And the gate’s systems opened up to it.
FROM THE BRIDGE of Lex Tredecim, Magos Locard’s eyes flickered and danced behind the synthskin lids. The mechanical torso with which he achieved locomotion sat at rest behind him, his body held suspended on a host of copper wires. A thick trunking cable rose from the floor and plugged into his spinal network through his artificial pelvis.
His body twitched, as though in the grip of a nightmare and his mouth opened in a silent gasp. Spreading his noospheric consciousness throughout the Imperial network was draining work, and tested even his formidable resources. There were other magos based on Calth, of course, and he piggybacked on their reach into the network, travelling the golden highways of data and information as easily as a transit train might cross the surface of Blessed Mars.
It began as a tiny blip in one of the logic engines controlling the guns of Guilliman’s Gate, an erratic systemic fault that almost escaped his notice until he recognised a distorted frequency in the Mechanilingua bandwidth. He had seen such aberrant code before, in the scrapcode attack on Calth’s orbital defences. Adrenal shunts deployed in his spine and cognitive enhancers pumped into his floodstream, heightening his awareness and honing his already fearsome analytical powers.
He inloaded the recordings of this data into a secured memory coil, a data prison to store dangerously unstable code, and began running every purgative in his arsenal. At the same time, he erected aegis Mockers in an attempt to prevent the infection from spreading.
“Gate command,” he said, opening a channel to the buried command centre that oversaw every operation within Guilliman’s Gate. “This is Magos Locard aboard Lex Tredecim. Advisement: isolate all linked fire control cogitators from battery three-ultra-nine. Its codeware has been infected.”
“Infected?” said a voice his pattern recognition buffers identified as Magos Ultis.
“Indeed,” said Locard as he watched one aegis blocker fall after another, overwhelmed in moments by the rapidly replicating and mutating code. “Repetition/Clarification/Emphasis: shut down and isolate all linked fire control cogitators.”
“Understood,” said Ultis. “Shutting down now.”
Locard immediately saw it wouldn’t be enough. The aggressiveness of the scrapcode was unbelievable, like the most virulent plague imaginable. He linked directly to the infected systems, copying and buffering his active systems into a disposable data intercept before immersing himself in the stream of corruption.
The code swirled and howled around him, its chaotic randomness offensive in its assault on the Euclidian laws of mathematics. It bore all the hallmarks of the Dark Mechanicus, the random destructiveness of the code in violation of every one of the sixteen laws of the Mechanicus. It seethed like a living thing, but it was not living; it was artificial, and nothing artificial was ever truly random.
He blocked it, shunted it to redundant systems and directed it into self-destructive cycles, but for every strand he destroyed, another rose up from the numerical debris. Like the hydra of old, it renewed itself with viral rapidity, and no sooner had he purged one system than another infection would arise.
It infected the gateway’s systems at a geometric rate, spreading to the life support mechanisms, the power relays, the ventilation and every other linked system. With mounting horror, he saw its ultimate goal—the systems that controlled the gate itself. So massive was Guilliman’s Gate that no mere manual means of opening it existed. Machine-driven pistons and engines drove the mechanisms that opened the gate, and even now those systems were falling under the control of the code’s originator.
Locard knew he could not defeat this attack, but with every thrust, parry and riposte of data, his understanding of the code’s methodology grew, stored away in the isolated and warded memory coils for future study.
“Magos Ultis,” he said, reading the confusion and panic within gate command. “The operating systems controlling the gate’s opening mechanism are compromised. Alert all stations to fall back immediately.”
“Magos Locard,” replied Ultis, his augmitted voice unable to conceal his fear. “I cannot issue such a command. I do not have the authority.”
Locard shut down his link with gate command, already hearing the burbling corruption in Ultis’ voice. The gate was lost, and he broadcast a vox-wide evacuation signal. Every Imperial vox-unit in the vicinity of Guilliman’s Gate would receive the order to fall back, and he only hoped he was in time.
There had been a malign consciousness behind this attack, an augmented mind swollen with forbidden knowledge and tainted with the deceits of Chaos. It had once been a mind much like his own, shaped by the greatest cognitive architects of Mars, but unlike other tainted minds Locard had encountered, this one was not nearly as experienced. There was newness to this mind that spoke of an originating source far younger than any of the fallen tech-priests who had sided with the Arch-Traitor Horus.
