‘Heth should–’
‘Heth can’t commit Guard forces without the cooperation of the Navy, and Lansung is more interested in the glory wars against the pathetic greenskins on the frontier. That’s where he’s sending his fleets. He’s fighting border wars and claiming territory practically in his own name. And with Udo backing him, he’s pretty much got a free hand to do that.’
‘Like too many seats on the council, Lansung places his own interests above those of the Imperium,’ said Vangorich.
She nodded again.
‘Ardamantua is just six warp-weeks from Solar Approach. It’s not a frontier war. It’s on our doorstep.’
‘And?’
‘We’ve been intercepting comm-traffic between the undertaking fleet and the Chapter House. In the last ten hours, relative, problems have begun to arise. We anticipate that Mirhen will be forced to request support and reinforcement inside a week.’
‘Against a xenos threat? Against… vermin?’
She held up a hand.
‘He will need it. And Lansung won’t give it. We must make sure we apply pressure today.’
‘Pressure?’
Wienand’s soft smile tightened.
‘Mirhen may have underestimated the nature of the xenos threat.’
‘Since when did the Imperial Fists underestimate anything?’ asked Vangorich.
‘Since, I think, they were forced to act without the combined support of the Senatorum,’ she replied. ‘I believe – that is to say that the strategic planners at the Inquisition, and my immediate superiors, believe – that the Imperial Fists will require direct fleet support within the next three months in order to complete the undertaking.’
‘Or?’
‘Or the xenos threat could actually threaten the Terran Core.’
Vangorich thought about that.
‘There hasn’t been a threat inside the Core for… centuries,’ he said lightly, much more lightly than he was feeling. ‘Xenos or otherwise. It’s unthinkable.’
‘Politics could make it happen. Power play.’
He considered her carefully.
‘These… Chrome things? Really? That dangerous?’
‘We believe there is a palpable and credible xenos threat. We brought it to the attention of Udo, Lansung, Kubik and Mirhen as a Critical Situation Packet. Only Mirhen agreed on its credibility.’
‘What aren’t you telling me, Wienand?’
‘Nothing, Drakan. Nothing at all.’
She fixed him with eyes as chilly as starlight.
‘It’s the principle of this matter. Personal ambition is allowing the Senatorum to become weak and inefficient. This is a matter we have discussed before. Now it threatens to become more than a theoretical annoyance. I will not stand by and see a core world burned or overrun just to demonstrate the fatal inadequacies of the Senatorum.’
‘What are you proposing?’ he asked.
‘We bring the issue into special business. Lansung, Mesring and Udo are too strong, and too many look to them, even if we swing Heth with us. Zeck too, perhaps, because the reputation of the Adeptus Astartes is at stake and he holds them in especial regard. The point is, we don’t try to change the world overnight. All we want is the Senatorum to recognise the problem, and get Heth to propose a fifty-regiment reinforcement expedition to back up the undertaking. We basically shame Lansung into approving fleet support. The Lord High Admiral does not want to go down on the parliamentary record as the man who refused support and left the core worlds wide open.’
‘Can he commit what we need? If we embarrass the man, we could corner him.’
‘I’ve reviewed it,’ she replied, ‘carefully. There are three Segmentum quarter-fleets he could mobilise easily enough, or two vanguard attack squadrons standing off Mars. He has the resources. Thank Throne, he hasn’t sent them all to the frontier.’
Vangorich sat back and watched the fish dart about.
‘Let’s not make it a hard vote,’ he said.
‘How so?’
‘Let’s not push him or humiliate him into compliance. Let’s make the case and give Lansung the opportunity to look magnanimous.’
‘You let him be the hero of the hour?’
‘Does that matter if the Terran Core is protected? Let’s give him the opportunity to look good in the eyes of the Senatorum and the populace. Let him take it as a win. Wienand, you get much more out of people if you let them feel good about doing what you want them to do.’
She laughed.
‘And if he does not?’
