Warhawk, p.43
Warhawk, page 43
‘To the extent possible.’
He looked away from her, and out over the parapet’s edge. On the western horizon, far beyond the tract of land he was already beginning to think of as the Colossi Run, the storm clouds were gathering in intensity, angrier and darker.
‘You can’t go back,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Then, I mean…’ He turned back to her. ‘I could still use a driver.’
‘Absolutely. I intend to continue.’
That was good news. It explained, in hindsight, why she had been so damned good. Legion-trained. The very best.
‘And afterwards?’
Dresi laughed. As far as he could remember, that was the very first time. ‘Afterwards? You think we will see an afterwards?’ She shook her head. ‘Throne, I do not know. A Leman Russ is much the same as a Land Raider on the inside. Maybe there will be a way to continue.’
She looked over at Aika 73.
‘Not a bad thing to drive, despite the reputation,’ she said, almost affectionately. ‘What more can you ask? It kept us alive.’
As did the machine. Maybe. Or maybe all that was left of him was a collection of physical remnants, just preserved inside a vile contraption that looked more like a torture device than a medicae unit.
Ilya hadn’t left his side. Her general’s uniform by itself didn’t guarantee her access to the very heart of the Sanctum, but her face was familiar from the time she’d spent cultivating contacts in the run-up to Horus’ arrival. And having Sojuk there had been an advantage too – the White Scar had shed his equanimity for something more menacing, and that had opened doors.
She didn’t remember much of the journey in. Sojuk hadn’t spoken about it. By rights it should have been impossible, but then again the air-lanes had been almost cleared by the wholesale slaughter in the weeks beforehand, giving them the slender chance they had needed. And Sojuk was an exceptional pilot. And maybe, for once, the fates had been on their side.
From the receiving stations in the Palatine Ring, they had been hurried into the heart of the Sanctum, and then down, down a long way. They had passed through chambers Ilya had never got close to before. If she had not been so preoccupied with the cargo she escorted, she might have taken a closer look at them, and observed how old they were, and how different they looked to any Imperial structures she’d seen elsewhere.
Now they were in the care of the Sigillite’s people. Those all wore robes of deep green, and ghosted through the shadows with a lifetime’s habituation to the dark. Their skin, where exposed, was drained of colour, threaded with augmetics of strange design. They had an unsettling way of looking at you, as if they were focusing on a spot just off to one side, a fraction too deep behind your eyes.
She had been grateful when one of the senior officials, a man named Khalid Hassan, had come to speak to them. He, at least, had looked relatively normal.
‘The Sigillite has been summoned,’ Hassan had told them. ‘He will be here as soon as he can. Please, wait here – I shall see you are looked after.’
That wait had felt like hours. It was during then that the great machinery had been wheeled out, with its serpentine cabling and its frosted glass panes, hissing with vapours and hauled on long segmented tracks. Forests of instruments had been hoisted overhead on cantilevered arms, all of it gnarled and ancient-looking. What remained of the primarch had disappeared into the heart of all that, and after that Ilya had only caught glimpses of him, lost behind a clicking menagerie of arcana.
Malcador himself had come eventually, bustling through the outer portals, his cowl thrown back, his age-creased face lined with concern.
‘You delivered him?’ he had demanded brusquely.
‘I did, lord,’ she had said.
He had grasped her hand, squeezing it hard with his own desiccated claws. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
Then he’d disappeared too, clambering into the tangled core of the ever-expanding nexus of instrumentation, followed by cadres of esoteric assistants in full-length environment suits and reflective face masks.
Ilya and Sojuk were permitted to remain as promised, out of the way, but only by a door’s width. It was left partially open, so she could see just a corner of the great device. One of its many panels was embossed with the numeral V, which made her wonder just how old it was, and what its origin had been.
After that, the real wait began. Ilya slumped against the bare rock wall, sitting on a shelf cut into it. Sojuk stood next to her.
