The Ebonite Archymsts 23 страница

‘Better this than a shift at the fans,’ said Ptolea, moving on.

Coryn and Sullax joined her and they moved deeper into the slice cut in the rock. A hundred metres or so away, a shimmer of light lit the far end of the furrow. Clearly whatever had fallen here was still white hot. They approached cautiously, but as the distance closed, Coryn began to realise that what he was seeing was not the remains of a crashed satellite or a downed spaceship.

He didn’t know what it was.

It was light, a cohering illumination that filled the end of the valley with its brilliant glow. Coryn stared at it, trying to pin some kind of form upon it, but all he could see were fleeting images and shapes: eyes, golden wings, a thousand wheels turning like the heart of the mightiest machine, multiple impossibly latticed genetic helices interleaving in a billion times a billion complex ways.

‘What the bastard hell is that thing?’ demanded Sullax, unlimbering the single-shot rifle he carried. ‘Is is dangerous?’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Coryn. ‘But I don’t think it’s dangerous.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Ptolea.

‘I just do,’ said Coryn, and he did. Though he did not know how he knew, he appreciated that whatever this light was, it had not come to harm them. He moved towards the light as it began to coil into itself, reshaping its form into something wondrous, a being reborn in its own self-immolation.

He felt something brush his mind, a presence greater than anything he could possibly have imagined. Everything he was, it knew. Everything he knew, it knew. He felt no violation at this, the presence was wholly benign. Tentative even, like a hand offered in friendship to a beautiful stranger.

As the light was pulled into itself, a shape began to form, and Coryn gasped as he saw what lay at its heart.

A baby boy, as perfect as any born to one of the gene-pure hermetics.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sullax.

‘It’s impossible,’ added Ptolea.

‘No,’ said Coryn, kneeling beside the baby. ‘It’s the miracle we’ve been waiting for.’

The child’s skin was radiant, as though the light that had surrounded him had been somehow incorporated into his very flesh. The baby gurgled happily at the sight of him and reached up to him with a smile that seemed far too knowing for something that had only just come into being.

‘Don’t touch it,’ warned Sullax. ‘It could be dangerous.’

‘It’s only a baby,’ said Coryn. ‘Babies aren’t dangerous.’

‘You don’t know what it is,’ said Sullax. ‘We should kill it and be done.’

‘Kill him?’ snapped Coryn. ‘What are you talking about?’

Sullax drew his knife. ‘It’s an orphan, and you know the rules about orphans. They don’t get to be a burden on the rest of us.’

‘We’re not killing him,’ said Coryn, lifting the baby into his arms. The child’s flesh was warm to the touch and that warmth spread into every cell of Coryn’s body in a fiercely protective surge.

‘Put the knife away,’ said Ptolea.

‘Trust me, I’ll be doing us a favour if I take the knife to its neck,’ said Sullax. ‘Who’s going to raise it? You? Him? You don’t need that extra burden when it’s not blood of your blood.’

‘I said put the knife down,’ said Ptolea as the light of the baby spread over her face.

‘No,’ hissed Sullax, reaching to snatch the baby from Coryn’s arms.

Ptolea’s bullet punched out through the back of Sullax’s head, and he dropped to his knees before toppling onto his side. Blood pooled at their feet, and though Coryn knew he should be shocked at the killing of his work-brother, he felt nothing.

Sullax’s death left him cold.

He saw that Ptolea understood, her face radiant and free of any guilt at taking the shot.

Sullax had threatened the perfect child and had suffered accordingly.

Coryn looked down as he heard a gurgle of something liquid at his feet and saw a trickle of water running from a crack in the ground where the baby boy had lain. That trickle grew to a steady flow, until crystal-clear water was pouring from the depths of the earth in a river. Water flowed around them, washing the blood and chem-dust from their boots and filling the air with its purity.

‘He brought the waters,’ said Coryn, handing the baby boy to Ptolea. She cradled his tiny body with a love the equal of any new mother holding her child for the first time. Coryn took the chapbook from his shirt pocket and flicked through its pages, heedless of the paper fragments that fell from its crumbling spine and disintegrated in the water.

‘Look,’ he said, tears flowing down his face as he held the book out to Ptolea.

The pages depicted an ancient creation myth, a purple-hued god rising from primordial waters to bring life to a barren world where nothing ever grew, but which was now reborn as a fertile paradise.

‘Who is that?’ asked Ptolea.

‘It’s the water-bringer,’ said Coryn. ‘Fulgrim.’

