Dennis

“I was there,” he would say afterwards, until afterwards became a
time quite devoid of laughter. “I was there, the day Horus slew the
Emperor.” It was a delicious conceit, and his comrades would
chuckle at the sheer treason of it.
The story was a good one. Torgaddon would usually be the one
to cajole him into telling it, for Torgaddon was the joker, a man of
mighty laughter and idiot tricks. And Loken would tell it again, a
tale rehearsed through so many retellings, it almost told itself.
Loken was always careful to make sure his audience properly
understood the irony in his story. It was likely that he felt some
shame about his complicity in the matter itself, for it was a case of
blood spilled from misunderstanding. There was a great tragedy
implicit in the tale of the Emperor’s murder, a tragedy that Loken
always wanted his listeners to appreciate. But the death of Sejanus
was usually all that fixed their attentions.
That, and the punchline.
It had been, as far as the warp-dilated horologs could attest, the
two hundred and third year of the Great Crusade. Loken always set
his story in its proper time and place. The commander had been
Warmaster for about a year, since the triumphant conclusion of the
Ullanor campaign, and he was anxious to prove his new-found
status, particularly in the eyes of his brothers.
Warmaster. Such a title. The fit was still new and unnatural, not
yet worn in.
It was a strange time to be abroad amongst stars. They had been
doing what they had been doing for two centuries, but now it felt
unfamiliar. It was a start of things. And an ending too.
The ships of the 63rd Expedition came upon the Imperium by
chance. A sudden etheric storm, later declared providential by
Maloghurst, forced a route alteration, and they translated into the
edges of a system comprising nine worlds.
Nine worlds, circling a yellow sun.
Detecting the shoal of rugged expedition warships on station at
the out-system edges, the Emperor first demanded to know their
occupation and agenda. Then he painstakingly corrected what he
saw as the multifarious errors in their response.
Then he demanded fealty.
He was, he explained, the Emperor of Mankind. He had stoically
shepherded his people through the miserable epoch of warp storms,
through the Age of Strife, staunchly maintaining the rule and law of
man. This had been expected of him, he declared. He had kept the
flame of human culture alight through the aching isolation of Old
Night. He had sustained this precious, vital fragment, and kept it
intact, until such time as the scattered diaspora of humanity reestablished
contact. He rejoiced that such a time was now at hand.
His soul leapt to see the orphan ships returning to the heart of the
Imperium. Everything was ready and waiting. Everything had been
preserved. The orphans would be embraced to his bosom, and then
the Great Scheme of rebuilding would begin, and the Imperium of
Mankind would stretch itself out again across the stars, as was its
birthright.
As soon as they showed him proper fealty. As Emperor. Of
mankind.
The commander, quite entertained by all accounts, sent Hastur
Sejanus to meet with the Emperor and deliver greeting.
Sejanus was the commander’s favourite. Not as proud or
irascible as Abaddon, nor as ruthless as Sedirae, nor even as solid
and venerable as Iacton Qruze, Sejanus was the perfect captain,
tempered evenly in all respects. A warrior and a diplomat in equal
measure, Sejanus’s martial record, second only to Abaddon’s, was
easily forgotten when in company with the man himself. A beautiful
man, Loken would say, building his tale, a beautiful man adored by
all. “No finer figure in Mark IV plate than Hastur Sejanus. That he is
remembered, and his deeds celebrated, even here amongst us, speaks
of Sejanus’s qualities. The noblest hero of the Great Crusade.” That
was how Loken would describe him to the eager listeners. “In future
times, he will be recalled with such fondness that men will name
their sons after him.”
Sejanus, with a squad of his finest warriors from the Fourth
Company, travelled in-system in a gilded barge, and was received
for audience by the Emperor at his palace on the third planet.
And killed.
Murdered. Hacked down on the onyx floor of the palace even as
he stood before the Emperor’s golden throne. Sejanus and his glory
squad – Dymos, Malsandar, Gorthoi and the rest – all slaughtered by
the Emperor’s elite guard, the so-called Invisibles.
Apparently, Sejanus had not offered the correct fealty.
Indelicately, he had suggested there might actually be another
Emperor.
The commander’s grief was absolute. He had loved Sejanus like
a son. They had warred side by side to affect compliance on a
hundred worlds. But the commander, always sanguine and wise in
such matters, told his signal men to offer the Emperor another
chance. The commander detested resorting to war, and always
sought alternative paths away from violence, where such were
workable. This was a mistake, he reasoned, a terrible, terrible
mistake. Peace could be salvaged. This “Emperor” could be made to
understand.
It was about then, Loken liked to add, that a suggestion of quote
marks began to appear around the “Emperor’s” name.
It was determined that a second embassy would be despatched.
Maloghurst volunteered at once. The commander agreed, but
ordered the speartip forwards into assault range. The intent was
clear: one hand extended open, in peace, the other held ready as a
fist. If the second embassy failed, or was similarly met with
violence, then the fist would already be in position to strike. That
sombre day, Loken said, the honour of the speartip had fallen, by the
customary drawing of lots, to the strengths of Abaddon, Torgaddon,
“Little Horus” Aximand. And Loken himself.
At the order, battle musters began. The ships of the speartip
slipped forward, running under obscurement. On board, stormbirds
were hauled onto their launch carriages. Weapons were issued and
certified. Oaths of moment were sworn and witnessed. Armour was
machined into place around the anointed bodies of the chosen.