‘Then we apply pressure. Then we threaten him with shame. You have my vote. I have a little sway with Zeck, and I believe I can call in a favour owed by Gibran if necessary.’
‘Good,’ she said.
‘Good,’ he replied, smiling. ‘I like our little talks.’
She rose to her feet and handed him her empty glass.
‘This xenos threat, Wienand,’ he asked. ‘Really, what aren’t you telling me?’
‘I’m telling you everything,’ she said.
‘I see.’ He shrugged. ‘When will you allow me to know your forename, Wienand?’
‘My dear Drakan, what makes you think you even know my surname? Killing is your business, sir. Secrets are ours.’
Ten
Ardamantua
The warrior-form came at Laurentis, jaws open, ropes of saliva stretched out between the points of laterally extended biting parts.
A force knocked it aside. The creature was smashed to the magos biologis’ right, splashing into the muddy slime that drooled along the tunnel floor. The impact that felled it was like the concussion of a demolition tool-bit working rockcrete.
The huge beast couldn’t get up. Something had it pinned. A humanoid form in yellow: an Imperial Fist.
A captain. Laurentis could see the rank marks, despite the wash of gore and mud plastering the Space Marine’s armour.
Slaughter. It was Slaughter.
Slaughter had brought the Chrome down, floored it and pinned it by the throat with his left fist. The Space Marine’s right fist was a piston, ramming a huge combat knife into the Chrome’s distended belly over and over again. Something burst. Brown liquid sprayed out across the tunnel. Laurentis recoiled from the vented reek of formic acid and rancid milk.
The warrior-form went slack. Slaughter got off it, but his combat knife was wedged between the integuments of its armour. A second large xenos thundered down the tunnel on the heels of the first, trailing the semi-articulated pieces of a driving servitor from one of its limbs.
Slaughter abandoned his combat knife. Leaving it embedded in the torso of his first kill, he threw himself over the corpse and into the face of the second warrior-form. He drew his broadsword as he leapt, sweeping the powered blade out of its over-shoulder scabbard and forwards, so that its cutting edge led the way.
Space Marine and Chrome warrior-form met. The clash made an air-slap that hurt Laurentis’ ears. The Chrome smacked Slaughter hard, twice, its claws drawing sparks off his armour. The Space Marine rocked, reeled back from the blows, and then renewed his efforts, hefting the blade into the Chrome’s shoulder with both hands.
It was the Chrome’s turn to reel. It staggered sideways. Taking a better grip on his gore-slick sword, Slaughter delivered a second blow that did significantly more damage. Split open, the Chrome tilted and fell backwards.
Laurentis hadn’t even seen the third enemy. Slaughter had. The warrior-form was very dark, the colour of a bruise. It came down the tunnel from the other direction, moving with extraordinary speed, claw-limbs hinged out to rain lethal downstrokes on the Imperial Fist.
Slaughter switched around to meet it, hacked with his sword, and took off one forelimb. The creature milled at him, claws glinting in the noxious light. Slaughter ducked aside, letting the blow go long
over his shoulder guard, stooping his back into a turn that took him under the Chrome’s guard and into its chest. He stabbed his sword in, tip-first, cracking the organic armour, and then shoulder-barged the clacking alien backwards, freeing his blade so he could thrust it again. The second time it went clean through the creature.
He ripped the sword out, and the warrior-form went down.
‘Magos?’ Slaughter called out, checking up and down the tunnel, sword ready.
‘Yes, captain?’
‘Are you alive there?’
‘I am, captain.’
‘Get ready to move with me when I tell you. The Chapter Master has sent Daylight Wall to get you out of this.’
‘It is very much appreciated,’ said Laurentis. ‘I thought I was d–’
‘Shhhh!’ Slaughter warned him.
From the distance, Laurentis could hear the sound of bolt-weapons firing.
‘There’s a lot of opposition in this zone,’ Slaughter said. ‘A lot.’
Laurentis began to wonder where the rest of Daylight Wall Company had got to.
