Apocalypse - Josh Reynolds Read online

  ‘The outer worlds have been promised to our fellow travellers, to do with as they wish.’ Amatnim looked at the Dark Apostle. ‘Would you have me go back on my word?’

  Lakmhu frowned. ‘If it was given in error, yes. We cannot trust the conquest of this system to lesser souls.’

  ‘Some of those souls belong to our brothers.’

  Lakmhu made a dismissive gesture. ‘Not all in our Legion are equal, Amatnim. Some are little better than chattel. Milk-bloods and by-blows, raised up in recent centuries, their only purpose to die in the name of the Urizen.’

  ‘Like your slaves, then.’

  Lakmhu glanced at his bodyguards. The creatures growled softly, the sound distorted by the vox-amplifiers built into their battleplate. ‘They are blessed. The Neverborn have made them strong. Stronger than they might otherwise have been.’

  ‘Well, we’ll never know now, will we?’

  Lakmhu gave him a sharp look. ‘I did not come to be insulted.’

  ‘Then why did you come?’

  ‘I wish to oversee the deployment of our forces. Swift subjugation of this system is imperative. Every moment could bring reinforcements. The ether is alight with whispers of a crusade, stretching from the broken husk of Terra. A crusade such as the galaxy has seen only once before…’

  ‘The ether is alight,’ Amatnim repeated, somewhat mockingly. ‘Just say daemons told you, brother. That is who you heard it from, isn’t it?’

  Lakmhu bristled. ‘And if it was?’

  Amatnim grinned. ‘Then I know how much credence to give such whispers.’

  ‘The Neverborn speak with the voices of the gods.’

  ‘And the gods are known for their sense of humour.’ Amatnim gestured airily. ‘Do not trouble yourself, brother. It is early days, yet, and I have some small strategic acumen.’

  ‘Your arrogance grows tedious, brother. Remember whom you serve, and who speaks on their behalf here.’

  Amatnim paused. Lakmhu was tendentious, even for a Dark Apostle. He turned and pointed. ‘And you would do well to remember that I am not your Coryphaus, brother. This fleet is mine, not yours. You have the ear of the Dark Council, but so do I. You are, at best, my equal in this endeavour.’ Amatnim spoke without rancour. Anger only served to feed Lakmhu’s ego, and that was large enough as it was.

  Lakmhu grunted. ‘A wise man admits when he has reached the limits of his knowledge.’ His tone was chiding, but there was an undercurrent of fury.

  ‘And be assured that I shall let you know when that happens.’ Amatnim smiled, knowing it would further infuriate the other Word Bearer. ‘You were never a field soldier, Lakmhu. You have ever preached from the safety of the artillery line. I do not begrudge you that – your weapon is your voice, and there is precious little room to employ such a tool in the trenches. Do not think that I have not considered the ramifications of my chosen strategy. Yes, we will leave potential foes in our wake. But consider the quality of those foes… even as you consider your own.’

  Lakmhu’s face was stiff. Amatnim could smell the anger bleeding off him. The Dark Apostle wanted to activate the accursed crozius he held and strike Amatnim down. His blade slaves growled gutturally, and their swords scraped eerily against ceramite as they swung them away from their shoulders.

  Amatnim waited, his expression mild. Lakmhu waved his slaves back, and gestured to the viewscreen. ‘What about that cruiser? It is not yet destroyed,’ he said.

  Amatnim shrugged. ‘But it is no longer able to stop us. If those who follow in our wake wish to dispatch it, let them. If it survives, then it is as the gods will. But it is of no more import, regardless. Let it wallow in its agonies. We have other prey to seek out.’ His smile was wide and savage.

  ‘Almace awaits.’

  Chapter Two

  12:10:09

  Almace, Primaris-grade cardinal world

  Tyr’s Oath dived through the black and into the blue.

  Aboard the Thunderhawk gunship, fifteen of the Emperor’s angels, drawn from three Chapters, waited to spread their wings. Warriors, both Primaris and otherwise, in the heraldry of the Imperial Fists, the Raven Guard and the White Scars, reclined in their restraint thrones – an unusual gathering, even in these strangest of days. The thunder of the engines reverberated up through the compartment, and made casual conversation all but impossible. Even so, the recycled air twitched with the static of encrypted vox communication.