In silence, tensed and ready to be unleashed, the speartip
watched as the shuttle convoy bearing Maloghurst and his envoys
arced down towards the third planet. Surface batteries smashed them
out of the heavens. As the burning scads of debris from
Maloghurst’s flotilla billowed away into the atmosphere, the
“Emperor’s” fleet elements rose up out of the oceans, out of the high
cloud, out of the gravity wells of nearby moons. Six hundred
warships, revealed and armed for war.
Abaddon broke obscurement and made a final, personal plea to
the “Emperor”, beseeching him to see sense. The warships began to
fire on Abaddon’s speartip.
“My commander,” Abaddon relayed to the heart of the waiting
fleet, “there is no dealing here. This fool imposter will not listen.”
And the commander replied, “Illuminate him, my son, but spare
all you can. That order not withstanding, avenge the blood of my
noble Sejanus. Decimate this “Emperor’s” elite murderers, and bring
the imposter to me.”
“And so,” Loken would sigh, “we made war upon our brethren,
so lost in ignorance.”
It was late evening, but the sky was saturated with light. The
phototropic towers of the High City, built to turn and follow the sun
with their windows during the day, shifted uneasily at the pulsating
radiance in the heavens. Spectral shapes swam high in the upper
atmosphere: ships engaging in a swirling mass, charting brief,
nonsensical zodiacs with the beams of their battery weapons.
At ground level, around the wide, basalt platforms that formed
the skirts of the palace, gunfire streamed through the air like
horizontal rain, hosing coils of tracer fire that dipped and slithered
heavily like snakes, die-straight zips of energy that vanished as fast
as they appeared, and flurries of bolt shells like blizzarding hail.
Downed stormbirds, many of them crippled and burning, littered
twenty square kilometres of the landscape.
Black, humanoid figures paced slowly in across the limits of the
palace sprawl. They were shaped like armoured men, and they
trudged like men, but they were giants, each one hundred and forty
metres tall. The Mechanicum had deployed a half-dozen of its Titan
war engines. Around the Titans” soot-black ankles, troops flooded
forward in a breaking wave three kilometres wide.
The Luna Wolves surged like the surf of the wave, thousands of
gleaming white figures bobbing and running forward across the skirt
platforms, detonations bursting amongst them, lifting rippling
fireballs and trees of dark brown smoke. Each blast juddered the
ground with a gritty thump, and showered down dirt as an aftercurse.
Assault craft swept in over their heads, low, between the
shambling frames of the wide-spaced Titans, fanning the slowly
lifting smoke clouds into sudden, energetic vortices.
Every Astartes helmet was filled with vox-chatter: snapping
voices, chopping back and forth, their tonal edges roughened by the
transmission quality.
It was Loken’s first taste of mass war since Ullanor. Tenth
Company’s first taste too. There had been skirmishes and scraps, but
nothing testing. Loken was glad to see that his cohort hadn’t grown
rusty. The unapologetic regimen of live drills and punishing
exercises he’d maintained had kept them whetted as sharp and
serious as the terms of the oaths of moment they had taken just
hours before.
Ullanor had been glorious, a hard, unstinting slog to dislodge and
overthrow a bestial empire. The greenskin had been a pernicious and
resilient foe, but they had broken his back and kicked over the
embers of his revel fires. The commander had won the field through
the employment of his favourite, practiced strategy: the speartip
thrust to tear out the throat. Ignoring the greenskin masses, which
had outnumbered the crusaders five to one, the commander had
struck directly at the Overlord and his command coterie, leaving the
enemy headless and without direction.
The same philosophy operated here. Tear out the throat and let
the body spasm and die. Loken and his men, and the war engines
that supported them, were the edge of the blade unsheathed for that
purpose.
But this was not like Ullanor at all. No thickets of mud and claybuilt
ramparts, no ramshackle fortresses of bare metal and wire, no
black powder air bursts or howling ogre-foes. This was not a
barbaric brawl determined by blades and upper body strength.
This was modern warfare in a civilised place. This was man
against man, inside the monolithic precincts of a cultured people.
The enemy possessed ordnance and firearms every bit the
technological match of the Legio forces, and the skill and training to
use them. Through the green imaging of his visor, Loken saw
armoured men with energy weapons ranged against them in the
lower courses of the palace. He saw tracked weapon carriages,
automated artillery; nests of four or even eight automatic cannons
shackled together on cart platforms that lumbered forward on
hydraulic legs.
Not like Ullanor at all. That had been an ordeal. This would be a
test. Equal against equal. Like against like.
Except that for all its martial technologies, the enemy lacked one
essential quality, and that quality was locked within each and every
case of Mark IV power armour: the genetically enhanced flesh and
blood of the Imperial Astartes. Modified, refined, post-human, the
Astartes were superior to anything they had met or would ever meet.
No fighting force in the galaxy could ever hope to match the
Legions, unless the stars went out, and madness ruled, and lawful
sense turned upside down. For, as Sedirae had once said, “The only
thing that can beat an Astartes is another Astartes”, and they had all
laughed at that. The impossible was nothing to be scared of.
The enemy – their armour a polished magenta trimmed in silver,
as Loken later discovered when he viewed them with his helmet off
– firmly held the induction gates into the inner palace. They were
big men, tall, thick through the chest and shoulders, and at the peak
of fitness. Not one of them, not even the tallest, came up to the chin
of one of the Luna Wolves. It was like fighting children.
Well-armed children, it had to be said.
