He looks at Sydance.
‘But there is always a thirteenth eldar.’
Sydance laughs.
Sullus is unable to cover a tiny smile.
‘We must cover our backs,’ Ventanus says. ‘We must channel our rage, and temper it with strategy. We must use every weapon: fury, vengeance, intelligence. Fury is our practical. Intelligence is our theoretical. Neither works alone. We would disgrace Guilliman in this hour if we forgot that. Information is victory.’
He turns to Cyramica.
‘Please, inform the server I wish to begin vox transmissions. I need the best signal encryption she can give me, and any source modifiers. Anything she can do to disguise our position.’
Cyramica nods.
Flanked by Sydance and Sullus, Ventanus walks into the vox-caster room. He takes up the speaker horn.
9
[mark: 11.06.41]
It’s darker above ground than beneath it.
The open air is a poison fog, and the dense blackness moves hard on a wind that pushes through the Ourosene Hills.
Brother Braellen doesn’t believe it’s a natural wind. A natural weather pattern. During a break in the gunfire, he heard Sergeant Domitian speculate that it was atmospheric displacement: major pressure and air patterns thrown into upheaval by orbital bombardment.
There’s certainly a line of firestorm glow around the lip of the southern sky.
6th Company, supported by the Army and stragglers from two other Ultramarines companies at the Ourosene muster, has pulled back from the devastated ground camp areas, and taken up position defending the surface tower of one of the northern arcologies.
Braellen hasn’t seen inside the arcologies, but he knows they are huge sub-ground complexes. Some of them are habs. This one, apparently. There are hundreds of thousands of citizen workers down there, and the 6th is the only thing stopping the enemy from getting at them.
The surface tower is a small fortress, a significant fortified structure that covers and defends the mouth of the arcology system. Its sublevels contain entrances to the main underground arterial, to walkways and cargo-freight systems, and even maglev rail lines, all feeding the huge subterranean complex.
The tower is a good place to make a stand.
The enemy has been coming up the pass all day. Brotherhood cultists at the fore, then Word Bearers, then armour. The cultists seem mindless, frenzied. They are drumming and chanting nonsense. Heedless of their own lives, they rush the walls and gates, and are cut down. Some are wired to explode, and detonate themselves against the walls in the hope of bringing them over.
Braellen is intrigued by their behaviour. The cultists seem willing and eager. That is clear from their chanting and drumming and mindless sacrifice. But it is a group mentality, a hysteria. He has observed Word Bearers at the back of the vast host spurring them on, driving them forward with pain and threats. They are enslaved killers, their hysteria enforced by cruel authority.
Perhaps they have been promised some redemption, some metaphysical reward for their bloody efforts. Perhaps they hope that if they survive devoted service, they might be freed.
Perhaps they know that refusing the XVII is a more unpleasant option.
A fresh wave comes at the tower. Captain Damocles has ordered that the Army provide fusillades for the instrumentation of each repulse. The legionaries must withhold, saving their more precious munitions for Legiones Astartes targets.
The link to the arcology is vital. Significant reserves of standard Army munitions can be raised from arcology silos to supply the human defenders. But the reserves of Legion-specific munitions, including ordnance for their fighting vehicles, is limited to the supplies carried by the battle-brothers, or retrieved from the muster camp before it was abandoned.
Every bolter round must count. Las-bolts and small-arms hard-rounds can be hosed at the waves of screaming knife brothers.
Legion weapons are withheld for more significant targets.
Those targets are coming. Apart from the Word Bearers, who are yet to commit in serious numbers, there are signs of major armour massing down the throat of the pass, perhaps even war-engines.
Braellen both understands and supports his commander’s practical. Tempting though it is, the legionaries must wait until their abilities are the only ones that will do.
He doesn’t understand the enemy.
What has transformed them so? What has turned them? They have all heard Domitian’s stories about the old rivalry and the competition.