  Heyd Calder studied the other passengers – the Raven Guard in their streamlined battleplate, and the White Scars with their tokens and talismans. Like night and day, and both equally different to his own impassive, yellow-armoured brothers.

  The Primaris lieutenant wondered what they were saying to one another. If they were anything like the quintet of Intercessors who served as his bodyguard, they were mostly discussing the battle to come, with varying amounts of eagerness and stoicism. He let his gaze rest on his brothers, in their yellow battleplate, bearing the crimson insignia of the Third Company. He had led them, and others, into battle often since his awakening. But nothing like what awaited him, he suspected.

  Tyr’s Oath held representatives from the three Chapters that made up the relief fleet. Though fleet was, perhaps, a generous term for such an assemblage of vessels – the Silent Horseman, a White Scars battle-barge, and two strike cruisers, Raven’s Valour, from the Raven Guard, and the Capulus, from his own Chapter. Besides these vessels were a handful of frigates, drawn from the fleets of all three Chapters.

  Regardless, it had made all speed for the Odoacer System, once word of the cardinal-governor’s request had reached Guilliman’s ears. They had reached Almace in good time, despite the inability to make longer warp jumps.

  Below, in the capital city of Almacia, the cardinal-governor awaited them. There would be ceremonies, triumphs and fetes aplenty in the coming days, in anticipation of inevitable victory – or simply to convince the world’s populace of such. A time-consuming tactic, but often effective. A distracted populace was one not likely to panic.

  Tyr’s Oath shuddered slightly, and atmospheric klaxons sounded, alerting the passengers to the gunship’s successful descent from orbit. Calder’s helmet vox-link crackled. ‘Atmospheric entry successful,’ the gunship’s pilot said. ‘Making our approach.’

  Calder sat back. They would be landing soon. ‘Acknowledged. Defences?’ They’d been given the transmission codes to bypass Almace’s frankly primitive orbital defence network, but ground defences were another matter.

  ‘Nothing to worry us, lieutenant. Static anti-aircraft batteries at the reported coordinates. Antiques.’ The pilot sounded almost insulted.

  ‘A stone can kill as easily as a bolt-round,’ Calder said.

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  The vox clicked off, and Tyr’s Oath continued its descent. Calder patted the hull plate behind his throne affectionately. The Thunderhawk gunship was old, as the Imperial Fists judged such things. It had seen battle across five systems and two sectors, been knocked from the sky twice and almost completely gutted once, in its storied career. But it had been repaired and rearmed, made fit for purpose every time. Duty ended only in death. That went for machines as well as men.

  Calder wondered, sometimes, where that left him. He was neither machine nor man, but something else entirely. Primaris. The last hope of a crippled empire – and perhaps one that had come too late. But regardless, they would try.

  The Indomitus Crusade marched across the galaxy, driving away the dark and lending aid where it could. Sometimes, that aid did not arrive in time – the void was lit by a thousand pyres, as worlds burned. But other times – at Baal, at Rynn’s World and a hundred others, the Lord Commander of the Imperium had cast the enemy back.

  As they would do on Almace.

  He leaned back in his restraint throne, and checked his battleplate’s internal chronometer. They h
ad some time until they reached Almacia, the planet’s capital. He activated the throne’s built-in hololithic projector. Every throne had one, for en-route mission briefings. The projector was hard-linked to his battleplate, and the twitch of a finger was sufficient to control the shimmering display before him. Fleet auguries played across the air, joining the rest of the reports, all woefully out of date.

  Calder sat in silence, studying the projections that flickered before him. The Odoacer System had been all but forgotten, even before the galaxy had cracked in half. It had been a bequest, donated to the Ecclesiarchy in less fraught centuries by its former rulers, the Kabalevskys. Almace, the core, had become a cardinal world, and the centre of an Ecclesiarchial hegemony comprising more than a dozen planets, most little more than feudal enclaves or epsilon-class industrial centres. Planetary tithes came in the form of agri-resources or mineral production, or, failing those, manpower.

