their silo bays. Charge batteries and plasma capacitors seethe with power, ready for lethal discharge. They are supposed to be deaf and blind too, but they are not. Detection and target systems beyond the darkest imaginings of the Mechanicum peer out into the noisy darkness and alight upon the scattering cobalt-blue vessels of the Ultramar fleet as though they were hot coals on cold ash. They find them, and they bind them, tracking them relentlessly, scrutinising them in lascivious detail, weighing and assessing their shielding and hull strength, while weapons batteries train and align, and munitions loads are ordered up. Bulk magazines chug and clatter as projectile shells and missiles are conveyed by automatic loaders, through-deck hoists or ordnance chutes.

Munitions fill the void like seed pods, like blizzards. Columns of scorching plasma and las, hundreds of kilometres long, stripe afterimages on the retinas of those who witness them. Main lance batteries vomit bright energy and spit light in beams, in gobs, in splinters, in twitching withies of lightning.

Ships burst in the darkness. The Gladius, a four-kilometre-long escort from the Saramanth Wing, serially detonates as it draws clear of its slipway, its armoured hull sectioned and chewed apart by internal explosions. The barge Hope of Narmenia is caught by a missile spread that strikes it like a storm of needles, puncturing its upper hull and stern in a hundred places, peppering it, engulfing its interior in white-hot fire. The support carriers Valediction and Vospherus are wrecked by sustained broadside fire from a battle-barge of the XVII. The Valediction breaks up first, its hullplates unwrapping around a core explosion like a time-lapse feed of a flower’s petals opening, blooming and dying. Hastily deployed lifeboats are swept away by the superheat wash. The Vospherus, shielded by the fate of its sister ship, turns away to run, but the enemy guns reach it and pulp its drive section. Drive vents and engine bells explode, and the inward pressure forces a drive plant event, a series of star-hot overblasts in the engineering spaces that burst the stern of the carrier like a pipe bomb. The force of the blasts throws the ruined carrier forward on a pressure wave and slams the ship into the troop transport Antropheles, cutting it in two. Eighty thousand lives lost in five seconds.

The Infernus-class battleship Flame of Purity, one of the true monsters of the XVII fleet, runs into the Asertis Orbital Yard, firing cannonades to maximise collateral damage. Its prow is armoured: a vast, burnished ramming blade, a giant’s chisel gilded with seraphs, narwhals and eagles. It ploughs through the smaller, berthed ships in its path, bisecting some, ripping others open, shattering hulls. Its main spinal lance mount, a primary magnitude exo-las weapon, wakes and screams, uttering a shaft of matter-annihilating light that sends the picket cruiser Stations of Ultramar reeling from a hammering concussion as it attempts to defend the yard space. The cruiser tries to rally, trailing debris from a blackened and molten port side. It turns about, dazed, clumsily glancing against support stations and yard gantries. Clouds of pink flame belch from its stricken engines. It raises its shields. The Flame of Purity fires its recharged exo-laser again. The shields surrounding the Stations of Ultramar do not even retard the beam. They pop like soap bubbles. The beam vaporises the cruiser’s central mass, until it’s merely a toroid of hull metal around a glowing white-hot hole. The Flame of Purity powers on, bumping the drifting ruin of the Stations of Ultramar aside on its magnetic bow-wave.

In the dark pits of drive rooms and engineering chambers, hosts of stokers and allworks slave away with furious effort. The chambers are infernal, soot-caked and lit by the ruddy glare of the vast engines and reactor furnaces. Armies of stokers, sweat-sheened and roaring, eyes like white stones in blackened faces, shovel fuel ores and promethium pellets into the iron chutes. Servitor crews, their metal skins colour-bruised like old kettles by the constant heat, lever and haul on the throbbing activator rods that quicken the drive plants. Coal-black chains swing. Bellows wheeze and flush dragon-breath balls of roiling fire up flues and vent pipes. Abhuman labourers, troll-like and grunting, swelter as they drag in monolithic payload carts of raw fuel from the silo decks.

There is frenzy here, panic that is barely kept at bay by the lashes and orders of the engine room masters. There are no windows, no way of appreciating the outer universe or the threats it may contain.

In truth, the envied bridge crews in their glass and gilt towers far above have no better understanding of the calamity than the blind stokers down in the dark below. Knowledge of this irony may not have enhanced the stokers’ confidence.

Many will never know the light again. Some of the ships slain during the Calth Atrocity will continue to circle the tortured star for a hundred thousand years as frozen wrecks, as tomb ships for the silent dead, mummified and preserved in the act of screaming their final screams.

Ventanus and Selaton hit the ground. The drop is severe. Their strength and their armour absorb the impact, and they come up, bolters ready. Dust and ash films their armour plate.

They move.

The module reaches the ground behind them, shredding open as it lands. The noise is huge, a splintering of metal. Behind the module comes the best part of one of the pylons. They can hear steel hawsers parting like bolter shots. Broken fastener pins, released by the extreme tension, whistle through the air like micro-missiles.

Selaton and his captain outrun the falling pylon. It collapses like a tranquillised animal, buckling at the knees, and then falling from loose hips, then from a slack neck that turns back against the direction of the fall. Dust erupts in a rolling wall, as if driven by the sound of tearing steel. Ventanus and Selaton bound out of the dust wall.

The landing platforms ahead of them are covered with debris and corpses. Ventanus blanches as he sees fallen Ultramarines. Bolter fire has reamed and split their beautiful cobalt-and-gold armour. He sees one man who died carrying a regimental standard. It is a golden symbol of the Legion surmounting a double eagle. The banner pole is clenched so tightly in his armoured fists that his grip has marked the haft.

This was an honour guard. A ceremonial squad cut down as it prepared to board. Nearby, the bodies of city dignitaries, of trade officials, of seneschals, of aides and cargo foremen. They are bloody ruins: split sacks of meat and torn clothing. They were cut down by weapons designed for post-human war, weapons that could slay and have now slain the Legiones Astartes.

