An expanding cone of fire and debris detonated outwards as the momentum and weapons fire of the Sisypheum punched through the vitals of the III Legion’s ship. Like a bullet exploding from the body of a gunshot victim, the Sisypheum blasted from the interior of the Andronicus, trailing molten debris and a flame-wreathed halo of ignited plasma. It rippled with void haze, and Perturabo saw the tortured squalls of light tearing at the edges of the exit wound as its shields dragged kilometres’ worth of armour plating in its magnetic wake.
Though notions of up and down were an irrelevance in space, the Andronicus listed downwards, swinging around like a punch-drunk fighter. Its gyroscopic systems fought to stabilise the vessel, but the damage was too severe, too sudden and too shocking to correct. Though her shipmaster fought to save her, Perturabo knew the Andronicus was doomed. Energy fields shimmered in a desperate attempt to preserve internal atmosphere as the front half of the vessel spun away. Its structural integrity gone, the Andronicus began to tear itself apart as its enormous mass and the eager riptides of the warp reached up to claim their prize.
‘By the Twelve…’ breathed Forrix, watching the awesome sight of a starship dying before his very eyes. To see a starfaring leviathan destroyed in battle was a sight no warrior could ever forget; the invincible defeated, the invulnerable humbled. The Andronicus was dead in space, its running lights flickering for a moment before being extinguished. The ship’s engines still flared in fits and starts, twisting the gutted carcass from the carefully mapped path laid before them. In moments, it would be swallowed by the bleeding warp currents, another victim of the Empyrean’s tempestuous wrath.
‘Do you think anyone’s left alive on there?’ asked Falk.
‘There will be some,’ said Forrix, moving to the surveyor station and linking it to the launch decks. ‘A few will have reached saviour pods, but some are still out in the void aboard Stormbirds and torpedoes. There’re bound to be more left aboard the wreck too. I’m launching a full spread of rescue craft.’
Perturabo watched as the Trident began re-establishing control throughout the Iron Blood, establishing a contravallation of picket ships and organising the rescue effort for the crew of the Andronicus. Thousands had died in its sudden, merciless demise, but Forrix could yet save hundreds with his unmatched logistical nous.
He watched the Iron Hands vessel twist on its axis, more agile than anything that ugly had a right to be. Still bleeding a tail of ignited plasma and mag-locked debris, the Sisypheum arced down towards a knot of storm clouds that looked to offer no easy way through.
‘My lord,’ said Kroeger, his fingertips hovering over fire control. ‘Do we shoot now?’
‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘Leave them. They’ve earned that much.’
SEVENTEEN
The Tower
Fratricide
I Will Command
Unlike many of his brothers, Perturabo did not hate the Legions that had remained true to the Emperor. They were tools with which their father had carved out his empire, warriors as abused as Perturabo’s sons, but too stubborn or too blind to see it. The Iron Hands were an honourable Legion, but they had changed in the centuries since Perturabo and his brother primarchs had each made that climb to the crenellated peak of the Astartes Tower to swear their oaths of moment.
Awaiting Fulgrim amid the structured chaos of his sanctum, with its stasis-sealed paintings, anatomical apparatus and half-built auto-matons, Perturabo toyed with the gear workings of a mechanical lion with carved lilies in its jaws. Remembering its construction back on Olympus, Perturabo broke his most inflexible rule and looked to the past. He thought back to his ascent up that polished marble spire, the night before leaving Terra for a life of war. Each step had required a superhuman effort of will, determination and courage. It was no simple screw-stair, but a challenge to the heart and intellect, a psychic communion with the Emperor himself that tested the very boundaries of a warrior’s endurance. Not all of them had passed the test.
Perturabo was no longer sure he had passed the test.
Heroic operas had been composed that told of the mighty oaths sworn atop that great tower. Imagists of every stripe had tried to capture the majesty of the moment when each primarch had stepped from its gilded archway, and hundreds of dramaturges had attempted to render in poetic verse the idealism embodied in the idea of such a profound moment.
None of them had even come close to succeeding.
They thought the oath symbolic; an arbitrary moment chosen to mark the beginning of something magnificent. They thought it powerful only for the instant of time it marked in the sand of Terra’s history. Perturabo had replayed the memory of that day many times, subjecting the words that passed between him and his father to the scrutiny of a critic. Each interpretation of the words gave him no comfort in the coldness of solitude that betrayal brought; only reproach.
‘You will be my hammer, Perturabo,’ his father had said. ‘What our enemies build to keep us from our destiny, you must put asunder.’
‘No one shall build anything I cannot break open. No one.’
‘I know,’ said his father, turning His gaze to the stars. At the top of the world they were clear as diamonds, the Palace built high above the low-lying fug of chemical residue from centuries of war and its ashen aftermath. Perturabo followed his father’s gaze, relishing the prospect of leading his warriors out to those selfsame stars.
‘Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war, my son,’ said his father. ‘It stains the soul forever and is like a cancer that gnaws away all that was once good in a man. To send men to their deaths without noble purpose and consign those you fight to the grave is a burden no man can bear and no man should forgive. Always remember that, my son. Fight when you must, but wield the power of your Legion with a solemn heart. Once unleashed, the beast of war does not return to its iron cage until it has sated its hunger in the blood of innocents.’