‘Let’s move,’ said Slaughter, and beckoned the magos biologis after him. The captain had made some kind of assessment presumably based on the data his armour was feeding him and incoming vox-signals, neither of which Laurentis was privy to.
They began to work their way back down the nest tunnel, picking their way through the ruins of the magos biologis’s convoy. The carriages were all shredded and crushed. His servitors and juniors were dead or fled. Blood-smoke wafted in the gloom of the tunnel. Now our matter is vaporised, Laurentis thought unhappily.
‘They have shown unexpected resolve within the perimeters of their nest,’ he said.
Slaughter grunted in reply.
‘We don’t much like the unexpected,’ the captain said.
‘Because?’
‘Because nothing should be unexpected.’
‘I see.’
‘I didn’t expect to run out of bolt-rounds today, for example,’ Slaughter said. Laurentis saw that the Space Marine captain’s massive firearm was clamped to his belt. He’d exhausted its munition supply. The fight must have been extraordinarily intense.
Slaughter glanced down at Laurentis.
‘There are supposed to be munition trains moving into the nest, at least one near here,’ he added.
‘Ah, so that’s what I owe my salvation to,’ Laurentis replied, trying to sound brave. ‘You were looking for the ammunition.’
‘I had an order,’ snapped Slaughter, ‘from the Chapter Master.’
‘Of course. I apologise.’
‘The fact that you were near a munition train was simply a bonus.’
Laurentis managed a laugh. Then he realised something that chilled him. Just as Laurentis had done, the Space Marine captain was trying to make light of the situation.
They really were in the most terrible trouble.
Eleven
Ardamantua – orbital
Chapter Master Cassus Mirhen watched the stricken Amkulon begin to fall out of fleet formation. There was something significantly wrong with the strike cruiser’s engines. It was venting radioactive clouds and all contact had been lost in a blizzard of vox-interference.
‘Did Lotus Gate get clear?’ he asked.
Akilios shook his head.
‘We don’t know yet, sir.’
‘Find out as soon as you can. I don’t see any drop-pods or escape boats.’
The truth was, it was hard to see much of anything. The incoming feed to the main viewers and the repeater and image-booster screens was fogged by the radiation backwash and some kind of gravimetric distortion. That was what Severance had been trying to warn them about. Mirhen had most of the Lanxium’s tech-staff working on the issue, analysing the data sent over from the Amkulon. Initial reports were bad. Pockets of gravity distortion were being detected in a range of orbital locations. No one could explain it, and no one could adequately explain why there had been no sign of the phenomenon before the fleet moved into its assault anchor.
Now there was the Amkulon itself. A whole ship, a good ship, and a whole wall of shield-corps brothers, potentially lost.
Mirhen watched the flickering, jumping screen image. The majestic strike cruiser was making a slow, pitching descent into Ardamantua’s gravity field, unable to support its mass. How long? An hour? Two? Four? The crippled drives would probably blow out because of the stress before that.
‘Can we get relief boats out to them?’ he asked.
‘We’re trying now, sir,’ replied Akilios.
‘We must be able to fetch some of them off it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mirhen turned to the ranks of the technicians and science adepts.
‘I want this explained,’ he said. ‘I want this accounted for and explained.’
The adepts nodded, but Mirhen felt no confidence in their response. They were as mystified as he was.
He was about to add further encouragement – at least, what he felt was encouragement – when the bank of screens behind him lit up brightly for a moment.
‘What was that?’ he asked, turning. ‘Was that the Amkulon?’
The airwaves were filled with vox-static and ugly distortion.
‘No, sir,’ replied a detection officer. ‘That wasn’t the Amkulon. Sir, the battle-barge Antorax just… just exploded, sir.’
Twelve
Ardamantua
The sky was weeping light.
Slaughter kicked his way through a half-collapsed section of tunnel wall and hauled himself onto the softly curving upper surface of the blisternest.