Weapons whose effects on unmodified, un-enhanced, unarmoured humans amount to overkill.

Selaton slows to a halt. He regards the litter of dead.

‘Move!’ Ventanus orders.

‘They were waiting to board,’ says Selaton, as if this matters.

Ventanus stops and looks at his sergeant.

It is so obvious, and yet, he missed it. It has taken Selaton’s less experienced mind to see the simple truth.

They were waiting to board. They died waiting to board, banners and standards raised. But it is, perhaps, fifteen or twenty minutes since the disaster struck, fifteen or twenty minutes since the orbital detonation that began the deluge of fire.

Did they stand there all that time, still waiting to board as the world caught light around them?

‘They were already dead,’ says Ventanus. ‘Dead, or dying.’

This murder predated the disaster. At best, it was simultaneous. The disaster was no accident.

Gunfire shrieks across the platforms. Las-fire spanks off the blast walls behind them. Bolter shells corkscrew the smoke they cut through. Impacts occur all around.

Ventanus sees Word Bearers advancing out of the filthy air. Troops move up with them, Army cohorts with lasrifles and halberds.

They’re shooting at any target they can see.

Selaton, still confined by the ethical parameters of the universe he used to understand, asks the obvious question.

‘What do we do?’ he says. ‘What do we do?’

2

Aboard the Samothrace, Sorot Tchure performs his second ministry.

His men are already killing most of the ship’s primary crew. Advancing to the main bridge, burning through blast hatches that had been closed in desperation, Tchure comes face-to-face with the ship’s captain, who solemnly announces his disinclination to assist Tchure, no matter what threat is made.

Tchure ignores the officer. He is a yapping gatehouse dog that is too ignorant to know better. He is barking futile defiance at the carnodon that has just entered through the gates.

Tchure grasps the captain’s head in his right hand and squashes it like an uncooked egg. He lets the body drop. The bridge crew gawps at him, realising that their predicament is far worse than they ever imagined. When a ship is seized, bridge crew can ordinarily safeguard their lives in exchange for their vital technical services.

The bridge officers of the Samothrace see their captain murdered, and realise their services are not required.

Several pull sidearms, despite the fact that they are unmodified humans dressed in cloth and braid, despite the fact that they are outnumbered by martial transhumans who have just cut their way into the main bridge space, despite the fact that their laspistols will not even dent the armour of the invaders.

Tchure is in the newer Maximus plate, as befits his command status. Crimson is the first colour his suit has ever been painted.

‘Death,’ he instructs as a las-round tangs off his shoulder plate.

The Word Bearers use their fists, guns slung. Tchure doesn’t want mass-reactive shells destroying the vital control stations of the bridge. They break men. They grab them and snap spines and necks, or mash skulls, or tear out soft throats. The officers have nowhere to run, but they run anyway, screaming in terror. They are grabbed and picked up by the hair, by the coattails, by the ankles and wrists, grabbed and picked up and killed. The bodies are slung in a pile in the centre of the deck in front of the late captain’s throne.

Tchure observes the work. He raises his left wrist, and speaks into the glass-and-wire mechanism welded there. It is inscribed with the mark of the sacred Octed. The dark, glistening thing living inside the wire-wrapped bottle does not send his words like a vox. It simply repeats them through other mouths in other places.

Hearing the signal through their own warp-flasks, the Mechanicum magi advance onto the bridge. They are all of the cadre that has sided with the Warmaster. They have turned their backs on Mars and Terra. Subtle variations in their robes and insignia already show this change of alignment, but most of all there is a darkness to them. They wear the mystery of their technological craft around them like a shadow.

‘The ship is seized,’ Tchure tells their leader. The magos nods, and instructs his men to bridge positions.

‘Ten minutes, and we will be mobile,’ the magos tells Tchure. ‘Motivation is coming to yield.’

‘Zetsun Verid Yard,’ says Tchure, naming his destination. The yard is a smaller, specialist facility that forms part of the orbital archipelago where the Samothrace has docked.

The magos nods again. Under the deck, systems are humming up to active power.

Tchure turns to his second, Heral.

‘Locator,’ he says.

Heral’s squad brings forward the locator unit, a warp-flask the size of an urn, and places it in the middle of the deck. They wedge it into the pile of corpses to hold it upright. Blood is sliming the floor under their feet.

They stand back. Something in the flask pulses and ripples, gleaming slug-black. Something whispers in the darkness. Something withdraws into its shell like a glistening mollusc, except the shell is not there, in the flask, on the bridge of the Samothrace, it is elsewhere, in another universe, recessed through the coils and loops and whorls of an interstitial architecture.

Frost forms on the corpse pile. Some of the dead muscles stiffen into rictus, and cause the corpses to jerk and lurch as though they are trying to wriggle out from under the tangle of limbs.

Corposant ignites around the flask, lights up the bodies, twitches and crackles along the ceiling beams like neon ivy. It grows impossibly bright. Tchure looks away.

When he looks back, the glow is fading, the piled corpses have been burned black, and a new figure has joined them, still smoking with teleportation energy.

‘Welcome to the Samothrace,’ says Tchure, bowing his head. The air smells of cooked fat from the incinerated bodies.

‘Sorot. Let us begin,’ says Kor Phaeron.

At Barrtor, the forests east of the Boros are on fire. Traitor Titans lumber through the sparks and smoke billowing up from the canopy. They look like woodsmen tending a brushfire. Their weapon mounts pour destruction into the glades and cavities of the forest.

Air support howls past. Down in the woods, the shattered remnants of the 111th and 112th Companies, Ultramarines, retreat before the reaping assault of the betrayers. Achilles-and Proteus-pattern Land Raiders, dressed in crimson and badged with abominable designs, demolish the tree cover and men alike. Mega bolters, grinding like unoiled fabrication plants, lacerate the world, reducing trees to fibres, rocks to dust, and bodies to paste.

