A WORLD OF STORMS
1
The Hex was a long blade of a ship, an ancient strike cruiser of a kind rarely seen in Imperial skies, modified down the generations with additional weapons, fighter bays, hull space and armour that should have left her hideous. She was a killer, a grand lady thousands of years old, and she looked both cantankerous and utterly lethal. I loved her the moment I set eyes on her.
In Devout Abjuration sailed at her side, lost in the larger ship’s shadow. The Hex’s captain refused any further contact after the curt command that we sail with them to Nemeton.
They guided us in over the course of several hours. Their approach vector seemed erratic at first, as the Hex flew in long arcs, avoiding entire spheres of space, rather than cut a straight line to the distant planet. The Abjuration shifted and swayed around as she followed her newfound sister. When we were slow to course-correct and cling to the Hex’s trail, we were granted a single, brief message from the Hex’s captain, ordering us to follow her with more care if we valued our lives.
‘Mines,’ Kartash said. ‘They’re leading us on a course through minefields.’
For that to be true, it spoke of a conflict exceeding our bitterest expectations. Tyberia looked at him as if he’d spoken rank idiocy. ‘No one would mine their home system,’ she said.
Kartash was implacable. ‘The Spears have.’
He saw that Tyberia was ready to object, doubtless citing the threats to navigation and the unprecedented nature of such a defence, but he quieted her with naked logic. ‘Can you suggest any other plausible reason for the divergent courses being plotted?’
She could not. Nor could I.
Before we reached orbit, Amadeus ordered us to machine him into his armour. It took two hours and forty-seven minutes of chanting, blessing and ritualised effort before the final section of battleplate was drill-locked into place. Once it was done, he moved through his full range of motion, articulating every joint to its extreme, repeatedly testing every compression and lengthening of his fibre-bundle muscle cabling. This took a further three minutes and forty seconds.
When he was satisfied, he stood motionless. Recognising the signal to continue, we bound his pistol holster to his hip, and fastened his belt pouches and grenade arsenal around his waist. Last of all, we presented him most reverently with his deactivated powerblade, sheathed in a scabbard of priceless leather from the flagellated backs of Terran pilgrims, and his heavily modified bolter, which required one of the servitors to lift in its hydraulic hands.
Many Space Marine Chapters have traditions of naming their weapons, granting honour to the machine-spirits within. Amadeus, an exemplar of the Mentor Legion, was disinclined to follow such a custom. His sword was named Fulvus only because its creator had named it so. The blade was a gift, granted to Amadeus by a forgewright of the Desolators Chapter. Along its length were the words ‘For the blood of traitors, I thirst. For the honour of angels, I slay.’ I always cleaned that acid-etched declaration with the care of handling a holy relic. To my master, the words were nothing more than blood channels to make the blade more efficient.
Amadeus was similarly without sentiment with his firearm. He referred to his boltgun as VCK-XA-1719, the weapon’s serial number, assigned when it was forged aboard one of the Mentors’ foundry ships a century ago.
Once he stood ready, he conveyed no gratitude to us. We were slaves, we expected none. He simply walked from the chamber. I watched through his eyes as he moved through the ship, slowed by needing to force jammed bulkheads open, making his way around hallways blocked by debris.
He paused on one of the remaining observation ramparts lining In Devout Abjuration’s damaged spine. There he lingered, watching the ringed planet Nemeton turn beneath him. Elara’s Veil, the nebula, stained the stars red around us. Behind us, like a bruise in the void, was the chasm of black poison we call the Cicatrix Maledictum, the Great Rift. Back the way we came was the true Imperium, and the Straits of Epona running through the wound that cut mankind’s empire in two. It would be visible from the surface of every world in Elara’s Veil as a rip torn across their skies. There could be no starker reminder of the galaxy’s frailty.
And there was Nemeton, home world of the Emperor’s Spears. Its surface was half hidden by a thick caul of cloud, and its visible landmasses were slivers of geography amidst oceans that drowned most of the planet. Lightning flickered in the guts of those clouds, bathing the surface in storms. The Rings of Nemeton, kaleidoscopic from afar, were a danger to navigation up close. To call them mundane would do an injustice to their pale blue beauty, but in orbit they were nothing more than rocks of ice, ranging from the scale of mountains to the size of my master’s fist.