So what? Show him two Legions that don’t compete for glory and distinction? The rebuke was just that: a rebuke for impoverished service and performance. And it was more than four decades ago!
What is this now? Are the Word Bearers and their demented master so addled that they can brood for forty years, and finally act with such disproportionate ignominy that the galaxy draws a gasp of surprise?
Braellen can tell that Captain Damocles is wounded by it. He has never seen him so driven or grim. It is the treachery more than the loss of life. The treachery has taken his breath away, and shaken his belief in the sanctity of the Imperial truth.
That’s all before you even begin to consider the transformation of the Word Bearers: their altered schemes and heraldry, their expressed choice to decorate their armour with esoteric and frankly bizarre symbols and modifications. Their willingness to consort with superstitious, heathen zealots.
Have they been consumed by some mass delusion of sorcery?
Or has something darker and more insidious got its poison into their veins and twisted their minds against their kin?
The next wave is coming. Braellen sees them running up the slopes, a mass of swirling black robes and brandished weapons. The knife brothers, thousands of them, stampede over the dead left by the last charge and roll like a river breaking its banks towards the gate and storm walls.
The Army – 19th Numinus, 21st Numinus, 6th Neride ‘Westerners’ and 2nd Erud Ultima – opens fire. Lasrifles volley, light support guns and crew-serveds chatter, grenade launchers clunk and pop. Heavier autocannon emplacements crank up, chewing into the moving lines.
Another slaughter. Black figures are mown down. Some explode in shooting fireballs as they die, slaying the men round them.
Braellen clutches his bolter, fighting back the urge to shoot.
‘Captain! Captain!’
Sergeant Domitian moves through the back of the line. Men turn as he passes.
Domitian reaches Captain Damocles.
‘Sir,’ he says. ‘The damn vox just lit.’
[mark: 11.10.13]
Sergeant Anchise turns sharply.
‘What did you say?’ he asks.
They’re on the fringes of Sharud Province, moving at best speed ahead of the conflagration that’s consuming the forests. They are the pitiful remnants of the 111th and the 112th.
Anchise has taken command now that the company captains are gone. He’s trying to rally something out of the men, but there’s no time to stand still. Pursuit is right there, constantly pressing them: Titans, Titans of the traitor Mechanicum, plus heavy armour columns.
The Word Bearers are in the burning woods, and every kilometre further means greater losses inflicted.
Warhorns, deep, lingering, mournful, echo through the blackness of the forest, summoning the Ultra-marines to their doom.
‘We’re detecting a sporadic pulse code on the vox, sir,’ says Cantis, who’s been carrying the only caster set they dragged out of Barrtor with them.
‘Is it on the helm pick-ups?’ Anchise asks.
‘Too weak,’ says Cantis. ‘I really need to set this down, erect the portable mast.’
Anchise doesn’t have to tell him why he can’t. Three or four mass-reactive rounds spit through the canopy above them like game birds bolting for freedom, and punch into a mature quaren. The bole splinters in a spray of fire, and the head limbs of the tree come tearing down through the canopy spread in a blizzard of sparks.
r />
‘Move! Move it!’ Anchise yells. Damn they’re close! He can hear whirring, the chug of treads. That’s a damn Whirlwind, or maybe one of the Sabre tank hunters.
There is simply no let up. They are going to be hounded until the last of them are dead.
Two Word Bearers rush the clearing. The trees are stark black, back-lit by fierce fires that have erupted close by. Anchise can smell woodsmoke, burning brush, sparks, the burnwash of explosives.
The first of the XVII brutes fires his storm bolter, and kills Brother Ferthun with a hit to the lower back that blows out his spine and hips. The other is hefting a lascannon. He braces it and lets rip, flattening trees and retreating Space Marines with bright spears of las-energy.
Anchise decides to face his death. He goes at them, boltgun blasting in one fist, kinetic mace in the other. The mace belonged to his captain, Phrastorex. The captain never even got the chance to unlock it from its case this morning.