“You are skilful,” he said, utilising his fleshvoice for fear he might repeat elements of the corrupt code. “But you are impetuous, and I am a quick study. I know you now, and knowledge is power.”
He shut off his link with the gate, breaking off all connections with the corrupt data he had recorded and stored in his secure memory prisons. He would study it later, but for now, his contribution to the defence of Calth would need to take on a more martial nature.
With a hissed cant of binary, Magos Locard powered up Lex Tredecim’s weapon systems.
HONSOU WATCHED AS the green light spread from Cycerin’s pool to the organic-looking orifices in the wall of the Black Basilica. This chamber had once been its command deck, but was now a temple of dark stone and iron. Cowled acolytes of the Dark Machine-God tended to its workings, each without a face, simply a black void beneath their hoods. A vast altar of red-veined bloodstone pulsed like a slow heartbeat, and its surface ran with emerald lightning.
“I don’t believe it,” said Grendel. “They did it.”
Honsou smiled and opened a channel to his army, but he saw no order would be necessary, for every warrior had seen what Grendel had seen.
Guilliman’s Gate was opening.
URIEL POUNDED ALONG the wide passageways within the gate, desperation lending his limbs extra strength and speed. The gate was opening, and its guns had fallen silent. Of all the stratagems he had thought the Iron Warriors might use, subtlety had not been one of them, and he cursed himself for not anticipating that Honsou would surprise him.
The evacuation of Guilliman’s Gate was already underway, a thousand vehicles of all descriptions falling back in good order along the Underway towards the first of the great caves. Lex Tredecim’s frontal section blazed with light as its multitude of weapon systems engaged the enemy warriors spilling through the opening gate. Nothing could survive such a blitzing hurricane of las-fire and hard rounds, but as the gate opened ever wider the enemy storm would soon become an unstoppable tide.
The Swords of Calth ran with Uriel, and soldiers of the Calth Defence Auxilia had been despatched to the location Magos Locard had identified as the source of the infiltration. Petronius Nero had his sabre drawn and a haze of nascent heat built around the barrel of Hadrianus’ melta gun. More useful for killing armoured vehicles, the melta was nevertheless a fearsome weapon for building clearances. Fired in a confined space, a blast would burn away the oxygen and suck and the air from the lungs of anyone within it.
The curved passageway was formed from prestressed permacrete, its walls machined smooth and stamped with bas-relief Ultramarines symbols and devotional frescoes. Armoured doors led off its length into armouries, shrines, firing ports and defence galleries.
An overlaid schemata described the route to the enemy’s point of entry, but Uriel needed no such guide, for he was following an altogether more primal instinct. Though he couldn’t explain it, he knew exactly where the enemy had breached the gate, just as he knew who was within; the bastard offspring of the Daemonculaba.
It had been its eyes he h
ad seen through, and he could feel its presence as surely as he could feel the thunder of his own heartbeat. Gunshots sounded from ahead, the actinic crack of las-rounds smacking permacrete and the deafening bangs of bolter fire. Uriel’s squad rounded a bend in the passageway to see a furious exchange of weapons fire and smoke.
Troopers in the blue and silver of the Defence Auxilia fired at a partially opened blast door that gave entry to one of the gate’s many defence batteries. Under the cover of his fellows, a brave trooper surged forward with a satchel charge to blow the door all the way open. A withering salvo of flechettes flashed towards him from within the gun battery. The instant before they struck, the darts exploded into a blizzard of razor fragments and the trooper was shredded into a confetti of blood and flesh.
A controlled burst of bolter fire felled three more troopers and the rest dived for cover.
“Get me close to that door and I’ll kill everything in that room,” said Hadrianus.
Uriel nodded, but before Hadrianus moved, he said. “Just get the door off. I want whoever is in that room alive.”
