Spear of Ultramar Read online

  Khrossus leaves the cell and takes a grav lift down to the underhive. He moves down through the endless clamour of the city’s industry. Though the Iron Warriors have conquered Carchera, the gigantic production machine that is Siderius grinds on, only now everything has been turned to the needs of the IV Legion. Huge new trenches are being dug, mine shafts are opening up to become gaping abysses and gigantic reservoirs are filling with molten ore. The millions of citizens of Siderius are governed by a single purpose. They wish to live, and so they slave to fulfil the will of the warsmith.

  The grav lift deposits Khrossus beside a cavern where excavators the size of hab blocks dig their immense shovels into the earth, breaking apart tunnels below, working to create a moat hundreds of metres deep.

  Past the excavation site, Khrossus enters a tunnel. It bores through rock and is lined with metal plates. It drops down a steep slope, and brings him at last to the chapel of the Word Bearers.

  All traces of the chamber’s original purpose are gone. The Word Bearers have had it scraped clean. The walls have been altered, the angles between them deepened and the sides worked until they are perfectly sheer. The cavern now has eight identical sides. The star of Chaos is carved into the floor. Runes have been painted in blood between each of the arms of the star. The shapes of the symbols hurt Khrossus’ eyes, and they writhe in his peripheral vision. Ker Vanthax stands in the centre of the star, surrounded by his acolytes. ‘This is a worthy place,’ the High Chaplain says to Khrossus. ‘There is much blood in the stone. Many died in this spot when the mines were first being dug. Lines of energy pass through here. Lines of Chaos.’ He nods, satisfied. ‘Carchera will fight for us. Have you examined the planet’s historical records?’

  ‘I have been otherwise occupied.’

  ‘Of course. Of course. I think they would be instructive. I can feel the blood that was spilled here. Though its citizens may not know it, this world owes allegiance to the gods. It is not a coincidence that the warp is strong in this system. Carchera’s allegiance is why we will be able to do what we must. The hand of fate is at work here.’

  ‘I have been working harder here than fate,’ says Khrossus.

  Ker Vanthax smiles. ‘You are its instrument. The will of Chaos works through you.’

  Khrossus grunts, noncommittal.

  ‘Have you come to tell us it is time?’ Ker Vanthax asks.

  ‘We cannot know exactly when the Ultramarines will arrive…’

  ‘…but they are getting close,’ the High Chaplain says. ‘Yes, we can sense that. We can feel their travel through the immaterium.’

  ‘We should begin,’ says Khrossus. ‘We should prepare our welcome.’

  ‘So we shall.’ Ker Vanthax nods to his brothers, and they take up positions surrounding him, standing on the points of the star that indicate the cardinal directions. One of the Word Bearers leaves the chamber for a moment and returns with an amphora. It is full of thick, rich blood. The Word Bearer pours it onto the floor, linking all the arms of the star, and daubs the armour of the other apostles. Then he resumes his place in the circle and joins in as the High Chaplain leads the chanting.

  Khrossus backs away. The air turns cold, and his breath mists almost as soon as the chanting begins. The eight-pointed star seems to twist. Voices creep in around the edges of Khrossus’ hearing, voices whose mouths are shaped for more than one tongue, tongues shaped to pronounce impossible words.

  Khrossus turns and makes his way back up the tunnel. What he has told his captains is true. He does not need to share the full truth of the Word Bearers to see, and believe in, the full effect it can have. Already, he feels ancient power gathering in the chamber and rising up from Carchera, into the void, reaching out to seize the enemies from Ultramar.

  Before he heads to the bridge, Guilliman turns the sandglass over again. He watches the grains drop for a few moments. He will not lie to himself, and pretend that the falling grains are marking the time to the Ultramarines’ arrival in the Carchera system. They are marking the time he has to reach Terra, and they are too few, and they are slipping away.

  He must pass through this system quickly.