Through the billowing smoke and the jarring detonations, Loken
led the veteran First Squad up the steps at a run, the plasteel soles of
their boots grating on the stone: First Squad, Tenth Company,
Hellebore Tactical Squad, gleaming giants in pearl-white armour,
the wolf head insignia stark black on their auto-responsive shoulder
plates. Crossfire zig-zagged around them from the defended gates
ahead. The night air shimmered with the heat distortion of weapons
discharge. Some kind of upright, automated mortar was casting a
sluggish, flaccid stream of fat munition charges over their heads.
“Kill it!” Loken heard Brother-sergeant Jubal instruct over the
link. Jubal’s order was given in the curt argot of Cthonia, their
derivation world, a language that the Luna Wolves had preserved as
their battle-tongue.
The battle-brother carrying the squad’s plasma cannon obeyed
without hesitation. For a dazzling half-second, a twenty-metre
ribbon of light linked the muzzle of his weapon to the auto-mortar,
and then the device engulfed the facade of the palace in a roasting
wash of yellow flame.
Dozens of enemy soldiers were cast down by the blast. Several
were thrown up into the air, landing crumpled and boneless on the
flight of steps.
“Into them!” Jubal barked.
Wildfire chipped and pattered off their armour. Loken felt the
distant sting of it. Brother Calends stumbled and fell, but righted
himself again, almost at once.
Loken saw the enemy scatter away from their charge. He swung
his bolter up. His weapon had a gash in the metal of the foregrip, the
legacy of a greenskin’s axe during Ullanor, a cosmetic mark Loken
had told the armourers not to finish out. He began to fire, not on
burst, but on single shot, feeling the weapon buck and kick against
his palms. Bolter rounds were explosive penetrators. The men he hit
popped like blisters, or shredded like bursting fruit. Pink mist fumed
off every ruptured figure as it fell.
“Tenth Company!” Loken shouted. “For the Warmaster!”
The warcry was still unfamiliar, just another aspect of the
newness. It was the first time Loken had declaimed it in war, the
first chance he’d had since the honour had been bestowed by the
Emperor after Ullanor.
By the Emperor. The true Emperor.
“Lupercal! Lupercal!” the Wolves yelled back as they streamed
in, choosing to answer with the old cry, the Legion’s pet-name for
their beloved commander. The warhorns of the Titans boomed.
They stormed the palace. Loken paused by one of the induction
gates, urging his frontrunners in, carefully reviewing the advance of
his company main force. Hellish fire continued to rake them from
the upper balconies and towers. In the far distance, a brilliant dome
of light suddenly lifted into the sky, astonishingly bright and vivid.
Loken’s visor automatically dimmed. The ground trembled and a
noise like a thunderclap reached him. A capital ship of some size,
stricken and ablaze, had fallen out of the sky and impacted in the
outskirts of the High City. Drawn by the flash, the phototropic
towers above him fidgeted and rotated.
Reports flooded in. Aximand’s force, Fifth Company, had
secured the Regency and the pavilions on the ornamental lakes to
the west of the High City. Torgaddon’s men were driving up
through the lower town, slaying the armour sent to block them.
Loken looked east. Three kilometres away, across the flat plain
of the basalt platforms, across the tide of charging men and striding
Titans and stitching fire, Abaddon’s company, First Company, was
crossing the bulwarks into the far flank of the palace. Loken
magnified his view, resolving hundreds of white-armoured figures
pouring through the smoke and chop-fire. At the front of them, the
dark figures of First Company’s foremost Terminator squad, the
Justaerin. They wore polished black armour, dark as night, as if they
belonged to some other, black Legion.
“Loken to First,” he sent. “Tenth has entry.”
There was a pause, a brief distort, then Abaddon’s voice
answered. “Loken, Loken… are you trying to shame me with your
diligence?”
“Not for a moment, first captain,” Loken replied. There was a
strict hierarchy of respect within the Legion, and though he was a
senior officer, Loken regarded the peerless first captain with awe.
All of the Mournival, in fact, though Torgaddon had always
favoured Loken with genuine shows of friendship.
Now Sejanus was gone, Loken thought. The aspect of the
Mournival would soon change.
“I”m playing with you, Loken,” Abaddon sent, his voice so deep
that some vowel sounds were blurred by the vox. “I”ll meet you at
the feet of this false Emperor. First one there gets to illuminate him.”
Loken fought back a smile. Ezekyle Abaddon had seldom
sported with him before. He felt blessed, elevated. To be a chosen
man was enough, but to be in with the favoured elite, that was every
captain’s dream.
Reloading, Loken entered the palace through the induction gate,
stepping over the tangled corpses of the enemy dead. The plaster
facings of the inner walls had been cracked and blown down, and
loose crumbs, like dry sand, crunched under his feet. The air was
full of smoke, and his visor display kept jumping from one register
to another as it attempted to compensate and get a clean reading.
He moved down the inner hall, hearing the echo of gunfire from
deeper in the palace compound. The body of a brother lay slumped
in a doorway to his left, the large, white-armoured corpse odd and
out of place amongst the smaller enemy bodies. Marjex, one of the
Legion’s apothecaries, was bending over him. He glanced up as
Loken approached, and shook his head.
“Who is it?” Loken asked.
“Tibor, of Second Squad,” Marjex replied. Loken frowned as he
saw the devastating head wound that had stopped Tibor.
“The Emperor knows his name,” Loken said.
Marjex nodded, and reached into his narthecium to get the
reductor tool. He was about to remove Tibor’s precious gene-seed,
so that it might be returned to the Legion banks.
