‘The Chromes are capable of a great deal more than we realise,’ Laurentis told his guardians. ‘These noises… these bursts of noise… They are why your Chapter Master has charged you to protect me. I have a theory–’
‘Tell us,’ said Slaughter bluntly.
Laurentis nodded and shrugged.
‘I will, sir. I think it’s communication. I think the Chromes are trying to communicate with us. We understood them to be non-sapient animals, but we may have been very wrong about that. I wish to test the communication theory, and that is why I need to get to the drop-point to access specialist equipment.’
Slaughter nodded. He checked the auspex mounted across his left forearm.
‘Tracking the drop. It’ll be down at DZ 457 in the next twenty minutes. Let’s move.’
They started off, crossing the oddly ridged humps and rain-slick gullies of the blisternest’s upper surface. The Fists, with their strength, long stride and armoured feet, had no trouble negotiating the unpleasant material. Laurentis kept slipping and slithering. He was wet, and cold to the bone. Woundmaker kept picking him up by the scruff of his robes and setting him back on his feet as if he were some clumsy toddler.
‘The point of the communication,’ said Laurentis, out of breath and struggling to keep up. ‘I mean, the point I was making was that if the Chromes are capable of communication, if they are capable of language, then they may be capable of much else besides. They can clearly cross between worlds and star systems in ways we cannot divine. Maybe they can take out ships. Maybe they have potent weapons for void fights.’
‘Ships of their own, after all,’ said Slaughter.
‘Perhaps.’
‘If they are capable of communication,’ said Slaughter, pausing for a moment to look at the magos biologis. ‘If you prove your theory…’
‘Yes?’
‘What are they trying to say?’
Laurentis paused.
‘I first presumed, captain, that they might be trying to negotiate surrender. That was when they seemed to be at our mercy, when their nest seemed to be toppling under assault.’
‘And now?’
‘Now, I wonder if it might not be a warning. A cry of defiance. A challenge. Now I wonder if they might not be demanding our surrender.’
‘Because they are hurting us?’
Laurentis sighed.
‘They are, it seems, taking out our starships. They are harrying our ground assault. The successful outcome of this undertaking is not as clear-cut as we first imagined.’
They followed the rim of the nest down, along to the ugly, chordate ridges that pressed like giant finger-bones into the mud of the river’s edge. The noise bursts continued to bark across the smoke-wrapped distances, causing the rain to squall and billow. Laurentis tried to keep a basic log of observable details on his data-slate as he struggled to keep up with his transhuman bodyguards. Fountains of ash and light vomited into the air from regions on the far side of the central blisternest, and the concussive booms reached them a moment later.
‘Major munitions,’ said Slaughter.
‘Orbital strike?’ asked Cutthroat.
Woundmaker shook his head.
‘Looked like… subterranean.’
‘So… our enemy has further weapons we don’t know about?’ asked Stab.
‘That they destroy their own nest with?’ asked Cutthroat.
‘Don’t argue. Don’t debate,’ Slaughter snapped. ‘Get moving.’
Another blast rocked the ground and a huge plume sheeted into the dismal sky six or seven kilometres away. The Fists of Daylight Wall stoically and obediently ignored it and started moving onwards. Laurentis hurried with them.
‘It could be a new weapon,’ conjectured the magos biologis, a little out of breath. ‘They might, I suppose… They might destroy their own nest if there was nothing left to be gained from protecting it. It might be… uhm, intended to create confusion and disarray, to take as many of us with them as possible.’
‘For what purpose?’ asked Slaughter, getting his hand under Laurentis’ armpit and frog-marching him over a stretch of mud so slick it was like quicksand.
‘If they had a final asset to protect?’ Laurentis ventured. ‘A queen, or the equivalent? A dominant reproductive female? The egg source? I am just hypothesising, but if the nest was lost, they might destroy it as cover for an evacuation of the queen.’
There was another blast. This one came from much closer at hand. The force of it knocked all five of them over and slapped out a wall of mud and steam. Debris pattered down, and the rain ran brown. The Imperial Fists struggled to their feet. Laurentis coughed and shivered, trying to clear his head.
