Gage can see the pain in Guilliman’s eyes, the enormity of what this means.
‘What was that thing he said, my primarch?’ Gage asks. ‘That last thing?’
Guilliman hesitates.
‘He said, “I am an orphan”.’
Gage straightens up and glances at the senior crew.
‘Your orders, sir?’ he says firmly.
‘Issue the instruction as best you can,’ Guilliman says, stepping down from the platform. ‘To all XIII Legion units and auxiliaries, upon my authority code. Priority one. Defend yourselves by all means at your disposal.’
Gage clears his throat.
‘My primarch, I need your confirmation. Have you just authorised actions up to and including return of fire?’
There is a long pause.
‘Return of fire is so ordered,’ says Guilliman.
Zedoff and the senior gunnery officers start barking orders. Gage turns to the rubricator waiting ready at his station beside the shipmaster’s throne.
‘Officer of record,’ he says. ‘Start the mark.’
The rubricator nods and activates his cogitator.
‘Initiating XIII Legion combat record, elapsed time count,’ the rubricator says. ‘Count begins. Calth mark: 00.00.00.’
SYSTEM//KILL
‘It is necessary under some circumstances, even – in extremis – actions of compliance, to methodically destroy an opponent’s infrastructure along with the opponent himself. Sometimes an emphatic military victory is not enough: sometimes the very earth must be salted, as the ancient texts put it. The principal arguments for this kind of action may be psychological (against a defiant people or species) or a matter of security (in that you are purifying a region of something too dangerous to exist). Neither of these arguments is especially comforting to a pragmatic commander. War is about accomplishment as well as victory; it should not be about supreme destruction. This kind of total war, this process of razing, is most commonly seen with shock or hyper-aggressive forces. The warriors of Angron, my brother primarch of the XII Legion, refer to it as Totality, and even they employ it rarely to its full extent. From my brother Russ, and the Wurgen war-cant of the Vlka Fenryka we borrow the term Skira Vordrotta, which may most usefully be rendered as System Kill.’
– Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial Codification, 4.1.ix
1
[mark: 0.00.01]
‘My brother, hear me. Warriors of the XVII Legion, hear me. This violence is against the code of the Legiones Astartes and against the will of our father, the Emperor. In the name of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, I implore you to cease fire and stand down. Open communication with me. Let us speak. Let us settle this. This action is an error of the most tragic kind. Cease fire. I, Roboute Guilliman, give you my solemn pledge that we will deal with each other frankly and fairly if these hostilities can be suspended. I urge you to respond.’
Guilliman puts the speaker horn down and looks at Gage and the Master of Vox.
‘As soon as we are able,’ he tells them, ‘transmit that message on repeat. Cycle transmissions. No interruptions.’
‘Yes, sir,’ says the Master of Vox.
[mark: 0.00.10]
Leviathans stir. Bigger than the human mind can comfortably conceive, starships move through the burning clouds of dust above Calth. Their dark hulks emerge from glittering banks of debris, through swirling flares of ejected energy, like marine monsters surfacing for air.
They are flying blind. They are fighting blind. They scream challenges and threats into the burning void through shorted vox systems and blown speakers. They detach themselves from the super-massive gantries, derricks and anchorages of the yards, some shearing cables, lines and airgates in their desperation to run free.
A moving target is harder to hit. That’s the logic. In truth, a moving target makes itself alone and vulnerable.
The warships of the XVII Legion make the kills appear effortless. Coasting, almost stately, they run forward, shields lit, creating bright halos around their hulls as dust and particulate matter burns off the fields. Their snarling gunports are open, their primary weapons extended in their silo bays. Charge batteries and plasma capacitors seethe with power, ready for lethal discharge. They are supposed to be deaf and blind too, but they are not. Detection and target systems beyond the darkest imaginings of the Mechanicum peer out into the noisy darkness and alight upon the scattering cobalt-blue vessels of the Ultramar fleet as though they were hot coals on cold ash. They find them, and they bind them, tracking them relentlessly, scrutinising them in lascivious detail, weighing and assessing their shielding and hull strength, while weapons batteries train and align, and munitions loads are ordered up. Bulk magazines chug and clatter as projectile shells and missiles are conveyed by automatic loaders, through-deck hoists or ordnance chutes.