Ekritus moves backwards, firing as he goes. Anchise is nearby, doing the same. Beyond him, a few other trusted men. Ekritus isn’t even thinking about what’s happening any more. To do so would be to confront the unthinkable, and to leave his mind and wits with as much protection as the flimsy trees are currently affording his body.

He is simply surviving. He is firing at anything he can cleanly target, and falling back. They are buying time for the squads he has sent off at an expedited rate of retreat. Throne alone knows if they will draw clear, or find any shelter from the aircover that is sweeping across them.

What’s left of his companies are cut off from their heavy support. They haven’t got anything in their arsenal that will stop the Land Raiders. Each of those beasts is felling a swathe of the forest ahead of it. Nothing at all will stop the Titans. Every time one of the marching giants speaks, booming its speaker horn in a howl of scorn and triumph, Ekritus feels his bones shake.

He scrambles through brush, reloading his weapon on clips taken from the dead. The blood of others paints his armour, turning him crimson, a colour he has an unexpectedly painful need to wash off. Bolt-rounds snap and whine through the trees. One pulps leaves in a mist of sap. One hits a tree trunk, explodes, and collapses the ancient tree wholesale. One destroys Brother Caladin’s head, and flips his corpse into a ditch.

Ekritus finds a mossy slope, ducks under a root mass, and clambers up. Old stonework, the retaining wall of some earthwork built in the early years, when this was estate land. Smoke bores through the woodland space as if driven by an ocean current. Animals and avians are mobbing out of the devastated environment in teeming plague-year swarms.

Nature in rout. A world turned upside down.

He clambers higher still. He is above the tree line. He can see for many kilometres. He can see the world burning. On the plains beyond the forest expanse, he can see vast hosts assaulting the towns along the river and the port. Waves of men, tens of thousands strong, Army or what until an hour ago passed for Army. Waves of men, of armour, formations of Titan engines, phalanxes of Space Marines, all of them hazed in the dust and smoke of their advance.

The blot of their insult.

The stain of their crime.

Here alone, east of the river, he can see a mobilised force large enough to take a continent. A world, probably. And this, just one muster of the Calth conjunction. He watches as it surges, a fluid mass, sweeping aside everything in its path.

There are so many burning ships and orbitals in the sky, it looks like a hundred sunsets all happening at once. The actual sun, the Veridian system’s pure, blue-white star, is lost behind circumfulgent smoke.

Ekritus wants to kill them all. He wants to face them and kill them, one by one, until there are none left, and the heat of his outrage is finally quelled.

He senses movement. The first of the Word Bearers appears. Behind him, two more, toiling up the earthwork slope. More come behind them. Ekritus stands to meet them.

They do not shoot him.

He hesitates, boltgun in one hand, power sword in the other.

He is red, like them. Except not by choice.

They see his true markings under the sticky sheen of blood only as they draw close. By this time, as they react, he is already killing them.

He shoots the first in the face. There is no time to appreciate the satisfaction of seeing the grilled helm explode, the pieces of bone and hair and brain-matter eject in all directions. The second he hits in the gut. The third in the left shoulder, tipping him backwards down the hill into the men behind him.

The fourth is another headshot.

There is no fifth. No rounds left.

Ekritus goes into them with his sword. He severs a wrist, a thigh, a neck. He impales a body and lifts it, hurling it like a sack down the earthwork rise. It crashes into its kin below. Two-handed, he buries the edge of the blade in the cranium of another helm, splitting it in half.

One has dropped a bolt pistol. He snatches it up out of the bloody moss and fires twice into the chest of the next traitor on him, killing him cold. He kills the next two, then side slashes a man off the bulwark ridge to his left.

But they’re on him. There are too many. Enough to take a world. Enough to bring a Legion to its knees. They hit him. They beat him with gun-butts and sword hilts. They pin him and club him down to his knees, chipping and denting his armour until some of the blue shows through again.

One of them tears off his helm.

‘Bastards! Bastards!’ he yells at them. A fist pulps his face, repeated blows to mash flesh and crush bone. He drools blood and teeth through swollen lips. One eye has gone.

They drag him up. He’s a captain. He’s a trophy.

A figure towers over him. Ekritus, half-blind, realises it’s one of the Titans, advanced to face the earthwork. Its speaker horns boom. The Word Bearers roar an answer and punch the air.

When the Titan resumes its advance, knocking down the old earthwork and trampling the trees, Ekritus is crucified on its torso plates.

Hol Beloth, recently teleported to the surface, commands the advance on the port at Lanshear. Hosts of the Kaul Mandori, the Jeharwanate, and the Ushmetar Kaul sweep before his engine formations. A brigade of the Tzenvar Kaul is encircling the port to the north.

The brotherhoods fight with supreme devotion. Beloth or his immediate officers have selected and anointed many of the zealots personally. They are conduits for the warp-magicks used by the highest ordinals of the XVII to enrapture their warhosts.

Hol Beloth is ambitious. He wishes to be more than a commander and more than a conduit. Such status has been promised to him by Erebus and Maloq Kartho and other, unnamed shadows that stand beside them sometimes and mutter in the twilight. He will be invested. He will be greater than even the Gal Vorbak. But he must prove himself, though he has proved himself in war a thousand times before.

This is a new form of war. This is a warfare that has never been unleashed openly before. Beloth must achieve his objectives, and perform his duties well. He must prove that he can command and control men and un-men alike.

He is hungry for power. Erebus and Kor Phaeron were always the greatest adepts, since the earliest days, but now the primarch seems to have exceeded them. His essence is frightening. Lorgar is transcendent. It is not simply the power, it is the fluid subtlety with which he employs it. Just being near Lorgar is a privilege. Being apart from, like here on Calth... it feels like the sun has gone out.

Hol Beloth believes that Erebus and Kor Phaeron are painfully aware of the way they have fallen behind. He believes they watch the primarch and crib from him, borrowing tricks and talents they have learned by observation, and then deploying them with stiff, crude proficiency. They are not adept any more. They are struggling to keep up with Lorgar’s mastery.