  If Odoacer had any claim to value, it was due solely to the extensive asteroid mining facilities scattered across the system core. Hundreds of valuable elements were scraped daily from the asteroid fields that hung in the void. Most were shipped to nearby systems, while the rest were processed for use in-system.

  But asteroid mines, valuable though they might be, were not why they had come. At least, that was Calder’s assumption. In truth, he couldn’t say why Guilliman had dispatched a relief fleet to the Odoacer System. Politics, perhaps. Guilliman’s return, while heralded by most, had caused friction with any number of the ancient bureaucracies that prowled the Imperium, including the Adeptus Ministorum. Calder suspected that it was because he was at once proof of the Emperor’s divinity, and a staunch opponent of unthinking superstition – a conundrum that the Ecclesiarchy had yet to solve to their satisfaction, though they’d spent a good deal of their time of late trying.

  Having dealt with a number of representatives of the Imperial bureaucracy since his awakening, Calder had some sympathy for the primarch. He kept such thoughts to himself, however. It was not his place to express such sentiments, invited or no. Even so, he wondered if Guilliman had launched the Indomitus Crusade, in part at least, to escape Terra and the abyssal pettiness of its politics. It had certainly come as something of a relief to Calder, even given his position as Huscarl.

  Originally, the Huscarls had been drawn from throughout the ranks of the Imperial Fists in order to create an elite body capable of defending Rogal Dorn in battle. With the primarch’s passing, the position had faded into irrelevance, becoming one more forgotten ritual added to the heap.

  But now, with Guilliman’s return, and the sudden influx of Primaris warriors to their ranks, the Chapter had reconstituted the Huscarls, albeit with a different focus. One better suited to this new age of eternal war. Calder was among the first of their number, chosen as much for his political acumen as his martial prowess. He did not consider such assumptions boastful – merely factual. He had allocated effort to the study of war on every level, not just strategic and tactical, but social and cultural as well.

  War, waged well, was swift. But its effects reverberated through the survivors in often unforeseen ways. The rebellions of the future had their genesis in the wars of today. Societal discontent, misplaced idealism, repressive political infrastructure – all these things were as deadly as any invasion. Calder had studied, and taught himself how to see the stress fractures in societies as easily as he might discern the weaknesses of a barricade. A planet could only be properly defended if its foundations were firmly set. Attempting to protect a world in the midst of a revolt was an untenable goal.

  Attempting to protect a galaxy amid such chaos was even more of a challenge. He thought, perhaps, that was why he had been chosen to lead this mission over the others, despite his lack of rank. He glanced at Suboden, suddenly aware of the White Scar’s gaze. They had not met prior to the command to come to Almace. There had been too much to do, too many preparations to make.

  This was the first time he’d even seen his opposite numbers in the flesh. He studied them. Sael Karros, a lieutenant of the Raven Guard’s Fourth Company, and Suboden Khan. Karros wore black, and his armour bore little to distinguish it from that of the other Raven Guard. He was a gaunt, pallid-faced warrior, with eyes like black pits and a soft, rasping voice. Suboden, on the other hand, was loud and brash. At least in comparison.

  Suboden was neither Primaris, like Calder, nor lieutenant like both Calder and Karros. Instead, he was khan of the Stormwrath Brotherhood, and captain of the White Scars Fifth Company. His own warriors referred to him as the Master of Spirits, though Calder had no frame of reference to contextualise such a title.

  He wondered what was going through the khan’s mind. What did he make of being seconded to the command of an officer his junior? Was he resentful? Puzzled? Calder considered what his own reaction might be, and tried to gauge the other Space Marine’s mood. After a moment, he pushed the thought aside. He would know soon enough. Suboden was no Imperial Fist, to hide himself behind walls of stoicism. The White Scars believed in confronting problems head-on, and swiftly. If there was an issue, the khan would approach him before long.

  As he turned his attentions back to the data-flow for Odoacer, he cross-referenced information on the surrounding systems. The cogitators aboard Tyr’s Oath were archaic but powerful, and he’d made sure to requisition as much information as possible for study. If he were to lead a successful defence, he needed access to every available detail.