Hadrianus nodded and spun around the bend in the passage, running bent over towards the door. Uriel and the rest of the Swords of Calth followed, spaced to avoid attracting a concentrated burst of fire with their bolters wedged in tight to their shoulders. Uriel drew his pistol and sword as a storm of flechettes spun out to meet his squad, but the splintering fragments were no match for power armour. Brutus Cyprian and Peleus fired towards the gap in the door, both warriors’ shots drawing screeching cries of alien pain.
Uriel saw a grey fleshed creature fall back, and slapped a palm down on Hadrianus’ shoulder guard.
“Now. Livius, Brutus!” he ordered. “Take that door down.” Hadrianus fired two quick bursts from his melta and the hinges of the door vanished in a flash of instantaneously molten steel. Gobbets of orange metal streamed down the edges of the blast door and Brutus Cyprian ran at it with a roar of ursine power. He slammed his boot into the heavy door, and it bucked inwards with a boom of ruptured metal. It toppled inwards as Cyprian spun away. Uriel and Peleus stood to either side of the door, firing across each other into the room as the enemy soldiers scattered from the breach in their refuge. Uriel saw darting, reptilian creatures bounding towards the massive, boxy shape of the silent gun battery, each with long dewclaws and hissing, draconic faces. Their skin rippled in a rainbow of colours and fresh storms of their dart-like projectiles slashed towards them.
Uriel ducked back as the doorway filled with slashing shrapnel. Peleus swung low and snapped off three precisely aimed shots, felling an alien with each one. To the untrained eye, it appeared Peleus hadn’t even aimed, but Uriel had seen him on the firing ranges of Macragge and knew that his banner bearer was a superlative shot, perhaps the best in the Chapter.
“Go!” he shouted, surging through the door, his bolt pistol bucking in his hand as he shot down another of the alien creatures. Its flesh exploded into wet grey fragments and it died with a brittle screech of pain. Another leapt at him, but his sword swept through its thorax and tore off its limbs in a hissing shower of slithering organs.
Petronius Nero moved through the leaping, darting mass of aliens like a dancer, his blade a slashing blur of silver as he wove an intricate path through his foes. Xenos claws raked at him, but he swayed aside with apparent ease, lopping sinewy limbs with every graceful blow of his sabre.
Peleus and Hadrianus fought with disciplined bursts of fire, fighting in mutual support of one another as they methodically cleared sector after sector. Brutus Cyprian clubbed xenos killers to the ground with his fists as they leapt at him, their hind claws tearing at his armour and jaws snapping at his visor. Another warrior might have panicked, but Cyprian calmly tore each attacker from his body and crushed its neck, stamped on its chest or bludgeoned its skull to destruction on the walls.
More flechettes sparked and ricocheted around the battery as the last of the reptile creatures fought to the death. They weren’t even trying to escape, realised Uriel as he killed another with a brutal lunge: they’re a rearguard. With that thought, he sheathed his swords and leapt onto a projecting stub buttress on the wall. From there he leapt for the breech of the great guns and hauled himself onto its upper surfaces.
Two individuals scrambled over the huge gun battery towards the wedged open blast shield.
One wore the burnished plates of the Iron Warriors, the other the midnight black of what had once been Raven Guard. The figure in black looked over its shoulder and their eyes met through the lenses of their battle helmets.
“Vaanes,” hissed Uriel and swung his pistol to bear.
He slotted the renegade Raven Guard between the open sights of his gun, and Ardaric Vaanes paused in his escape.
The moment stretched, but Uriel did not fire. He couldn’t see Vaanes’ face, but felt his desire to remain behind and face him. No, not face him… face his own forsaken redemption. The sensation was like nothing Uriel had ever experienced. This was an enemy who had betrayed everything the Adeptus Astartes stood for, yet still he did not take the shot.
The claws slid from Vaanes’ gauntlets and he launched himself at Uriel with a shrieking howl. Uriel fired, and the shot shattered the claws of the Raven Guard’s right fist. He threw himself back as the warrior barrelled into him. One claw lanced for his side, and Uriel rolled to avoid it. Energised blades scraped his armour and he slammed the butt of his pistol into Vaanes’ head.
