‘You are creatures of honour and reason,’ says Cxir. ‘You understand terms. That is why I refrained from seizing a death I was happy to embrace, and undertook this humiliation. I have come to offer you terms.’
‘You have one minute to express them,’ says Ventanus.
‘In failing to take the palace and destroy you,’ Cxir begins, ‘I have disappointed my field commander. Leptius Numinus was identified as a primary target. Do you understand what I’m saying, captain? Just because you’ve defeated my force, it will not prevent others from coming. At the time of my capture, Commander Foedral Fell was advancing on Leptius with his battlehost. They can’t be long away. Fell will crush you. You barely broke my force. His is twenty times the size. And he is not a creature of honour, captain, not as you understand the principle. Surrender now. Surrender to me, and I will vouch on your behalf. You, your forces here, their lives will be spared.’
‘Spared for what?’ asks Sullus. ‘A life spared under those terms is not a life I’d care for.’
Cxir nods.
‘I understand. I anticipated as much. There can be no rapprochement between us. We have waded into blood too far.’
‘Then what did you expect?’ asked Ventanus. ‘That we would surrender to you? Side with you, with the XVII, with – if what you say is true – Horus? Against Terra?’
‘Of course not,’ replies Cxir. ‘But I did, perhaps, expect that you might at least listen to our truth. It is not what you think, captain. It is beautiful. Your understanding of the galaxy will change. A paradigm shift. You will wonder why you ever thought the things you think. You will wonder how and why they ever made any sense.’
‘Cxir,’ says Ventanus. ‘I have listened to your terms, and I have heard your offer. I formally reject both.’
‘But you will die,’ says Cxir.
‘Everyone dies,’ replies Ventanus, turning away.
‘It will not be a good death,’ Cxir calls after him. ‘There will be no glory in it. It will be a sad and miserable end.’
‘Even in glory, death is miserable,’ Ventanus replies.
‘Fell will punish you! He will punish you in unimaginable ways! He will trample your flesh into the earth!’
‘Ignore him,’ Ventanus says to Sullus.
‘Just like we did to your primarch!’ Cxir yells. ‘We will cut you and bleed you and kill you, like we cut and bled him! He begged for death in the end. Pleaded for it! Begged us like a coward! He wept! He pleaded for us to finish him. To end his pain! We just laughed and pissed on his heart because we knew he was afraid.’
Ventanus can’t stop him. Sullus moves like a blur. Cxir’s torso is slashed open from the left hip to the throat in one ripping cut. The end of Sullus’s sword embeds itself in the underside of Cxir’s jaw.
Blood pours out of the Word Bearer. He sways. Black blood floods from the wound, down his legs, back down the wedged blade and up Sullus’s arm. It streams from Cxir’s mouth. His mouth is half-open. Ventanus can see the fine steel edge of the sword blade running between two of the lower teeth.
Cxir is laughing.
He murmurs something, choking on blood, gagged by the sword.
Ventanus pushes Sullus away and grasps the sword to wrench it out and deliver the mercy of a quick kill.
‘Finally,’ Cxir gurgles. ‘I w-wondered w-what it w-would take... I knew o-one of you would have the balls...’
He begins to collapse, dropping to his knees before Ventanus can withdraw the sword. The blood pools around him on the dry earth, rolling out like a purple mirror in all directions. The four Ultramarines guards step back in quiet disapproval. Sullus is staring, cursing himself for letting his anger out.
Something else is being let out, too.
Cxir is laughing. The laughter throbs tidal surges of blood out of his mouth. It is thick. There are clots in it. Shreds of tissue. The laughter is a gurgle, like a blocked storm drain.
Cxir divides along the line of the sword wound. He splits from the hip to the throat. Then his skull parts too in a vertical line, like a pea-pod dividing. Flesh tears and shreds apart like fibrous matter. The sword, unseated, falls onto the bloody earth.
Cxir is on his knees, opened from the waist like a bloody flower. He is still, somehow, laughing.
Then he turns inside out.