‘My gravitics are shot,’ reported Stab, checking his visor display.
‘Mine too,’ said Cutthroat. ‘No, correction. Gravitic register is working. It’s just showing very irregular patterning.’
‘Agreed,’ said Stab, ‘rechecking. Local gravity just looped for ten milliseconds, and that blast focus was gravitically strong.’
‘These weapons… these new weapons…’ Slaughter asked. ‘They’re what? Gravity weapons? Gravity bombs?’
Laurentis struggled to reply. He tried to formulate a reasonable-sounding explanation for why the Chromes should have mastery over gravity, one of the universe’s most notoriously uncooperative forces. Maybe their inter-system travel relied on some gravitic drive?
‘Watch your heels!’ Cutthroat yelled.
Chromes were rushing them from the nest pods behind them. They were standard forms, their silvery shells glinting in the stained light, spattered with mud and liquid, but there were a lot of them. Cutthroat and Stab met the first of them, side-by-side, driving strokes and slices with their hefty blade weapons that sent the xenos tumbling and bouncing backwards, slamming into the ranks behind, slit and spraying. The stink of ichor filled the rain.
Slaughter and Woundmaker got Laurentis back, and began to struggle down the reed-choked slope towards the waterline. The ground, wet as a marsh, was littered with dead xenos from the first phase. Moving backwards, Stab and Cutthroat came after them. Laurentis, gasping with anxiety, marvelled at their bladework. The speed of it. The relentless fury. The precision. Severed pieces of Chromes flew up into the air, spinning. Ichor jetted. The pushing ranks of assaulting xenos stumbled and clambered over the bodies of their dead.
Laurentis had seen ants do that. Forest ants, at the edge of a stream, the first ones drowning and dying so that those behind could use their corpses as a bridge, as a growing bridge.
The ants always got across the stream.
Ants never mourned their dead. They used them.
Another wave of Chromes scurried towards them along the bank to their right, clacking and sounding out the tek-tek-tek noise they made with their mouthparts.
Slaughter, positioned on the right, turned to meet them, his broadsword coming out. None of the Space Marines had resorted to bolters. Conservation of munition supplies.
Slaughter’s blade met the first Chrome, half-impaled it, then hurled it bodily across the river. It arced and hit the water with a dirty splash. His sword swung back and decapitated the next, and then cleaved the third down the middle through the head.
‘Protect the principal!’ Slaughter roared.
Laurentis cowered on the mud flats. The four Fists closed in around him, at compass points, each one meeting the assault as it swirled around them from the two lines of attack. There was so much ichor spray in the air that the rain tasted of it. They were all dappled with it. The Chromes threw themselves against the four-point defence, finding only death and dismemberment as a reward for their efforts. There is nothing, Laurentis remembered the old saying, as deadly as an Imperial Fist standing his ground.
Laurentis wondered how much scrutiny the Masters of the Chapters and other senior minds of the
Imperial military, and even the beloved and exalted Emperor Himself when He had set to devising the Legiones Astartes, formulating their minds and bodies… How much scrutiny had they given to natural history, to the behaviour of cooperative animals and insects, to their selfless and almost mechanical efforts? The individual was never important, only the group effect. One quick glance at a magos biologis’ notebook or cyclopedia would reveal a thousand examples in nature of selfless cooperation, postlogical stratagems, and ensured survival.
A huge, armoured beetle could easily kill a tiny, lone ant.
But the ants always got across the stream.
Thirteen
Terra – Tashkent Hive
‘You look unhappy,’ remarked Esad Wire.
‘Do I?’ replied Vangorich. ‘Do I really? You can tell that?’
Wire shook his head.
‘No, you can’t read that in a face. Not for certain,’ he admitted. ‘You can’t read anything in a face for certain.’
He stared at Vangorich for a moment, Vangorich just standing there in the doorway of the monitor station control room like a shadow brought in by the dusk, and considered him carefully.