Loken left the apothecary to his work, and pushed on down the
hall. In a wide colonnade ahead, the towering walls were decorated
with frescoes, showing familiar scenes of a haloed Emperor upon a
golden throne. How blind these people are, Loken thought, how sad
this is. One day, one single day with the iterators, and they would
understand. We are not the enemy. We are the same, and we bring
with us a glorious message of redemption. Old Night is done. Man
walks the stars again, and the might of the Astartes walks at his side
to keep him safe.
In a broad, sloping tunnel of etched silver, Loken caught up with
elements of Third Squad. Of all the units in his company, Third
Squad – Locasta Tactical Squad – was his favourite and his
favoured. Its commander, Brother-sergeant Nero Vipus, was his
oldest and truest friend.
“How’s your humour, captain?” Vipus asked. His pearl-white
plate was smudged with soot and streaked with blood.
“Phlegmatic, Nero. You?”
“Choleric. Red-raged, in fact. I”ve just lost a man, and two more
of mine are injured. There’s something covering the junction ahead.
Something heavy. Rate of fire like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Tried fragging it?”
“Two or three grenades. No effect. And there’s nothing to see.
Garvi, we”ve all heard about these so-called Invisibles. The ones
that butchered Sejanus. I was wondering-”
“Leave the wondering to me,” Loken said. “Who’s down?”
Vipus shrugged. He was a little taller than Loken, and his shrug
made the heavy ribbing and plates of his armour clunk together.
“Zakias.”
“Zakias? No…”
“Torn into shreds before my very eyes. Oh, I feel the hand of the
ship on me, Garvi.”
The hand of the ship. An old saying. The commander’s flagship
was called the Vengeful Spirit, and in times of duress or loss, the
Wolves liked to draw upon all that implied as a charm, a totem of
retribution.
“In Zakias’s name,” Vipus growled, “I”ll find this bastard
Invisible and-”
“Sooth your choler, brother. I”ve no use for it,” Loken said. “See
to your wounded while I take a look.”
Vipus nodded and redirected his men. Loken pushed up past
them to the disputed junction.
It was a vault-roofed crossways where four hallways met. The
area read cold and still to his imaging. Fading smoke wisped up into
the rafters. The ouslite floor had been chewed and peppered with
thousands of impact craters. Brother Zakias, his body as yet
unretrieved, lay in pieces at the centre of the crossway, a steaming
pile of shattered white plasteel and bloody meat.
Vipus had been right. There was no sign of an enemy present.
No heat-trace, not even a flicker of movement. But studying the
area, Loken saw a heap of empty shell cases, glittering brass, that
had spilled out from behind a bulkhead across from him. Was that
where the killer was hiding?
Loken bent down and picked up a chunk of fallen plasterwork.
He lobbed it into the open. There was a click, and then a hammering
deluge of autofire raked across the junction. It lasted five seconds,
and in that time over a thousand rounds were expended. Loken saw
the fuming shell cases spitting out from behind the bulkhead as they
were ejected.
The firing stopped. Fycelene vapour fogged the junction. The
gunfire had scored a mottled gouge across the stone floor,
pummelling Zakias’s corpse in the process. Spots of blood and
scraps of tissue had been spattered out.
Loken waited. He heard a whine and the metallic clunk of an
autoloader system. He read weapon heat, fading, but no body
warmth.
“Won a medal yet?” Vipus asked, approaching.
“It’s just an automatic sentry gun,” Loken replied.
“Well, that’s a small relief at least,” Vipus said. “After the
grenades we”ve pitched in that direction, I was beginning to wonder
if these vaunted Invisibles might be “Invulnerables” too. I”ll call up
Devastator support to-”
“Just give me a light flare,” Loken said.
Vipus stripped one off his leg plate and handed it to his captain.
Loken ignited it with a twist of his hand, and threw it down the
hallway opposite. It bounced, fizzling, glaring white hot, past the
hidden killer.
There was a grind of servos. The implacable gunfire began to
roar down the corridor at the flare, kicking it and bouncing it,
ripping into the floor.
“Garvi-” Vipus began.
Loken was running. He crossed the junction, thumped his back
against the bulkhead. The gun was still blazing. He wheeled round
the bulkhead and saw the sentry gun, built into an alcove. A squat
machine, set on four pad feet and heavily plated, it had turned its
short, fat, pumping cannons away from him to fire on the distant,
flickering flare.
Loken reached over and tore out a handful of its servo flexes.
The guns stuttered and died.
“We”re clear!” Loken called out. Locasta moved up.
“That’s generally called showing off,” Vipus remarked.
Loken led Locasta up the corridor, and they entered a fine state
apartment. Other apartment chambers, similarly regal, beckoned
beyond. It was oddly still and quiet.
“Which way now?” Vipus asked.
“We go find this “Emperor”,” Loken said.
Vipus snorted. “Just like that?”
“The first captain bet me I couldn’t reach him first.”
“The first captain, eh? Since when was Garviel Loken on pally
terms with him?”
“Since Tenth breached the palace ahead of First. Don’t worry,
Nero, I”ll remember you little people when I”m famous.”
Nero Vipus laughed, the sound snuffling out of his helmet mask
like the cough of a consumptive bull.
What happened next didn’t make either of them laugh at all.
“Captain Loken?”
He looked up from his work. “That’s me.”
“Forgive me for interrupting,” she said. “You”re busy.”
Loken set aside the segment of armour he had been polishing
and rose to his feet. He was almost a metre taller than her, and naked
but for a loin cloth. She sighed inwardly at the splendour of his
physique. The knotted muscles, the old ridge-scars. He was
handsome too, this one, fair hair almost silver, cut short, his pale
skin slightly freckled, his eyes grey like rain. What a waste, she
thought.