All her infirmities rushed back in that moment. She suddenly felt her age. She felt her frailty, the footsteps of the impending demise that she had been stalling for so long that it had become almost comical.
‘He knew,’ she said. Her thin voice echoed oddly in those eerie catacombs.
Sojuk turned to her. ‘If he did it, then it was necessary.’
Shiban had told her that too, a long time ago. Killing is nothing without beauty, and it may only be beautiful if it is necessary. But this hadn’t been beautiful. Nothing about it was beautiful – it had been ugly, horrific, without any of the art that she knew he venerated.
‘You felt it,’ she said. ‘You all did. He died, Sojuk.’
Sojuk didn’t look like he wanted to speculate. ‘The arch of heaven hides many mysteries. Let them do their work. This was where they were made.’
Easy to say, harder to do. She had to sit back, and wait. A lifetime of doing, of making choices and giving orders. In the chamber beyond, she heard drills going in. She heard lines being clicked into place. She heard the murmur of quiet, competent voices.
She let her head fall back against the stone. She was exhausted, but she wouldn’t sleep.
There is always a Great Khan.
She clenched her fists. She had to stay awake.
Let them do their work.
For the labour had only just begun. The survivors of the Legion, already driven to the extremes of endurance, were now tasked with securing what they had won. The space port remained dangerous – the White Scars controlled its borders, had mastery of its major systems now, but many areas were still too foul to enter or remained teeming with nightmares. The long lines of battlements had yet to be compassed, the collapsed areas shored up, the power fully restored and fresh sources of untainted supplies located.
So Shiban never stopped working. Jangsai worked alongside him, and slowly what remained of the Legion command joined them. Ganzorig was among those, though Qin Fai had been killed in action, as had Naranbaatar and the greater part of the zadyin arga. The attempt to count the full tally of the dead and extract surviving gene-seed had only just started, hampered by the need to burn the enemy corpses lest plague begin to spread again.
For all that, the port was theirs for as long as they had the power to defend it. The great palls of psychic despondency had lifted, replaced by a more prosaic weariness that could be fought through. As a result, once the raw business of survival had been attended to, once the reconstruction and defensive work was fully underway, thoughts swiftly turned to what came next. What could be done. What must be done.
‘Any news from the core?’ asked Ganzorig, standing awkwardly amid the ruins on a shattered and roughly splinted leg.
Jangsai shook his head. ‘They would not risk the transmission, even if there was.’
‘It matters not,’ said Shiban. ‘It must be now as he always wished for – not to defend, but to attack.’
To repress that urge for so long had been the greatest challenge, for it was just as he had told Torghun, all the way back on Chondax, before any awareness of heresy had even reached them. We must fight in the way we were born to fight.
‘We can barely man the walls,’ said Ganzorig sceptically. ‘Do we have the strength?’
‘Not over land,’ said Shiban. ‘Our war there is done, unless they dare to come at us themselves.’ He gestured upward, and cracked a grin under his battered helm. ‘But we have the guns. We get them working, we power them up.’
They all started to visualise it. It wouldn’t be easy. But then, nothing worth doing ever was.
‘Then we do what we came here for,’ said Shiban fiercely. ‘Target the fleet.’
This book tries to do two things. The first is to be the sixth instalment in the Siege of Terra series. The second is to complete the story of the White Scars in the Horus Heresy. That’s a tricky balancing act to attempt – it would be very easy to sell either or both of those goals short – but it felt like the right thing to try. Two novels, a novella and a raft of short stories have told the tale of the Khan getting back to Terra in time to contribute to the defence of the Throneworld, so it was important to give that contribution a proper telling. At the same time, the previous books in the Siege series have set up so many fantastic narrative through-lines – characters, ideas, ongoing battles – that these needed to be given equal care and attention. The result was a great deal of thinking before I got close to actually starting to write – no book I’ve written before has come near the amount of head-scratching over structure and content as this one, nor has one attempted to combine so much continuity into a single narrative space.