‘Been a very long time, besides,’ Wire added. ‘A long time not seeing your face. I’m no longer familiar with its nuances. I wouldn’t know what sadness looked like anyway, even if I could read it for sure.’
Wire rose from his worn leather seat, brushing imaginary lint from his double-breasted arbiter jacket.
‘A long time,’ he said, an echo, spoken only to himself.
Vangorich was still in the doorway. Wire beckoned him.
‘You can come in, sir,’ he said. ‘Come right in. Or do you have to be invited over the threshold like a night ghoul?’
Vangorich stepped inside the control room. It was brightly lit, too brightly lit, the hard shine of the lamp-globes and spots revealing every fatigued edge and scuffed fascia of the control suite: the dials and levers worn by centuries of hands, the milky read-outs, the chattering banks of antiquated switches, the electric noticeboards with their mechanical letters and series lights that stated the day’s crimes and actions and, every few minutes, reshuffled and revised, like the journey monitors at transit stations.
Monitor Station KVF (Division 134) Sub 12 (Arbitrator). It had taken Vangorich four hours to get there. An hour’s flight east from the Palace by suborbital, then a three-hour descent into the underhives of Tashkent Spire, a journey of rattling lift cages, suspension platforms and dank hallways.
It had taken Esad Wire a great deal longer to reach Monitor Station KVF. After his past life was laundered and washed clean, three years at Adeptus Arbitrator incept training, two more at the Procedural Division in the Asiatic Domes, and then eight years with Tashkent Major Case and another six as a jurisdiction subcommander. Then he got the Sector Overseer star to pin on his jacket, and a monitor control room full of antiquated switches.
Everything was processed, everything formalised. Every crime had to be catalogued and filed, described and posted, and redirected to the appropriate division. It was a ritualised system that had never really coped with the actuality of real life and real crime in the vast hive, but it was considered the optimal solution and thus persevered with. Running the data-switching station was also considered a task of great responsibility, and thus always awarded to a man of significance or ability, as a mark of promotion. Esad Wire was not a law enforcer. He did not fight crime. He simply filed it.
The room was essentially automated. Wire made a gesture, and two junior arbiters, the only other living people present, went off to find duties in adjacent chambers.
‘“You look unhappy”,’ said Vangorich. ‘After all this time, that’s the beginning of your conversation?’
Wire shrugged.
‘It struck me as so,’ he said.
‘How has life treated you since you left the Officio?’ Vangorich asked. He did not look at Wire. He studied the chattering, updating lines of tile-type that were rattling up and down the displays.
‘One never really leaves the Officio, sir,’ Wire replied, with a half-smile.
‘No need for the sir,’ said Vangorich.
Wire shook his head.
‘I think so. You are a man of a certain position in life and the world, and I am another, of another position. The inequality of our states seems to indicate I should call you that.’
‘It’s good to see you, Beast,’ said Vangorich.
‘And you, sir.’ Wire grinned. ‘Damn, I haven’t been called that in a long time.’
He walked to the side cupboards and poured two mugs of thick, black caffeine from a jug. He handed one to the Grand Master.
‘Social call, is it? Been a couple of decades, about time I visited Esad?’
‘I’ve wanted to before, many times,’ said Vangorich with surprising directness. ‘Never been appropriate.’
‘Is it now?’
‘No, but I did it anyway. I needed to get out. I needed to… converse with someone who wasn’t anything to do with anything at the Palace.’
‘Find a priest,’ suggested Wire. ‘A confessor.’
‘The priests all have agendas,’ replied Vangorich.
‘So… you’re here. Go on.’
‘Little men,’ said Vangorich, taking a seat at one of the monitor stations and sipping his caffeine. ‘Little men, playing at being High Lords. Personal ambition is in danger of costing the Imperium very dearly. I tried to block it, but the Officio doesn’t have the clout it once wielded, and I got played.’
‘Lansung. Udo. Mesring,’ said Wire quietly.
Vangorich smiled.
‘Well informed.’
