Empion was all for close attack: flagship power to yield, shields up, throw off the enemy cruisers suckling around them and go for the yard. Blow it out of nearspace. Ram it, if necessary.
Except, the moment they moved, the moment they even rated a power condition, the Macragge’s Honour would become a target. The flagship could move rapidly, and with devastating effect, but faster than the weapons grid could be retrained and discharged? That was even supposing nothing got in their way, like a drive issue, or an enemy ship.
So Empion’s plan had also been dismissed, and Gage’s alternative considered: put all power into the teleport system. Transfer a kill squad, maybe two if the power lasted, direct to the Zetsun Verid. Do it the old way.
‘I will lead it, of course,’ said Guilliman.
‘I hardly think so,’ retorted Gage. Almost everybody present physically recoiled from the look the primarch shot his Chapter Master.
‘Very well,’ said Gage.
‘Damn it, Marius,’ growled Guilliman. ‘If not now, when?’
The first kill squad of fifty Ultramarines, led by Guilliman, Heutonicus and Thiel, assembles in the flagship’s teleportation terminal. If enough power remains, a second squad led by Empion will follow them.
The helms of Heutonicus and the section leaders are painted red to match Thiel’s.
Guilliman’s cleaned and polished wargear makes him look more like a vengeful martial god than ever. There are golden wings spread across his helm’s faceplate. His left fist is a massive power claw, and his right holds a superb bolter weapon, decorated to match his armour.
There is a stink of ozone in the chamber, a metallic tang rising from the heavy, matt-grey platform of the teleport system. Coolant vapour rolls like mist in the yellow light. Guilliman takes a cue from his squad leaders, then signals to the Magi of Portation behind their lead-lined screens.
Power builds. It builds to a painful pitch.
Like a storm, about to break and unload its fury.
[mark: 19.39.12]
Sullus can hear the rain beating on the roof. He watches the magos, Uldort, working in communion with the data-engine. It is as though she is in a trance. Data chatters and whirrs. Her hands make haptic motions across invisible touchpads.
Sullus hurts. He never told Ventanus or any of the others quite how much he had been damaged. He can feel bones grinding, refusing to mend despite the fever heat of biological repair throbbing through his body.
Pain, death, he doesn’t fear any of that. Only failure.
His helmet link bleeps. He gets up, picks up his sword and his boltgun, and limps up the passageway to the west entrance.
In the rain, the ruined grounds and collapsed frontage of the palace seem even more dismal. Water streams and patters down from the shattered roof, dripping on grand tiles and mosaics, cascading down inlaid staircases, turning fallen drapes and tapestries into lank shrouds.
He limps out onto the rubble. Rain drums on his armour. The sun, a toxic blue, burns malignantly through the cloud cover.
Arook Serotid is waiting for him.
‘They are here,’ says the master of skitarii.
Sullus looks out into the rain. Beyond the crumpled walls, beyond the earthwork ditch, beyond the ragged bridge, the enemy has assembled. They have come silently out of the downpour. They are not chanting. The black ranks of the brotherhoods line the ditch in rows a hundred deep, but behind them are the shapes of war machines, and the ominous gleam of red armour.
Behind that mass, there are larger shapes still. Giant things, obscured by rain, horned and hunched.
There are even more than Sullus imagined. Foedral Fell’s assault force numbers in the tens of thousands.
‘Now it ends,’ says Arook.
Sullus draws his sword.
‘Oh please, skitarii,’ he says, head up. ‘It’s only just beginning.’
2
[mark: 19.50.23]
4th Company strikes.
The first that the Word Bearers know of it is a savage, serial bombardment of light cannon and field pieces, supported by the immense firepower of a Shadowsword and a handful of other significant machines.
The Word Bearers had forces positioned along Ketar Transit, a main access way that linked the container stores to the northern facilities of Lanshear port. The forces were supposed to ward Hol Beloth’s main army from any counter-attack that came around the eastern sweep of the Shield Wall into Numinus territory.