  On the bridge, as translation from the empyrean approaches, Guilliman mounts the pulpit. Shutters cover the windows of the Ultimus Mundi, keeping out the madness of the warp. From her navigation cell, where she lies on a bed suspended in a pool of nutrient fluids, Maesa voxes that the critical seconds are approaching. On the bridge, it is the weapons officers who hold the greater part of Guilliman’s attention.

  ‘Nova cannon ready to fire,’ one calls.

  ‘Broadsides standing by,’ says another.

  The reports come in from the rest of the fleet. Every ship is prepared to open fire on targets they will not see until after the guns have opened up.

  ‘A salvo over a wide area, with no aim possible,’ Gorod comments. He and Prayto flank Guilliman beside the elevated pulpit.

  ‘No aim is necessary,’ Guilliman says. ‘We will have the luxury of precision once we have engaged the enemy. Consider this our pre-emptive counter-attack. We know where and when we will be struck, so I will strike first.’

  A servitor begins the countdown to translation. Guilliman waits in silence for the fleet to drop out of the warp. He has already given his commands. All the captains know their duty, and every ship is charging to war. Guilliman does not need to give a new order to fire. He has set out his will, and his Legion is about to carry it out.

  ‘Translation,’ the servitor says, its voice dull, the announcement too flat for the holocaust it signals.

  The Ultimus Mundi shakes three times. The first blow is the shock of the return to the materium. The second comes with the deep-throated thrum of the Nova cannon firing and the unleashing of every other gun in a massive choir of destruction.

  The battleship shakes for the third time just after the shutters pull back to reveal the Carchera system, and the cataclysm rushes in on the fleet.

  Two

  Aflame

  The near space of the Mandeville point is filled with wreckage. The Ultramarines’ salvo of arrival has disintegrated more than a dozen ships. The void pulses with the flames of dissipating gases. Fragments of attackers bounce harmlessly off void shields. The XIII Legion has created a graveyard around its vessels.

  The barrage has barely cut into the vast number of attackers.

  ‘Firing solutions,’ Guilliman orders. ‘Priority on close-proximity targets. Engines full ahead. Take us through.’

  A fleet is closing in on the Ultramarines, and it is not one to be fought, only destroyed. It is a cloud of freighters of varying size. There are some Navy vessels among them, battered frigates and escorts, and a single cruiser. Its superstructure has collapsed, and its hull is cratered. It is a ship that was killed, then resurrected for a final act of destruction.

  ‘Fire ships,’ Gorod snarls. ‘A cowardly attack.’

  ‘A brilliant one,’ Guilliman corrects.

  There are smaller objects swarming in with the ships. The Mandeville point has been mined. There are thousands of the explosives, inside the ring of fire ships. The sudden influx of mass summons them. They arrive like flies to batten on the blood of the fleet. Behind them come the suicide ships.

  Guilliman’s focus is on the mines and the fire ships, on the damage done by his fleet’s barrage, and on the paths the Ultramarines must take. There is just enough room at the edges of his concentration for a spare thought, compartmentalised where it cannot interfere with the tactical needs of the moment, and with the process of commanding a war. This thought is a consideration of the nature of the fire ships and the fact that they must be crewed by slaves. The thought, sealed away, becomes an articulation of regret, an enunciation of sorrow, and a spur to greater anger against the enemy.

  Guilliman knows there is nothing that can be done for the crews. Their fates were sealed
the moment they were placed on those ships. Guilliman cannot save them. He cannot consider the burning horror of their deaths. His duty lies on Terra, and the grains of sand are flowing away. He must take his Legion through. He must break the barrier before him.

  But first the fleet must survive.

  The second Nova cannon shot cuts a swath through the minefield before the prow of the Ultimus Mundi. The monstrous kinetic energy of the shell is too great for the mines to trigger its explosion. It goes by too quickly to be caught, but its passage triggers the mines. The space ahead of the battleship lights up with a plague of minor explosions. Beyond them is a freighter. Its trajectory is taking it head-on towards the Ultimus Mundi. It has barely begun to move when the shell cuts through it. The freighter has been loaded with explosives, its warp drive fractured. The only purpose of its altered form is to die, and so it dies, a plasma eruption tearing the void apart with the scream of a sun. The freighter is a fraction of the size of the Mundi, but its death is vast, and had it succeeded in ramming the battleship before it exploded, the damage would have been catastrophic.

