Now Peals Midnight - John French Read online

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  Now Peals Midnight – John French

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  NOW PEALS MIDNIGHT

  John French

  ‘Time is relentless. Fate is remorseless. We cannot outrun the future – we can only endure it.’

  – attributed to the Emperor at the outset of the First War of Unification

  Five Hours to Midnight

  ‘Are you certain?’ Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra, primarch of the VII Legion, looked at Armina Fel. The old astropath had always been frail, and now was little more than bones and skin driven by will.

  ‘As certain as we can be,’ she replied.

  ‘There has been no word from the system edge,’ he said.

  ‘Not yet, but there will be,’ said Armina. ‘The light will follow the words, the fire…’

  ‘How soon do you estimate?’

  ‘Soon, lord, hours at most.’

  She lapsed into silence, and Dorn turned away, looking out at the night beyond the worn stone parapet of the Bhab Bastion.

  The Imperial Palace gleamed in his sight. Flares of burning gas from disposal furnaces breathed from stacks. Lights blinked on the tips of spires, and beneath that the glow of millions of windows seeped up to smudge the dark to a muddy orange. Gun batteries clung to the stone, barrels pointed at the sky. Clusters of macro shield generators squatted amongst the colonnades and walkways like ticks burrowed into the mane of a lion. Layers of armour-clad buildings, hiding their elegance beneath slabs of metal shaped to deflect shell impacts. Between the scabs of armour lay kilometres of structures that had been marked as snare grounds. Porous to attack, they were laced with mines and traps both small and vast. In the battles to come – battles that had seemed constantly threatening and yet somehow distant – these areas would be allowed to fall. Their purpose was to draw in as many of the enemy as possible before being reduced to rubble and flame. And around them the guns of the Palace that was now a fortress would howl into the sky as the beauty of its past burned from its face.

  ‘The last grains of the future now fall and become the dust of the past,’ he said softly.

  ‘You sound as though this is the end, my lord,’ she said.

  ‘It is, after a fashion.’

  Clouds scudded across the night sky. The lights of the Palace caught their edges, turning them into shapes of fire-orange and grey shadow.

  Half a kilometre west of the bastion, the first of the shield generators began to test fire. Blisters of energy snapped into place across the heavens, shimmered and then vanished before snapping back into place. Snow began to fall as the shield interface met the moisture of the clouds. Threads of lightning flashed between them.

  ‘I came to you first, lord. The message will pass to the Sigillite, of course, unless you wish to tell him personally…’

  ‘He will know already,’ said Dorn, still watching the flare light of the shield tests. ‘He always does.’

  ‘And the Khan and Lord Sanguinius?’

  ‘Tell them,’ he said. ‘Tell them everything, and tell them I will attend with them shortly on the eastern prospect.’

  ‘And the signal?’

  Dorn was silent for a second.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said at last.

  Armina Fel opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said again, his voice low and his eyes far away. In the distance, the next in the chain of shield generators began to fire. The sequence would march across the thousands of kilometres of the Palace, treading behind the fall of night. So large was the Palace that four hours separated the onset of darkness at the eastern gates from its arrival at the westernmost reaches. But midnight was the hour when night balanced above the Dome of Unity, and that moment still waited to pass.

  ‘One night we shall look up and see the heavens burning.’ The words came to him like a whisper breathed by a ghost.

  ‘My thanks, mistress,’ he said, and began to walk towards the stairs down into the mass of the bastion. The astropath’s face twitched as though her eyelids were trying to blink over the empty sockets of her eyes. ‘Thank you for this, and for everything.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ she called after him, but he did not turn.

  ‘Re-check all data inputs,’ said Admiral Su-Kassen.

  ‘They are functioning within parameters,’ droned the senior lexmechanic after a few seconds. ‘The current visualisation of data is accurate.’

  ‘Check it again,’ she said.

  ‘Admiral–’

  ‘Check it again.’

  She waited while the lexmechanic bent to his task, and tried to keep the worry from her face. She was not prone to anxiety, and that made the thoughts drumming against the inside of her skull all the more concerning.

  On a screen suspended at the centre of the Bhab Bastion command chamber, the frequency of hostile and potentially hostile incidents across the Solar System glowed in orange numerals on black. Tactical code flowed in a raw stream beneath. In the last years the numbers had often been a blur and the code flow a smeared cascade. Now the numerals held steady, barely ticking over. Around the chamber, command officers sat silent at their consoles. In times of crisis the chamber surged with voices, signal bleed and the hum and clatter of cogitators. Even in lulls in activity a low hum of tension rolled through the air like the voice of an ocean growling beneath a calm surface.

  Now the quiet screamed.

  ‘The data inputs are correct, and the current visualisation is accurate, admiral,’ said the lexmechanic. She nodded acknowledgement, and felt her worry grow as she discarded one of the more comforting possibilities of what was happening. As watch officer for Primary Solar Command, she was effectively the person in charge of the system’s defences at that moment. It was not a position that favoured uncertainty.

  ‘Get me a direct vox connection to the astropath enclave,’ she said.