The forces do not realise that, by occupying the zone around Ketar Transit, they are also effectively guarding the data-engine of the cargo handling guild in the bunker system below the majestic prospect of the guildhall.
It was a majestic prospect. Stippled with shell holes, the guildhall remains an inspiring building, crowned by statues of toiling guild porters and the proud Ultima symbol.
The area has not been razed wholesale. It is not military, it is commercial. Server Hesst chose it very well.
The barrage pummels the roadway, levels three blocks of habs, and scatters the enemy formation. Hundreds of knife brother warriors are killed by the shellfire, dozens of Word Bearers too. Armoured vehicles are destroyed and left burning in the rain. A traitor Warhound engine, suddenly alert and striding forward like an angry moa, hunts for a hot target. A torrent of cannonfire catches it, hammers it, and beats its void shields down with sheer relentless insolence. Then the Shadowsword speaks, and a spear of white light kills the Warhound like the lance of some vengeful god.
Debris showers for hundreds of metres, felling some of the retreating cultists. Others, urged by their raging crimson lords, dig in behind walls and barriers of wreckage, and begin to return fire.
Warp-flask messages chime and shrill across the zone; desperate calls for support.
The Land Raiders spur forward, hulls streaming with rainwater, kicking out spray from the rain-sheeted roadway. They drive down walls, rolling over the rubble, crunching over the knife brothers trapped and killed by the cover they had chosen to use. Sponson-mount lascannons rasp into the blue-white twilight, causing the rain to steam and swirl. Heavy bolters shred the air with their noise and drench the enemy positions with destruction.
Ventanus leads the foot advance behind the Land Raiders, double-time across the broken streets. To his left, the units led by Sydance, Lorchas and Selaton. To his right, the units led by Greavus, Archo and Barkha. Cyramica’s skitarii form a wide right flank, blocking and punishing an attempt by the Jeharwanate to regroup and counter-charge. Sparzi’s infantry mob in behind and to the left of the legionary assault, evicting knife brothers from their strongpoints and foxholes along the north-western end of the massive carriageway.
Word Bearers, a scarlet line in the rain, rise up to block the main charge. Missiles cripple the first of Ventanus’s Land Raiders, leaving it trackless and burning. There is fire from autocannons, the streaks of mass-reactive rounds, both of which drop cobalt-blue figures from the charge.
But the Word Bearers have developed a taste for cutting, an appetite for bladework. Perhaps it has come from their knife brother slave-hosts. Perhaps it is simply to do with the sacrificial symbolism of the sharpened edge.
Concentrated and well-directed firepower might have broken or turned Ventanus’s charge, but it is not used. The Word Bearers simply wait for the clash, relishing the prospect. They draw their blades. They want to test their mettle against the vaunted XIII in a skirmish, the outcome of which cannot possibly influence the final resolution of the Calth War.
The traitors want to prove themselves against the paradigms to which they have been compared so many times.
There is a crashing, hyperkinetic impact. The charging cobalt-blue bodies reach the solid red line. They tear into it. They rip through it, they mangle it, red and blue together, a blur. Blows are traded. Huge power, huge force, huge transhuman strength. Blood squirts in the driving rain. Bodies crash to the ground, spraying up water. Blade grips grow slick with rainwater, oil and blood. Shields chip and b
reak. Armour fractures. There is a spark of ozone and power mechanics, the crackle of electrical discharge.
Ventanus is in the thick of it. Boltgun. Power sword. Standard across his back. He shoots away a head in a cloud of bloodsmoke. He impales. He chops off an arm, and smites a helm in two, diagonally.
He has never felt this strong. This driven.
This justified.
He has never known such an entirely fearless state.
There is nothing the Word Bearers can do to him any more. They have done their worst. They have burned his world, his fleet, his brothers; they have shed his blood and unleashed their daemons.
They can shoot him. They can stab him. They can grab him and tear him down. They can kill him.
It doesn’t matter.