The words had been said in a reflective tone, as though they carried his father’s regret and a weight of bitter experience. Now they echoed from the past with a sting of prescience and a viper’s bite of forewarning.
‘But what I ask of you is necessary beyond the understanding of most men,’ continued his father. ‘Many in this new world think me vain-glorious, citing my hubris in declaring a manifest destiny to rule the stars, but they understand nothing of the truth of the universe. They cannot know that this is a war of species survival. Either we go out into the galaxy and win it in time or we will be consigned to a slow death or a stagnation that may be far worse.’
‘Your sons will not let that happen.’
His father had smiled. ‘It may already be inevitable.’
‘Nothing is inevitable.’
‘I hope you are right, Perturabo,’ said his father, and a moment of genuine affection passed between them, the like of which Perturabo had not felt before and would never feel again. ‘Over the centuries, our species has tried many ways of fighting the forces of evil: prayer, fasting, good works, ritual and holy books, but that is not how we will fight it.’
‘Evil?’ Perturabo had asked.
‘A turn of phrase,’ said the Emperor, not quite convincingly. ‘All those ways were meaningless and ineffective, and saw millions dead. We, on the other hand, will fight with bolters, blades and the courage of the greatest warriors this galaxy has ever seen. That is how you fight evil.’
That word again.
‘The Iron Warriors are yours to command, father,’ said Perturabo. ‘Wherever our paths take us, whatever we meet and however long it takes, we will not fail you.’
His father turned to look at him, His golden eyes like two siege augers digging into Perturabo’s heart, coring his very essence and learning everything about him in the blink of an eye. But whatever He had seen was not reflected in His impenetrable expression, and Perturabo had spent long years trying to breach that wall.
The Emperor looked from the tower windows, over the mountains that pierced the highest clo
uds of the world, over the millions-strong workforce still set to transforming this mountain range into an edifice deserving of awe. His gaze encompassed everything laid before Him, from the newest settlements accruing around the Palace precincts to the distant war-ravaged lands of the fallen techno-barbarian kings, all the way to the farthest satrapies.
‘I can no longer see the paths and outcomes leading from this moment,’ said his father as anabatic winds lifting off the plain below filled the silence between them.
‘Is that why Magnus and his Legion remain on Terra while the rest of us crusade across the stars?’
‘Partly, though he will join you soon enough. I hope that one day Magnus will return to me again, for he sees much that I do not.’
‘He will not stay on crusade?’ said Perturabo, disappointed.
‘Magnus will return to Terra, but not for a very long time,’ said the Emperor, turning to him as though surprised at his dismay. ‘You and he are close?’
‘I’ve only met him a few times,’ said Perturabo after a moment’s consideration. ‘But, yes, I like him. He’s already helped me in translating some of the more obscure texts in my collection. I think he and I will be good friends.’
‘Why?’
It had seemed like a strange question, even then. Time and the later events at Nikaea only made it stranger, as though the Emperor had already known the path upon which the Crimson King was setting his feet.
‘We share a love of learning, and a hunger to know new things,’ said Perturabo. ‘After all, without culture and learning, what’s the point of any crusade? To destroy, to lay waste? No, if a crusade is to have purpose, it needs to forge something better in its wake.’
‘Ah, the words of your Firenzii polymath,’ said the Emperor with a soft grin.
‘And here I thought to pass it off as my own wisdom,’ said Perturabo with a matching smile.
These words returned to him often, mocking what had become of the great vision promised by the Emperor. Two centuries of idealism and hope swept away in a spasm of rebellion, uncounted great works undone in an instant.
What would future historians make of Horus Lupercal’s gamble? Would they pore over their dusty books and play out events long past and see what might have been? Perturabo dismissed the question as irrelevant; history was not a game that could be played out again and again to create fresh outcomes. What had happened had already happened, and what did not happen could not come to pass. Games of ‘what if’ might be diverting for scholars and theoreticians, but for warriors they were a distraction.
Fulgrim had climbed the Astartes Tower years before him, and Perturabo had often wondered what he and the Emperor had spoken about on their final night on Terra. Was the Phoenician plagued by memories in the dark watches of the night? Was he troubled by hidden meanings and subtexts in their father’s words that only now became obvious?
Was there a voice in Fulgrim’s head that whispered dark-hued truths?
The survivors from the Andronicus had been housed on one of the upper decks of the Iron Blood until the Pride of the Emperor was ready to retrieve them. In lieu of a large enough space to hold the three thousand souls rescued from the void, they had been housed amidships in what had once been the remembrancer decks. The interior of an Iron Warriors ship was a hard-edged, functional environment, with little in the way of superfluous space, but these decks reeked of abandonment. The thousands of remembrancers that had attended the Legion in the latter days of the Crusade years had lived and worked here, but they were all gone now, and none of the IV Legion made use of those dark spaces. Scraps of the remembrancers’ graffiti still lingered on the walls, snatches of poetry, pornographic caricatures and hastily drawn musical scales, but many were now obscured by bloody handprints and spattered arcs of dried gore.