Munitions fill the void like seed pods, like blizzards. Columns of scorching plasma and las, hundreds of kilometres long, stripe afterimages on the retinas of those who witness them. Main lance batteries vomit bright energy and spit light in beams, in gobs, in splinters, in twitching withies of lightning.
Ships burst in the darkness. The Gladius, a four-kilometre-long escort from the Saramanth Wing, serially detonates as it draws clear of its slipway, its armoured hull sectioned and chewed apart by internal explosions. The barge Hope of Narmenia is caught by a missile spread that strikes it like a storm of needles, puncturing its upper hull and stern in a hundred places, peppering it, engulfing its interior in white-hot fire. The support carriers Valediction and Vospherus are wrecked by sustained broadside fire from a battle-barge of the XVII. The Valediction breaks up first, its hullplates unwrapping around a core explosion like a time-lapse feed of a flower’s petals opening, blooming and dying. Hastily deployed lifeboats are swept away by the super-heat wash. The Vospherus, shielded by the fate of its sister ship, turns away to run, but the enemy guns reach it and pulp its drive section. Drive vents and engine bells explode, and the inward pressure forces a drive plant event, a series of star-hot overblasts in the engineering spaces that burst the stern of the carrier like a pipe bomb. The force of the blasts throws the ruined carrier forward on a pressure wave and slams the ship into the troop transport Antropheles, cutting it in two. Eighty thousand lives lost in five seconds.
The Infernus-class battleship Flame of Purity, one of the true monsters of the XVII fleet, runs into the Asertis Orbital Yard, firing cannonades to maximise collateral damage. Its prow is armoured: a vast, burnished ramming blade, a giant’s chisel gilded with seraphs, narwhals and eagles. It ploughs through the smaller, berthed ships in its path, bisecting some, ripping others open, shattering hulls. Its main spinal lance mount, a primary magnitude exo-las weapon, wakes and screams, uttering a shaft of matter-annihilating light that sends the picket cruiser Stations of Ultramar reeling from a hammering concussion as it attempts to defend the yard space. The cruiser tries to rally, trailing debris from a blackened and molten port side. It turns about, dazed, clumsily glancing against support stations and yard gantries. Clouds of pink flame belch from its stricken engines. It raises its shields. The Flame of Purity fires its recharged exo-laser again. The shields surrounding the Stations of Ultramar do not even retard the beam. They pop like soap bubbles. The beam vaporises the cruiser’s central mass, until it’s merely a toroid of hull metal around a glowing white-hot hole. The Flame of Purity powers on, bumping the drifting ruin of the Stations of Ultramar aside on its magnetic bow-wave.
In the dark pits of drive rooms and engineering chambers, hosts of stokers and allworks slave away with furious effort. The chambers are infernal, soot-caked and lit by the ruddy glare of the vast engines and reactor furnaces. Armies of stokers, sweat-sheened and roaring, eyes like white stones in blackened faces, shovel fuel ores and promethium pellets into the iron chutes. Servitor crews, their metal skins colour-bruised like old kettles by the constant heat, lever and haul on the throbbing activator rods that quicken the drive plants. Coal-black chai
ns swing. Bellows wheeze and flush dragon-breath balls of roiling fire up flues and vent pipes. Abhuman labourers, troll-like and grunting, swelter as they drag in monolithic payload carts of raw fuel from the silo decks.
There is frenzy here, panic that is barely kept at bay by the lashes and orders of the engine room masters. There are no windows, no way of appreciating the outer universe or the threats it may contain.
In truth, the envied bridge crews in their glass and gilt towers far above have no better understanding of the calamity than the blind stokers down in the dark below. Knowledge of this irony may not have enhanced the stokers’ confidence.
Many will never know the light again. Some of the ships slain during the Calth Atrocity will continue to circle the tortured star for a hundred thousand years as frozen wrecks, as tomb ships for the silent dead, mummified and preserved in the act of screaming their final screams.