  The combined blast of the freighter and the Nova shell smashes another cargo ship, cracking it like an egg and triggering its ferocious death cry. Before Guilliman’s eyes, the chain reaction of explosions turns the void into a cauldron of fire. The Ultimus Mundi seems to be plunging into the heart of a star.

  The natural instinct would be to evade the conflagration, to raise the bow of the ship and seek to ride over the colossal fireball. But Guilliman knows that instinct is mistaken. ‘Full ahead,’ he says again. ‘Take us through the heart of the flames.’

  That which would destroy the Ultimus Mundi in this direction has itself been destroyed. The explosions are, for the moment, the closest thing there is to safe passage.

  ‘Fire again,’ Guilliman orders. ‘Concentrate the barrage forward.’

  The Ultimus Mundi rushes into the holocaust. Ignited plasma washes over the battleship, an embrace of fury. The ship groans, the void shields strain, and then the Ultimus Mundi comes through to the darkness beyond, still firing, but now its scans and its servitors and its weapons officers look for specific targets.

  Other ships are not as fortunate.

  The frigate Golden Triumph takes out the mines nearest its hull, but the enemy-ravaged cruiser Resplendent comes at it vertically to the plane of the ecliptic. The few shots that hit the Resplendent are not enough either to deflect it from its path, or to trigger its explosives early. The bow of the Resplendent strikes the Golden Triumph amidships. The void shields flare and collapse from the impact of so great a mass. The Resplendent hits like a spear of fire. It explodes on impact, and the upper hull of the Triumph erupts with the force of a volcano. Plasma ignites plasma, and the ships vanish in the terrible rupture of their engines.

  A cluster of mines shoots past the broadsides of the escort Pride of Talasa and clings to its hull before spreading a breaching necklace of fire along its length. The Talasa staggers forward, still firing, its guns still active, but atmosphere and crew and legionaries spill out of its shredded starboard.

  The cruiser Parmenio Sentinel is caught between two fire ships. The double explosion shears its forward third away. Engines running, guns firing erratically, the Sentinel moves on, its decks exposed, its new prow a molten wreck. Its sudden, frantic bursts of vox traffic fade into the dark.

  The discipline of the fleet holds. Every ship obeys Guilliman’s commands, and the fleet is enveloped by the halo of its fire, clearing the mines. If the fleet had not translated with a full, massive barrage lashing out on all sides, the fire-ship attack would have ripped out its heart. Though this wave of fire ships hammers at the fleet, its formation remains strong. The Legion pushes the fire ships back, destroying most before they can strike their targets, and detonating thousands of mines before hitting them. And the fleet moves forward.

  So the first minutes of the battle go. But only the first minutes.

  Before the Ultimus Mundi has fully cleared the destruction of the Golden Triumph, more klaxons sound on the bridge.

  ‘Heavy enemy fire to port and off the bow,’ the auspex officer calls. ‘Cannons and torpedoes.’ And a moment later she says, ‘Warp storm forming ahead.’

  Guilliman can feel the sands in the glass running, running. He can follow each grain that falls, and in the space of a single grain’s descent from one reservoir to another, there is space to think, to analyse and to decide. Guilliman heeds the warning, he hears the klaxons and he sees the pict screens light up with the trajectories of missiles and shells. He sees, through the great viewport of the Ultimus Mundi, off the starboard edge of the bow, the void begin to churn. Vortices form, wrinkling the black, twisting it, staining it with the violet of bruise and rot. Then other colours spread into the materium, colours with no names, unless those names are insanity and murder and corruption.

  All this in the fall of one grain.

  To act before the next grain lands would be to act on impulse, not reason, and Guilliman refuses to fall into the traps that have been set for him and his Legion.