It is as though they are borrowing from another place, while Lorgar has become one with that place.

Hol Beloth intends to ascend to a place beside his primarch. He will burn Lanshear for the right to do so.

Numinus City is mortally wounded. Actinic light shivers along the skyline. Criol Fowst knows that the blessed dark masters of the XVII are already loosening the interstices of Calth. They are displacing it; they are rocking it in its clasp like a thief twisting a jewel out of its setting. Hoar frosts keep forming then thawing on the walls and roofs of the city. Fires gutter and die for no reason, and then reignite spontaneously. Twice, Fowst has looked up and seen, through the smoke cover, patterns of stars that do not belong to Calth or the Veridian System; patterns of stars, indeed, that he has never seen before, but which seem so familiar they make him weep for joy.

He rallies his men. The Ushmetar Kaul are dedicated. They have already gutted the Army encampments along the south bend of the river and left them in flames. They have killed thousands. Fowst has inspected the heaped dead. Almost a division of men went into the river in a thrashing attempt to escape, and were cut down by cannon and rifle. Their bodies, those which have not washed away downstream, have formed several new jetties at the water’s edge; slipway ramps of corpses jutting out into the stained current.

Where there is resistance, the Brotherhood does not flinch. They walk into return fire, soaking up the hits. It is a process of gleeful sacrifice that leads to overwhelm. Some of his men are strapped up with explosives, and walk in amongst the masses of the fleeing enemy to find their ascension.

In the ransacked encampments of the Numinus 61st, the Brotherhood has found crates of rifles, las-weapons, new issue Illuminators ready for distribution. The Ushmetar Kaul took them, ditching their old pieces in favour of the powerful new firearms. Fowst has one. It is tough and lightweight, with virtually no kick. It has a folding wire stock that he can clip back out of the way. He has killed six men with it already.

He is an educated man. The irony is not lost on him.

Orders are coming from the Legion. The spaceport must be secured, and then the outlying palaces on the plains.

Fowst wonders about the planet’s southern hemisphere, primarily ocean and more sparsely inhabited. He believes it is about to have more comprehensive fury meted out upon it. Great power, both ritual and actual, has been unsheathed today. But the task at hand will take much more than that.

The Samothrace steers in through the slip gates of the Zetsun Verid Yard. Behind it, Calth’s main shipyard is burning. No one challenges the Samothrace. It’s a vessel of the XIII fleet, running for cover, and besides, the vox is choked and the noosphere is dead.

No one aboard the Zetsun Verid Yard questions the fact that the yard structure has remained untouched either. Too small? Overlooked? Yet it is a vital specialist facility, and yards around it have been targeted and obliterated.

The ship docks between the two fast escorts sheltering in the yard space.

‘How long?’ Kor Phaeron asks the senior magos of his shadow techpriests.

‘Three hours, provided we are not interrupted, majir,’ the priest replies.

‘They will not be interrupted,’ says Sorot Tchure.

Kor Phaeron is breathing hard. He seems desiccated and frail inside his armour, as though he is drawing off great quantities of his own vitality. Space has worn thin around him.

Calth is his operation, far more than it is Lorgar’s. Kor Phaeron has planned this for his primarch meticulously, and executed it with the aid of Erebus. The punishment and annihilation of the XIII is its principal aim; the humiliation and execution of the wretched Roboute Guilliman. But it is also an advancement, another step on the spiral path of the Great Ritual. It will allow their beloved primarch to progress.

Sorot Tchure is aware of his commander’s burden. There is no room for failure. There is a priceless and vital military objective to be won, but even that pales into nothing beside the greater intent.

He will support his commander every step of the way. It has been Sorot Tchure’s privilege to be one of Kor Phaeron’s senior assault leaders for several years. The novelty of their Legion’s transmutation has simply deepened his commitment to their cause. They were always driven by faith in a higher power. Now they are inspired by proof of that power. It has invested them all. It has answered them. It has blessed them. It has revealed to them the truths that underpin all mysteries of creation.

And the greatest truths are these: the Emperor of Terra is no god, as they once believed. He is a small and pitiful spark in the blackness of the cosmos, and in no way deserving of their devotion. He rebuked the Word Bearers for their faith, and he was right to do so: he was probably afraid of what the real gods would do when they saw him being worshipped.

The faith of the Word Bearers was misplaced. It was mis-assigned. They were looking for a god, and they found merely a false idol, hungry for adoration.

Now they have found a power in the heavens worthy of their faith.

The docking clamps seal the airgate hatches open. As he did during the first act of the ritual, Sorot Tchure leads the way through.

3

In a star formation, led by the barge Destiny’s Hand, seventeen ships of the XVII fleet enter low orbit and prosecute the southern hemisphere.

As they descend, the ships snipe and barrage at the local orbitals, destroying two yards outright and crippling a third. Attempts to block their advance are met with dogged fury. The frigate Janiverse is killed by multiple main lance blasts as it attempts to disrupt the planetary assault formation. The carriers Steinhart and Courage of Konor are driven back, and then crippled in a direct confrontation. The Steinhart suffers a critical power failure, loses all vital support mechanisms, and slides into a ragged, thousand-year death orbit of the sun with its crew ice-locked at their posts. The Courage of Konor, void-holed twice by broadsides and struggling to pull clear of the advancing formation, is caught a third time by cannonfire. Hull plates fail. The keel fractures. A meson beam ruptures the carrier’s exposed reactor core, and it immolates, dropping away into the atmosphere.

It becomes, therefore, the second capital-class ship to hit Calth.

Its plunge is not stately and slow like the dying fall of the grand cruiser Antrodamicus. The Courage of Konor is a plenilunar ball of white fire, consumed by fluorescent radiation from bow to stern. It falls like a meteor, turning and spinning. It strikes the cold, open ocean near the planet’s southern pole.

