He gets to his feet, unsteady. He’s battered and bruised. His clothes are caked in mud that’s just beginning to dry and stiffen. He tries to get his bearings.
There’s not much to see. A dense grey mist is shrouding the entire world. There are rumbling sounds, and dull flashes up behind the clouds. Far away – Oll’s guess would be to the north – there’s a glow, as if something big on the other side of the fog is burning.
Something big like a city.
He looks around. The ground’s a slick of stinking black mud and ooze, of mangled agricultural machinery and broken fence posts. This is the spew the tidal wave left in its wake. This is what’s left of his land, of his fields.
He stumbles along, his boots squelching in the muck. The thick fog is part smoke, part vapour from the flood. The ground stinks of mineral cores and riverbed mire. All of his crops have gone.
He sees a line of fence posts, still standing. From the height of them above the muck, the flood wave left about a metre of silt and soil behind it. Everything’s buried. Worse than damned Krasentine Ridge. He sees a hand, a man’s hand, sticking up out of the black ooze, pale and wrinkled. It looks as if he’s reaching up, grasping for air.
Nothing to be done about it.
Oll reaches the fence posts and leans on one of them. He realises that it’s the gate at the end of the west field level. He’s not where he thought he was at all. He’s about half a kilometre west. The force of the flood water must have carried him, carried him like flood litter, like flotsam. Bloody wonder he didn’t break his limbs or get his brains dashed out against an upright post; it was a wonder he didn’t drown.
Re-aligned, he turns around and heads back the way he came. Now he’s got his bearings, he knows where the farmhab is.
He passes a cultivator unit, on its side and half-sunk in black mud. Then he finds the lane, or what used to be the lane. It’s a groove of ooze, a muddy furrow, knee deep in violet water along its belly. He sloshes along.
‘Master Persson?’
He stops, shocked at the sound of a voice.
A man sits at the edge of the track, his back against what’s left of the fence. He’s plastered in mud.
‘Who’s that?’ asks Oll.
‘It’s me. It’s Zybes.’
Zybes. Hebet Zybes. One of the labourers. One of the pay-by-the-days.
‘Get yourself up,’ Oll says.
‘I can’t,’ says Zybes. He’s sitting oddly against the fence. Oll realises that the man’s left arm and shoulder are wrapped to the fence post with barbed wire. They’ve become tangled together in the flood surge.
‘Hold on,’ says Oll. He reaches into his belt, but his work tools are long since lost. He goes back to the overturned cultivator unit and digs around in the thick mud until he finds the tool box in the cab. Then he comes back with a pair of cutters, and sets Zybes free. The man’s flesh is pretty torn up by the wire.
‘Come on,’ says Oll.
‘Where to?’
‘We’ve got places to be,’ says Oll.
It takes twenty minutes to trek across the mire, through the fog, to the farmhab. What’s left of it.
On the way, Zybes keeps asking questions, questions like, ‘What happened?’ and ‘Why did it happen to us?’
Oll doesn’t have any answers. None that he has the time or desire to explain, anyway.
Five minutes from the hab, they come across Katt, short for Kattereena. Ekatterina. Something like that, Oll forgets. She’s a paid-by-day too, like Zybes, works in the kiln store, drying the sheaves. She’s about seventeen; his neighbour’s girl.
She’s just standing there, in the fog, smirched in mud, looking vacant, staring at something there’s no possibility of seeing because there’s no distance visible, thanks to the fog. Maybe she’s staring at something comforting, like the day before, or her fifth birthday.
‘You all right there, girl?’ Oll asks her.
She doesn’t reply. Shock. Plain shock.
‘You all right? Katt, come with us.’
She doesn’t make eye contact. She doesn’t even nod. But when they start walking again, she follows them at a distance.
The hab is a mess. The floodwash swept right through it, taking away the doors, the windows, and most of the furniture, leaving a half-metre carpet of silt and wreckage in exchange. Oll thinks about looking for that pict of his wife, the one that used to stand on the dresser in the kitchen, but the dresser’s gone, so he doesn’t see much hope of finding a picture that he last saw standing on it.