Though there was no disguising his inhumanity, especially in
this bared form. Apart from the sheer mass of him, there was the
overgrown gigantism of the face, that particular characteristic of the
Astartes, almost equine, plus the hard, taut shell of his rib-less torso,
like stretched canvas.
“I don’t know who you are,” he said, dropping a nub of polishing
fibre into a little pot, and wiping his fingers.
She held out her hand. “Mersadie Oliton, official remembrancer,”
she said. He looked at her tiny hand and then shook it, making it
seem even more tiny in comparison with his own giant fist.
“I”m sorry,” she said, laughing, “I keep forgetting you don’t do
that out here. Shaking hands, I mean. Such a parochial, Terran
custom.”
“I don’t mind it. Have you come from Terra?”
“I left there a year ago, despatched to the crusade by permit of
the Council.”
“You”re a remembrancer?”
“You know what that means?”
“I”m not stupid,” Loken said.
“Of course not,” she said, hurriedly. “I meant no offence.”
“None taken.” He eyed her. Small and frail, though possibly
beautiful. Loken had very little experience of women. Perhaps they
were all frail and beautiful. He knew enough to know that few were
as black as her. Her skin was like burnished coal. He wondered if it
were some kind of dye.
He wondered too about her skull. Her head was bald, but not
shaved. It seemed polished and smooth as if it had never known
hair. The cranium was enhanced somehow, extending back in a
streamlined sweep that formed a broad ovoid behind her nape. It
was like she had been crowned, as if her simple humanity had been
made more regal.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I understand you have a story, a particularly entertaining one.
I’d like to remember it, for posterity.”
“Which story?”
“Horus killing the Emperor.”
He stiffened. He didn’t like it when non-Astartes humans called
the Warmaster by his true name.
“That happened months ago,” he said dismissively. “I”m sure I
won’t remember the details particularly well.”
“Actually,” she said, “I have it on good authority you can be
persuaded to tell the tale quite expertly. I”ve been told it’s very
popular amongst your battle-brothers.”
Loken frowned. Annoyingly, the woman was correct. Since the
taking of the High City, he’d been required – forced would not be
too strong a word – to retell his first-hand account of the events in
the palace tower on dozens of occasions. He presumed it was
because of Sejanus’s death. The Luna Wolves needed catharsis.
They needed to hear how Sejanus had been so singularly avenged.
“Someone put you up to this, Mistress Oliton?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Captain Torgaddon, actually.”
Loken nodded. It was usually him. “What do you want to know?”
“I understand the general situation, for I have heard it from
others, but I’d love to have your personal observations. What was it
like? When you got inside the palace itself, what did you find?”
Loken sighed, and looked round at the rack where his power
armour was displayed. He’d only just started cleaning it. His private
arming chamber was a small, shadowy vault adjoining the off-limits
embarkation deck, the metal walls lacquered pale green. A cluster of
glow-globes lit the room, and an Imperial eagle had been stencilled
on one wall plate, beneath which copies of Loken’s various oaths of
moment had been pinned. The close air smelled of oils and lapping
powder. It was a tranquil, introspective place, and she had invaded
that tranquility.
Becoming aware of her trespass, she suggested, “I could come
back later, at a better time.”
“No, now’s fine.” He sat back down on the metal stool where he
had been perching when she’d entered. “Let me see… When we got
inside the palace, what we found was the Invisibles.”
“Why were they called that?” she asked.
“Because we couldn’t see them,” he replied.
The Invisibles were waiting for them, and they well deserved their
sobriquet.
Just ten paces into the splendid apartments, the first brother died.
There was an odd, hard bang, so hard it was painful to feel and hear,
and Brother Edrius fell to his knees, then folded onto his side. He
had been struck in the face by some form of energy weapon. The
white plasteel/ceramite alloy of his visor and breastplate had
actually deformed into a rippled crater, like heated wax that had
flowed and then set again. A second bang, a quick concussive
vibration of air, obliterated an ornamental table beside Nero Vipus.
A third bang dropped Brother Muriad, his left leg shattered and
snapped off like a reed stalk.
The science adepts of the false Imperium had mastered and
harnessed some rare and wonderful form of field technology, and
armed their elite guard with it. They cloaked their bodies with a
passive application, twisting light to render themselves invisible.
And they were able to project it in a merciless, active form that
struck with mutilating force.
Despite the fact that they had been advancing combat-ready and
wary, Loken and the others were taken completely off guard. The
Invisibles were even hidden to their visor arrays. Several had simply
been standing in the chamber, waiting to strike.
Loken began to fire, and Vipus’s men did likewise. Raking the
area ahead of him, splintering furniture, Loken hit something. He
saw pink mist kiss the air, and something fell down with enough
force to overturn a chair. Vipus scored a hit too, but not before
Brother Tarregus had been struck with such power that his head was
punched clean off his shoulders.
The cloak technology evidently hid its users best if they
remained still. As they moved, they became semi-visible, heat-haze
suggestions of men surging to attack. Loken adapted quickly, firing
at each blemish of air. He adjusted his visor gain to full contrast,
almost black and white, and saw them better: hard outlines against
the fuzzy background. He killed three more. In death, several lost
their cloaks. Loken saw the Invisibles revealed as bloody corpses.
Their armour was silver, ornately composed and machined with a
remarkable detail of patterning and symbols. Tall, swathed in
mantles of red silk, the Invisibles reminded Loken of the mighty
Custodian Guard that warded the Imperial Palace on Terra. This was
the bodyguard corps which had executed Sejanus and his glory
squad at a mere nod from their master.