Anchise’s bolts blow the face off the Word Bearer with the cannon. The visor of the man’s helmet explodes, and he falls back, hard. The other clips Anchise on the shoulder, and then makes a cleaner hit to his left leg. The detonation of the mass-reactive shell hurls Anchise onto the loamy ground. Rolling, he swings the mace, and breaks both of the Word Bearer’s legs. The warrior goes down. Anchise finishes the job with another mace swing.
His own leg is broken. He can feel the bone trying to reknit, but the damage may be too great.
He looks around in time to see that the other Word Bearer is not dead.
He’s getting up. Anchise’s shots shredded his helmet, his gorget and part of his upper chest plate. The Word Bearer’s head and face are exposed.
It may just be injury: burns, contusions, swelling. The warrior has, of course, just taken substantial damage from a boltgun.
But the horror doesn’t look like that to Anchise. The flesh is puffed taut, like the necrotised swelling of a venom bite. The mouth is misaligned, but it looks as though it has grown that way, not been brutally configured by kinetic shockwaves. Blood streams down the side of the Word Bearer’s face and neck.
There are yellow scutes on his brow that look disturbingly like budding horns.
He throws himself at Anchise, a combat blade in his right hand. The dagger looks as though it’s made of obsidian or polished black rock. Its grip is wound with fine chains. Is it some kind of trophy?
Anchise lapses to automatic practical, taking his foe on in basic, close-hand measures to stop the blade. He half-rises to meet the Word Bearer, turning his left palm out to run in past the lunging knife, and turn the right wrist and forearm away. Simultaneously, he brings his right forearm up as a crossed block against the enemy’s face and chest.
Transhuman versus transhuman. It’s about mass and speed and power, about the application of accelerated strength and enhanced reaction time. Anchise’s hard block breaks the Word Bearer’s cheek, his pass turning the knife aside. But the Word Bearer is strong, and driven by a murderous fury. He circles the blade, stabbing at Anchise’s side and left arm. Anchise turns his right arm block into a jabbing punch, ramming his steel fist into the enemy’s throat which has been exposed thanks to the damaged gorget. The impact crushes something in the Word Bearer’s throat. His eyes bulge for a second, and blood jets from his mouth and nostrils. He attempts another savage stab, and the knifeblade scores Anchise’s right forearm through armour, flesh and muscle to the very bone.
Anchise is not going to lose the advantage. He places a second punch into the throat, and then a third, higher, into the misshapen jaw.
The Word Bearer’s head snaps back. Anchise feels rather than hears a sharp crack. He punches again to be sure. Then, as his foe drops, he wrenches the dagger out of his hand to make certain of things.
The hand that he uses to grasp it tingles. The wound made by the knife in his forearm throbs.
He freezes.
Something opens in his mind. Despite the burning forest around him, everything is very cold. There is a sterile blue light. Something pulses. Anchise can hear a deep, cosmic heartbeat. He can smell neurotoxin and molecular acid. He cannot see it, but he has a sense of something uncoiling, something vast, something black, something scaled and greasy, something coated in a heavy caul of grey mucus. He can feel it unwrapping, expanding out of a pit that’s older than all the eons, moving up through the eternal darkness of Old Night and the interstellar gulf, moving towards the light of the burning forest. Moving towards him.
It can smell him. It can taste his pain. It can hear his thoughts.
Closer. Closer. Closer.
Anchise cries out and hurls the black glass dagger away. The door in his mind slams shut.
He is breathing hard, shaking. The wound in his arm will not stop bleeding.
He knows he needs the vox. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t got the time or opportunity to stop and set up. He needs the vox.
If someone’s out there, if anyone’s listening, they need to hear him. They need to know.
They need to know what they’re facing.
[mark: 11.16.39]
On. Off.
On. Off.
On.
Maintain activation. Maintain. Wake.
Trapped and blind. Helpless. Deprived of consciousness for so long, he has lost all sense of when now is or what now is.
