Horus Rising (24 page)

‘Dead,’ nodded Lucius. ‘You can look upon their cadavers if you wish. They’re over there. They were too slow.’

Weapon raised, Tarvitz pushed through the swaying stalks, some of them broken and snapped over by frantic bolter fire. He saw the two bodies, tangled amid fallen white shoots on the red earth, their beautiful purple and gold armour sawn apart and running with blood.

Dismayed, he looked away from the butchery. ‘Find Varrus,’ he told Kercort, and the man went off to locate the apothecary.

‘Did we kill anything?’ Bulle asked.

‘I hit something,’ Lucius said proudly, ‘but I cannot find the body. It left this behind.’ He held out the thing in his hand.

It was a limb, or part of a limb. Long, slender, hard. The main part of it, a metre long, was a gently curved blade, apparently made of brushed zinc or galvanised iron. It came to an astonishingly sharp point. It was thin, no thicker than a grown man’s wrist. The long blade ended in a widening joint, which attached it to a thicker limb section. This part was also armoured with mottled grey metal, but came to an abrupt end where Lucius’s shot had blown it off. The broken end, in cross-section, revealed a skin of metal surrounding a sleeve of natural, arthropoid chitin around an inner mass of pink, wet meat.

‘Is it an arm?’ Bulle asked.

‘It’s a sword,’ Katz corrected.

‘A sword with a joint?’ Bulle snorted. ‘And meat inside?’

Lucius grasped the limb, just above the joint, and brandished it like a sabre. He swung it at the nearest stalk, and it went clean through. With a lingering crash, the massive dry shoot toppled over, tearing into others as it fell.

Lucius started laughing, then he cried out in pain and dropped the limb. Even the base part of the limb, above the joint, had an edge, and it was so sharp that the force of his grip had bitten through his gauntlet.

‘It has cut me,’ Lucius complained, poking at his ruptured glove.

Tarvitz looked down at the limb, bent and still on the red soil. ‘Little wonder they can slice us to ribbons.’

Half an hour later, when the stalks shivered again, Tarvitz met his first megarachnid face to face. He killed it, but it was a close-run thing, over in a couple of seconds.

From that encounter, Saul Tarvitz began to understand why Khitas Frome had named the world Murder.

T
HE GREAT WARSHIP
exploded like a breaching whale from the smudge of un-light that was its retranslation point, and returned to the silent, physical cosmos of real space again with a shivering impact. It had translated twelve weeks earlier, by the ship-board clocks, and had made a journey that ought to have taken eighteen weeks. Great powers had been put into play to expedite the transit, powers that only a Warmaster could call upon.

It coasted for about six million kilometres, trailing the last, luminous tendrils of plasmic flare from its immense bulk, like remorae, until strobing flashes of un-light to stern announced the belated arrival of its consorts: ten light cruisers and five mass conveyance troopships. The stragglers lit their real space engines and hurried wearily to join formation with the huge flagship. As they approached, like a school of pups swimming close to their mighty parent, the flagship ignited its own drives and led them in.

Towards One Forty Twenty. Towards Murder.

Forward arrayed detectors pinged as they tasted the magnetic and energetic profiles of other ships at high anchor around the system’s fourth planet, eighty million kilometres ahead. The local sun was yellow and hot, and billowed with loud, charged particles.

As it advanced at the head of the trailing flotilla, the flagship broadcast its standard greeting document, in vox, vox-supplemented pict, War Council code, and astrotelepathic forms.

‘This is the
Vengeful Spirit
, of the 63rd Expedition. This vessel approaches with peaceful intent, as an ambassador of the Imperium of Man. House your guns and stand to. Make acknowledgement.’

On the bridge of the
Vengeful Spirit
, Master Comnenus sat at his station and waited. Given its great size and number of personnel, the bridge around him was curiously quiet. There was just a murmur of low voices and the whir of instrumentation. The ship itself was protesting loudly. Undignified creaks and seismic moans issued from its immense hull and layered decks as the superstructure relaxed and settled from the horrendous torsion stresses of warp translation.

Boas Comnenus knew most of the sounds like old friends, and could almost anticipate them. He’d been part of the ship for a long time, and knew it as intimately as a lover’s body. He waited, braced, for erroneous creaks, for the sudden chime of defect alarms.

So far, all was well. He glanced at the Master Companion of Vox, who shook his head. He switched his gaze to Ing Mae Sing who, though blind, knew full well he was looking at her.