  ‘Admiral, the praetorian is approaching,’ said Lieutenant Cator, the senior Imperial Fists officer in the chamber.

  A moment later the doors opened.

  Su-Kassen came to attention as Rogal Dorn entered. Across the chamber senior officers and Imperial Fists followed suit. The officers manning the banks of data and signal machinery remained seated, their eyes locked on their screens. Su-Kassen gave a brief salute, which Dorn answered with a nod as he moved through the chamber.

  Spheres of holo-light rotated in the air above them. Terra, Luna, the planets, clouds of warships, defence platforms and void fortresses all hung in the dark. She watched Dorn’s eyes take in the status of each of the five spheres of defences with a glance. In his mind there would now be a mirror of that information. She was a crusade-grade command officer with bio and memetic conditioning and it took her fifteen minutes to comprehend the system’s status every time she took command. A human without her ability and training would be utterly lost. That almost casual way Dorn assimilated something so complex, was one of the measures by which she tried to understand the gap between a human and a primarch.

  Some thought all the primarchs beyond understanding. She did not. In her eyes Dorn was more than human, but more similar than different. His nature was exalted, not alien. He suffered and dreamed and worried. The stone of his nature came from control, from willing it so. And the will of a primarch was enough to crush empires.

  Dorn’s eyes settled on Su-Kassen.

  ‘Cancel your communication request to the astropaths,’ he said. ‘It is unnecessary.’

  ‘Lord, all conflict and warning indicators are down and holding steady.’ She paused, rare hesitation finding a h
ook in her words. ‘It has been like this for two hours.’

  ‘Your assessment?’ said Dorn.

  ‘I have none,’ she said. ‘There is no cause that I can find or deduce. The effect is system wide, not localised. The riots in the northern hives have guttered out. The last communication from the Ardent Reef said that there were no signs of vessels of any type approaching the outer system, and that there had been none for the previous forty-six hours. Camba Diaz reports that there have been no launches from the surface of Mars. It’s as if…’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘As if what, admiral?’ asked Dorn, his voice level and his face unreadable.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I have no credible tactical assessment to share, lord.’

  ‘But you have an impression, a feeling. Please speak it.’

  Kassen bowed her head in assent.

  ‘It is as if a shadow is falling across the system, a shadow that quiets even the battles that already burn here.’

  Dorn held her gaze for a moment, and then looked around slowly, eyes taking in everything.

  ‘Stand down to secondary status for four hours,’ said Dorn at last. ‘Cator will take the watch. All command staff to rotate off post across all sectors.’

  Su-Kassen blinked at him, though she kept the confusion from her face.

  ‘My lord, I don’t–’

  ‘Get some rest, Niora,’ he said, using her birth name for the first time in the decades they had known each other.

  She felt the frown form on her face.

  ‘Nothing will happen that requires you to be here. Not yet.’

  Her face became still, and in stillness understanding passed between the demigod and the human warrior. She felt suddenly very cold, but there was a calm to the sensation. She let out a slow breath.

  ‘As you command, lord,’ she said.

  He gave the smallest nod, and she bowed, before turning to issue the orders. He walked to the door that led out of the chamber.

  She saw him pause on its threshold and look back at the rotating image of Terra and the Solar System. For a second she saw the light catch in the depths of his eyes, and he nodded, and walked out through the doors leading to the rest of the Palace. She watched him, wondering where he was going, then the doors sealed and the sight of him was lost to her.

  Four Hours to Midnight

  ‘The future is dead, Rogal Dorn. It is ashes running through our hands…’

  He heard the ghost speak from his memory as he walked on. Two of his huscarl bodyguards shadowed him, one moving ahead, one following behind. The sounds of their armoured feet echoed cold against the stone. Above them the bundles of cables stapled to the ceiling hummed. Down he walked, past chambers in which humans crouched over sensor screens, and listened to the hiss of signals sifted from the air of Terra.

  ‘We will put the work back when this is done…’

  On through the night-darkened halls, past the avenues of pillars filled with the light of candles, under the banners hanging like skins of shadow. Even since it had become a fortress, the Palace never slept, and it did not sleep now. It had simply slid into the night and become still, just as the hands of a chrono were still in the last minute before striking the hour.

  ‘He saw this Heresy coming in his visions. That is the truth you fear. You wish you had listened…’

  On, step by step, his eyes seeing all, his ears hearing the hush of the Palace drawn through its stone lungs, the Praetorian walked towards midnight.

  A thousand miles away, in the barrack caves bored into the Ganjar Mesa, Seplin Tu picked her way through the clusters of people. Her autogun banged against her back as she moved, but she kept the bowl of soup held between her fingertips steady. A yell followed her as her foot found a sleeping body. She called apologies, but kept her eyes on the space just in front of her. Around her the sea of people went on and on, clustered around their cooking fires. Some slept, others ate, a few laughed, the sound ricocheting off the stone walls. Some were old, some too young. Brothers and sisters sat together, muttering memories and hope to each other. A woman, her arms thick with gang tattoos, stripped and reassembled an ancient-looking lasgun as Seplin passed.