They rolled like common brawlers in the confined space, their fists, knees and elbows weapons as they battered each other with the fury of old comrades that now found themselves to be enemies. Uriel slammed his boot against Vaanes’ hip. The warrior flinched and slammed the flat of his hand into Uriel’s helmet, snapping his head back with a sharp crack. Once again the crackling blades slashed for Uriel, but he rolled aside and launched himself at Vaanes’ legs.
They crashed together and fell from the breech of the great guns, slamming to the floor of the battery chamber with a crack of ceramite. Uriel hammered his elbow down on Vaanes’ throat, but the Raven Guard squirmed free of his grip and the gauntlet blades snapped from his knuckles with a hiss of fizzing energy.
Uriel had kept a grip on his pistol and swung the weapon up, once again slotting Vaanes between his sights.
“Go ahead, Ventris,” said Vaanes with his fist poised to deliver the killing blow. “Get it over with.”
Brutus Cyprian slammed into Vaanes and bore him to the ground, pinning him with his incredible strength. Vaanes struggled in his grip, but against such power, his efforts were wasted. Uriel picked himself up as Livius Hadrianus stepped in with his melta gun raised. “No,” he said. “Shaan will want him alive.”
Hadrianus nodded and Petronius Nero helped Cyprian lift the struggling Raven Guard to his feet. As Uriel let out a pent-up sigh, he looked up towards the top of the gun as he remembered the second figure he’d seen.
The Iron Warrior was crouched on the edge of the gun, its head cocked to one side in rapt wonder. Uriel needed no vision of its disfigured face to know that this was the creature that bore his likeness and carried his genetic material within its abused body. It had its weapon raised, but it did not fire.
“You are Ventris?” it said, with a voice that was at once grating and vile, yet had a horrid familiarity to its tones.
“I know you,” said Uriel. “I know what they did to you.”
“You know nothing,” hissed the Iron Warrior and shot Uriel in the head.
THE CAVE MOUTH beyond the open gate was impassably blocked, a mass of collapsed boulders and fallen debris from the cavern roof. Millions of tonnes of rock had been blasted from the ceiling of the cave by the Imperial battle fortress, blocking the route down into Calth as surely as it had never existed. Wrecked tanks and bodies were mixed with the rubble, the ruin of those too eager in their pursuit of the Ultramarines as they fled deeper into their catacombs.
“How long will it take to get through that?” ask
ed Grendel.
“Through it?” said Honsou as the ground rumbled with the approach of five mighty vehicles. “We’re not going through it, we’re going under it.”
Emerging from the oil-soaked holds of the Black Basilica like fat, cone-mouthed maggots, the five war machines were cylindrical and fully twenty metres in diameter with a multitude of conical drills, laser cutters, melta borers and conversion beam augers mounted on their frontal sections.
“Drilling rigs like these brought down the walls of Hydra Cordatus and a thousand fortresses before that,” said Honsou. “They’ll have little trouble in clearing a path through the rock of Calth. We’ll be on course inside of a few hours.”
Grendel nodded as the Iron Warriors directed the enormous, iron-sheened rigs towards the rubble-strewn ground before the avalanche. Hydraulic pumps lifted their rear sections into the air with grinding squeals of greased metal and the conical cutting sections spooled up in a blaze of noise and light.
As the first rig powered into the ground with a juddering roar, Honsou turned to the Newborn, seeing a faraway look in the eyes of his grotesque champion. It had returned from the mission to open the gateway with the loxatl, but Ardaric Vaanes had been taken prisoner by the Ultramarines. Honsou hadn’t yet decided whether that was a bad thing or not.
“You saw him?” asked Honsou. He didn’t need to qualify the question.
“I saw Ventris,” confirmed the Newborn, watching as hundreds of Bloodborn soldiers crawled away from the dust-filled cavern mouth the avalanche had blocked.
“And you didn’t kill him?” sneered Grendel. “You’re getting soft in your old age.”
“There wasn’t the chance,” said the Newborn. “Vaanes got in the way.”
“I never thought they’d capture a Raven Guard,” said Grendel, jerking a thumb at the Newborn and staring straight at Honsou. “I thought they’d get that thing first. Or is there something you’re not telling us?”
Honsou didn’t answer and the Newborn turned to Grendel. “You suspect Vaanes allowed himself to be captured?”