It was raining some kind of liquid that wasn’t water through an ugly squall that blew sidelong and made every surface slick and sticky. The nest was a huge sprawl, like some mass of offal oozing on a slab, magnified to titanic proportions. There were loops of tunnel that looked like intestinal knots, there were renal lumps and lobed chambers. Some sections of the vast, organic city were patterned coils like the fossil imprint of ancient seashells. Other sections were crushed to pulp by orbital bombardment and airstrikes. Smoke bled up from the blisternest in a thousand places, mixed with the wind, and washed into the squalling storm. Slaughter heard the downpour tick and tap on his helm and armour.
‘Come up,’ he called.
Cutthroat climbed after him, and then reached down to haul the dishevelled magos biologis up out of the tunnel. After them came Stab and Woundmaker. Slaughter had left the rest of Daylight Wall inside the nest under Frenzy’s command. The Chapter Master’s express orders had been to get Laurentis to the contact point. Well, four of them could do that. There was no sense pulling a whole company out. He’d voxed that decision to the Lanxium, but he hadn’t had a reply. Something was chopping vox and pict to hell. Atmospherics. It was like Karodan Monument all over again. They’d been deaf and blind there.
And they’d still won.
The magos biologis was looking around, blinking at the daylight. The rain ran off his face and plastered his robes to his body.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the sky.
‘We haven’t got time for sight-seeing,’ snapped Woundmaker. Woundmaker was a sergeant, a good man. In the last stretch of tunnel, they’d come upon one of the automated munition trains sent in to support them. It had been mangled beyond recognition by Chrome warrior-forms, and the servitors slain, but Woundmaker and Stab had managed to drive the enemy off and recover some reloads for their bolters. He was sorting and distributing them.
‘No, look,’ said Laurentis.
Slaughter took the four clips Woundmaker handed him and turned to look where the magos biologis was pointing. There was a light in the sky. It was a broad, diffuse light, weeping out of the ugly cloud cover, but there was a malicious little glowing coal at the heart of it, small and re
d, like the ember-fragment of a star.
‘That’s a ship death,’ said Cutthroat bluntly.
Slaughter heard Woundmaker curse. He’d been too ready to dismiss the magos biologis’ comment, but he could see that Cutthroat was right. They could all see he was right. They’d all seen a ship die from planetside. It was a heartbreaking thing.
‘When in Throne’s name did these vermin get orbital weapons?’ asked Woundmaker. ‘When did they get ship-to-ship capability?’
‘We still don’t know precisely how the Chromes distribute themselves across space,’ said Laurentis. ‘It is presumed they employ some form of pod or seed dispersal via fluctuations in the warp, but a full scale migration of the magnitude that would explain their population density here has never been witnessed or described. We don’t believe they have what we would consider to be ships or a fleet, no vessels at all, but–’
He fell silent. Four angular visors glared at him, rain beading off their beaked jaws.
‘I… I’m just saying,’ Laurentis managed. ‘I don’t know how the Chromes could have taken out one of our ships. Perhaps it is an unhappy coincidence, or an accident.’
‘There are no coincidences!’ Stab told him.
Cutthroat began to say something about accidents and defaming the ability of the fleet.
‘Well, something’s happened,’ said Slaughter, cutting them both off. ‘That’s a dead ship up there, and a big one too. The magos is right. If the Chromes couldn’t hit it, that leaves accident, or coincidence. And coincidence means–’
‘What?’ asked Laurentis.
‘Someone else,’ said Slaughter.
A noise burst filled the air. Outdoors, in the stinking open air, it was like the booming of a warhorn, the braying of some daemonic voice. The air seemed to shudder. All four Imperial Fists winced as it stripped through their helmet vox-systems and assaulted their ears. Laurentis felt it prickle his skin. The hairs on his arm rose, despite the rain. Static. Ozone. Around the distant, broken steeples at the blisternest heart, chain lightning flickered and crackled in a sickly yellow display. Two more noise bursts followed. Laurentis felt the actual structure of the blisternest beneath them resonate with the plangent sound.