  ‘Forward shields on full,’ he says. The Ultimus Mundi is the tip of the fleet’s spear, and it will take the brunt of the oncoming torpedoes. ‘Maintain course. Auspex, give me a deep system scan. Tell me where the enemies are.’

  The Nova cannon fires a third time, scything its way through more minefields, destroying some of the torpedoes in its passage, and then the shot vanishes into the void. There are no fire ships before the Mundi now, but somewhere out there is the true foe. The enemy has declared himself by launching this barrage.

  ‘Enemy ships to port,’ says the auspex officer. ‘Beyond the fire ships.’

  ‘How many?’ Guilliman asks.

  Another slow fall of a grain while the data accumulates. Then the officer says, ‘A single strike cruiser, broadside to us.’

  A thin force, Guilliman thinks. One that cannot meet his fleet head-on, but with the help of the fire ships, there is much it can do.

  ‘Cluster of contacts dead ahead,’ the officer continues. ‘Further off.’ Bethra Kallan hesitates. ‘They’re not moving.’

  ‘An enemy squadron?’

  ‘I don’t think so, lord primarch. The contacts are too close together to be ships.’ The screen above her station lights up, pinging, as another wave of torpedoes and cannon shells streak towards the Ultramarines. ‘Too much firepower in too concentrated a region,’ Kallan says.

  ‘Orbital defence platforms?’ Gorod wonders.

  ‘Around what?’ says Prayto. ‘There are no planets in that direction.’

  ‘There don’t have to be,’ says Guilliman. ‘Our enemy is not on the defensive. He is on the attack. If he does not need the platforms to defend a planet, he can repurpose them into a new means of assault.’

  ‘More scans are coming through,’ says Kallan. ‘There is a very large central mass, consistent with a space station.’

  Guilliman nods, and he begins to see the contours of what must be done to neutralise this threat.

  Visible through the viewport, the warp storm spreads like an oil slick over the void, churning and grinding reality to shreds. It is rapidly growing in size and strength. It is hungry for the fleet, and it is also reaching behind, flanking the Legion to starboard.

  ‘The warp storm is closing in on the Mandeville point,’ says Kallan.

  Another grain of sand falls, and Guilliman has what he needs. The picture is not complete, but he has enough data to form a theory, one that explains what he sees, describes the means by which a small force can be brutally effective against a much larger one, and gives him the foundation for a counter-attack.

  The sand grains are slipping away, no matter how quickly he thinks. The foe does not want to face Guilliman’s full strength, so he will force the issue. He will attack to overwhelm the enemy’s fleet, and he will neutralise the tacti
cs that amplify the foe’s power.

  There is one more thing he must know. ‘Vox,’ he says, ‘is there any traffic from Carchera?’

  The system is a small one. There are only two worlds. The outer one, Himera, is lifeless rock. Only Carchera is inhabited. The vast numbers of fire ships already point strongly towards one conclusion about the planet’s status, but Guilliman needs confirmation before he commits his Legion to a specific strategy.

  The first wave of torpedoes and cannon fire arrives. The Ultimus Mundi’s countermeasures destroy many of the torpedoes before they hit. The shells are too many and too small be shot away. They push the shields hard, and a few torpedoes do get through. The battleship shudders with the impact. The pain of the void shields sears the dark beyond the viewport. But the ship is strong. It weathers the storm and pushes forward.

  ‘No vox traffic at all from Carchera,’ says the officer. ‘Though we are getting some interference.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘The readings are nonsensical.’

  ‘Warp energy,’ says Prayto.

  ‘Can you locate the source?’ Guilliman asks the Librarian.

  ‘Yes,’ says Prayto. He does not hesitate, though Guilliman recognises how deeply Prayto will have to expose himself to the warp to pinpoint a location.

  ‘Good,’ says Guilliman. ‘Find the source, and we will destroy it.’

  Beyond the decision he has taken, Guilliman has his confirmation about what is happening in this system. The pieces fall into place. The enemy holds Carchera, and the warp storm is being directed by human will. It is nothing compared to the scale of the Ruinstorm, but the principle is the same, and the intelligence controlling the storm is on Carchera.