Ashes of the imperium th.., p.23
Ashes of the Imperium: The Scouring, Book 1, page 23
He would have to guess. To run the odds. To be – that most hateful of delusions – lucky.
‘Apostle,’ came the hiss in his comm-bead.
Adraharsis drew in a breath. Each time something came in from the bridge, the likelihood was that an enemy cruiser had finally locked on to them, and oblivion awaited. ‘Yes?’ he replied.
‘We have Neptune on the ranged augurs,’ came the response. ‘You might want to take a look.’
The planet hung in the darkness, sea blue, gleaming with gaseous iridescence. They were all so pristine out here, the giants, compared to the wastelands of war the inner planets had become.
Adraharsis studied the augur logs carefully. No ship-idents or enemy signals for now. The local void volume was largely barren, save for a few pinpricks of heat from the various satellite settlements still smouldering under what remained of their artificial atmospheres.
‘There’s been heavy fighting,’ Theokon noted, gesturing towards some clusters of hull plating drifting aimlessly in high orbit. ‘And they’ve made a mess of the hives.’
That would have been on the Grand Fleet’s first attack run. Neptune had been sparsely settled by the Sol System’s standards, but millions had lived here nonetheless, mostly occupied in the industrial hab-complexes and military facilities.
Triton was the largest moon, one that had been heavily fortified to protect its long-established mine workings. Adraharsis spent some time on the picter images – the place was a blackened husk now, all surface structures razed. The bulk of that must have taken place during the initial phase of the Solar War. Other battle-signs were more recent – radiation signatures indicating bombardments across the secondary tier of satellites. Proteus, Nereid, a couple more. Some of those places had been home to weapons laboratoria and Navy installations, and the enemy had come to ensure anything left behind had been purged, any remaining ships blown up in the void. It didn’t look like a very thorough operation, though – some parts of the old hive towers were intact and semi-powered, and there might even have been people alive in them, slowly running out of oxygen. No doubt they’d had more important objectives to get to, and flushing out cultist garrisons installed in distant mining outposts would not have been the most pressing of their many tasks.
‘Ruins,’ said Theokon dryly. ‘Nothing more.’
Adraharsis ignored him, and cycled through the full schedule of sensor readings. Some of the old orbital platforms were also partially intact, with detectable atmosphere pockets and some limited power readings. A big weapons rig was slowly, very slowly, spiralling deeper into Neptune’s orbit, its geostat thrusters compromised and its stabilisers burned out. A colony station with the augur-ident Grylor was entirely dark, its outer surface mottled with what looked like organic growths, now all seared back to fused carbon. This was a graveyard, a place devastated by his own side before being torched once again by the enemy in revenge. It would be a major task to repopulate, if anyone ever thought the effort worthwhile.
There was nothing here. There was nothing anywhere. This whole place had been wrecked, just like every other outpost and island of civilisation. Humans had dwelled in these places for centuries, perhaps even millennia, and were now exterminated by their own hand. A dangerous, treacherous thought crept into his mind. Maybe the Iron Warrior was right. Maybe this had all been a colossal betrayal from all sides. Why was he even trying to divine the will of his primarch? Why did he even care what he thought or did any more? They had done this.
‘This is strange,’ Nastron said, gesturing at one of the consoles. ‘Malfunction?’
The panel before him contained two brass-framed chronos. One had stopped. The other was cycling a fraction too fast, ticking the intervals over.
Adraharsis came to look. His first instinct was to ask Theokon for an opinion, but then he peered closer. The mechanisms looked fine. He turned back, went up to the ornate command throne, called up an absolute locator reference. Three figures came back from the cogitators, none of them exactly corresponding to where he knew they must be. The distances were not large – fractions of a degree from true – but this was an Astartes ship.
‘That’s not mechanical,’ he muttered, then glanced up at the realviewers. Neptune was distant – a pale hemisphere the size of a coin on the armaglass. Its satellites were all invisible, just specks of darkness against the infinite. Sol itself was little more than just another star in the broad scatter beyond. You could imagine yourself almost anywhere.