Amadeus had meticulously studied his destination. We all had. Now we witnessed the memorised lore playing out before our eyes, in harmony with the active scanning data from the ship’s sensors spilling down each of our retinal feeds. We looked upon the one and only world of the vast blue sun Ophion, on the edge of Elara’s Veil.
We also saw Bellona for the first time. The archives stated that when the tribes of Nemeton looked skywards through the rain clouds, they saw their world’s bright moon as the Emperor’s eye gazing down upon them. The primitives apparently considered this a sign of favour for their storm-choked planet. My view was somewhat less romantic. Scan-lists and population factoring streamed down the inside of my eyes, detailing Bellona for what it truly was: an allied Adeptus Mechanicus forge-moon of grey industry and silver rock. All our readings told the same tale: a moon of armoured spires and bunkered fastnesses, sheltering beneath an orbital defence array that bristled with torpedo platforms and shipyard docking rings. Bellona was militarised almost to the extent of a true forge world.
It was the Bellonan fleetyards that captured my master’s eye more than all else. Though they stood mostly empty, the significance of their scale wasn’t lost on any of us. This was no mere shipyard; this was an orbital installation the size of a hive city, constructed to serve an armada. I watched through his eyes as a frigate in the red-and-black plating of the Adeptus Mechanicus slowly pulled free of her moorings, backing out on thrusters for several minutes until she had the clearance to come about and sail away from orbit.
The fleet in-system was still sizeable, a portion of what was surely a far larger host. The Hex was the largest capital ship, sistered with a strike cruiser of almost equal size, plated in broken armour of burnished gold. She was docked, buried in repair gantries, swarming with mechnician shuttles. Whatever foe she’d been fighting before coming to Nemeton had mauled her almost unto death. A lion’s head showed on her flank, jaw wide, fangs bared, roaring into the void. I heard Amadeus exhale softly.
‘Scan that vessel,’ he ordered Captain Engel on the bridge.
The reply came back at once, ‘The Kai’manah, lord.’
Amadeus made no comment on the existence of a vessel believed to have been destroyed a century ago. He merely tuned his vox-link back to our private channel.
‘Record all you see,’ he commanded us. ‘And take note of what you don’t.’
‘The fortress-monastery,’ said Kartash. ‘I see no sign of a Chapter fortress on Nemeton.’
‘Exactly so,’ Amadeus concurred. ‘Further notation – one of the capital ships in high orbit is a Cardinal-class heavy cruiser in the colours of the Emperor’s Spears. A most adamant violation of the Codex Astartes.’ He sounded cold, but I took the words as an observation rather than a judgement. They required no reply.
‘Do you disapprove, master?’ Tyberia ventured, in her ingratiating tone. It was as if she spoke only to show Amadeus that she was paying attention.
‘I do not know, Helot Tertius. The law of the frontier seems to prevail here. Desperation has forced their hands.’
Nor was it the only sin on display. We counted six more vessels in the flotilla that conformed to Standard Template Construct patterns barred from use by the Adeptus Astartes. A Space Marine Chapter using Imperial Navy vessels, scavenged or otherwise, within its own fleet was most severely punishable in other, better circumstances. But it wasn’t his place to offer judgement, let alone punishment. He’d come to observe. Imperial forces on the Nihilus side of the Rift were known to be fighting against destruction. Nothing would be achieved by taking them to task on transgressions of law made in the name of staving off extinction.
Nemeton’s principal defence in the absence of a fortress-monastery – and if one chose not to count the incredible might of Bellona itself – was its orbital array. Thousands of weapon satellites controlled by monotasked machine-spirits orbited great launch platforms armed with torpedo banks and laser batteries. An Imperial Navy Grail-class carrier had been void-beached and converted to form the core of a high-orbit battle station. Her name no longer showed, her identity banished with her new role. Bellonan fighter craft flitted around her, ugly wasps of Martian red iron.