Nero Vipus was raging, offended by the cost to his squad. The
hand of the ship was truly upon him.
He led the way, cutting a path into a towering room beyond the
scene of the ambush. His fury gave Locasta the opening it needed,
but it cost him his right hand, crushed by an Invisible’s blast. Loken
felt choler too. Like Nero, the men of Locasta were his friends.
Rituals of mourning awaited him. Even in the darkness of Ullanor,
victory had not been so dearly bought.
Charging past Vipus, who was down on his knees, groaning in
pain as he tried to pluck the mangled gauntlet off his ruined hand,
Loken entered a side chamber, shooting at the air blemishes that
attempted to block him. A jolt of force tore his bolter from his
hands, so he reached over his hip and drew his chainsword from its
scabbard. It whined as it kicked into life. He hacked at the faint
outlines jostling around him and felt the toothed blade meet
resistance. There was a shrill scream. Gore drizzled out of nowhere
and plastered the chamber walls and the front of Loken’s suit.
“Lupercal!” he grunted, and put the full force of both arms
behind his strokes. Servos and mimetic polymers, layered between
his skin and his suit’s outer plating to form the musculature of his
power armour, bunched and flexed. He landed a trio of two-handed
blows. More blood showered into view. There was a warbled shriek
as loops of pink, wet viscera suddenly became visible. A moment
later, the field screening the soldier flickered and failed, and
revealed his disembowelled form, stumbling away down the length
of the chamber, trying to hold his guts in with both hands.
Invisible force stabbed at Loken again, scrunching the edge of
his left shoulder guard and almost knocking him off his feet. He
rounded and swung the chainsword. The blade struck something,
and shards of metal flew out. The shape of a human figure, just out
of joint with the space it occupied, as if it had been cut out of the air
and nudged slightly to the left, suddenly filled in. One of the
Invisibles, his charged field sparking and crackling around him as it
died, became visible and swung his long, bladed lance at Loken.
The blade rebounded off Loken’s helm. Loken struck low with
his chainsword, ripping the lance out of the Invisible’s silver
gauntlets and buckling its haft. At the same time, Loken lunged,
shoulder barging the warrior against the chamber wall so hard that
the friable plaster of the ancient frescoes crackled and fell out.
Loken stepped back. Winded, his lungs and ribcage almost
crushed flat, the Invisible made a gagging, sucking noise and fell
down on his knees, his head lolling forward. Loken sawed his
chainsword down and sharply up again in one fluid, practiced mercy
stroke, and the Invisible’s detached head bounced away.
Loken circled slowly, the humming blade raised ready in his
right hand. The chamber floor was slick with blood and black scraps
of meat. Shots rang out from nearby rooms. Loken walked across
the chamber and retrieved his bolter, hoisting it in his left fist with a
clatter.
Two Luna Wolves entered the chamber behind him, and Loken
briskly pointed them off into the left-hand colonnade with a gesture
of his sword.
“Form up and advance,” he snapped into his link. Voices
answered him.
“Nero?”
“I”m behind you, twenty metres.”
“How’s the hand?”
“I left it behind. It was getting in the way.”
Loken prowled forward. At the end of the chamber, past the
crumpled, leaking body of the Invisible he had disembowelled,
sixteen broad marble steps led up to a stone doorway. The splendid
stone frame was carved with complex linenfold motifs.
Loken ascended the steps slowly. Mottled washes of light cast
spastic flickers through the open doorway. There was a remarkable
stillness. Even the din of the fight engulfing the palace all around
seemed to recede. Loken could hear the tiny taps made by the blood
dripping off his outstretched chainsword onto the steps, a trail of red
beads up the white marble.
He stepped through the doorway.
The inner walls of the tower rose up around him. He had
evidently stepped through into one of the tallest and most massive of
the palace’s spires. A hundred metres in diameter, a kilometre tall.
No, more than that. He’d come out on a wide, onyx platform that
encircled the tower, one of several ring platforms arranged at
intervals up the height of the structure, but there were more below.
Peering over, Loken saw as much tower drop away into the depths
of the earth as stood proud above him.
He circled slowly, gazing around. Great windows of glass or
some other transparent substance glazed the tower from top to
bottom between the ring platforms, and through them the light and
fury of the war outside flared and flashed. No noise, just the
flickering glow, the sudden bursts of radiance.
He followed the platform round until he found a sweep of curved
stairs, flush with the tower wall, that led up to the next level. He
began to ascend, platform to platform, scanning for any blurs of
light that might betray the presence of more Invisibles.
Nothing. No sound, no life, no movement except the shimmer of
light from outside the windows as he passed them. Five floors now,
six.
Loken suddenly felt foolish. The tower was probably empty.
This search and purge should have been left to others while he
marshalled Tenth Company’s main force.
Except… its ground-level approach had been so furiously
protected. He looked up, pushing his sensors hard. A third of a
kilometre above him, he fancied he caught a brief sign of movement,
a partial heat-lock.
“Nero?”
A pause. “Captain.”
“Where are you?”
“Base of a tower. Heavy fighting. We-” There was a jumble of
noises, the distorted sounds of gunfire and shouting. “Captain? Are
you still there?”
“Report!”
“Heavy resistance. We”re locked here! Where are-”
The link broke. Loken hadn’t been about to give away his
position anyway. There was something in this tower with him. At
the very top, something was waiting.