He turned to Uxidas, now maybe the most reliable of his remaining warriors. ‘Somehow, from somewhere, something is still being channelled,’ he said. ‘Weakly, I would guess. Do you feel it?’
Uxidas tilted his head a little, as if listening. The chronos kept ticking, just a little too fast. ‘I sense nothing here.’
Adraharsis shook his head. He was increasingly sure. ‘Prepare me a tabulation of the satellites. How many were inhabited?’
Uxidas got to work – the runner had been in the Sol System long enough to have the cartographical and nav-data in the cogitator banks. ‘Seventeen,’ he replied. ‘Six natural, eleven artificial.’
‘And all still register on the augurs?’
‘All do. The void-stations have been heavily compromised – none have functional atmospheres or grav-envelopes.’
‘What about the moons?’
‘Triton is devastated. Most of the rest are sensor-dark. Destroyed? A single battle cruiser could break up those smaller rocks all by itself.’
The chrono kept ticking. It felt like it was judging him, testing him. Adraharsis looked over the figures scrolling down the lens before him – standard orientation stats drawn from the records. Then he looked back out of the armaglass panes, towards the silence and the ashes, all floating in their ancient choreography.
‘We have mass calculations for every body stored in the ship’s nav-system,’ he said, watching the figures themselves glow from the phosphor wafer. ‘I want them compared to the current readings from local augurs.’
Uxidas looked at him for a moment, as if that might have been a jest of some sort. Then, when it clearly wasn’t, he started work. ‘I don’t see–’
‘Just run the runes. All of them. Something is uncanny here.’
Adraharsis could sense the unease on the bridge, even from his own people. It was dangerous to be static. The system looked empty, but that could change in an instant – the enemy might still be here, powered down, maybe even masked by the gas giant’s volume. With every spike of energy they consumed in calculations and scan-sweeps came a greater chance that they themselves would be picked up by something hostile. Still, they obeyed. It wasn’t as if other courses of action were immediately obvious.
‘Sweep complete,’ reported Uxidas eventually. ‘Reference figures sent to your terminal.’
Adraharsis manipulated the data, organising the numbers into two columns – the stored mass values from the nav-system set against the values produced from the ship’s augurs. The values were pretty similar. Triton had been so badly mauled that its figure was a little lower than before; the rest were just as they should have been.
Except one. Laomedeia. The tiny moon had been the site of a well-developed industrial city, a grand sprawl of spires and hab-towers crowded together on a rock that, without the help of subterranean terraformers, would not have had either atmosphere nor sufficient gravity to sustain them. Like so many ancient Imperial colonies, it had grown erratically over thousands of years, the new constructions hammered onto the mouldering foundations of older ones. The years of Unity had been its best time, with the introduction of ore-processing manufactoria giving its millions of inhabitants something close to a stable means of employment and sustenance. For all that, the schedules had been punishing and the conditions harsh, which made it fertile ground for the kind of thing Adraharsis’ Legion had always specialised in – seeding doubts, fomenting change. Very old archetypes were drawn on, tropes and imprints from the deepest recesses of the time before Anathema, subtly changed and moulded into suitable vehicles for the true religion.
He even knew the name of the cult they’d sent in – the Paths of Revelation. A standard cabal in many ways, though influences had somehow crept in from the VIII Legion, which made them a trifle more theatrical than most. It had been their divine task to subvert the little moon away from its moorings, to prepare the way for its replacement fortification to come. Adraharsis remembered learning of its tasking during the long sermons out in the void, back when the Grand Armada was still coming together and the greatest battles had yet to be fought, when it had been just one of hundreds of similar efforts.