It’s his turn. This is his turn.
This is what happens when you leave an Ultramarine alive. This is what happens when you make the foulest treachery your instrument. This is how it comes back to reward you. This is how Ultramar pays you back.
Carnage. Carnage. Absolute and total slaughter. The visitation of death in the form of a gold and cobalt-blue storm. A Word Bearer, reeling, arms spread, his carapace sliced open to the core, releasing a profusion of blood. Another, hands lost, stumps smouldering, sinking slowly to his knees with a bolter shell blast hole clean through his torso. Another, red helm caved across the left half, the bite of a power sword. Another, jerking and convulsing as mass-reactive shells blow out his body and overwhelm his transhuman redundancies. Another, cleft by a power axe. Another, disarticulated by a Land Raider’s cannons. Another, with the toothmarks of a chainsword.
Another.
Another.
Another. Grunt and spit and curse and gasp and bleed and strike and turn and move and kill and die.
Ventanus reaches the guildhall, leaps the barricades, and lands amongst knife brothers who shriek and flee before him. Red armour comes at him, a sergeant of the XVII, bringing down a thunder hammer. Ventanus dodges the swing, lets it pulverise rockcrete. He lunges and drives his sword, tip-first, through visor, face, skull, brain and the back plate of a helmet.
He snatches the blade out. The sergeant falls, flops over, blood welling up out of his holed visor like oil from a freshly drilled reserve.
The gutter is running with blood. Ventanus smashes down two of the Tzenvar Kaul foolish enough to attack him, and then shoots a Word Bearer who is coming down the shot-chewed front steps at him. The blast blows out the brute’s hip, drops him sideways. Ventanus kills him with his power sword before he can rise again.
Sydance passes Ventanus, ascending the steps. He’s firing his boltgun ahead of him, targeting Word Bearers at the top by the main doors of the guildhall. Shots streak back at him. The Ultramarine beside him, Brother Taeks, ends his service there, brains spilled. Sydance’s bolter shells put Taeks’s killer backwards through the panelled doors.
The first of the XIII are in the building. Ventanus is with them. Blood and rain drips from them onto the marble floor.
‘Back up,’ warns Greavus.
They make space.
A Land Raider drives in through the doors, collapsing them, splintering the wooden bulk of them.
Ventanus and his men cover the side hatch as it opens and skitarii lead Tawren out.
‘Haste,’ the server says to Ventanus.
‘Not a point that needs to be emphasised, server,’ he replies.
It will not take Hol Beloth’s assault leaders long to realise that this is not a counter-punch into Lanshear. The guildhall was a specific target.
Small-arms fire pinks at them from upper galleries in the huge atrium. Sergeant Archo waves up a kill team and heads away to scour the knife brothers out.
Artillery and heavy weapons continue to pound outside. The suspended lamps in the atrium swing and sway. Pieces of glass and roof tile fall in from the damaged clerestory far above.
Selaton locates the armoured elevator to the guildhall’s sublevels. They can rig power from the Land Raider to light and run the system, but it needs an override code.
Tawren enters it.
‘My birthdate,’ she says, noticing Ventanus watching her.
‘There were two codes,’ he says.
‘I have two birthdays. My organic incept, and my date of full-plug modification. Hesst knew both.’
‘You were close,’ notes Ventanus.
‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘He was, I suppose, my husband. My life partner. The Mechanicum does not think in such old-fashioned terms, and our social connections are more subtle. But yes, captain, we were close. A binary form. I miss him. I do this for him.’
The lift shutters open. For a second, Ventanus envies her loss. However approximate to standard human her relationship with Hesst might have been, it was still something. An analogue.
He is transhuman. He knows no fear, and there are many other simple emotions he will similarly never experience.
Outside, soaked in rain, Colonel Sparzi turns as gunfire kisses the walls behind him.
‘Oh damn and fug,’ he groans.
His men see it too.
Hol Beloth is coming.