Honourable Soulaka made his way through the host of mortals and legionaries that thronged the cramped, low-ceilinged corridors with a growing sense of disbelief and outrage. Legionary bodies were laid out in random piles with triage marks on their shoulder guards, though it was clear that no one had attended to even those in need of immediate aid. The stench of open wounds was strong, as was the overpowering aroma of gene-modified coagulant that meant a great many Legion warriors had been badly wounded.
Iron Warriors Apothecaries had immediately made their way to the remembrancer decks without any orders needing to be given, but the survivors of the Andronicus turned them away. Soulaka alone remained, hoping against hope that he might see some of the creatures the Stonewrought had described after his abortive sojourn at the Emperor’s Children’s revels. Howls like the hunting cries of crag-raptors drew him deeper into the twisting maze of corridors, the wet-throated sounds amplified by the metal walls and distorted by the many turns. Dissonant bass notes thrummed the air and a skirling, squealing whine scratched on his nerves like badly-tuned vox-output, but he could see no source for these grating sounds.
Injured legionaries sat in pools of sticky blood, ignored by all except a handful of III Legion medicae-implanted servitors, cybernetic slave creatures that were only ever intended for low-priority walking wounded. No one of any apparent skill appeared to be tending to the mortally injured amongst the survivors.
It made no sense to Soulaka.
Without Apothecaries, a great many warriors would die who did not need to.
Without speedy implementation of reductor protocols, the gene-seed of the dead would be lost, but the Emperor’s Children didn’t seem to care. The most precious resource of a Legion, and the Phoenician’s warriors were heedless of its loss.
The deeper into the remembrancer decks Soulaka went, the more he began to suspect why.
A great many of the Emperor’s Children had diverged so far from their original gene-template that it was almost impossible to recognise them as legionaries any more.
Or to know if their gene-seed could even be conventionally harvested.
Soulaka saw a warrior with a shattered breastplate, beneath which he observed a broad chest that resembled the rugose flesh of a reptile’s belly, another whose arm bent in ways that indicated the presence of far too many joints, and yet a third whose battle helm appeared to have fused with the meat of his skull, such that there was no telling where armour ended and flesh began.
And these were among the least of the changes he saw.
Eyes of multifarious hues and facets stared angrily at him, as though he were the intruder on their vessel. Instead of an Apothecary attempting to help those in need of medical attention, he felt like a neophyte scout on his first mission behind enemy lines who’d just given away his position.
He moved quickly, cataloguing the various deformities and mutilations worked into the bodies of the Emperor’s Children. Some were clearly surgical adaptations, but others could only be the result of manipulation of the gene-seed. That anyone had the skill to do such a thing beyond the hidden laboratoria on Terra and Mars was astounding, but having heard what the Stonewrought had said upon his return from the Pride of the Emperor, there could be only one man capable of such a feat.
Soulaka heard a groaning gurgle of breath beside him and felt questing fingers weakly grasp his leg. He looked down to see a wounded warrior whose cyanotic complexion and bloodied eyes spoke of dreadful hypoxia and flash depressurisation injures. This warrior had been blown out into the vacuum of space without any means of life support, and that he had survived at all was a testament to the robustness of Space Marine physiology.
The legionary was blind; his eyes had literally filled with blood until they ruptured.
‘Apothecary?’ said the warrior. ‘I’m hurt…’
Soulaka knelt beside him and grimaced as he saw the rings and toothed hooks stitched into his face. The warrior gripped the barbed haft of a whip that lay coiled beside him like a sleeping snake. Soulaka blinked as he thought he saw the toothed length of the whip twitch in recognition of his scrutiny.
‘Tell me your name,’ said Soulaka.
‘Kalimos,?
?? said the warrior. ‘Ah… the pain…’
Soulaka nodded and held out his arm, letting the narthecium’s auspex play over Kalimos and collect diagnostic information that would allow him to treat the warrior’s wounds. His injuries were severe: many of Kalimos’s internal organs already damaged beyond repair by oxygen starvation, and those that remained were on the verge of complete failure. He was not beyond saving, and with a full suite of medicae tools, Soulaka could restore Kalimos to the fighting ranks within a few days.
‘I can fix you,’ said Soulaka. ‘But I need to get you to the apothecarion.’
Kalimos twitched as a spasm of agony passed through him. He licked a bifurcated tongue over his cracked lips, and Soulaka saw that his canines had been replaced by implants of razor-sharp surgical steel.
‘You are not Third Legion,’ said Kalimos, twin runnels of blood flowing from the corners of his mouth. ‘You don’t know, do you?’
‘I don’t know what?’ said Soulaka, leaning in.
‘The pain…’ said Kalimos.
‘I can help with that,’ said Soulaka, extending his narthecium.
Kalimos slapped the surgical device away and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The pain… It’s exquisite, you see. I never knew how good it could feel… to die…’
His head slumped to one side, and Soulaka needed no warning tone from the narthecium to tell him that Kalimos was dead. Soulaka had seen many warriors die before him, but this death sat badly with him.