All of this might in the night sky, defending barbarians that knew next to nothing of its existence. From the surface, the array’s individual components would blend in with the starfield and Nemeton’s beautiful rings.
Part of Lieutenant Commander Incarius’ preparation necessitated studying the belief systems of Nemeton’s tribes. They were barbaric in every definition of the word: a melange of blood sacrifice and sky worship beneath the gaze of ancestor spirits who supposedly dwelled at the God-Emperor’s side.
‘They are as ignorant as the Cretacian clans,’ my master had once commented aloud in his cell, while reading translations of ancient Nemetese scrolls.
‘Master?’ At the time Tyberia had looked up from where she knelt in silent contemplation across the chamber. Her half-lidded eyes showed her surprise in the shadows of her hood. ‘You have need of us?’
Our lord ignored the question, going back to his reading.
On the observation deck, Amadeus still stared at the world turning so slowly beneath us. The landmasses of Nemeton, such as they are on an oceanic world, possessed no buildings above a primitive level of technology. The planet’s island-continents and archipelago chains seemed wholly given over to forested mountains. Everywhere we looked, everywhere we scanned, there was nothing but knuckly peaks capped with snow, their sides blanketed in evergreen trees.
Of high civilisation we saw no sign, only the memory of cities. Ruins, abandoned generations ago, now devoured by the forests or sunk into the landscape. More curious still, these ruins were of marble, yet orbital auspices denied the presence of that precious stone occurring naturally on Nemeton. The marble was quarried elsewhere in the galaxy and brought to this world through the void.
Someone had tried to imprint civilisation here. Evidently they failed.
Some unspoken instinct lifted my master’s gaze from the watery world, to the heavens lit a hazy scarlet by the trails of Elara’s Veil. Dust. Reflective dust, scattered in bloom-clouds and trailing tendrils, too thin to hinder visibility or interfere with a warship’s systems. Just a smattering of random light on the cosmic canvas.
Amadeus left the observation deck. He didn’t need to tell anyone of his destination. There was only one place he would be going. I informed Captain Engel that our master was on his way.
2
We weren’t permitted to fall into orbit. Instead, as the Hex completed its overbearing escort run, its captain commanded us to anchor in the void out of deployment range. Three other vessels left Nemeton’s orbit on intercept courses. Our sensors also chimed as we detected the minimal radiation from tight-beam auspex scans originating all the way from the forge-moon Bellona.
The Cardinal-class cruiser and two destroyers drifted into optimal lance range, yet none of the ships granted us a visual link upon our requests. They didn’t greet us or welcome us. They circled us in loose formation, weapons locked. Their stellar dance seemed a performance of almost weary aggression. Every ship in the defence fleet showed markings of recent wounds.
The Hex contacted us first with a less-than-charming hail consisting of a single word.
‘Well?’
My master gestured for the vox-link to remain open. ‘I am Lieutenant Commander Amadeus Kaias Incarius of the Mentors Chapter, commanding the warship In Devout Abjuration. We ran the Straits of Epona and emerged forty-three days ago.’
There was a pause. The Hex’s captain’s voice, crackling over the bridge’s speakers, was inhumanly low but unmistakably alive. Not a servitor, nor a machine-spirit. A Space Marine commanded the strike cruiser.
‘And here you are,’ was the man’s answer. ‘Now state your purpose.’
‘I was sent by my Chapter Master, Nisk Ran-Thawll, to act as emissary to the Sentinels of the Veil.’
‘Very well. What is it you wish to say to us, emissary?’
Amadeus hesitated in the face of their abruptness bordering on hostility. I could almost feel him weighing his words, and deliberating on how much truth they should be laced with. He wouldn’t lie, I was certain of that, but there are degrees of honesty in all diplomatic engagements.
He told the truth. The whole truth, as I understood it then.
‘I was sent to see if Elara’s Veil still holds against the enemy. To see if the Lions and the Spears still live, still fight.’
‘We still live,’ came the reply. ‘And we still fight.’
Amadeus waited for more. After ten seconds, it became clear that more wasn’t coming.