Here are some of the things I thought were important during that process, and how I tried to address them.
The White Scars
The core idea of the V Legion throughout the Heresy was born of necessity. Before the books came along, they had almost no background at all, and so deciding what to do with them required some thought. In the end, the real-world situation became the fictional-world situation – their very lack of background became their defining feature. They were unknowable, obscure, hard to pin down. The stories themselves all followed from that – the schism between factions in Scars, the desperate attempt to fight their way home in The Path of Heaven. None of that has any basis in the established lore, though hopefully it fits well enough with it.
This time around, things were slightly different. The little we know about the White Scars in the Heresy pretty much all comes from the Siege story. Some of these snippets are part of published lore, others more like urban myth. Four key elements are:
– The White Scars’ main action in the story is to retake the Lion’s Gate space port from the enemy. They achieve this in conjunction with Terran tanks, then use the port’s guns to hinder further landings.
– A mysterious object known as the ‘Sky Fortress’ attempts to bring the Khan back to the Inner Palace once this is achieved, but fails, crashing into the ground.
– The Khan, for some reason, is not present when the loyal primarchs accompany the Emperor up to the Vengeful Spirit for the final confrontation.
– The Khan rides a Land Raider/Rhino/Razorback (take your pick) out of the Eternity Gate and into the besieging hordes.[1]
What we’ve tried to do in all the Siege stories is honour these old fragments, even if we couldn’t always incorporate them just as they appeared in the past. So I wanted to get all of these snippets into the novel, albeit revised in order to fit into the broader story we were trying to tell.
The final element of the scenario was the Death Guard. Mortarion had been the White Scars’ antagonist in both their Heresy novels, and having the final confrontation between these two primarchs immediately felt like the way to make the clash at the space port a suitably epic encounter. It would create an extra dimension to the conflict – making it about revenge, not just capturing the guns – as well as providing the climax of the book. After all, the clash had been prefigured from the very start, with Yesugei’s visions of the Khan’s death being seeded all the way back in Scars. This did create its own problem, though: how is it conceivable that the Khan, powerful as he is, could ever beat Mortarion, a newly ascended daemon primarch, on what has become his own territory?
The answer to this problem gave me an answer to one of the points above: why the Khan played no major role in the final stages of the story. He played no role because the possibility of emerging intact from a fight with Mortarion was zero. Even if he won, he’d be so damaged by the encounter that he’d have been effectively taken out of the game. Just going up against Mortarion would be an act of bravery so colossal that only a primarch would be mad enough to undertake it. That thinking shaped the entire fight, and led to the idea that the Khan’s sacrifice is what gives the White Scars the impetus to take the port against a nominally superior enemy. Mortarion has every advantage, save for this: he can no longer die. The fight means more to the one who is staking everything on it, and, by extension, it means more to his Legion. The gifts of Chaos are powerful indeed, but they contain within them, by necessity, the seeds of their own destruction.
And so the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The ‘tank charge’ would no longer be a triumphant sortie into enemy territory, but a funeral procession out of the ruined port. The ‘Sky Fortress’ of the old lore would be the ‘Skye plate’ from Guy Haley’s story ‘Duty Waits’. Rather than ferrying primarchs around from pillar to post, it would be the means by which the White Scars prevented their gauntlet run being smashed apart from orbit.[2] The White Scars would take the port, aided by an army cobbled together by their counsellor, Ilya Ravallion. The cost of doing this would be so grievous that it would end their involvement in the story, making this their achievement, their lasting contribution to history, and the culmination of everything done up to that point.