EIGHTEEN

See it Done
Crone World
City of the Dead Exacting attention to detail had served Perturabo well in his centuries of life. In war and at peace, he revelled in the minutiae of any given task, be it reducing an alien fortress to rubble or establishing the golden ratio within every portion of a theoretical design. Angron had berated him for wasting time on irrelevant details, while Guilliman had lauded him for his thoroughness.

Two very different characters, two very different opinions.

Both were correct in their own way, but neither fully appreciated his methodology or the bitter drive behind his exacting preferences. The need to be better, the urge to prove his worth beyond taking the metal to the stone.

Perturabo was a craftsman, and to be worthy of the appellation, every piece of work that bore his name must be judged for as long as it stood. His legacy was to leave no undertaking unfinished.

Every task was approached as though it might be his last, and this was no different.

His sanctum was draped in shadows, the grand designs and priceless artworks hung on the walls kept hidden from sight. The automatons were slumped and silent on their shelves, with only the rustle of stacked weapon schemata on curling wax paper to disturb the silence. Not even the distant throb of the Iron Blood ’s engines intruded upon his introspective isolation.

Spread before him like components of the most intricate chronometer imaginable, were the pieces of the smashed Warhound automaton. Fulgrim’s head had broken it into fragments, and Perturabo was painstakingly repairing it. It had been an act of impulse to destroy the Warhound – one calculated to drive a point home, but impulsive nonetheless.

Bent over his workbench, Perturabo gently teased out a bend in a cogwheel, using the microscopic tines of precision callipers to realign each miniature tooth. It would be the work of months to repair it fully, but Perturabo had always believed that once a task was begun, only a lesser man would fail to see it through to the end.

Ten days had passed since his assault on his brother.

Perturabo did not regret the act, but Forrix’s words had struck a chord within him. It was foolish to trust to the word of a narcissistic egomaniac. The Trident had urged him to lead the Iron Warriors fleet from the Eye of Terror – his newly chosen name already gaining currency – and return to the Warmaster’s side, but he had given Fulgrim his oath that he would see this to the end and that was that.

Perturabo knew his brother would betray him. He was resigned to its inevitability. Such individuals could never be relied upon to do anything other than further their own interests, and Fulgrim was no exception. The only question was when the betrayal would come.

Speculation was pointless. It would happen, and he would be ready for it.

Part of him looked forward to it.

At least then he would be freed from his obligation to Fulgrim.

Satisfied that the cogwheel was returned to its original form, Perturabo carefully placed it back where it had come from and slotted the tool into its compartment. He straightened and rubbed the heels of his palms over his face. His eyes were heavy and felt gritty, as though he had not rested or had slept badly.

Perturabo sat back and poured himself a heavy goblet of wine from a bronze ewer. Bitter and flavoured with almonds and gene-recovered spices from Terra, the beverage was one fermented by a son of the Crimson King. Thinner than the robust Olympian wines, but exciting and full of interesting contradictions.

Much like the Crimson King himself.

He pulled his fur-lined cloak about himself, feeling cold in his flesh and weary to his bones. Of all the things Fulgrim had brought to this mission, Perturabo valued the gift of this cloak the highest. Its fabric was warm and the workmanship of the skull fastener inhumanly beautiful. The stone at its centre was polished smoother than even he might manage in a lapidary’s workshop. It had been black with hair-fine golden threads when Fulgrim had first presented it to him, but was now a melange of gold and black, the former gradually becoming the dominant colour.

Perturabo turned the stone, letting it catch the light from the hovering lumen globes.

‘An inconstant thing,’ he said. ‘The perfect gift from my brother.’

Perturabo sighed and returned to the broken Warhound, picking up a timing lever and beginning to work the kinks out with a miniature hammer and laser measuring device.

The massed fleets of the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children still plied the tempestuous currents of the warp under the guidance of Karuchi Vohra, but their journey was almost over. The Trident were eager to be unleashed, to set their Grand Battalions to war once more.

A single warship with a competent Navigator could utilise the torrential currents of the warp, slingshotting from squall to squall to make best speed, but to attempt such manoeuvres with a large fleet was to invite disaster. Perturabo would not risk such impetuosity, not this deep in the Eye of Terror, where each storm and tempest was strong enough to tear ships apart in the blink of an eye.

The Paths Above were indeed a calm current through the warp, as Karuchi Vohra had promised, but to move so many ships through them took time.

He didn’t trust Vohra, just as he did not trust Fulgrim, but he could not say for sure what the guide’s true agenda might be. What could a lone eldar scholar – if that was his true vocation – hope to gain by deceiving them? Barban Falk had standing orders to put a bolt-round through the guide’s head at the first sign of betrayal, a task he was already hoping he would have to carry out.