The impact is akin to an extinction event meteor strike. The atmosphere buckles for five hundred kilometres in all directions as the released heat and light squirt outwards in a distorted, epipolic flash. Trillions of tonnes of ocean water are vaporised instantly, and trillions more are upflung in an ejection cone. Tectonic damage occurs. The consequential tidal wave, a rolling wall of black water, hits the continental coast six minutes later and wipes out the littoral to a distance of four kilometres inland.

It is merely a prelude, collateral damage that forms a savage precursor to the assault proper.

The assault formation descends to the lowest possible operational altitude, their sizzling void shields squeaking and howling against the thin upper atmosphere. Ventral lance batteries and bombardment cannon begin to fire.

The systematic destruction begins.

There is no finesse involved. The northern hemisphere is dense with strategic targets and population centres that need to be targeted and secured. The northern hemisphere is also where most of the XVII ground forces could be landed prior to the hostilities without raising questions.

The southern hemisphere can, largely, be decimated.

The Hand’s formation does just that. Magma bombs blitz the bleak antipodean continents, scouring them with hellish firestorms. Lance fire turns seawater into steam, and rips oceans from their beds. Meson convertors and ion beamers dislocate the ancient tectonic patterns, buckle the crust, and send seismic spasms through the mantle. Smoke, ash and ejected matter stain the atmosphere. Steam clouds the polar latitudes.

Forests burn. Jungles scorch. Rivers vanish. Glaciers melt. Mountains collapse. Marshlands desiccate. Deserts fuse into glass.

Millions die in the scattered southern cities.

Guilliman watches.

His stylus has snapped in his hand. He calls for another. The console in front of him is piled with notes and sketched plans.

The magi of the Mechanicum, those who were not crippled or killed or driven insane by the first outrage, have begun to reboot the flagship’s crippled systems. Limited vox has been restored. Guilliman has motive power, shields and weapons.

But even the mighty Macragge’s Honour cannot take on the XVII fleet alone. The Ultramar fleet elements are scattered. There is no way to coordinate them.

There is no way to coordinate them fast enough to counter and check the planetary assault.

Calth is burning. Calth, jewel of Veridia, one of the great worlds of the Five Hundred, is violated, perhaps beyond any hope of recovery.

Guilliman turns his back. He cannot watch.

‘Is it still on repeat?’ he asks.

‘My lord?’ Gage responds.

‘My declaration? My message to my brother?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ says Marius Gage. ‘It is on constant repeat via what little comms capability we have.’

The primarch nods.

‘Should I… cancel it?’ the First Master asks.

Guilliman doesn’t reply. Aides have delivered more data to his bridge position. Lacking cogitator function and active grids, he has had scribes and rubricators stationed on all observation decks, recording data by hand on slate and paper. Runners bring all documents to him every four minutes. The heap of information is growing.

The primarch has noticed something. He has noticed some detail amongst all the others. He scoops it up. Other papers and info-tiles slither to the deck, disturbed.

‘What is it?’ asks Gage.

The world is trembling. On the far side of the globe, the planetary bombardment is under way, scourging the other hemisphere. The trauma, transmitted as a subterranean micro-shock and an atmospheric flicker of overpressure, can be felt even here.

Here. Numinus starport. Enormous sections of its sprawl are still on fire. The drumming of heavy artillery is coming from the city. Formations of attack craft rush overhead every few minutes, roaring bright coals of afterburner heat. Smoke has blackened the sky, apart from the bright pinpricks of debris burning up, of ship-fire up in space, of dying orbital yards combusting.

There’s dust everywhere. It’s fine, yellowish, a by-product of ash and the up-cast of surface impacts. It films the air and coats upper surfaces. The micro-shocks are making it trickle and sift in places. It seeps through vents. It dribbles down gutters. It wafts like smoke where the breeze stirs it.

It sticks to blood.

It has adhered to the blood-soaked skin and armour of the fallen. It has clotted the pools of blood like sawdust. It covers dead faces like powder, so the corpses look painted and preserved, formally prepared by mortuary assistants.

Vil Teth, gene-named leader of a Kaul Mandori strike team, advances along one of the transit causeways, lasrifle trained. His brown leather boots scuff up the yellow dust. Eight men of his immediate brotherhood squad follow him, with another twelve holding back with the heavy support, an armoured speeder with an autocannon mount. Zorator, their watcher, is somewhere nearby.

The zone has to be cleared. The commanders have ordered this. By midnight, the entire port must be sectioned and secure. There are survivors hiding everywhere. Teth is cautious because he knows that some of these so called ‘survivors’ are XIII Legion warriors, gone to ground. His men are not equipped for that kind of opposition, no matter how broken or cornered it might be.

That’s why they have the heavy support and the watcher.

It’s not death that Teth fears. They’re Kaul Mandori. They are immortal. This is the promise that has been made to them, the vow they have accepted. This is the promise that lured him from his life in the Army and made him join the brotherhood. Immortality for service: it seemed, to Vil Teth, a fair exchange.

It’s not the death he fears. But he’s seen enough action in his career to know that he’d prefer to avoid the pain.

Zorator’s presence in the area is spooking the enemy from cover. Teth rises sharply as three men break into the open ahead, and begin to flee across the field of smouldering rubble. They are non-heterosic humans, which relieves him. They are wearing the livery uniforms of the cargo handling guild. They are unarmed.

Teth raises his rifle, takes aim, and shoots the first of them. A seventy-five metre shot at a moving target. Back of the legs, as he intended. Not bad. The man falls, wailing in pain. Alive. Alive is good. As well as clearing the zone, his strike team has been told to forage for food.

Around him, the Kaul Mandori raise their weapons and take aim. Two make shots that miss the fleeing pair, and skim the dusty rubble. Garel, Teth’s second, squeezes a las-bolt off and clips one of the targets. The man topples, headshot. Dead is good too.

Teth laughs. Garel laughs back, white teeth in a dust-caked face.