He knows fear.
He is Telemechrus.
He has been taught things, and one of them is to control his anger until it is needed. It is probably needed now.
He lets his go. He lets it replace the abomination fear.
He analyses. He scans. He determines.
His determination is this: he is still in his casket, and his hibersystems have shut down. No, they have been interrupted. By a comm signal. An encrypted vox signal.
He was woken by an encrypted vox transmission that triggered an auto-response in his casket support system.
His casket is damaged. Telemechrus does not believe he can get out of it. He calls out, but there are no venerables around to counsel or help him.
There is no one around.
He will know no fear. He will know no fear.
His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for a little over eleven hours. External sensors are down. He can’t see. He can’t open the casket. There is no noosphere. There is no data inload.
There is only the vox signal that woke him. He clings to that. He tries to decrypt it.
His inertial locators tell him that he is stationary. They record, eleven hours earlier, an extreme displacement followed by a kinetic trauma spike that was too intense to fully measure. He does not remember that. Hiberstasis must have shut him down before it happened.
Motion sensors light.
There is something close by. Something approaching his casket.
Friend or foe? He has no data. No means of determination. He cannot target. The casket is trapping him. He cannot even discharge his weapons while he is locked in the box.
Friend or foe?
Something strikes the outer shell of his casket and slices through the clamps. Something pulls the hatch open.
‘Are you alive in there?’ a voice asks.
Telemechrus suddenly gets optic feed input. Light. He can feel air flow against his skin, even though he has no skin.
The voice comes from the figure silhouetted against the light.
‘Respond,’ the voice says. ‘Are you capable of activity, friend?’
Telemechrus tries to reply, but his voice does not work. There is a whirr. A whine. A dry gasp of sonics. He engages his cyberorganics, drives power to his articulated limbs, shakes off the tingling numbness of stasis, and levers himself forward.
Clumsy and inelegant, he clambers out of the casket. The figure moves back to let him out.
He steps out of the casket, crushing rock fragments and glass to powder beneath his feet. He feels sunlight on his face, though he has no face. He stretches out his ghost spine, stretches his re
membered arms.
His weapon pods engage. Power couplings light up. Feeds flow live. He looks down at the figure who freed him.
‘Thank. You. Lord,’ he manages to say.
‘You know me?’ the warrior asks.
‘Yes. Tetrarch. I. Identified. Your voice. Pattern.’
Eikos Lamiad nods.
‘That’s good. My face is not as recognisable as it once was.’
Telemechrus adjusts his optic feed and zooms in on the great tetrarch. Lamiad’s visual profile does not match the one stored in Telemechrus’s autostack memory.
Lamiad’s glorious golden armour is dented and scorched. The famous porcelain half of his face is cracked and disfigured. The intricate mechanism of the left eye is ruined.
His left arm is missing from just above the elbow, leaving nothing but a buckled stump of armour, and a cluster of torn fibernetic cables, broken ceramite bone-form, and frayed artificial muscles. With his right hand, Lamiad leans on his broadsword as though it were a walking staff.
‘You. Are. Hurt. Lord Champion.’
‘Nothing that can’t be repaired,’ replies Lamiad. ‘Except, perhaps, my heart.’
‘You. have. Sustained. Cardiac damage? Which. Vessel?’
‘No, friend. I meant it metaphorically. Do you understand what’s happened today?’
‘No. Where. Am I?’
Lamiad turns and gestures. Telemechrus adjusts his optic scope and pans out, wide, tracking. A desert area. The sky is dark and mottled with heat-strong blotches. A heat-blotch in the near distance represents a building structure of significant size, which is on fire. More distant but perhaps larger heat-blotch/fires can be identified and plotted. The desert is littered with debris, much of it Legion materiel, much of it apparently destroyed by impact. Telemechrus tracks around. He scans his own casket, crumpled, half-buried in an impact crater. Smashed storage pods and equipment containers are scattered all around. There are two other caskets.