  She could see the spot she was aiming for, there, just under a pillar of rock whose surface glittered in the flicker of the chemical fire burning in a drum at its base. A figure lay beside the fire, wrapped in a ragged blanket.

  ‘I brought you some soup,’ she said, crouching down and holding out the bowl. ‘Still warm, I think.’

  Her father lifted his head, blinking, eyes distant, and then he saw her and pulled himself up to seated. He winced and only just managed to bite back the gasp of pain.

  ‘Do you–’ she began, putting the soup down on the floor and reaching for him.

  ‘I’m fine!’ he snapped. Then took a breath and smiled at her. She ignored the fresh pain that flashed in his eyes from the effort. He picked up the soup, blew on it, and took a sip.

  ‘Any news?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, and did not add that there had been no rumours running the queues to the provender tents. That had worried her, though she did not know why.

  ‘This will be over soon anyway,’ her father said as he sipped the soup. ‘You’ll see. Nothing is going to happen. You see if this doesn’t turn out to be just a way to clear the block levels and take what we have.’

  Seplin frowned.

  ‘There’s a lot of people here for it to be a way to get hold of what people in the blocks have.’

  ‘Someone has something, others will want to take it.’

  ‘Careful,’ she said as the bowl wobbled to his lips, her eyes darting over the creases of his face. The grey-and-black uniform he had been given hung off him. His hair fell in lank, iron-grey streaks down his head. In the light of the chemical flame, his skin looked like clammy marble. He should never have left the block. He should never have been issued a uniform let alone a weapon. But the draft harvesters had taken the population by the block, and counted them by passing them through hundred-metre-long pens. If you could walk they took you, and her father could walk. Barely.

  ‘We’ll be lucky if they haven’t levelled the district to build some new tower dock,’ he said as he sipped. ‘But they won’t keep us here long – costs too much. You’ll see, all done by the turning of the year.’

  Seplin pursed her lips, frown deepening.

  ‘They gave us bullets…’ she said softly, thinking of the forty autogun rounds tucked into her pockets and pouches. They had told them over the vox-horns that there would be inspections, and anyone who did not have their ammunition would be shot. There had been shootings amongst the conscripts already, but no inspections. Even so, Seplin had made sure she and her father kept their allocations and weapons close. She only knew how to fire a gun because he had shown her once. That had been when her sister came back from her time as a caravan guard. That was why Seplin hadn’t tried to duck the draft. She knew how to shoot at least, and that was more than many in the militias.

  Her father licked his lips and took another sip of his soup.

  ‘All done by the turning of the year…’ he muttered. Far off someone laughed. His head turned to look in the direction of the noise.

  ‘Careful,’ she said, and steadied the bowl of soup as it wavered in his hand.

  Three Hours to Midnight

  Archamus waited in the gloom of the Qokang Oasis. He leant on the balustrade. Beneath him lay the great pool. Silver from the moonlight falling through the opening in the great dome above rippled across the surface. Above him the thin ropes of water drained from the turbine sluices. Only weeks before he would not have been able to see the pool for the spray from the great cascade. The thunder of falling water would have filled his ears. Now the splash of the draining water was just a murmur.

  ‘You know what this means?’ said Andromeda-17 from beside him. The Luna gene-witch sat on the balustrade, legs dangling over the drop. He loo
ked at her. She shrugged and her chromed dreadlocks twitched across her shoulders. ‘Why he summoned you now, I mean?’

  ‘I do not presume to be certain,’ he said.

  ‘But you know. Some things you don’t need to hear. You can feel them. Tonight there is not a person between here and the edge of the sun’s light who does not know. In all the quiet places there are people feeling the silence grow around them. Humans are like that – deep down we are still animals crouching in a forest listening for the howls of wolves…’ She was looking up at the shafts of moonlight, and he noticed that her eyes had a look that he had never seen before. ‘We used to do that, you see, when we were a species teetering on the edge of survival – we would go quiet and still and hope that the growl we could barely hear was just the wind in the trees, and the shadows beneath the moon were just shadows… We carry that memory, all of us. Our blood remembers…’

  He remained silent, and the sound of the draining water filled the stillness. At last she looked around at him. She gave a cold laugh and shrugged.

  ‘Not the most comforting thought, I’ll admit.’ He shook his head but did not answer. She frowned, her gaze steady on him.

  ‘You are thinking–’

  ‘We are not ready,’ he growled softly.

  ‘You were never going to be ready,’ she said. ‘None of you, not Dorn, not you, not all the guns of Terra. You were never going to be ready.’

  ‘With more time–’

  ‘There is not time enough to prepare for this.’ She picked up a loose chip, and dropped it over the edge. She leant forwards to watch for the splash. ‘It is a matter of the soul, that is why you are not ready.’

  He felt himself tense. Andromeda laughed at his discomfort.

  ‘My kin of the Selenar believe that the soul lies not outside us but in our blood, in the memory of our genes. They would say that there is no way for mankind to be ready for this. What is happening and what is to come will leave a scar in the blood. It will change the soul of mankind and all of its offspring. In ten thousand years this will be the memory that sings in the soul of all. If that time comes, then we will be ready to face this again.’