Ventanus, Sullus and the guards recoil in dismay. Blood spatters them. Cxir’s backbone sprouts like a calcified tree trunk, growing weird branches that look as if they are composed of arm bones. His ribcage opens like skeletal wings. His organs pulse and grow, smearing tissue and sinew across the reshaping skeleton.
Cxir becomes a vessel. Whatever is hidden inside him, whatever is germinating and shooting through him from the warp, is much much bigger than his physical form could have contained.
Sprouting limbs turn black and scaly. They grow bristles and thorns. They stretch out like the legs of a giant arachnid. Scorpion tails twist and thrash like a nightmare wreath as they grow out of the open ribs. Stings glitter like knives.
Cxir’s new head buds and unfolds, slowly turning up from a bowed stance. Mouthparts chatter. Huge multi-faceted eyes twinkle and glitter, iridescent. Horns sprout from the cranium; the huge, upright horns of some ancient Aegean bull-daemon.
Cxir is still laughing, but it’s not Cxir any more.
The air is full of blowflies, like a storm of buzzing ash.
‘Samus,’ laughs Cxir. ‘Samus is here!’
USHKUL//THU
‘In the End Phase of any combat, or at any point after the Decisive Strike has been accomplished, loss must be recognised. This is often the hardest lesson for a warrior to learn. It is seldom written about, and it is not valued or defined. You must understand when you have lost. Perceiving this state is as important as accomplishing victory. Once you appreciate that you have, by any theoretical measure, been defeated, you can decide what practical outcome you can best afford. You may, for example, choose to withdraw, thus preserving force strength and materiels that would otherwise be wasted. You may choose to surrender, if anything may be accomplished by the continuation of your life, even in captivity. You may choose to expend your last efforts doing as much punitive damage to the victor as possible, to weaken him for other adversaries. You may choose to die. The manner in which a warrior deals with defeat is a truer mark of his mettle than his comportment in victory.’
– Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial Codification, 26.16.xxxv
1
[mark: 12.17.46]
‘Who is... Samus?’ asks the Master of Vox. Then he flinches, and pulls his headset away from his ears.
‘Report!’ snaps Gage.
‘Sudden and chronic interrupt, sir,’ says the Master of Vox, working his console deftly to reconnect. ‘Interference patterns. It sounded like huge storm-pattern distortion, as if bad weather had closed in on the Leptius Numinus area.’
‘Have you lost vox?’ asks Gage.
‘Vox-link with Leptius Numinus is suspended,’ the Master of Vox reports.
‘The datalink is still active, however,’ says the magos at the next station. ‘Information is still being processed and relayed by the palace’s data-engine.’
‘Restore that link,’ Gage says to the Master of Vox.
Gage crosses to the strategium where Shipmaster Hommed and his officers are examining the rapidly building tactical plot. It is a three-dimensional hololithic representation of Calth and its nearspace regions.
The story it tells is a bitter one.
Virtually all the orbital yards are gone, or so damaged that they will need to be destroyed and replaced rather than rebuilt. XVII fleet formations are bombarding the southern hemisphere of Calth. The rest of the fleet has established a clear orbital superiority position.
The Ultramar fleet is scattered. It has been reduced to about a fifth of its original strength. Those vessels remaining are either fleeing to the far side of the local star to avoid fleet attack or the inexorable fire of the weapons grid or, like the
Macragge’s Honour, they are lying helpless and drifting in the high anchor zone.
There’s virtually nothing left to fight with. They are done. It is over. It is simply a matter of the Word Bearers picking off the last few fighting ships of the XIII fleet.
The weapons grid seems to be having no difficulty doing that. It has destroyed the local forge world, a small moon with offensive capabilities, a starfort near the system’s Mandeville Point, and several capital ships.
‘We have sensors,’ says the shipmaster, ‘and power is coming to yield. I anticipate capacity for weapons or drive in fifteen minutes. Not both.’
‘What about shields?’ asks Gage.
‘It seemed to me that weapons or drive were greater priorities.’
Gage nods. The theoretical is sound. There are three Word Bearers cruisers effectively docked to the flagship. The weapons grid will not fire at the Macragge’s Honour while they are so close. The cruisers will not fire, because they would have done so by now. They have come in close to begin boarding actions.
