“How were these images captured?” asked Tigurius.
“The Inquisition does not reveal its information sources,” said Suzaku archly.
“Every world of Ultramar has at least one Inquisition capture-drone in orbit,” said Lord Calgar, and Uriel was pleased to see Suzaku’s eyes narrow in annoyance. Lord Calgar met her angry stare. “Did you really think I wouldn’t know?”
he asked.
“I had thought our veils too subtle,” said Suzaku, unashamed at such blatant violation of trust. The Ultramarines permitted the Inquisition to maintain a base within Ultramar, but such an agreement was supposedly based on the premise that neither organisation would interfere with the other’s business. The atmosphere in the courtyard changed in a heartbeat. Where before Suzaku was someone to be wary of, now she was someone to be viewed with outright suspicion.
“You are spying on our worlds?” stormed Agemman.
“We were doing our job,” returned Suzaku.
“It does not matter,” said Calgar, ending the confrontation. “A world of Ultramar has been attacked, keep that as your focus.”
“Do we know how it happened?” asked Uriel. “How did the daemons get to Tarentus?”
“Keep watching,” advised Suzaku.
The view on the electrostatically charged air altered, and the edit-engine snapped into sharper focus as it shifted its aim back into space with a series of shuttered clicks. The sandy curve of Tarentus filled the lower portion of the image, but in the top corner, a vast structure was just visible, the edge of something so huge that it seemed inconceivable that it was not anchored to the surface of a world.
Its lines were brutally angled, jarring and cloaked in a veil of crystallising gasses. It had the suggestion of a castellum wall or an enormous earthwork covered in forests of razorwire. The shutter snapped one last time and the entirety of the structure was visible for a fraction of a second before the image froze in place, hissing and jerking with static.
“What is that?” asked Epathus. “A space hulk?”
“No,” said Marneus Calgar, and Uriel detected a hint of remorse in the Chapter Master’s voice. “It is something altogether worse.”
“Worse than a space hulk,” said Sicarius. “That’s something I’d like to see.”
“No you wouldn’t,” said Uriel, remembering the horror of razored claws reaching out of the darkness of the Death of Virtue. “Trust me.”
Sicarius gave him a bitter stare, but said nothing. The captain of the 2nd had been one of the most vocal in condemning Uriel after the Tarsis Ultra campaign, and also the most reluctant to accept him back within the fold of the Ultramarines after the completion of his Death Oath. The recent war on Pavonis had fully restored Uriel’s captaincy, but there were some who still felt his return was something to be regarded with suspicion.
“It’s not a space hulk,” said Captain Galenus of the 5th, his anger simmering just beneath his skin. “It’s the Indomitable!”
“The Indomitable?” said Epathus. “How is that possible?”
“It is possible because I was forced to make a dreadful decision,” said Lord Calgar, holding his head high as he spoke. “You all know of the Daemon Prince M’kar.”
“Aye, the daemon whelp whose fleet I destroyed at the Halamar Rift,” said Sicarius, hammering a fist on his breastplate. “You bested him too, my lord. On the Indomitable.”
“That I did, Cato,” said Lord Calgar, turning to Agemman. “I led the warriors of the 1st, reborn after the Battle for Macragge, onto the Indomitable and defeated him.”
“Tore him limb from limb!” roared Sicarius.
“No,” said Calgar. “I did not.”
TIGURIUS STEPPED INTO the courtyard, his eyes unfocussed as he looked at the twisting image of the Indomitable. He reached out with one gauntlet, as though to touch the image, but curled his fingers back at the last moment. He twisted around, and Uriel quailed before the pellucid light he saw in the Librarian’s eyes.
“The Thrice Born, I see it now,” he hissed. “Defeated once at Halamar, broken again on the Indomitable. Now returned to wreak havoc on the sons of Ultramar. The Sentinel of the Tower is restored to us and the Thrice Born is clad in flesh once more…”
“This is that time, Varro?” asked Calgar, as though afraid of the answer.
“Aye, my lord,” nodded Tigurius.