‘No response, master,’ she said.

‘Repeat,’ he ordered. He wanted that signal response, but more particularly, he was waiting for the fix. It was taking too long. Comnenus drummed his steel fingers on the edge of his master console, and deck officers all around him stiffened. They knew, and feared, that sign of impatience.

Finally, an adjutant hurried over from the navigation pit with the wafer slip. The adjutant might have been about to apologise for the delay, but Comnenus glanced up at him with a whir of augmetic lenses. The whir said, ‘I do not expect you to speak.’ The adjutant simply held the wafer out for inspection.

Comnenus read it, nodded, and handed it back.

‘Make it known and recorded,’ he said. The adjutant paused long enough for another deck officer to copy the wafer for the principal transit log, then hurried up the rear staircase of the bridge to the strategium deck. There, with a salute, he handed it to the duty master, who took it, turned, and walked twenty paces to the plated glass doors of the sanctum, where he handed it in turn to the master bodyguard. The master bodyguard, a massive Astartes in gold custodes armour, read the wafer quickly, nodded, and opened the doors. He passed the wafer to the solemn, robed figure of Maloghurst, who was waiting just inside.

Maloghurst read the wafer too, nodded in turn, and shut the doors again.

‘Location is confirmed and entered into the log,’ Maloghurst announced to the sanctum. ‘One Forty Twenty.’

Seated in a high-backed chair that had been drawn up close to the window ports to afford a better view of the starfield outside, the Warmaster took a deep, steady breath. ‘Determination of passage so noted,’ he replied. ‘Let my acknowledgement be a matter of record.’ The twenty waiting scribes around him scratched the details down in their manifests, bowed and withdrew.

‘Maloghurst?’ The Warmaster turned his head to look at his equerry. ‘Send Boas my compliments, please.’

‘Yes, lord.’

The Warmaster rose to his feet. He was dressed in full ceremonial wargear, gleaming gold and frost white, with a vast mantle of purple scale-skin draped across his shoulders. The eye of Terra stared from his breastplate. He turned to face the ten Astartes officers gathered in the centre of the room, and each one of them felt that the eye was regarding him with particular, unblinking scrutiny.

‘We await your orders, lord,’ said Abaddon. Like the other nine, he was wearing battle plate with a floor length cloak, his crested helm carried in the crook of his left arm.

‘And we’re where we’re supposed to be,’ said Torgaddon, ‘and alive, which is always a good start.’

A broad smile crossed the Warmaster’s face. ‘Indeed it is, Tarik.’ He looked into the eyes of each officer in turn. ‘My friends, it seems we have an alien war to contest. This pleases me. Proud as I am of our accomplishments on Sixty-Three Nineteen, that was a painful fight to prosecute. I can’t derive satisfaction from a victory over our own kind, no matter how wrong-headed and stubborn their philosophies. It limits the soldier in me, and inhibits my relish of war, and we are all warriors, you and I. Made for combat. Bred, trained and disciplined. Except you pair,’ Horus smirked, nodding at Abaddon and Luc Sedirae. ‘You kill until I have to tell you to stop.’

‘And even then you have to raise your voice,’ added Torgaddon. Most of them laughed.

‘So an alien war is a delight to me,’ the Warmaster continued, still smiling. ‘A clear and simple foe. An opportunity to wage war without restraint, regret or remorse. Let us go and be warriors for a while, pure and undiluted.’

‘Hear, hear!’ cried the ancient Iacton Qruze, businesslike and sober, clearly bothered by Torgaddon’s constant levity. The other nine were more modest in their assent.

Horus led them out of the sanctum onto the strategium deck, the four captains of the Mournival and the company commanders: Sedirae of the Thirteenth, Qruze of the Third, Targost of the Seventh, Marr of the Eighteenth, Moy of the Nineteenth, and Goshen of the Twenty-Fifth.

‘Let’s have tactical,’ the Warmaster said.

Maloghurst was waiting, ready. As he motioned with his control wand, detailed hololithic images shimmered into place above the dais. They showed a general profile of the system, with orbital paths delineated, and the position and motion of tracked vessels. Horus gazed up at the hololithic graphics and reached out. Actuator sensors built into the fingertips of his gauntlets allowed him to rotate the hololithic display and bring certain segments into magnification. ‘Twenty-nine craft,’ he said. ‘I thought the 140th was eighteen vessels strong?’