  The Odoacer System had been isolated since the formation of the Great Rift. With the Astronomican still in disarray, travel was limited to short jumps, and then only when necessary. Nonetheless, elements of the defence fleet had tried to seek help in nearby systems – including several that had been engulfed, at least temporarily, by the Great Rift. These attempts had resulted in thirteen separate fleet engagements, as per the reports.

  ‘I’m surprised that they have a fleet left.’

  Calder blinked, and looked up into the brutal, blunt features of Suboden. The White Scar stood over him, clad in his battle-scarred, snow-white power armour, his hair unbound and his moustaches threaded with gold.

  ‘A testament to the skill of the officer in charge,’ Calder said, studying the other Space Marine.

  Unlike Calder’s own Mark X battleplate, Suboden’s was an older variant, with articulated armour panels on the torso and a raised gorget. The gorget had been pierced in places, allowing a number of rawhide thongs to be threaded through the holes. These were attached to bone and bronze amulets of varying shape and size, each bearing a single sigil. Suboden touched them occasionally, as if seeking reassurance.

  Suboden snorted. ‘Maybe.’ He studied the projection, his dark eyes flicking quickly across the reams of information. Calder turned his own attentions back to it. ‘You aren’t like the other Fists I’ve met,’ Suboden said, after a moment.

  Calder glanced at him. ‘I know. I am taller.’

  Suboden grinned. ‘Not that. Most would content themselves with hard data – resources, materials, the strength of walls and the bodies to set atop them. But you are reading social histories, studying pict-feeds of feast days and public speeches by the cardinal-governor and his councillors.’

  Calder paused the feed and looked up. He was becoming annoyed by the White Scar’s interruptions. ‘Yes. What of it?’

  ‘I am curious.’

  ‘As am I. Hence my study of these ancillary matters.’ Calder gestured, and the data-feed continued to unspool. ‘A world is not made of walls, but people. To gauge the strength of the former it is best to know about the latter.’

  ‘Spoken like a true iterator,’ Suboden said.

  Calder paused the data-feed again. The White Scar was interrupting intentionally, he was certain. A test of some sort, perhaps. They had not yet had much time to acclimatise to one another. ‘I am a Huscarl. I defend worlds. To defend a world, I must know its strengths and weakn
esses, even as you must know the limits of your engines.’

  Suboden grinned. ‘No offence meant, brother. It was a compliment. I am told, in your day, iterators were spoken of with honour.’ He straightened. ‘These days, they are often grey little drabs who speak in empty platitudes and squawk for aid at the first sign of resistance.’ He frowned. ‘Or they were, before the galaxy was torn asunder.’

  In your day. The words sank into him like arrows. He looked back at the data-feed. Time had passed him by while he slumbered in the stasis-vaults. Thousands of years, in fact. He felt a sort of numbness at the thought – such a number was hard to contemplate with any rationality. In the 31st millennium, it had seemed as if the Imperium of Man might bestride the galaxy as a colossus, and its people claim every world as their birthright.

  Now, the empire he had helped to build was a broken animal – fierce and stubborn, even in its death throes. Heroic in its refusal to succumb to a mortal blow that had been delivered thousands of years before men like Suboden were born.

  The stasis-vaults had been all but emptied now, and the first generation of Primaris Space Marines loosed to join their Chapters, or to fight at the primarch’s behest in the Unnumbered Sons. And still, it did not seem to be enough. Calder had made a study of the galaxy, in the years since his awakening. It would take more than warm bodies to throw back the dark. The Imperium tottered on rotting foundations, and there was much work to be done. Odoacer was but the start.

  ‘Do you think we are to garrison this little system then?’ Suboden sounded disappointed.

  Calder gestured, and a series of industrial reports streamed across the projection. Intake from the asteroid mining facilities had dropped precipitously. Reports of sedition, sabotage and worker-related disturbances were appended to these figures, as if by way of explanation. He made a mental note to investigate further, at a more practical date.

  ‘If it requires such,’ Calder said.