Uriel’s blood chilled at Tigurius’ words. On Salinas, Brother Leodegarius of the Grey Knights had performed cartomancy and drawn the Tower for Uriel, a card that symbolised change, conflict and catastrophe; an overturning of the existing order of things. Coupled with Tigurius’ words, it boded ill for the future. “The Thrice Born?” said Galenus. “It is the Daemon Lord M’kar?”
“It is,” said Tigurius, his eyes returning to their normal hue. “Aye, it has always been thus. Trapped on the Indomitable for sixty years, bound to the warp core with eldritch wards and set adrift in the heavens on an unknown course.”
“How can that be?” demanded Galenus. “Lord Calgar, you returned from the Indomitable with tidings of the daemon’s death. My men garrisoned that star fort!”
Lord Calgar slowly nodded. “To my eternal shame, I fear they must be dead. Olantor, Decimus, Sabbatina and even Venerable Brother Altarion,” he said, turning to address his captains. “With the aid of the Inquisition I was able to defeat M’kar, but I could not destroy its essence. To do so would have required strength not even I possess. In the end, all that could be done was to bind its essence to heart of the star fort’s warp core, a prison that pulled tighter with every raging attempt to break it open. The Indomitable was set to hurl itself into oblivion, to vanish forever in the depths of the warp, but so strong was M’kar’s hatred that no matter the course its Navigators plotted, it was forever bound to Ultramar.”
“That’s why it was always guarded,” said Galenus, the loss of half his company almost too much to bear. “You couldn’t get rid of it, so you had to keep watch on it.”
Lord Calgar nodded, and Uriel felt the rock upon which he had built his every belief being chipped away with every word the Chapter Master spoke. The destruction of M’kar was part of Lord Calgar’s legend, an inspirational tale told to recruits to fill their hearts with fire and ambition. To learn that Uriel, and the entire Chapter, had been lied to was a blow to rock the certainty of even the strongest character. Looking around the courtyard, Uriel saw the hurt in every warrior’s face. The notion that an Ultramarines warrior as revered as Lord Calgar could have broken faith with truth was as shocking as it was unimaginable.
“Then someone has found the Indomitable and freed the Thrice Born,” said Tigurius.
“It is the only explanation,” agreed Calgar sadly.
“Who?” demanded Sicarius. “Who could have known where to find it?”
“I believe I may shed some light on that matter,” said Magos Locard.
LOCARD CLICKED OVER the marble flagstones towards Suzaku’s savant. “If I may?” he said.
Suzaku nodded and Locard swivelled upon his central axis to pass an information wafer to the pict-savant. The man fed the waver into the edit-engine and waved the projection wand again. Immediately, the image of a planet appeared, complete with streams of biometric, geographic and cartographic data. The view zoomed into the planet’s surface to reveal a verdant world of bright jungle flora and vast agricultural holdings spread across its fertile regions.
Uriel saw nothing unremarkable in the imagery until the view focussed in on a facility of obviously Imperial design. Only then did he realise the scale of the forests and jungles surrounding it.
“The Golbasto Facility,” began Magos Locard. “An isolated research outpost set up fifty-three point nine Terran standard years ago to study the effect of various growth exacerbators on basic foodstuff crops. The research was only moderately successful at first, but two years ago Magos Szalin reported promising results with a new viral agent he named the Heraclitus strain.”
The view swept o
ver the planet, and now that Uriel knew what the Adeptus Mechanicus had attempted, he saw the vast scale of production on Golbasto. Enormous forests with fruit the size of a man’s torso, crops with seeds like grenades, and grain fields taller than a Warhound. The potential of such work was incredible, but its significance to the current crisis was lost on him.
“What has this to do with anything?” demanded Agemman, echoing Uriel’s confusion.
“Everything, Captain Agemman,” assured Locard. “Everything is connected and all the pieces matter. Allow me to demonstrate.”
The view shifted back to the Golbasto Facility, but this time it was in ruins, smoke from numerous fires curling into the sky and spreading to the nearby forests.
“What happened?” asked Uriel.
“The facility was attacked and destroyed, and its entire stock of the Heraclitus strain was stolen. These images are all the data-sifters could retrieve from the shattered memory coils of Magos Third Class Evlame, the only body recovered from the site.”