He tells Zybes and Katt to wait, and goes in. His room’s upstairs, in the roof, so it’s weathered the smash better than the rest. He finds his old service kitbag, made of faded green canvas, and packs it with a few useful bits and pieces. Then he strips off to his work boots, and puts on dry clothes. The best he can find are his old Army-issue breeches and jacket, also green and faded.
He picks up a last few items, choosing things to take and things to leave. There’s a spare coat for Zybes, plus a medicae pack, and a blanket from the bed to keep Katt warm. He goes back down the stairs to find them.
His old lasrifle is still hanging over the fireplace. He takes it down. From the niche in the chimney breast he retrieves a small wooden box. Three magazines, fully charged. He puts two in his pocket and gets ready to slot one into the weapon.
He hears Zybes cry out, and rushes into the muddy yard, slipping and slithering. The bloody mag won’t slot. It’s been a long time since he drilled with a rifle, and he’s forgotten the knack.
He’s scared too. More scared than he’s ever been in his life, and that’s saying something, because his life has included Krasentine Ridge.
‘What’s going on?’ he asks, reaching Zybes, who has ducked behind a toppled stack of grass crates.
‘There’s something over there,’ he says, pointing at the side barn. ‘Something big. Moving around.’
Oll can’t see anything. He looks around to check where Katt is. She’s standing by the kitchen door, gazing at the past again, oblivious to Zybes’s panic.
‘Stay here,’ Oll tells the injured man. He gets up and moves towards the barn, rifle trained. He hears something move. Zybes wasn’t lying. It is big, whatever it is.
Oll knows he’ll need a clear shot. A kill shot. If it’s big, he’ll need to stop it fast.
He wrenches open the barn door.
He sees Graft. The big loader servitor is rolling around in the barn, bashing into things. Mud and riverweed have totally baffled its sensors and visual systems.
‘Graft?’
‘Trooper Persson?’ the servitor replies, recognising his voice.
‘Stay still. Just stay still.’
The big cyborganism halts. Oll reaches up and yanks the ropes of weed away. He gets a cloth and cleans the optics, and gets the mud out of the fine sensor grids.
‘Trooper Persson,’ says Graft. ‘Thank you for the assistance, Trooper Persson.’
‘Follow me,’ says Oll.
‘Follow you where, Trooper Persson?’
‘We’ve got work to do,’ says Oll.
2
[mark: 4.14.11]
‘Explain this,’ says the Word Bearer. His name is Ulmor Nul.
‘There was an ambush,’ says Vil Teth. ‘Two of the Ultramarines.’
Nul looks down at the corpse of the cataphractii.
‘They did this?’
‘They did this,’ agrees Teth. ‘They killed my watcher, killed members of my team, and then took the speeder. One was a captain.’
‘Why didn’t you stop them?’ asks Nul.
‘The cataphractii couldn’t stop them,’ says Teth, in surprise. ‘What makes you think I could?’
He pauses.
‘Forgiveness, majir. They were legionaries. We had no means.’
‘You have stayed in position since the attack, waiting for support?’
‘Yes, majir.’
Ulmor Nul raises his warp-flask. He speaks into it, alerting the
formation officers that at least two more of the enemy elite are loose in that section of the starport.
‘They might have transport,’ he adds.
Nul looks at his squad members.
‘They need to be hunted down,’ he says, simply.
One of his men, Kelter, nods and brings the tracker forward. He has to use the electric goad. The tracker is angry and uncooperative.
It’s about the size of an adult mastiff, but it’s bulkier and it’s not canine. It growls and snuffles, drooling mucus from its flared black-flesh nostrils.
‘We need something they touched,’ says Nul.
‘The captain touched me,’ says Teth. ‘He knocked me down–’
He’s still saying it when he realises he’s an idiot.
Nul looks at him and nods.
‘Majir, no–’ Teth begins to say.
The tracker surges forward. It’s on him. Teth shrieks as it begins to eat him alive.