If they had succeeded here, then Laomedeia would have been laid waste by the Ultramarines. And on the visual readings at range, that appeared to be the case – the rocky satellite had been blasted to pieces, its once coherent surface now cracked and split into a loose collection of granite-dark chunks. The remains of the old cities straddled the fractures, shedding dust and debris in plumes as the grav-coherence failed. The moon was half the size it had once been, left unviable for anything other than a slow descent into its mother planet’s crushing embrace.
And yet its mass was just the same as before. Both figures on his lens lined up almost perfectly. The evidence of his senses and the evidence of the augurs did not match.
‘That moon,’ he said, overlaying a navigational lattice across the main tactical scans and directing his warriors’ attention to it. ‘There is something wrong with that moon.’
Theokon, the only member of the Iron Warriors on the bridge, glanced for a moment at the nav-data, then at the ranged viewfinders. He checked it, then checked again. ‘Or our sensors,’ he said.
Adraharsis felt like laughing. ‘Something remains!’ he said. ‘I do not expect you to feel it, but you might at least acknowledge what you see.’
‘Some deception,’ said Uxidas.
‘Maybe not too powerful, up close,’ said Adraharsis, now thoroughly convinced. ‘But it doesn’t need to be, does it? Who would be looking very hard?’ He switched his throne controls to the motive systems. ‘We will. We will look very hard indeed.’
No objections came. The system runner was fully activated, the drives crackling into life again. The ship nudged out towards the planet’s higher orbital layers, then boosted further across a secant trajectory towards Laomedeia’s absolute coordinates. Slowly, gradually, the moon came within true visual range.
In itself, it was unimpressive – just a smallish hunk of rock, though its entire surface was encrusted with the ruins of habitats and refineries and landing ports. When you looked at it directly, the evidence of destruction was clearly there, just as the augurs told you – it had come apart and was surrounded by a dissipating swarm of rubble and dust, its lumens extinguished and its power sources cold. But if you turned your head just a fraction, if you flicked your gaze towards one of the other viewfinders, allowed yourself to be open to the truth, you might glimpse it – a ripple of distortion, a snatch of photons. The moon was intact. It was lit. And the city that covered it was standing.
‘A thin place,’ Adraharsis breathed, recognising the power of the illusion. Someone on that moon was still capable of art. Not all subtlety had been drained from the universe.
‘What do you mean?’ Theokon snapped, clearly still unable to see it.
Adraharsis ignored him. He leaned over to Uxidas. ‘There would have been codes. Every seeded cult had them – this was one of ours. Did you maintain them?’
Before Uxidas could answer, Nastron looked up. ‘I was charged with the lists,’ he said.
‘The Paths of Revelation,’ said Adraharsis. ‘That was the one sent here.’
‘I recall it.’
The system runner drifted closer. The moon swelled up on the viewers, still a loosely collated heap of charred iron and stone… unless you caught it right. Now even the others were sensing it – the subtle bending of reality around the remains.
‘What is this?’ Theokon murmured uneasily. Out of instinct, it seemed he was slowly reaching for his weapon.
‘This is the turning,’ Adraharsis told him. ‘This is when the truths begin to revive.’
He had been wrong to doubt. He had wavered then, just when things looked darkest. He would have to make penance for that, and the gods would demand a high price for it. For all that, the joy he felt was unbounded. This was here. This was real. Someone, somehow, was still able to tap the old wellsprings. And if they could do it, then everything had not been lost. The primarch must know of this. He had directed them here. The great scheme was still unfurling.
‘Open the vox-links,’ he commanded. ‘Broad range – we will throw this out at them, and hope they pick it up.’
Uxidas complied, and Nastron immediately fed the passcodes into the transmitter. All the words were High Colchisian, twisted and reversed in ways that only a fellow initiate would be able to untangle.
For a while, nothing. The system runner slid to a halt, holding a stationary location over the ravaged moon. The chronos whirled more actively than before. The bridge was otherwise silent, tense, expectant.
‘I have another signal,’ Uxidas reported then. ‘A ship, static I think, right on the edge of our range.’
Theokon turned to him. ‘The enemy?’
‘Unsure. It’s not moving. I don’t think it’s seen us.’