So old real-world sources become transmuted into new fictional-world ones, and the V Legion’s story in the Heresy era comes to its conclusion. It feels very sad now, with all the writing done, to have reached the end of that road. I’m extremely attached to the Scars, and they have been very good to me. In truth, though, their long story was always about their final stand on Terra, and whether they would prove worthy of the test. As Shiban Khan says, in the very first novella featuring the Legion, one that takes place in the glory days of the Crusade before they knew anything about the Heresy:
‘I sometimes imagined how I would feel if we ever came up against a foe we could not defeat, where nothing remained but to fall back, again and again, weakening further with every encounter, watching the lifeblood slowly drain out of those around us as the noose tightened. I hoped and believed that I would do as they did, and keep fighting.’
That sentiment was the one that I used to guide everything I ever wrote about them. I hope that the younger Shiban would have been proud of how his Legion acquitted themselves when the test finally came about. I also hope that readers who followed his journey all the way from Chondax to Terra will feel the same way.
The Death Guard
The Lion’s Gate space port battle is a victory for the White Scars. But that doesn’t mean that their enemies, the Death Guard, are by extension uninteresting or weak. Occasionally, readers can assume that when a writer depicts a faction losing an encounter that they must dislike them, or be somehow ‘biased’ in favour of the winners. This can be a frustrating criticism – if no one ever truly lost or won battles, then every Black Library book would be a series of sterile draws. I love the Death Guard – I think they’re one of the most fascinating factions in the entire background. I knew they would have to lose this battle, and lose it decisively, but I wanted to give them a good showing. They’re a serious enemy, with a culture and a lore just as rich as the White Scars.
This played out in two ways. The first was the aspect of the Death Guard as being new to Chaos. They emerge out of the warp and pile straight into the action. Unlike the World Eaters or the Word Bearers, say, they didn’t have years of close interaction with daemons before the Siege. They have had involvement with the daemonic before, and have fought alongside some deeply corrupted allies, but, somewhat like the Iron Warriors, they kept pushing full immersion away, trying to have the best of both worlds. By the time they arrive at the Palace, they’re just getting to grips with what their big change – their ‘Doom’ – really means. They’re more powerful, but haven’t yet worked out how to use it all. Naturally enough, they’re thinking hard about the consequences. Some are sceptical, like Morarg, and others are enthusiastic, like Crosius. This is something that they’ll take with them all the way into 40K, prefiguring the kind of tension that exists between, say, Vorx and Dragan in The Lords of Silence.
The second aspect was the role of Mortarion. I was very conscious throughout the book that I wanted him to be a terrifying enemy, one that you would think twice before going up against. Part of that came from his evident power – the fact that he can create a warp-suffused fortress of decay on Terra itself and send waves of despair rippling across the entire Palace. The other part came from a re-examination of his actions prior to the Siege kicking off. And this is where we get into properly dicey territory.
Full disclosure: I’ve never fully understood the traditional account of the Doom of the Death Guard. Chaos normally works by getting its hooks into some kind of character weakness, prodding and cajoling until its victim sees the benefit of accepting its gifts. It’s a Faustian bargain. Just like with vampires, you have to make the choice to invite it in. And yet, the old background of the Doom had two strange features: it didn’t appear as if Mortarion had very much to do with what happened, and there was nothing much in the way of a bargain, just a massive application of force before the Legion eventually gave up and accepted their fate. And this, from the Death Guard, of all Legions, never quite felt right to me.
So emerged the dialogue between Morarg and the Remnant. I thought very long and hard about including this. Some will no doubt dislike the implied changes in motivation. Others will feel that it overrides existing lore, including in both Horus Heresy and 40K novels. I don’t take that lightly. In the end, though, I thought that the idea of Mortarion having more control over events was compelling enough to put forward. The facts of the Death Guard’s fall remain the same, but what Mortarion knows, and, crucially, when he chooses to act, have a different spin put on them. In themselves, those are tiny shifts in focus. Their implications, though, are significant. My hope was, by presenting everything together, to make Mortarion’s various portrayals part of a coherent character journey, as well as place weight on the fact that he’s in charge of his fate. His many zigzags aren’t born of weakness, but the result of being placed in an impossible position, recognising his own limitations, and eventually acting to overcome them.