The enemy wants the flagship intact.
Gage sees the pattern. For a moment, he couldn’t understand why, of the surviving Ultramarines vessels, many were the largest and most powerful capital ships. Surely an adversary with control of the weapons grid would pick off the most serious threats first?
The ships that have been spared are all helpless and drifting, like the Macragge’s Honour. The moment they shake off the effects of the scrapcode or the electromagnetic pulse, and move, or raise shields, the grid destroys them.
The Word Bearers intend to take as many of his Legion’s capital ships intact as they can. They want to bolster their fleet with warships. They want to build their strike power.
They want to turn Ultramarines ships against the Imperium.
What was that nonsense Lorgar was ranting at the end? Horus turning? A civil war? He was demented and, besides, it wasn’t Lorgar. It was some xenos manipulation. It was some empyrean breach effect.
Gage knows he’s lying to himself. Today has changed the shape of the galaxy in a way that the wildest theoretical could not have anticipated. He hopes he will not live to endure the new order.
However long the rest of his life turns out to be, he will not allow ships of Ultramar to be used against the Imperium.
He turns to Empion.
‘Are your squads assembled?’
‘They are,’ says Empion.
‘Mobilise,’ orders Gage. ‘Repel boarders. Find them and drive them off this ship.’
[mark: 12.20.59]
Oll Persson tells them to wait.
Smoke covers the river, covers the wharfs, covers the docks. Two container ships are on fire out in the estuary, making dancing yellow fuzzes in the stagnant fog. It’s as if the whole world is reducing to a vaporous state.
He tells them to wait: Graft, Zybes, the two troopers and the silent girl. They take cover in a pilot’s house overlooking the landing. They’re all armed, except Graft and the girl. She has still to speak a word or look anyone in the eye.
Oll shoulders his rifle sling and finds a quiet spot in one of the packing sheds. Back in the day, he’d often come to Neride Point for the markets. There was always a fresh catch coming in, even though the wharf spaces were primarily industrial. Hundreds of boats would bob along the jetties and landings, in between the bulk containers.
It’s all messed up now. More than one huge sea-surge has swept boats into the streets and smashed them against habs and factory structures. The streets are wet, and covered with an ankle-deep litter of garbage and debris. The water is worse. It’s like brown oil, and there are bodies floating in it, thousands of bodies, all choking the landings and under the pier walks and bridges, gathered up by the prevailing currents like jettisoned trash.
The place smells of death. Waterlogged death.
Oll sits down and opens his old kitbag. He turns out the few items he rescued from his bedroom and sorts through them on the top of an old packing case.
There’s a little tin, a tobacco tin for rough cut lho leaf. He hasn’t smoked in a long time, but several older versions of him did. He pops the tin open, smells the captured scent of lho, and tips the cloth bundle into his palm. He opens it.
They are just as he remembered them. A little silver compass and a jet pendulum. Well, they look like silver and jet, and he’s never corrected anyone who said that’s what they were. The jet stone is suspended on a very fine silver chain. It’s been years since he last used these objects – Oll suspects it might be more than a hundred – but the polished black orb on the end of the chain is warm.
The compass is fashioned in the form of a human skull, a beautiful piece of metalwork no bigger than his thumb. The cranium is slightly elongated, slightly longer than standard human proportions, suggesting that it was not actually a human skull that formed the model for the design. The skull, a box, opens along the jawline on minutely engineered hinges, so that the roof of the mouth is revealed as the dial of the compass. The markings on the compass rim are so small and intricate you’d need a watchmaker’s loup to read them. Oll has one of those too.
The simple gold and black pointer spins fluidly as he moves the tiny instrument.
He sets it down, aligns it north. He watches the pointer twitch.
Oll takes a little clasp notebook out of his kit and opens it to a fresh page. Half the book is filled with old handwriting. He slides out the notebook’s stylus, opens it, and writes down the date and the place.