Once more the view changed, but this time it was a series of static-washed still images: a view of the burning silver dome at the heart of the facility; a blurred impression of a corpse-face held together with wire stitching; and lastly a distant group of armoured warriors who were surely Space Marines. Most wore armour of bare metal plates, but one stood out from the others by virtue of the glossy black of his armour.
“Who are they?” asked Uriel, as a dreadful suspicion began to form in his gut.
Locard waved an augmetic limb and haptic receptors manipulated the image to zoom in on the figures. Too blurred and indistinct to recognise individual faces, the image was clear enough to identify their markings.
Yellow and black chevrons edged the plates of their armour and one shoulder guard bore a hateful iron skull set within an eight-pointed star.
“No!” hissed Uriel. “Iron Warriors. It can’t be.”
“But who’s the other one?” asked Learchus. “The one in black.”
Uriel didn’t answer, but the posture of the warrior in black seemed oddly familiar, his body language speaking volumes about his strength, skill and fighting style. This warrior was an ambush killer, a hunter who struck from the shadows and Uriel was certain he knew from where he recognised him.
“I suspect there is a more personal note to these events than simply the wrath of a daemonic entity,” continued Locard. “I postulate that the originator of the assault on Tarentus has a personal stake in this that centres upon Captain Ventris.”
“How so?” asked Calgar.
“I was led to the Golbasto Facility by an attack on another world. One that had been destroyed by the Heraclitus strain.”
“Tarsis Ultra,” said Uriel, already knowing where this was leading. “I am right, am I not?”
“You are,” confirmed Locard with all too human remorse. “I discovered trace elements of the Heraclitus strain in what little vegetation was left on Tarsis Ultra. It appears that enemy raiders took control of an orbital missile silo and launched a series of warheads armed with the virus.”
“This virus was that dangerous? You said it was supposed to enhance crop growth. How could it wipe out an entire world?” asked Lord Calgar.
“It could not, unless that world was tainted by the residue of a tyranid invasion, my lord,” explained Locard. “Though the tyranid fleet was defeated, much of the bio-matter already deposited on Tarsis Ultra remained, despite the best efforts of the slash and burn programs we instituted in the wake of victory. What you must understand is that the biological impetus of tyrannic organisms is to endlessly propagate, which is a hyper-evolutionary trait designed to smother a world in spore growth that chokes the life from it in order to allow easier digestion by the bio-harvesting organisms. The Heraclitus strain sent the tyrannic organisms into overdrive and no one could stop them. They carpeted the land in corrosive algae, infected every molecule of oxygen and burned away the atmosphere. Within days the entire planet was consumed and laid bare to the star’s radiation. It is a barren rock now.”
Locard looked over at Uriel and made his way back to the statue of Konor, where he bent to retrieve a silver-sided box. “But in the midst of that destruction we found one thing we did not expect. A missile launched from the orbital platform without a warhead, one that was used to carry something else to the planet’s surface. It had a locator signal, so it was clear that someone wanted us to find it.”
“That contains what the missile was carrying?” asked Uriel.
“Yes,” said Locard, opening the box and removing a battered Mark VII, Aquila-pattern helmet. The paint was peeling, but there was no mistaking the colouring or the inverted omega of the Ultramarines just visible beneath the paint on the forehead. Locard turned the helmet around and read the armourer’s mark inside the rim.
“Six Epsilon Gladius,” he said.
“My helmet,” said Uriel. “The one I wore on Medrengard. The one I left behind.”
“It seems you are linked to this coming war in a manner more personal than most,” said Lord Calgar. “Why should that be so?”
“There can be only one explanation,” said Uriel. “Honsou.”
URIEL SPENT THE next hour retelling the epic tale of his Death Oath. He told how he and Pasanius had been carried halfway across the galaxy by the Omphalos Daemonium to Medrengard, a forsaken world in the Eye of Terror, and how they had been drawn into a war between rival Iron Warriors’ Warsmiths. He told of their meeting with the renegade Astartes and their leader, Ardaric Vaanes of the Raven Guard, at which point Captain Shaan’s interest was clearly piqued.