‘It’s got the taste,’ Kelter says. He pulls the tracker off the Kaul Mandori warrior. Teth’s not dead. He should be. He ought to be. Too much of him is missing and gnawed away for him to ever mend or lead any kind of life. He can’t speak. He can’t even express his overwhelming agony, except to paddle his fingerless hands and churn what’s left of his jaw.
The tracker starts to move, following the psyk-sense it has devoured. The Word Bearers fall in behind it.
‘What about him?’ one of them says to Ulmor Nul, indicating the twitching remains. ‘You could end his pain.’
‘Pain is something we learn from,’ says Nul, ‘and mercy is a waste of ammunition.’
[mark: 4.26.11]
The Ultramarines captain puts up a decent fight. Cornered and outnumbered, he tries to do as much damage as possible before the inevitable.
Sorot Tchure makes the kill. He puts two mass-reactives into the bulkhead behind the Ultramarine, and the force of the blasts, in the enclosed space, rams the cobalt-blue figure out of cover.
He tries to get up, but it’s too late. A third shell takes his head off.
Tchure walks back to the yard’s master control room. He masses his squads marshalling human prisoners, or dragging out the bodies of the enemy dead. A sheen of blue smoke hangs in the air. The Zetsun Verid Yard is now secure.
It’s taken longer than expected. This irks Tchure. He had hoped that sheer bewilderment would knock the fight out of the XIII, but they stuck to it.
His only solace is that the shadow magi have exceeded their estimates too. They’re still at work, recalibrating the yard’s main systems. Kor Phaeron’s displeasure will mostly be reserved for them.
In the master control room, some magi are working with power tools, removing still more deckplates and wall panels to access sheafs of cables. Others are performing more delicate processes, probing intricate circuitry with watch-maker instruments, many of which are fused into their digits. A few have linked directly via the MIU ports, freeing their minds into an improvised noospheric environment in which they can rebuild the yard’s shattered manifold architecture. They are bathing in the warm essence of the Octed code loose in the systems.
Kor Phaeron, Master of the Faith, is not exasperated. Tchure finds him in a control office overlooking the main chamber, a glazed brass box like an ecclesiastical confessional. He is reading from a roughly-bound book. The Book of Lorgar. It is not the whole book, of course, merely one volume. The Book of Lorgar fills an entire data-stack, and has been transcribed by hand into nine thousand seven hundred and fifty-two volumes. The number increases regularly. Kor Phaeron has personally gathered a ten-thousand-strong staff of rubricators and scribes to copy the book, and to multiply those copies. Each senior officer of the XVII, and each planetary overlord appointed by the Word Bearers, is expected to own and study a set. Tchure understands that sets are also being prepared as gifts for each of the primarchs who have thrown their loyalty behind Horus. Copies of copies of copies. Perturabo’s edition will be bound in etched steel. Fulgrim’s will be bound in living flesh. Alpharius will be presented with two editions, each subtly different from the other.
Horus’s set will be wrapped in the tanned hide of betrayed legionaries.
Copies of copies of copies. Lorgar reviews each edition, line by line. Transcription errors are punished by death, or worse. Just the day before they translated into the Veridian System, a rubricator was disembowelled for missing a comma.
Tchure enters the control office. He can see, now he is closer, that the book Kor Phaeron is reading is one of the master copies, one of the original manuscripts. It is in the primarch’s own hand, directly as he composed it. This is the latest volume, ready for dissemination. Kor Phaeron always makes a close, personal study of the new instalments before passing them to his staff for copying, archiving and publication.
Kor Phaeron is reading secrets that no one else has yet seen.
‘I apologise for the delay,’ says Tchure.
Kor Phaeron shakes his head, raising a claw hand, still reading.
‘The magi have explained it,’ he says. ‘Our devastation of the Calth noospherics was more fundamental than we hoped. There is a lot to rebuild. Another ten minutes, as I understand it.’
‘I will be happy when you are securely back aboard your ship, master,’ says Tchure.
Now Kor Phaeron looks up. He smiles.
‘Your care is noted. But I am safe here, Sorot.’
He looks frailer than ever. A halo of filthy empyrean light flickers around him. Tchure can see flashes of his bones through his skin, like sporadic X-rays. Kor Phaeron is maintaining a vast degree of warpcraft.