Adraharsis felt irritation mount. These were irrelevancies. Having to fight or run now would be a disaster.
Then the vox-emitters on the consoles crackled into life. A screed of Colchisian, hard for even Adraharsis to make out, was followed by a greeting in standard Gothic.
‘Be welcome, Apostle,’ came a voice over the link. ‘We have been waiting for your arrival.’
A fresh ripple across the viewfinders broke out, a fizz of ions, and the way ahead clarified.
‘By the hells,’ Theokon breathed, clearly astounded at what he saw.
Adraharsis merely smiled. How could he have doubted?
‘Bring us in,’ he said calmly. ‘And let us hear what they have to tell us.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I don’t remember him ever getting angry with the enemy. Not visibly so, anyway. But with us? Oh yes. By the Throne, he was always angry with us.
– Remark attributed to the primarch Roboute Guilliman, allegedly referring to his brother Rogal Dorn, recorded in
Archive XII of the Lemud V Apocrypha
How quickly it all turned, Archamus thought. Weeks ago – or was it months? – the world was reeling, in shock, unable to tell which way was north and which was south. Millions were at imminent risk of starvation, billions were staring at penury and ongoing strife. Now no one was talking about that. No one was talking about the fact that combat operations were still active across all of Terra’s administrative zones, and that Astartes kill teams were finding fresh targets every hour. No one was talking about the colossal movements of refugees into the Palace ruins, an exodus from the hinterland that was straining even the Ultramarines’ abilities to bring supplies down from orbit. No one mentioned, at least aloud, that the Emperor had not been seen by anyone outside of the Sanctum, that the Custodians seemed to be in some kind of psychic shock, that the wave of religious fervour that had surged up in the last days of the Siege had now dissipated entirely, something that might have been explained by the fact that rations were doled out only to those expressing fealty to the old Imperial Truth, or perhaps to the strange and unexpected withdrawal of that ineffable sense of the divine that few could even articulate, let alone mourn.
No, all that anyone spoke of now was the new war. The offensive. The taking back of initiative. For the first time in seven years, the Imperium was gearing up for a conquest that it would win. People should have been ecstatic about that; they should have been lining the streets and cheering in the way that they had done after Ullanor. But of course they weren’t. They were exhausted, ground down with illness and malnutrition and the baked-deep dread that came from so long under the hammer. They saluted still – they made the aquila, they bowed to the Astartes and they thanked them – but when the armoured giants had passed on they grumbled and swore, thinking themselves out of earshot. They had hoped that war might stop, at least for a time. They knew what its resumption would mean – food supplies going to the military, resources switched to the fleets. Perhaps some of the millions of refugees would drift back into the wilderness, risking the rads and the mutant dregs of the old conquering armies in order to scavenge for their own needs. Most would not – they would huddle in the growing slums, resentful but needy, powerless despite their vast numbers. Terra was not a world of self-sufficient farmers, even if its soils could have been made fertile again – it was a world of scholars and administrators, now reduced to peasants with no hope but to cling to their indifferent liberators for handouts.
Nor were many of the legionaries filled with enthusiasm. They might not have ever admitted it, but they were not immune to the general air of fatigue. Many of them, particularly the Space Wolves and the Dark Angels, would have been fired up by a zealous crusade again – the prospect of overtaking the masters of treachery and bringing vengeance to them at close quarters – but this was not that. This was the stepwise, cautious move of a tactician, designed to restore coherent borders. The fighting would be grim, taking on desperate defenders with nowhere to go, but it would never be glorious.
Was it facile of them to want glory? Should they not have rejoiced at new fighting, any fighting, if it restored the Imperium they had been created to defend? No, Archamus concluded. No, that was too much to ask, even for them. All their sacrifices had brought them nothing but more grind, more calculation of the percentages, and the warrior’s soul in each of them remained famished for something stronger. They yearned to be like Sigismund, and instead were being asked to be like the Sigillite.