The penultimate deck. From above came a soft creaking and
grinding, like the sails of a giant windmill. Loken paused. At this
height, through the wide panes of glass, he was afforded a view out
across the palace and the High City. A sea of luminous smoke,
underlit by widespread firestorms. Some buildings glowed pink,
reflecting the light of the inferno. Weapons flashed, and energy
beams danced and jumped in the dark. Overhead, the sky was full of
fire too, a mirror of the ground. The speartip had visited murderous
destruction upon the city of the “Emperor”.
But had it found the throat?
He mounted the last flight of steps, his grip on the weapons tight.
The uppermost ring platform formed the base of the tower’s top
section, a vast cupola of crystal-glass petals, ribbed together with
steel spars that curved up to form a finial mast at the apex high
above. The entire structure creaked and slid, turning slightly one
way then another as it responded phototropically to the blooms of
light outside in the night. On one side of the platform, its back to the
great windows, sat a golden throne. It was a massive object, a heavy
plinth of three golden steps rising to a vast gilt chair with a high
back and coiled arm rests.
The throne was empty.
Loken lowered his weapons. He saw that the tower top turned so
that the throne was always facing the light. Disappointed, Loken
took a step towards the throne, and then halted when he realised he
wasn’t alone after all.
A solitary figure stood away to his left, hands clasped behind its
back, staring out at the spectacle of war.
The figure turned. It was an elderly man, dressed in a floorlength
mauve robe. His hair was thin and white, his face thinner still.
He stared at Loken with glittering, miserable eyes.
“I defy you,” he said, his accent thick and antique. “I defy you,
invader.”
“Your defiance is noted,” Loken replied, “but this fight is over. I
can see you”ve been watching its progress from up here. You must
know that.”
“The Imperium of Man will triumph over all its enemies,” the
man replied.
“Yes,” said Loken. “Absolutely, it will. You have my promise.”
The man faltered, as if he did not quite understand.
“Am I addressing the so-called “Emperor”?” Loken asked. He
had switched off and sheathed his sword, but he kept his bolter up to
cover the robed figure.
“So-called?” the man echoed. “So-called? You cheerfully
blaspheme in this royal place. The Emperor is the Emperor
Undisputed, saviour and protector of the race of man. You are some
imposter, some evil daemon-”
“I am a man like you.”
The other scoffed. “You are an imposter. Made like a giant,
malformed and ugly. No man would wage war upon his fellow man
like this.” He gestured disparagingly at the scene outside.
“Your hostility started this,” Loken said calmly. “You would not
listen to us or believe us. You murdered our ambassadors. You
brought this upon yourself. We are charged with the reunification of
mankind, throughout the stars, in the name of the Emperor. We seek
to establish compliance amongst all the fragmentary and disparate
strands. Most greet us like the lost brothers we are. You resisted.”
“You came to us with lies!”
“We came with the truth.”
“Your truth is obscenity!”
“Sir, the truth itself is amoral. It saddens me that we believe the
same words, the very same ones, but value them so differently. That
difference has led directly to this bloodshed.”
The elderly man sagged, deflated. “You could have left us
alone.”
“What?” Loken asked.
“If our philosophies are so much at odds, you could have passed
us by and left us to our lives, unviolated. Yet you did not. Why?
Why did you insist on bringing us to ruin? Are we such a threat to
you?”
“Because the truth-” Loken began.
“-is amoral. So you said, but in serving your fine truth, invader,
you make yourself immoral.”
Loken was surprised to find he didn’t know quite how to answer.
He took a step forward and said, “I request you surrender to me, sir.”
“You are the commander, I take it?” the elderly man asked.
“I command Tenth Company.”
“You are not the overall commander, then? I assumed you were,
as you entered this place ahead of your troops. I was waiting for the
overall commander. I will submit to him, and to him alone.”
“The terms of your surrender are not negotiable.”
“Will you not even do that for me? Will you not even do me that
honour? I would stay here, until your lord and master comes in
person to accept my submission. Fetch him.”
Before Loken could reply, a dull wail echoed up into the tower
top, gradually increasing in volume. The elderly man took a step or
two backwards, fear upon his face.
The black figures rose up out of the tower’s depths, ascending
slowly, vertically, up through the open centre of the ring platform.
Ten Astartes warriors, the blue heat of their whining jump pack
burners shimmering the air behind them. Their power armour was
black, trimmed with white. Catulan Reaver Squad, First Company’s
veteran assault pack. First in, last out.
One by one, they came in to land on the edge of the ring
platform, deactivating their jump packs.
Kalus Ekaddon, Catulan’s captain, glanced sidelong at Loken.
“The first captain’s compliments, Captain Loken. You beat us to
it after all.”
“Where is the first captain?” Loken asked.
“Below, mopping up,” Ekaddon replied. He set his vox to
transmit. “This is Ekaddon, Catulan. We have secured the false
emperor-”
“No,” said Loken firmly.
Ekaddon looked at him again. His visor lenses were stern and
unreflective jet glass set in the black metal of his helmet mask. He
bowed slightly. “My apologies, captain,” he said, archly. “The
prisoner and the honour are yours, of course.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Loken replied. “This man demands the
right to surrender in person to our commander-in-chief.”
Ekaddon snorted, and several of his men laughed. “This bastard
can demand all he likes, captain,” Ekaddon said, “but he’s going to
be cruelly disappointed.”
“We are dismantling an ancient empire, Captain Ekaddon,”
Loken said firmly. “Might we not display some measure of gracious
respect in the execution of that act? Or are we just barbarians?”
“He murdered Sejanus!” spat one of Ekaddon’s men.
“He did,” Loken agreed. “So should we just murder him in
response? Didn’t the Emperor, praise be his name, teach us always
to be magnanimous in victory?”