[mark: 0.00.20]
Ventanus and Selaton hit the ground. The drop is severe. Their strength and their armour absorb the impact, and they come up, bolters ready. Dust and ash films their armour plate.
They move.
The module reaches the ground behind them, shredding open as it lands. The noise is huge, a splintering of metal. Behind the module comes the best part of one of the pylons. They can hear steel hawsers parting like bolter shots. Broken fastener pins, released by the extreme tension, whistle through the air like micro-missiles.
Selaton and his captain outrun the falling pylon. It collapses like a tranquillised animal, buckling at the knees, and then falling from loose hips, then from a slack neck that turns back against the direction of the fall. Dust erupts in a rolling wall, as if driven by the sound of tearing steel. Ventanus and Selaton bound out of the dust wall.
The landing platforms ahead of them are covered with debris and corpses. Ventanus blanches as he sees fallen Ultramarines. Bolter fire has reamed and split their beautiful cobalt-and-gold armour. He sees one man who died carrying a regimental standard. It is a golden symbol of the Legion surmounting a double eagle. The banner pole is clenched so tightly in his armoured fists that his grip has marked the haft.
This was an honour guard. A ceremonial squad cut down as it prepared to board. Nearby, the bodies of city dignitaries, of trade officials, of seneschals, of aides and cargo foremen. They are bloody ruins: split sacks of meat and torn clothing. They were cut down by weapons designed for post-human war, weapons that could slay and have now slain the Legiones Astartes.
Weapons whose effects on unmodified, un-enhanced, unarmoured humans amount to overkill.
Selaton slows to a halt. He regards the litter of dead.
‘Move!’ Ventanus orders.
‘They were waiting to board,’ says Selaton, as if this matters.
Ventanus stops and looks at his sergeant.
It is so obvious, and yet, he missed it. It has taken Selaton’s less experienced mind to see the simple truth.
They were waiting to board. They died waiting to board, banners and standards raised. But it is, perhaps, fifteen or twenty minutes since the disaster struck, fifteen or twenty minutes since the orbital detonation that began the deluge of fire.
Did they stand there all that time, still waiting to board as the world caught light around them?
‘They were already dead,’ says Ventanus. ‘Dead, or dying.’
This murder pre-dated the disaster. At best, it was simultaneous. The disaster was no accident.
Gunfire shrieks across the platforms. Las-fire spanks off the blast walls behind them. Bolter shells corkscrew the smoke they cut through. Impacts occur all around.
Ventanus sees Word Bearers advancing out of the filthy air. Troops move up with them, Army cohorts with lasrifles and halberds.
They’re shooting at any target they can see.
Selaton, still confined by the ethical parameters of the universe he used to understand, asks the obvious question.
‘What do we do?’ he says. ‘What do we do?’
2
[mark: 0.01.00]
Aboard the Samothrace, Sorot Tchure performs his second ministry.
His men are already killing most of the ship’s primary crew. Advancing to the main bridge, burning through blast hatches that had been closed in desperation, Tchure comes face-to-face with the ship’s captain, who solemnly announces his disinclination to assist Tchure, no matter what threat is made.
Tchure ignores the officer. He is a yapping gatehouse dog that is too ignorant to know better. He is barking futile defiance at the carnodon that has just entered through the gates.
Tchure grasps the captain’s head in his right hand and squashes it like an uncooked egg. He lets the body drop. The bridge crew gawps at him, realising that their predicament is far worse than they ever imagined. When a ship is seized, bridge crew can ordinarily safeguard their lives in exchange for their vital technical services.
The bridge officers of the Samothrace see their captain murdered, and realise their services are not required.
Several pull sidearms, despite the fact that they are unmodified humans dressed in cloth and braid, despite the fact that they are outnumbered by martial trans-humans who have just cut their way into the main bridge space, despite the fact that their laspistols will not even dent the armour of the invaders.
Tchure is in the newer Maximus plate, as befits his command status. Crimson is the first colour his suit has ever been painted.
‘Death,’ he instructs as a las-round tangs off his shoulder plate.