And then there was the matter of the second ship he had glimpsed when the Sisypheum had inadvertently unmasked itself. None of the ship’s surveyor apparatus had registered it and none of the bridge crew had witnessed it, but Perturabo knew what he had seen.

Who else might be on the hunt for the Angel Exterminatus?

Imperial forces? Unlikely, for there was every indication that the second ship had been hiding from the Sisypheum as well. Perhaps Karuchi Vohra was not as alone as he claimed, or perhaps there were other races who knew of this mission and sought to thwart its success or profit by its achievement.

Further questions were put aside as a gentle chime sounded from the entrance to his sanctum. Perturabo answered without looking up.

‘Enter.’

The door opened and Forrix stood silhouetted in the stark glare of the vapour lights behind him. In his Terminator armour, he looked invincible.

‘My lord,’ said Forrix. ‘Pardon the intrusion.’

‘What is it, my triarch?’

‘The eldar says we have reached our destination.’

Perturabo waited until he had finished working on the timing lever, the laser telling him it was as straight as it ever would be. He put it and the hammer back in their proper places.

‘Have you been able to fix it, my lord?’ asked Forrix. ‘The Warhound, I mean.’

Perturabo stood with a groan of weariness, sudden pain lancing up his spine.

‘A handful of components amongst thousands,’ he said, rubbing his face. ‘There’s a lesson there somewhere, but I’m too tired to think of it.’

Perturabo had never seen a world like it.

Like a pearl set in a canvas left out in the rain, it was a pristine bauble in the miasma of boiling energies of the warp. Where other pockets of matter were storm-lashed hell-worlds of impossible physics and nightmarish pseudo-realities, this planet had somehow remained untouched, a point of light against a backcloth of impenetrable darkness.

‘Wonderful,’ said Fulgrim, his holographic form wavering and crazed with static. ‘It is a virgin in a bordello, a regimental mascot in a slaughterhouse.’

Fulgrim’s image was clad in battle-plate, the golden wing of his shoulder guard gleaming, even over the patchy holographic connection. There was no sign of the hurt he had suffered at Perturabo’s hands.

‘Does it have a name?’ asked Perturabo.

Karuchi Vohra stood beside the command lectern, with Barban Falk his constant shadow a pace behind him.

‘This region of space was once home to a world known as Iydris,’ said Vohra. ‘A world said to have been favoured by the goddess Lileath, but I do not know if this is the same place.’

‘And you’re sure this is where we’ll find the weapons?’ asked Forrix.

‘Of course he’s sure,’ snapped Fulgrim. ‘How many other worlds like this do you imagine there are?’

‘This is the place,’ said Vohra. ‘The sorrow I feel just from looking at it tells me so.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Kroeger.

‘This is a Crone World, a relic of my people’s long-vanished empire,’ said Vohra. ‘A race fell to ruin here, billions of souls lost forever. It is not easy for me to see this.’

Perturabo sensed falsehood in Vohra’s answer, but there was little to be done about it now. They were here, and there was work to be done. He turned to address the hybrid machine shipmaster of the Iron Blood.

‘Captain Vort, give me a full surveyor sweep of the surrounding area,’ he commanded. ‘I want to know if there is anything else nearby.’

‘You think the Iron Hands might be here?’ asked Fulgrim.

‘Don’t you?’ he countered.

‘I think their vessel must surely have been too badly damaged after ramming the Andronicus to have survived much longer than my beautiful ship,’ said Fulgrim.

‘Then you’re forgetting how resourceful Ferrus’s sons are,’ said Perturabo. ‘They’ve taken enough punishment to cripple a capital vessel and are still flying. That ship’s as hard as Olympian bedrock, and it’s going to take more than a collision to put it out of the fight.’

‘Assuming you’re right, what can one ship do against our massed strength, brother? We have two entire Legion fleets, hundreds of vessels, tens of thousands of warriors.’

‘You heard what happened on Dwell?’

‘No,’ said Fulgrim.

‘You’re lying,’ said Perturabo. ‘And you should know better than to dismiss any warriors of the Iron Tenth.’

‘They died easily enough on Isstvan,’ sneered Fulgrim.

‘You have a short memory, brother,’ said Perturabo. ‘They died hard and they died fighting. And they’re here somewhere.’