He is descending on the guildhall with a vengeance. He is coming with punishment. He is coming with Titans and cataphractii and the Gal Vorbak.
3
[mark: 20.01.23]
The teleport burst scorches and jolts every molecule of their bodies.
It is an intensely risky operation. A considerable nearspace distance. A vast energy expenditure. Mass transfer – an entire armoured kill squad. A comparatively small target zone.
Thiel loathes teleports. It feels like you’re being pushed through the mesh of an electrified sieve. There is always a bang like a fusion bomb in your brain. There is always an aftertaste like bile and burned paper left in your mouth.
They materialise.
He stumbles, his balance screwed for a second. He’s on a deck. He hears a scream.
Given the risk factor and the atrocious error margins, the teleport can be considered a success. Forty-six of the squad have appeared with Guilliman on the transverse assembly deck of Zetsun Verid Yard. They have lost four.
Two of them are fused into the bulkhead wall behind them, parts of their visors and gauntlets and knees protruding seamlessly from the grey adamantium. Another has been reduced to a glistening red sludge by re-formation failure. He is spread over a wide area.
A fourth, Brother Verkus, has materialised bonded into the deck plates from the waist down. He is the one screaming. It’s not as though he can be pulled out. He is the deck now, and the deck is him.
It is troubling to hear a legionary scream with such a lack of restraint, but they say teleportation overlap is the most unimaginable pain.
Guilliman cradles his head and kills him quickly to end his suffering.
‘Move,’ he instructs the squad.
There’s no time for reflection, no time to take a breath. There’s no time to get over the stinging discomfort of the transfer. The squad confirms its arrival site against schematics of the yard and fans out. There is caution, but there is no loss of pace. They are transhumans moving with all the speed and efficiency they possess.
The transverse assembly deck was chosen because it was the largest interior space, and thus allowed for the greatest transfer imprecision. Their assault target is the yard’s master control room, two decks up.
The Word Bearers will have read the teleport flare. You can’t mask an energy signature like that.
Heutonicus confirms their transfer by vox to the Macragge’s Honour. Gage replies that there is insufficient power for a second transfer. Empion’s kill squad will not be following them, not for a while at least.
They move up through the deck gantries, past the massive airgate and mooring assemblies where ships are docked. The interior superstructure is brightly lit and filled with a vast network of chrome pipes, rods and cablework.
Word Bearers open fire on them from above. Shots rip past them,
exploding against the bare metal and ceramite fabric of the yard. The blasts and impacts make huge booming sounds inside the artificial structure.
Two Ultramarines, Pelius and Dyractus, die in the first hail of shells. They are cut apart by sustained fire. Then Brother Lycidor topples over a rail, headshot. His cobalt-blue figure drops into the assembly area below, arms outstretched.
The Ultramarines fire back, covering the structures above them in a cloud of bolter blasts. Word Bearers topple, but there are more to fill their places. Many more.
Guilliman roars a challenge to them. He condemns them to death. He condemns their master to a worse fate.
He hurls himself at them.
The primarch is, of course, their greatest asset, Thiel realises. Not because of his physical superiority, though that is hard to overestimate.
It is because he is a primarch. Because he is Roboute Guilliman. Because he is simply one of the greatest warriors in the Imperium. How many beings could measure favourably against him? Honestly? All seventeen of his brothers? Not all seventeen. Nothing like all seventeen. Four or five at best. At best.
The Word Bearers on the upper structures see him coming. They are kill squad strength at least, the best part of a full company. At least a proportion of them are the vaunted Gal Vorbak elite.
But they see him coming, and they know what that means. It doesn’t matter what cosmic dementia has corrupted their minds and souls. It doesn’t matter what eternal promises the Dark Gods are whispering in their ears. It doesn’t matter what inflated courage the warp has poured into their veins along with madness.
Guilliman of Ultramar is coming right at them. To kill them. To kill them all.
Even though they stand a chance of hurting him, they waste it. They baulk. For a second, their twisted hearts know fear. Real fear.
And then he has them.