‘Come, Sorot,’ he says. ‘Read with me, for a moment.’
Sorot Tchure steps to the console and looks at the open book. He notes the intricate beauty of the handwriting. There is barely a hint of blank paper on the pages.
‘He uses a stylus. And ink,’ says Kor Phaeron, as if marvelling. ‘In this day and age. A stylus. Of course, I have the rubricators do the same thing.’
‘I understand that–’
Kor Phaeron looks at him.
‘What, Sorot?’
‘I was going to say, master, that I understand Guilliman also uses a stylus.’
‘Indeed. Who told you that?’
‘Luciel.’
‘The one you killed?’
‘The first sacrifice, yes.’
‘He was your friend.’
‘That is why the death had value,’ says Tchure.
‘Yes, I believe that Roboute Guilliman uses a stylus,’ says Kor Phaeron. ‘He writes. A lot of words, as I have been told. Not a great deal of content, however. He writes… a treatise. On warfare. On combat mechanics. On the theory of fighting. Childish concerns. The man clearly has no soul or character. And no interest in the metaphysical subjects that challenge those of more considerable intellect. Our beloved primarch already knows all there is to know about killing. He has no need or reason to write it down. The principles are simple. That is why he is able to go beyond records of gross practicality, and invest his time and energy in consideration of the great mysteries. The workings of this universe, and others. The nature of existence.’
Kor Phaeron looks at him.
‘You know, Lorgar simply records what is dictated to him? What is whispered to him and him alone?’
‘By the gods?’ asks Tchure.
‘By the powers of eight,’ replies Kor Phaeron. ‘By the speakers of the void and the voices of the abyss. By the Primordial Annihilator, out of the throat of the warp.’
There is a call from outside. The magi have finished their work.
Kor Phaeron closes the book and rises to his feet.
‘Let us put their good work to use, shall we?’ he asks.
[mark: 4.55.34]
The Zetsun Verid Yard systems come on-line, restarted by the shadow Mechanicum. A data-engine resumes operation. Sensing that the planetary weapons grid is inactive, and that the inactivity has been caused by the inexplicable loss
of the data-engine hub located aboard Calth Veridian Anchor, the engine automatically obeys protocol and assumes control, taking up the slack reins of the grid system. Zetsun Verid contains one of the advanced engine hubs capable of substituting, in an emergency, for the primary orbital hub.
The Calth weapons grid goes back on-line. Its manifold re-ignites.
Kor Phaeron observes the work, observes how the scrapcode of the Octed is firmly established in the noospheric architecture. He determines his target, and the magi hurry to set and lock the coordinates.
All the orbiting weapons platforms, as well as several ground-based stations including the polar weapon pits, activate and begin to track as their power reservoirs come up to yield.
It takes approximately ten minutes before authority lights flicker green along the master control room’s main console.
‘Target resolution achieved,’ reports the senior magos, scrapcode binaric chattering behind his meatvoice.
‘You may fire when ready,’ says Kor Phaeron.
There is a glimmer. A flash. Beams of coherent energy, beams of staggering magnitude, rip from Calth and from its orbital stations.
Calth has a weapons grid capable of keeping at bay an entire expedition fleet or primary battlegroup. Only the most devious and ingenious treachery has circumvented it today.
The weapons grid begins to discharge. Calth begins to kill the neighbouring planets in the Veridian system.
It starts with a massive asteroid world that orbits the system beyond the circuit of Calth’s moons. The asteroid, called Alamasta, is the main remnant of a planet that once occupied that orbital slot. It is now a rock the size of a major satellite.
It is no longer called Alamasta. It is known as Veridia Forge. It is the system’s principal Mechanicum station, and the most significant manufacturing venue in six systems.
Veridia Forge is helpless, its systems crashed by the same scrapcode that brought the Calth grid down.
It has no shields, no responsive weaponry, and no means of evasion.
It takes four prolonged strikes from the weapons grid. The first two burn away surface rock and immolate rockcrete bastions or adamantine bulwarks. The third voids the main fabricatory to space, and combusts the forge world’s reactor power systems.