The Word Bearers use their fists, guns slung. Tchure doesn’t want mass-reactive shells destroying the vital control stations of the bridge. They break men. They grab them and snap spines and necks, or mash skulls, or tear out soft throats. The officers have nowhere to run, but they run anyway, screaming in terror. They are grabbed and picked up by the hair, by the coat-tails, by the ankles and wrists, grabbed and picked up and killed. The bodies are slung in a pile in the centre of the deck in front of the late captain’s throne.
Tchure observes the work. He raises his left wrist, and speaks into the glass-and-wire mechanism welded there. It is inscribed with the mark of the sacred Octed. The dark, glistening thing living inside the wire-wrapped bottle does not send his words like a vox. It simply repeats them through other mouths in other places.
Hearing the signal through their own warp-flasks, the Mechanicum magi advance onto the bridge. They are all of the cadre that has sided with the Warmaster. They have turned their backs on Mars and Terra. Subtle variations in their robes and insignia already show this change of alignment, but most of all there is a darkness to them. They wear the mystery of their technological craft around them like a shadow.
‘The ship is seized,’ Tchure tells their leader. The magos nods, and instructs his men to bridge positions.
‘Ten minutes, and we will be mobile,’ the magos tells Tchure. ‘Motivation is coming to yield.’
‘Zetsun Verid Yard,’ says Tchure, naming his destination. The yard is a smaller, specialist facility that forms part of the orbital archipelago where the Samothrace has docked.
The magos nods again. Under the deck, systems are humming up to active power.
Tchure turns to his second, Heral.
‘Locator,’ he says.
Heral’s squad brings forward the locator unit, a warp-flask the size of an urn, and places it in the middle of the deck. They wedge it into the pile of corpses to hold it upright. Blood is sliming the floor under their feet.
They stand back. Something in the flask pulses and ripples, gleaming slug-black. Something whispers in the darkness. Something withdraws into its shell like a glistening mollusc, except the shell is not there, in the flask, on the bridge of the Samothrace, it is elsewhere, in another universe, recessed through the coils and loops and whorls of an interstitial architecture.
Frost forms on the corpse pile. Some of the dead muscles stiffen into rictus, and cause the corpses to jerk and lurch as though they are trying to wrigg
le out from under the tangle of limbs.
Corposant ignites around the flask, lights up the bodies, twitches and crackles along the ceiling beams like neon ivy. It grows impossibly bright. Tchure looks away.
When he looks back, the glow is fading, the piled corpses have been burned black, and a new figure has joined them, still smoking with teleportation energy.
‘Welcome to the Samothrace,’ says Tchure, bowing his head. The air smells of cooked fat from the incinerated bodies.
‘Sorot. Let us begin,’ says Kor Phaeron.
[mark: 0.20.34]
At Barrtor, the forests east of the Boros are on fire. Traitor Titans lumber through the sparks and smoke billowing up from the canopy. They look like woodsmen tending a brushfire. Their weapon mounts pour destruction into the glades and cavities of the forest.
Air support howls past. Down in the woods, the shattered remnants of the 111th and 112th Companies, Ultramarines, retreat before the reaping assault of the betrayers. Achilles- and Proteus-pattern Land Raiders, dressed in crimson and badged with abominable designs, demolish the tree cover and men alike. Mega bolters, grinding like unoiled fabrication plants, lacerate the world, reducing trees to fibres, rocks to dust, and bodies to paste.
Ekritus moves backwards, firing as he goes. Anchise is nearby, doing the same. Beyond him, a few other trusted men. Ekritus isn’t even thinking about what’s happening any more. To do so would be to confront the unthinkable, and to leave his mind and wits with as much protection as the flimsy trees are currently affording his body.
He is simply surviving. He is firing at anything he can cleanly target, and falling back. They are buying time for the squads he has sent off at an expedited rate of retreat. Throne alone knows if they will draw clear, or find any shelter from the aircover that is sweeping across them.
What’s left of his companies are cut off from their heavy support. They haven’t got anything in their arsenal that will stop the Land Raiders. Each of those beasts is felling a swathe of the forest ahead of it. Nothing at all will stop the Titans. Every time one of the marching giants speaks, booming its speaker horn in a howl of scorn and triumph, Ekritus feels his bones shake.