Soft plainsong issued from the vox-grilles mounted on the ceiling. A melody without a tune and a wordless evocation of emotional intensity beyond understanding. The sound permeated every corner of the Iron Blood ’s bridge, a lyrical note that jarred with the hard edges and uncompromising lines of the space. Even the soft binaric burr of the bridge data engines seemed to still themselves in the presence of the sound.

‘What is that?’ said Kroeger.

‘Background radiation and fluxing emissions from the planet,’ came the bark of the captain’s augmetic voice. ‘The auspex is interpreting it as a vox signal. Filtering it out now.’

‘Wait,’ said Perturabo. ‘Leave it.’

‘You hear it too?’ asked Fulgrim.

Perturabo nodded. ‘Yes. That’s not interference.’

He saw the confusion in the faces of his triarchs and said, ‘It’s a lament.’

‘And a warning,’ added Fulgrim. ‘I have heard the like of it before, around Murder.’

‘A warning of what?’ said Forrix.

Perturabo shifted the focus of the viewscreen and what had been lost in the magnification of the pearlescent world was revealed.

The heart of the Eye of Terror, a gravitational hellstorm with a supermassive black hole at its centre. A sphere of polished onyx swirling with colours like oil smears, it was a sucking wound in the flesh of the galaxy that vomited unnatural matter into the void. Whatever cataclysm had brought the Eye of Terror into being, this was its epicentre. A dark doorway to an unknowable destination and an unimaginably powerful singularity whose gravity was so strong that it consumed light, matter, space and time in its destructive core.

‘How is that planet not being dragged in?’ wondered Forrix. ‘How are we not being dragged in?’

‘Legend says that Lileath was protective of her world and held it tight to her breast,’ said Karuchi Vohra. ‘Not even Morai-heg’s black hunger could wrench it from the firmament.’

‘That’s no answer,’ boomed Falk.

‘It is the only one I have,’ replied the eldar guide. ‘The Paths Above have brought us to Iydris in such a way that whatever force holds this world from destruction and keeps the ravages of the warp at bay keeps us safe too.’

‘Then we should be about our business before that changes,’ said Perturabo, switching the display on the viewscreen to a topological representation of the planet’s surface. ‘Where is the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis? Show me.’

Karuchi Vohra nodded and zoomed in on the planet’s surface. There was no indication of the world’s climate or environment, nothing beyond its superficial geography, yet Perturabo instantly saw one unique feature of its form.

Fulgrim saw it too and said, ‘It’s a perfect sphere.’

‘What does the planet’s shape matter?’ asked Kroeger.

‘Such ideal geometry is virtually impossible in planetary formation,’ said Perturabo. ‘The push and pull of gravity from nearby stars and celestial phenomena stretches and compresses planets. Most are flattened ellipses, but this is perfectly spherical.’

‘What could have caused it?’ said Forrix.

‘I don’t know,’ said Perturabo. ‘Who truly understands the forces at work in the warp?’

‘There,’ said Karuchi Vohra, and a shimmering crust overlaid the smooth surface of Iydris, a hazed representation of soaring towers, grand palaces and magnificent temples. As the composite image gathered information from the Iron Blood ’s many surveyors, the spread of structures eventually covered the entire world.

A tomb world, its entire surface given over to mourning and remembrance of the dead, perhaps?

No, that wasn’t right, but Perturabo couldn’t grasp the true nature of this world.

‘The Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom sits at the centre of Amon ny-shak Kaelis,’ said Vohra, pointing to a shimmering arrangement of geometric forms at what, on a Terran-standard world, would be the northern polar icecap. ‘It stands astride the entrance to the prison tomb of the Angel Exterminatus.’

‘How is it defended?’ asked Perturabo.

‘This maelstrom was said to be Asuryan’s best defence against anyone finding the resting place of the Angel Exterminatus,’ said Vohra. ‘Though some legends speak of an army of immortals who stand sentinel upon the citadel’s walls to watch over its weapons, but that is all I know.’

‘Immortals?’ said Kroeger. ‘Robots, maybe?’

‘Unlikely,’ said Forrix.

‘Then what?’

Perturabo ended their debate by jabbing a fist at the structure Karuchi Vohra had indicated.

‘This is where we will break in,’ he said. ‘What are the rest of these structures? Why raise a world’s worth of buildings if there’s no one to put in them?’

‘I do not know, my lord,’ said Karuchi Vohra.

Once again, Perturabo felt the lie uncoil from the eldar, but Fulgrim spoke before he could understand the heart of it. ‘What does it matter, brother? We will find out when we make planetfall. A little mystery is nothing to fear.’

Perturabo nodded to himself and folded his arms, feeling a chill seep into his bones at the sight of the dead planet before him. His entire body felt numb and his lungs burned with the effort of breathing.