It takes a few minutes. He suspends the pendulum over the compass on its silver chain and lets it swing. He repeats the process several times, noting down, in a neat column, the angles and directions of the spin and the twitches of the compass needle. He calculates and writes down the azimuth. Then he flips the pages of the notebook to the back, opens out a folded, yellow sheet of paper that has been glued into the back cover, and studies the chart. It was written on Terra, twenty-two thousand years earlier, a copy of a chart that had been drawn twenty-two thousand years before that. His handwriting was rather different in those days. The chart shows a wind rose of cardinal points. It is a piece of sublime mystery recorded in ink. Oll thinks of the two forces clashing on Calth and reflects that they are both right about one thing. It’s the one thing they agree on. Words are power, some of them at least. Information is victory.
‘Thrascias,’ he says to himself. As he suspected, they’re going to need a boat.
He packs his things away as carefully as he unwrapped them, preps his gun, and goes to find the others.
Bale Rane looks dubiously at the skiff.
‘Hurry up and get in,’ says Oll.
The skiff’s a fishing craft, good for a dozen people, with a small covered cabin and a long narrow hull.
‘Where are we going?’ asks Zybes.
‘Away from here,’ says Oll, lifting some of the boxes aboard. ‘Far away. Thrascias.’
‘What?’ asks Zybes.
‘North-north-west,’ Oll corrects himself.
‘Why?’ asks Rane.
‘It’s where we have to go. Help me with the boxes.’
They’ve packed some canned food, some foil-wrapped ration packs, some medical supplies and some other essentials, looted from the pilot house. Krank and Graft have gone back down the landing to fill four big plastek drums with drinking water from the dockside tanks.
‘Are we rowing?’ asks Rane.
‘No, it’s got an engine. A little fusion plant. But it makes a noise, and there are times when we’ll have to be quiet, so we’re taking oars too.’
‘I’m not rowing,’ says Rane.
‘I’m not asking you to, boy. That’s why we brought Graft. He doesn’t get tired.’
The boy, Rane, is getting fidgety. Oll can see it. They’re all nervous. All except Katt, who’s just sitting on a bollard, gazing at the bodies in the water. There’s gunfire in the streets up in the Point, and the sound of tanks. Tanks and dogs.
Except Oll know
s they’re not dogs.
‘Go help your friend with the water,’ says Oll. He climbs aboard to check the electrics and tick the engine over.
Rane goes back up the landing towards the tanks. Gusting wind drives black smoke across the wharf, and it makes him cough.
He’s not even thinking about Neve. Not at all.
She’s just there, suddenly. Right there in front of him, as though she stepped out of the smoke.
She smiles. She’s never looked more beautiful to him.
‘I’ve been looking for you, Bale,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’
He can’t speak. He goes to her, his arms wide, eyes wet.
By the tanks, Krank looks up. He sees Rane, down the boardwalk. He sees what he’s doing.
‘Bale!’ Krank screams. ‘Bale, don’t! Don’t!’
He starts to run to help, but there are suddenly men in his way. Men on the jetty. Men looming out of the smoke. They are hard and dirty, dressed in black. They are scrawny, as if they’re underfed. They have guns, rifles. They have knives made of black glass and dirty metal.
Krank’s rifle is leaning against the tank. He backs away. There’s no hope of him reaching it.
The knife brothers laugh at him.
‘Kill him,’ Criol Fowst tells the Ushmetar Kaul.
[mark: 12.39.22]
Suits sealed, kill squad six exits the Port 86 airgate. Thiel has command. Empion has personally given him the responsibility, even though there are several captains among the assembled shipboard survivors who would have seen the duty as an honour.
Forty squads move through the hull of the Macragge’s Honour. Forty kill squads, each of thirty men. They carry bolters and close-combat weapons. Three brothers in each squad lug mag-mines.
Thiel’s squad emerges aft of one of the main port-side attitude thrusters. It’s a giant, solid mass like the tower of a habitat block, mounting exhaust bells on each aspect that could form the domes of decent-sized temples.
Calth rises above the thruster assembly: bright planetrise above a haunted tower. Calth has the look of Old Terra: green landmasses and blue seas, laced in white cloud.