‘So we were told, lord,’ Maloghurst replied. As soon as they had stepped out of the sanctum, they had started conversing in Cthonic, so as to preserve tactical confidence whilst in earshot of the bridge personnel. Though Horus had not been raised on Cthonia – uncommonly, for a primarch, he had not matured on the cradle-world of his Legion – he spoke it fluently. In fact, he spoke it with the particular hard palatal edge and rough vowels of a Western Hemispheric ganger, the commonest and roughest of Cthonia’s feral castes. It had always amused Loken to hear that accent. Early on, he had assumed it was because that’s how the Warmaster had learned it, from just such a speaker, but he doubted that now. Horus never did anything by accident. Loken believed that the Warmaster’s rough Cthonic accent was a deliberate affectation so that he would seem, to the men, as honest and low-born as any of them.

Maloghurst had consulted a data-slate provided by a waiting deck officer. ‘I confirm the 140th Expedition was given a complement of eighteen vessels.’

‘Then what are these others?’ asked Aximand. ‘Enemy ships?’

‘We’re awaiting sensor profile analysis, captain,’ Maloghurst replied, ‘and there has been no response to our signals as yet.’

‘Tell Master Comnenus to be… more emphatic,’ the Warmaster told his equerry.

‘Should I instruct him to form our components into a battle line, lord?’ Maloghurst asked.

‘I’ll consider it,’ the Warmaster said. Maloghurst limped away down the platform steps onto the main bridge to speak to Boas Comnenus.

‘Should we form a battle line?’ Horus asked his commanders.

‘Could the additional profiles be alien vessels?’ Qruze wondered.

‘It doesn’t look like a battle spread, Iacton,’ Aximand replied, ‘and Frome said nothing about enemy vessels.’

‘They’re ours,’ said Loken.

The Warmaster looked over at him. ‘You think so, Garviel?’

‘It seems evident to me, sir. The hits show a spread of ships at high anchor. Imperial anchorage formation. Others must have responded to the call for assistance.’ Loken trailed off, and suddenly fought back an embarrassed smile, ‘You knew that all along, of course, my lord.’

‘I was just wondering who else might have been sharp enough to recognise the pattern,’ Horus smiled. Qruze shook his head with a grin, sheepish at his own mistake.

The Warmaster nodded towards the display. ‘So, what’s this big fellow here? That’s a barge.’

‘The
Misericord
,’ suggested Qruze.

‘No, no,
that’s
the
Misericord
. And what’s
this
about?’ Horus leaned forwards, and ran his fingers across the hard light display. ‘It looks like… music. Something like music. Who’s transmitting music?’

‘Outstation relays,’ Abaddon said, studying his own data-slate. ‘Beacons. The 140th reported thirty beacons in the system grid. Xenos. Their broadcasts are repeating and untranslatable.’

‘Really? They have no ships, but they have outstation beacons?’ Horus reached out and changed the display to a close breakdown of scatter patterns. ‘This is untranslatable?’

‘So the 140th said,’ said Abaddon.

‘Have we taken their word for that?’ asked the Warmaster.

‘I imagine we have,’ said Abaddon.

‘There’s sense in this,’ Horus decided, peering at the luminous graphics. ‘I want this run. I want us to run it. Start with standard numeric blocks. With respect to the 140th, I don’t intend to take their word for anything. Cursed awful job they’ve done here so far.’

Abaddon nodded, and stepped aside to speak to one of the waiting deck officers and have the order enacted.

‘You said it looks like music,’ Loken said.

‘What?’

‘You said it looks like music, sir,’ Loken repeated. ‘An interesting word to choose.’

The Warmaster shrugged. ‘It’s mathematical, but there’s a sequential rhythm to it. It’s not random. Music and maths, Garviel. Two sides of a coin. This is deliberately structured. Lord knows which idiot in the 140th Fleet decided this was untranslatable.’

Loken nodded. ‘You see that, just by looking at it?’ he asked.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Horus replied.

Maloghurst returned. ‘Master Comnenus confirms all contacts are Imperial,’ he said, holding out another wafer slip of print out. ‘Other units have been arriving these last few weeks, in response to the calls for aid. Most of them are Imperial army conveyances en route to Carollis Star, but the big vessel is the
Proudheart
. Third Legion, the Emperor’s Children. A full company, under the command privilege of Lord Commander Eidolon.’

‘So, they beat us to it. How are they doing?’

Maloghurst shrugged. ‘It would seem… not well, lord,’ he said.