There’s another shot. It’s not a las. It’s a gut-deep boom. Bolter. Garel explodes. There’s meat and black blood everywhere in a splatter pattern, covering them all, dark gore and liquidised tissue coating the dust that’s coating them. Teth flinches as he is hit by a whizzing chunk of Garel’s spine. He blinks blood out of his eyes. He sees teeth on the ground, teeth embedded in a chunk of jaw, teeth that just that second were grinning at him.

Teth’s men are scattering. He yells an order.

‘Support! Support!’

There’s a fugging Ultramarine coming at them. Coming out of cover. Coming like a blue blur. The bastard’s huge.

They open fire. Five lasrifles find the giant, clip him with zagging neon las-bolts. The impacts chip his dusty blue armour. They check him, but they don’t stop him. He’s got a fugging sword in one hand, and a battered golden standard in the other.

He puts the sword through Forb, clean fugging through, and then carves Grocus. Grocus rotates as the sword catches him. He spins like a dancer pirouetting, twirling blood like an outflung cape, then falls.

The Ultramarine kills Sorc, then Teth’s world turns upside down as he gets knocked flat. The Ultramarine isn’t stopping. He’s going for the heavy support. He knows that’s the real threat.

Teth rolls over, spitting out blood, dust and the part of his tongue he bit off when the Ultramarine smashed into him.

‘Kill him! Kill him!’

The support unit’s coming up. The men are firing, some kneeling to steady their shots. The Ultramarine’s running right at them. He’s brandishing the fugging standard pole. Idiot. Autocannon’s going to fug him up.

The speeder spurs forward. Why the fug isn’t it firing?

Teth realises how clever the Ultramarine has been. That’s why he came through them, head on. He wants to take the speeder. If the speeder opens up at him, Teth and the others are in its field of fire.

You idiots, Teth thinks. You idiots. What the fug’s the universe going to look like with you ruling it? I don’t matter? I’m fugging immortal! Gene-named! Remember? We’re gene-kin! They’ve taken our blood. They’ll bring us back. That’s what the Word Bearers promised us if we served them. If we die for them, they bring us back. they can do that. They have gene-tech.

Forget me! Fugging shoot the bastard!

The speeder kicks forward to meet the bounding Ultramarine. The fugger’s so fast. Something that big and heavy ought not to be able to move that f–

Teth realises something.

Garel got ruined by a bolter, but the Ultramarine hasn’t got a bolter. He hasn’t got a bolter, so–

The second giant in cobalt blue shows himself. He has got a bolter.

He comes off the roof of a fab-shop twenty metres back. A running jump off a six-metre drop. Transhuman muscle puts some real distance on that. His feet stride out as he sails down. He was waiting until the speeder passed under him. He was waiting for it to come to meet his partner.

The newcomer bangs down on the lid of the speeder, both feet planted, denting the roof panel. The landing is as loud as a bolter round hitting. The speeder bounces on its grav-field, soaking the impact.

The newcomer, feet braced, bends over and fires his boltgun through the roof. Thud. Thud. Two shots. Two kills.

The first Ultramarine reaches him, running head-on into the support squad’s frantic small-arms fire. Teth sees point-blank las shot flecking clean off his armour. More sword work. Arterial blood hoses the side of the speeder. The Ultramarine swings the standard like a club, spading one of the Kaul clean out of his boots.

The second Ultramarine jumps off the speeder’s roof and joins the melee. He’s put the bolter up. Saving ammo. He’s laying in with his combat blade. Eight of the twelve are dead in fewer seconds.

Teth shouts. He shouts so hard he feels like he’s going to turn his lungs inside out.

Ventanus hears the yell. He turns. The battered golden standard in his hands is dripping blood.

‘What did you bring that for?’ Selaton growls, withdrawing his blade from his last kill.

Ventanus isn’t listening. Some of the enemy foot troops are still alive. The leader is yelling.

‘We should shut him up,’ says Selaton. He’s opened the side hatch of the speeder, and is dragging an exploded body out. The cabin interior is painted with blood. He needs to find the levers to adjust the seats.

The Word Bearer appears. Cataphractii. Terminator.

‘Zorator! My watcher! Kill them!’ Teth shrieks.

The Terminator is massive. The enhanced armour, cumbersome, is also as solid as a tank. The lorica segmentata of the huge shoulder plates rise up above the crested helm. The bulky gorget is part snarling mouth, part cage. Studded leather pteruges and mail skirts protect the weaker joints. He looks like a Titan engine: the vast shoulders and upper body, the stocky legs.

Lightning crackles around his left-hand claw. He starts to fire his giant combi-bolter.

Mass-reactive shells rip up the concourse. They explode and kill two of the Kaul Mandori that Ventanus had subdued but not slain. They knock Ventanus off his feet, driving armour splinters into his shin and thigh, and rip a considerable bite out of the speeder’s nose plating.

Selaton throws himself down in rolling cover, using the speeder as a block. He tries to return fire. His aim is good, but the cataphractii soaks up his rounds. Flames from the mass-reactive impacts gout around the reinforced carapace.

The Word Bearer heavy fires at Selaton. The speeder takes more serious damage, including a bolt that scalps the crew bay, peeling the metal skin of the cabin roof up like the tongue of a shoe.

Ventanus is hurt. His leg is punctured. The bleeding’s already stopped. He churns to his feet. He’s got the speed the hulking Terminator lacks. It’s a blood-red beast, maned with crimson horsehair. He rushes it.

It swings its aim back to him. Ventanus is transhuman fast, but he can’t outrun shells of a combi-bolter, and his armour won’t stop them either.

There’s a ping of tearing metal, of bolts popping. It’s the sound Selaton makes as he wrenches the speeder’s autocannon off its mount. He’s standing on the speeder, half inside the cab, one foot on the seats, one braced on the nose plate, the cabin roof peeled back as if to reveal him like a theatrical surprise. He’s got the multi-barrelled cannon wedged against his hip, the metal snake of the munition feeder coiling back, fat and heavy, into the crew bay.