‘There’s little to do here, sir,’ said Wire. ‘I fill my time with the data-slates and the court reports. I do like to keep up with the reported business of the legislature and the Senatorum. Politics has always been an interest of mine. My old dad used to say that politics is what determines who lives and who dies, so though the business of parliaments sounds dull, it pays to keep an eye on what those idiots are up to.’
‘Published Senatorum records don’t show the half of it,’ said Vangorich.
‘They show enough to see that Lansung’s after Lord Commander, and Udo’s happy to facilitate that succession. Mesring and Ekharth will go along for the ride and lend their weight, if they get rewarded on the other side. Or is that read too simplistic? Am I just an armchair amateur?’
‘Good enough,’ said Vangorich. ‘It’s the usual power play.’
‘But?’
‘They’re so busy playing, they’ve taken their eyes off the board. The Fists have gone to address the situation, but they’ll probably need support. Navy support.’
‘The Fists will need support–?’ Wire began.
‘Let’s skip that for now. It’s a threat. The Inquisition says so.’
Wire whistled.
‘How far out?’
‘Far too close. We need the Navy, and we need the Guard, and if we need the Guard, we need the Navy anyway. But Lansung doesn’t want to get his toys broken.’
‘So make him look good.’
‘I tried that,’ said Vangorich. ‘We brokered a little persuasive block vote to make him commit his fleets, but which allowed him to look like the hero of the hour. And he took it, but he played us. He said that if the Fists needed full support, they should be allowed to commit their entire reserve. He made ships available. Even the wall-brothers have gone from their eternal posts. For the first time ever. The whole Chapter. There isn’t an Imperial Fist left on Terra or on the Phalanx. It’s as if he’s handing them glory, as if it’s his to give. Of course, by making it possible for the entire Chapter to deploy, he’s reduced the commitment of fleet and Guard forces he needs to field.’
‘That’s not right,’ said Esad Wire. ‘You don’t commit a whol
e Chapter in one go. That’s basic.’
‘You do if you’re an idiot with dreams of a de facto throne. You do if you put yourself above the needs of mankind. And you do if you’ve become so complacent after decades of peace that you think nothing can ever harm us again. Beasts arise.’
Wire laughed, though his face was troubled.
‘They do,’ he agreed. ‘When you least expect. First lesson they ever taught us.’
‘And the reason for your nickname,’ said Vangorich.
‘That belonged to someone else,’ said Wire, losing the smile. ‘I’m a respectable civil servant now.’
He looked at Vangorich.
‘When did this happen?’
‘Six weeks ago. It wasn’t publicly announced. A matter of security. The reinforcements should reach the main force very soon.’
‘That close?’
‘Oh yes.’
Wire shrugged.
‘So, may I ask, sir,’ he said, ‘what was this visit? An opportunity to vent to a sympathetic ear? Or did you think that I could somehow offer a solution to help an entire Chapter of Adeptus Astartes in trouble?’
Vangorich smiled.
‘Back in the day, I would not have put such a task beyond the powers of Beast Krule.’
‘Beast Krule’s long gone,’ said Wire.
Vangorich stood up.
‘Anyway, no. Not at all,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to have a solution, and we don’t need one. It’s the entire Chapter of Imperial Fists, plus support, Beast. They will quash this threat very quickly. Very quickly. Then no one will notice or remember how close we came to being stupid.’
He faced Wire.
‘That’s the real crisis. That’s why I came to ask your opinion. It’s not what’s happening now. What’s happening now is an act of strategic idiocy sanctioned by men who are too busy chasing the highest office. It’s ugly and ham-fisted, but it will resolve itself, and all will be safe. We can trust the Fists. But in the long term, we are left with men who made it happen, let it happen, and thought it was absolutely fine that it happened. And that presents us with the possibility of what might happen next time, and the time after, and the time after that, until such acts of idiocy really start to cost. These men are not fit, Beast. But they represent a seamless power bloc at the heart of the Twelve that cannot be unshaken or dislodged, even with the most radical tactical voting from the rest of us. The Senatorum Imperialis is theirs and will remain theirs.’