‘It gratifies me to hear that, brother,’ my master said. ‘Lord Commander Guilliman seeks to construct an evolving picture of the riven Imperium. I have further orders to assess the disposition of the forces in Elara’s Veil. Once I have gathered this information, I will return through the Great Rift and carry word of your war to the Primarch Reborn.’
A pause. A breath. Did they believe us? Did they even believe we were Imperial? Over a century had passed since this region was connected to the true Imperium. What suspicions had grown in the hundred years since these warriors last saw the Emperor’s Light?
‘A boarding party has been launched,’ was the Hex’s reply. ‘If we are satisfied with what we find aboard your vessel, and your words match your deeds, you will be allowed to make planetfall.’
The link went dead.
‘Informal, aren’t they?’ remarked Captain Engel, standing at Amadeus’ side, looking up at the oculus. I looked at him through my master’s eyes. The grey of his hair. The tightness at the edge of his mouth and eyes. He had aged a decade in the months since we’d set out. We all had.
Amadeus didn’t reply to Engel; he spoke only to us. ‘Helots, I will deal with the boarding party while you make ready for planetfall.’
‘Yes, lord,’ Kartash’s voice returned on our behalf. ‘Your will be done.’
Tyberia asked, in a fawning tone I had become used to over the last months, if our master required anything more before the mission’s commencement.
Amadeus terminated the vox-link without answering.
‘Why did you ask that?’ I looked across our communal chamber to Tyberia. ‘If he had any other requirements, he’d state them with his original orders.’
Tyberia bristled, suddenly defensive. ‘I seek only to meet our master’s needs.’
I offered my next words carefully, aware that although the three of us had survived a great deal together, we scarcely knew one another. ‘With respect, Tyberia, I believe you risk being too servile.’
She cringed from me, in disagreement rather than discomfort, and walked away.
‘Remember, this is her first deployment,’ said Kartash. The hunchback had a gentle voice, matching his gentle eyes. You trusted him on sight. Everyone did. ‘And she was trained aboard the Eunoia.’
The Eunoia. The Mentors flagship. I’d been trained aboard one of the Chapter’s deep-void runners, the Vanguard-class light cruiser Mitrah. As much as Tyberia seemed sycophantic and self-conscious, did I appear rural and imprecise to her, failing to meet the standards she’d come to expect? I didn’t enjoy that thought.
‘Leave it,’ Kartash advised me. ‘She will learn.’ He shook his head to ward off further conversation, and commanded the servitors to begin their duties.
3
Amadeus met the boarding party in the hangar bay. He went with Captain Engel, and both men stood in the avian shadow cast by the incoming Overlord. My master chose Kartash to watch through his eyes, consigning Tyberia and I to work with the servitors.
Yet I divided my attention, working and watching through Amadeus’ eye-lenses as the azure gunship drifted in and down, venting from its boosters as its landing claws kissed the hangar deck. It settled with a pneumatic whine, and its engines began the droning song of cycling down.
‘Helot Secundus,’ my master intoned. ‘Sever this connection.’
The gunship’s gang ramp lowered with hydraulic complaint. I saw silhouettes in the Overlord’s crew bay: the cloaked figures of skitarii warriors, and a taller figure, his helmet crested, his ceramite war-plate graven with the image of a trident, the three-bladed spear.
‘But master…’
‘Now, Anuradha.’
I deactivated the link, blinding myself to my master’s doings and plunging back into my own surroundings. Tyberia was smiling to herself as she racked her weapons in their crates. Evidently, she’d been listening in over the vox.
4
When Kartash entered our chambers after almost an hour, his expression was grave.
‘We’re permitted to make planetfall,’ he said. ‘We will be met by an officer named Brêac.’
‘That’s what we wanted,’ I replied. ‘So why do you look so concerned?’
Kartash mused over how best to phrase his observations. ‘Relations between our master and the Spears are likely to be difficult.’
‘We were prepared for that,’ I pointed out. ‘We expected no less.’
Kartash gave a grunt that wasn’t quite agreement. Tyberia raised an eyebrow at his hesitation. Her own suspicion was mounting.
‘Define “difficult”,’ she said.