“The Emperor, praise be his name, is not with us,” Ekaddon
replied.
“If he’s not with us in spirit, captain,” Loken replied, “then I pity
the future of this crusade.”
Ekaddon stared at Loken for a moment, then ordered his second
to transmit a signal to the fleet. Loken was quite sure Ekaddon had
not backed down because he’d been convinced by any argument or
fine principle. Though Ekaddon, as Captain of First Company’s
assault elite, had glory and favour on his side, Loken, a company
captain, had superiority of rank.
“A signal has been sent to the Warmaster,” Loken told the elderly
man.
“Is he coming here? Now?” the man asked eagerly.
“Arrangements will be made for you to meet him,” Ekaddon
snapped.
They waited for a minute or two for a signal response. Astartes
attack ships, their engines glowing, streaked past the windows. The
light from huge detonations sheeted the southern skies and slowly
died away. Loken watched the criss-cross shadows play across the
ring platform in the dying light.
He started. He suddenly realised why the elderly man had
insisted so furiously that the commander should come in person to
this place. He clamped his bolter to his side and began to stride
towards the empty throne.
“What are you doing?” the elderly man asked.
“Where is he?” Loken cried. “Where is he really? Is he invisible
too?”
“Get back!” the elderly man cried out, leaping forward to grapple
with Loken.
There was a loud bang. The elderly man’s ribcage blew out,
spattering blood, tufts of burned silk and shreds of meat in all
directions. He swayed, his robes shredded and on fire, and pitched
over the edge of the platform.
Limbs limp, his torn garments flapping, he fell away like a stone
down the open drop of the palace tower.
Ekaddon lowered his bolt pistol. “I”ve never killed an emperor
before,” he laughed.
“That wasn’t the Emperor,” Loken yelled. “You moron! The
Emperor’s been here all the time.” He was close to the empty throne
now, reaching out a hand to grab at one of the golden armrests. A
blemish of light, almost perfect, but not so perfect that shadows
behaved correctly around it, recoiled in the seat.
This is a trap. Those four words were the next that Loken was
going to utter. He never got the chance.
The golden throne trembled and broadcast a shockwave of
invisible force. It was a power like that which the elite guard had
wielded, but a hundred times more potent. It slammed out in all
directions, casting Loken and all the Catulan off their feet like corn
sheaves in a hurricane. The windows of the tower top shattered
outwards in a multicoloured blizzard of glass fragments.
Most of Catulan Reaver Squad simply vanished, blown out of
the tower, arms flailing, on the bow-wave of energy. One struck a
steel spar on his way out. Back snapped, his body tumbled away into
the night like a broken doll. Ekaddon managed to grab hold of
another spar as he was launched backwards. He clung on, plasteel
digits sinking into the metal for purchase, legs trailing out behind
him horizontally as air and glass and gravitic energy assaulted him.
Loken, too close to the foot of the throne to be caught by the full
force of the shockwave, was knocked flat. He slid across the ring
platform towards the open fall, his white armour shrieking as it left
deep grooves in the onyx surface. He went over the edge, over the
sheer drop, but the wall of force carried him on like a leaf across the
hole and slammed him hard against the far lip of the ring. He
grabbed on, his arms over the lip, his legs dangling, held in place as
much by the shock pressure as by the strength of his own, desperate
arms.
Almost blacking out from the relentless force, he fought to hold
on.
Inchoate light, green and dazzling, sputtered into being on the
platform in front of his clawing hands. The teleport flare became too
bright to behold, and then died, revealing a god standing on the edge
of the platform.
The god was a true giant, as large again to any Astartes warrior
as an Astartes was to a normal man. His armour was white gold, like
the sunlight at dawn, the work of master artificers. Many symbols
covered its surfaces, the chief of which was the motif of a single,
staring eye fashioned across the breastplate. Robes of white cloth
fluttered out behind the terrible, haloed figure.
Above the breastplate, the face was bare, grimacing, perfect in
every dimension and detail, suffused in radiance. So beautiful. So
very beautiful.
For a moment, the god stood there, unflinching, beset by the gale
of force, but unmoving, facing it down. Then he raised the storm
bolter in his right hand and fired into the tumult.
One shot.
The echo of the detonation rolled around the tower. There was a
choking scream, half lost in the uproar, and then the uproar itself
stilled abruptly.
The wall of force died away. The hurricane faded. Splinters of
glass tinkled as they rained back down onto the platform.
No longer impelled, Ekaddon crashed back down against the
blown-out sill of the window frame. His grip was secure. He clawed
his way back inside and got to his feet.
“My lord!” he exclaimed, and dropped to one knee, his head
bowed.
With the pressure lapsed, Loken found he could no longer
support himself. Hands grappling, he began to slide back over the lip
where he had been hanging. He couldn’t get any purchase on the
gleaming onyx.
He slipped off the edge. A strong hand grabbed him around the
wrist and hauled him up onto the platform.
Loken rolled over, shaking. He looked back across the ring at the
golden throne. It was a smoking ruin, its secret mechanisms
exploded from within. Amidst the twisted, ruptured plates and
broken workings, a smouldering corpse sat upright, teeth grinning
from a blackened skull, charred, skeletal arms still braced along the
throne’s coiled rests.
“So will I deal with all tyrants and deceivers,” rumbled a deep
voice.
Loken looked up at the god standing over him. “Lupercal…” he
murmured.
The god smiled. “Not so formal, please, captain,” whispered
Horus.

Author Archives: Dennis

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