He fires. The heavy weapon makes a grinding metal noise like bells being crushed through some kind of mill. A jumping lick of burning gases flickers around the rotating barrels.

The storm of shots brackets the cataphractii and rips across him. Fragments of metal flake off his armour in a puff of abraded smoke. Rubble on either side of him explodes. Pieces of the gorget and visor fly off, along with scraps of leather pteruges, shreds of horsehair, and broken mail rings. The shots penetrate in four places, allowing blood to glug out of the bare metal craters.

The Terminator stays upright for a long time, staggering backwards under the hail of fire. Finally, he goes down on his back with a crash.

Ventanus stands over him. Smoke, blue and pungent, streaks the air. The Word Bearer, gurgling the blood that is filling his helmet and throat brace, stirs. He’s dying, but he’s a long way from dead. He starts lifting the oil-black combi-bolter.

Ventanus brings the blade of the standard shaft down through the visor slot with both hands, driving it and turning it and screwing it, until it meets the inside back of the armoured helmet. Blood wells out over the eye slits and gorget lip, and runs down the sides of the helmet to mat the horsehair broom of the crest.

Ventanus steps back, leaving the standard planted there, crooked. Selaton approaches.

‘We must move,’ he says.

‘Is the speeder functional?’

‘Just about.’

Ventanus pulls out the standard and carries it towards the shot-up vehicle.

‘That’s why,’ he says.

‘What?’ asks Selaton.

‘That’s why I brought this,’ Ventanus replies, raising the bloody standard. ‘Precisely for things like that.’

‘What does it mean?’ asks Marius Gage.

‘It means…’ Guilliman begins. He takes the data-slate back, ponders it. ‘It means a precondition of malice.’

He looks out of the flagship’s vast crystalflex ports at the bombarded planet below.

‘Not that it‘s really in any doubt,’ he adds. ‘If this started as an accident or mistake, then it has truly passed beyond any limit of forgiveness. It is, however, salutary to know that my brother’s crime is entirely proven.’

Guilliman summons the Master of Vox with a quick gesture.

‘Rescind my previous looped broadcast,’ he says, taking the speaker horn. ‘Replace it with this.’

He hesitates, thinking, and then lifts his head and speaks cleanly and quickly into the device.

‘Lorgar of Colchis. You may consider the following. One: I entirely withdraw my previous offer of solemn ceasefire. It is cancelled, and will not be made again, to you or to any other of your motherless bastards. Two, you are no longer any brother of mine. I will find you, I will kill you, and I will hurl your toxic corpse into hell’s mouth.’

He hands the horn back to the vox-officer.

‘Put that on repeat immediately,’ he says.

Guilliman ushers Gage, Shipmaster Zedoff and a group of other senior executives towards the strategium.

‘In the absence of vox, we will need to use direct link laser comms and sealed orders physically carried by fast lighters to coordinate the fleet,’ he begins. ‘I have sketched a hasty tactical plan. Specific ship orders must be communicated to each master and captain by the most expedient means available. Within the hour – the hour, you understand – I want this fleet operating to purpose. We will deny that bombardment.’

‘That is our objective?’ asks Zedoff.

‘No,’ Guilliman admits. ‘I am going to put that trust in the Mlatus and the Solonim Woe. They will lead the formations against the planetary attack. Our specific objective will be the Fidelitas Lex.’

Zedoff raises his eyebrows.

‘A personal score, then,’ he says.

Guilliman doesn’t try to hide it.

‘I will kill him. I will literally kill him. With my bare hands.’

He looks at Gage.

‘Don’t say anything, Marius,’ he says. ‘You’ll be transferring to the Mlatus to lead the attack. With a sober head and a proper plan. I know that going after the enemy flag has serious demerits, tactically. I don’t care. This is the one battle of my career I’m going to fight with my heart rather than my head. The bastard will die. The bastard.’

‘I was merely going to object to being absent at the moment you kill him,’ says Gage.

‘My primarch!’

They turn. The Master of Vox is pale.

‘Lithocast, sir. Long-range signal from the Fidelitas Lex.’

Guilliman nods.

‘So he ignores my plea for ceasefire, but I tell him to go and screw himself and he makes contact immediately. Put it on.’

‘My primarch, I–’ Gage begins.

Guilliman pushes past him, heading for the lithocaster plate.

‘There is no way you will stop me having this conversation, Marius,’ he says.

Guilliman steps onto the hololithic platform. Light bends and bubbles in front of him. Images form and fade, re-form and decay, like scratches of light on film. Then Lorgar is standing there, life-size, facing Guilliman. His face is in shadow again, but the light construction makes him look utterly real. Other shapes crowd around him, sections and fragments of shadow, no longer recognisable as his minions and lieutenants.

‘Have you lost your temper, Roboute?’ Lorgar asks. They can hear the smile.

‘I am going to gut you,’ Guilliman replies softly.

‘You have lost your temper. The great and calm and level-headed Roboute Guilliman has finally succumbed to passion.’

‘I will gut you. I will skin you. I will behead you.’

‘Ah, Roboute,’ Lorgar murmurs. ‘Here, at the very end, I finally hear you talk in a way that actually makes me like you.’

‘Precondition of malice,’ says Guilliman, barely a whisper. ‘You took the Campanile. By my estimation, you took it at least a hundred and forty hours ago. You took the ship, and you staged this. You organised this atrocity, Lorgar, and you made it seem like a terrible accident so you could capitalise on our mercy. You made us stay our hand while you committed murder.’

‘It’s called treachery, Roboute. It works very well. How did you find out?’

‘We back-plotted the Campanile’s route once we’d worked out what had hit the yards. When you look at the plot, the notion that it was any kind of accident becomes laughable.’

‘As is the notion you can hurt me.’

‘We’re not going to debate it, you maggot, you treacherous bastard,’ says Guilliman. ‘I just wanted you to know that I will rip your living heart out. And I want to know why. Why? Why? If this is our puerile old feud, boiled to the surface, then you are the most pathetic soul in the cosmos. Pathetic. Our father should have left you out in the snow at birth. He should have fed you to Russ. You worm. You maggot.’