Though many of the gathered Ultramarines had heard this tale before, they listened attentively to this new rendition. Uriel was unflinching in his recital, telling how he and Pasanius had infiltrated the dread fortress of the Warsmith Honsou in the midst of a hellish siege and their subsequent capture by the creature Onyx.
Honsou had believed them to be renegades like Vaanes and offered them a place at his side, a notion that horrified the Ultramarines. Even Sicarius smiled when Uriel spoke of how they had spat his offer back in his face. Those smiles fell away as Uriel described the macabre lair of the Savage Morticians, his imprisonment within one of the Daemonculaba womb creatures and the horror of his escape.
More than a few raised their eyebrows anew when Uriel told of his alliance with the Unfleshed, and hissed with disgust at hearing of how Vaanes rejected the chance for redemption Uriel had offered him.
When Uriel explained how he had engineered the destruction of Honsou’s fortress, a heavy silence descended, but no one dared speak out, for no less a force than the Grey Knights had declared Uriel and Pasanius untainted. Upon their return to Macragge, the Chaplaincy and Apothecarion carried out exhaustive tests of physical, mental and spiritual purity, and that declaration was confirmed.
Uriel and Pasanius had returned to their Chapter pure.
“What I can’t understand,” began Captain Galenus, “is how this Honsou knew to strike at Tarsis Ultra. How could he have picked one world with such a precise connection to Captain Ventris? How could he possibly have done that?”
“I do not know,” replied Uriel, stepping down into the courtyard. “But he did and he wanted us to know it was him. This attack is not just directed at me, it is directed at all of us. Our Chapter swore the Warrior’s Debt to defend Tarsis Ultra, and the honour of every one of us is stained by this base act of murder. Yet if Honsou has come to Ultramar, it falls to me to face him and kill him. My actions have drawn his vengeance down upon us, and however he has managed to do the things he has done is immaterial. He is here and he needs to be put down like the rabid dog he is.”
Uriel felt the his heart pulse with the excited urge for action that presaged going into combat, and looked around the Chapter Master’s chambers at the warriors he called brother and those who had come to Ultramar to fight alongside its guardians. The battle captains were on their feet, ready to go to war, while Librarian Tigurius regard
ed him coolly and with an intensity he found unsettling.
Marneus Calgar stepped towards Uriel and placed one enormous gauntlet upon his shoulder. The Chapter Master looked deep into his soul, seeing the strength that lay at his core, a strength that would stand against this upstart foe and see him defeated.
“Varro told me that you would prove key to the coming conflict,” said Lord Calgar.
“But for good or ill?” asked Sicarius.
“Who can know for sure?” said Tigurius, circling Uriel with an appraising glare. “Our salvation or the bringer of our doom? Either way, the fate of the Ultramarines is bonded to the blood feud this enemy has brought to our realm. Whatever else happens next, Captain Ventris must be at its heart.”
Uriel read the acknowledgement in the Librarian’s words and turned to Captain Shaan. He stared into the Raven Guard’s hooded eyes, so like those of the renegade warrior he had fought alongside on Medrengard.
“You came here for Ardaric Vaanes, didn’t you?” he said.
“I did,” agreed Shaan. “The traitor has the blood of my kin on his hands, and the Raven Guard do not forget those who have wronged them.”
Uriel held out his hand and said, “Then come to Tarentus and we will make him pay.”
Shaan nodded, his gaunt features sombre and unforgiving.
The Raven Guard shook Uriel’s hand with a crooked smile and said, “We will end these traitors together. The old-fashioned way.”
FOUR
SCOUT-SERGEANT ISSAM panned the polarized lenses of the magnoculars over the darkened ramparts of Axum once more, checking his earlier count. He knew there were five of them, but there are only two kinds of Scouts, those who are thorough and those who are dead. He could see in the dark almost as well as he could during the hours of daylight, but the magnoculars registered the heat signature of their targets’ poorly maintained power armour.
“I make it five,” he whispered over the squad-vox.