Lorgar raises his face slightly so that Guilliman can see a hint of his smile in the shadows of his face.

‘This has nothing to do with our enmity, Roboute… Except that it affords me the opportunity to avenge my honour on you and your ridiculous toy soldiers. That is just a delicious bonus. No, this is the Ushkul Thu. Calth is the Ushkul Thu. The offering. It is the sunrise of the new galaxy. A new order.’

‘You’re rambling, you bastard.’

‘The galaxy is changing, Roboute. It is turning upside down. Up will be down, and down will be up. Our father will be tossed out of his throne. He will fall down, and no one will put him back together again.’

‘Lorgar, you–’

‘Listen to me, Roboute. You think you’re so clever. So wise. So informed. But this has started already. It’s already under way. The galaxy is turning on its head. You will die, and our father will die, and so will all the others, because you are all too stupid to see the truth.’

Guilliman steps towards the lithocast phantom, as though he might strike it down or snap its neck.

‘Listen to me, Roboute,’ the light ghost hisses. ‘Listen to me. The Imperium is finished. It is falling. It is going to burn. Our father is done. His malicious dreams are over. Horus is rising.’

‘Horus?’

‘Horus Lupercal is rising, Roboute. You have no idea of his ability. He is above us all. We stand with him, or we perish entirely.’

‘You shit, Lorgar. Are you drugged? Are you mad? What kind of insanity is–’

‘Horus!’

‘Horus what?’

‘He’s rising! He’s coming! He will kill anyone who stands in his way! He will rule! He will be what the Emperor could never be!’

‘Horus would–’ Guilliman clears his throat. He swallows. He is dazed by the sheer extent of Lorgar’s dementia. ‘Horus would never turn. If any of us turned, the others would–’

‘Horus has risen against our cruel and abusive parent, Roboute,’ says Lorgar. ‘Accept that, and you will die with greater peace in your heart. Horus Lupercal has come to overthrow the Imperial corruption and punish the abuser. It is already happening. And Horus is not alone. I am with him, sworn and true. So is Fulgrim. Angron. Perturabo. Magnus. Mortarion. Curze. Alpharius. Your loyalty is air and paper, Roboute. Our loyalty is blood.’

‘You’re lying!’

‘You’re dying. Isstvan V burns. Brothers are dead already.’

‘Dead? Who are–’

‘Ferrus Manus. Corax. Vulkan. All dead and gone. Slaughtered like pigs.’

‘These are all lies!’

‘Look at me, Roboute. You know they are not. You know it. You have studied every one of us. You know our strengths and our failings. Theoretical, Roboute! Theoretical! You know this is possible. You know from the very facts that this is a possible outcome.’

Guilliman steps back. He opens his mouth, but he is too stunned to reply.

‘Whatever you think of me, Roboute,’ says Lorgar, ‘whatever your opinion, and I know it is about as low as it can be, you know I’m not a stupid man. I would betray my brother and attack the assembled might of the XIII Legion… for a grudge? Really? Really? Practical, Roboute! I am here to exterminate you and the Ultramarines because you are the only force left in the Emperor’s camp that can possibly stop Horus. You are too dangerous to live, and I am here to make sure you do not.’

Lorgar leans forward. The light catches his teeth.

‘I’m here to remove you from the game, Roboute.’

Guilliman steps back.

‘Either you’re insane, or the galaxy has gone mad,’ he says with remarkable steadiness. ‘Whichever, I am coming for you, and I will put you and your heathen killers down. Excommunicate Traitoris. You will not have any opportunity to reflect upon the monstrosity of this crime.’

‘Oh, Roboute, I can always rely on you to sound like a giant pompous arsehole. Come and get me. We’ll see who burns first.’

Lorgar turns to step out of the light, and then hesitates.

‘One last thing you need to know, Roboute. You really don’t appreciate what you’re up against.’

‘A madman,’ snaps Guilliman, turning his back.

Lorgar alters.

His holocast form shifts, like fat melting, like bones deforming, like wax dripping. His smile tears in half and something rises up out of his human shape. It is not human.

Guilliman senses it. He turns back. He sees it.

His eyes widen.

He can smell it. He can smell the pitch-black nightmare, the cosmic stench of the warp. The thing is growing, still growing. Lorgar’s empty skin sloughs off like a snake’s.

It is a horror from the most lightless voids. It is glistening black flesh and tangled veins, it is frogspawn mucus and beads of blinking eyes, it is teeth and batwings. It is an anatomical atrocity. It is teratology, the shaping of monsters.

Filthy light veils it and invests it like velvet robes. It is a shadow and it is smoke. Its crest is the horns of an aurochs, four metres high, ribbed and brown. It snorts. There is a rumble of intestines and gas, of a predator’s growl. A smell of blood. A whiff of acid. A tang of venom.

The things that hovered behind Lorgar are transforming too. They turn beetle-black, gleaming, iridescent blue. Their boneless limbs and pseudopods writhe. They stir vibrissae and clack like insects. Multiple faces fold and ooze into one another, mutating into ghastly diprosopia. Overlapping mouths pucker and lisp Guilliman’s name.

Guilliman steadies himself. He will know no fear.

‘I’ve seen enough of his charlatan tricks,’ he says. ‘Break the lithocast link.’

‘The… link…’ begins the Master of Vox. ‘Sir, the link is already broken.’

Guilliman sweeps back to face the nightmare, the thing-that-is-no-longer-Lorgar. His hand reaches for the hilt of his sword.

The thing speaks. Its voice is madness.

‘Roboute,’ it says. ‘Let the galaxy burn.’

It lunges, jaws wide, spittle flying.

Blood, many hundreds of litres of human blood, suddenly sprays the walls of the flagship’s bridge under pressure. The crystalflex window ports blow out in blizzards of shards, voiding into space.

The bridge tower of the immense battleship Macragge’s Honour explodes.