He threw off the lethargy and said, ‘Falk, I want everything around that sepulchre levelled. Leave an exclusion zone of three kilometres from its farthest edge, but everything beyond that for a hundred more is to be bombed flat.’

‘What? No!’ cried Fulgrim.

‘This is my command,’ said Perturabo. ‘And I don’t land a single warrior into a potentially hostile environment without a preliminary bombardment.’

‘You might damage what’s below!’

Perturabo took note of Fulgrim’s phrasing and shook his head.

‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘If there’s one thing the Iron Warriors do better than anyone else, it’s launching pinpoint barrages from orbit.’

The IV Legion fleet assumed bombardment formation over Amon ny-shak Kaelis, their barrage cannons, mass drivers and bomb bays loaded with surface-smashing ordnance, short-burn incendiaries and electromagnetic pulse-bomblets. Those ships assigned fire sectors closest to the citadel were loaded with lower-yield munitions, while those tasked with levelling the outer regions prepped the largest warheads. Volley-firing frigates jostled with heavier capital ships as they prepared to rain explosive fury upon the world below.

The Emperor’s Children played no part in the bombardment preparations. Perturabo was unwilling to trust their fire discipline, and Fulgrim declined to bombard a world he had coveted for so long. Within an hour of the order’s issue, the last assigned ship in the Iron Warriors fleet had assumed geostationary orbit around Iydris with its weapon bays and cannons ready to lay waste to the surface.

The fire command came a second later, and the heavens lit up with the collimated fire of a Space Marine Legion as it unleashed a controlled instant of lethality. One burst was all it took, one searing instant of precisely calculated fire.

Flash-burning lances struck first, igniting the atmosphere to eliminate the frictional drag on the following ordnance. Kinetic mass driver munitions hit next, slamming into the surface of the planet like the hammers of gods. Shockwaves spread out in radial sector patterns, sending tectonic blasts along mathematically precise vectors. Conventional warheads followed, pounding the earth in stepped barrages, marching outwards in repeating waves.

Incendiaries razed the target zone flat, vitrifying the rock and burning away whatever organic material might remain on the surface. A cone of fire gouged the surface of Iydris, burning, pounding and flattening in the blink of an eye structures that had stood inviolate for tens of thousands of years.

A barren ring of pulverised earth encircled the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis, leaving its walls, towers and temples an isolated island cut off from the rest of the planet’s structures by a billowing firestorm of planet-cracking force.

And in its wake came a blooming haze of iron and violet steel.

Flocks of Thunderhawks, Stormbirds, Warhawks and heavy planetary landers launched from crammed embarkation decks. Bulk tenders descended to low orbit and disgorged thousands of troop carriers, armour lifters and supply barques. Titanic, gravity-cushioned mass-landers moved with majestic slowness as two battle engines of Legio Mortis took to the field, and this was but the first wave of the invasion.

Another eight would follow before the martial power of two entire Space Marine Legions and their auxiliary forces had made planetfall.

But Iydris was fighting back.

Forrix knew it was nonsense to think like that, but that was how it felt.

Most worlds did not welcome the presence of the Iron Warriors, for the IV Legion was known to bring ruin and bloodshed in its wake. Not for its legionaries the cheering crowds and floral-lined triumphal marches enjoyed by the likes of Guilliman’s popinjays.

But this world seemed to be actively repelling them.

The blasted wasteland of ground zero was a glassy plain of powdered rubble and blackened fragments of some unknown material. What might once have been an area of awe-inspiring architecture from a bygone age of a fallen civilisation had been razed more thoroughly than any barbarian horde had ever left a city of Old Roma.

The landing zone was awash with thousands of armoured vehicles, supply camps, munition depots and fuel silos. Clouds of toxic fumes gathered overhead like looming thunderheads, from the armada of tracked fury ready to bear the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children to the Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom. Battalions of mobile artillery strained to be unleashed and hardened magazines of wall-shattering ordnance had already been built to service their insatiable hunger.

A great army awaited the order to attack, but its dropsite was yet to be declared secure.

Within minutes of the first Iron Warriors ship landing, Perturabo’s Legion had begun the task of building fortifications to shelter the invading force and protect their chain of supply from orbit. Towers and walls were raised in the time it took to unload a single cargo bay, modular construction patterns, natural affinity and centuries of practice making the task as natural as breathing.

The Emperor’s Children dropped in the wake of the Iron Warriors, their maddened carnival of lunatic mortals disgorging onto the surface of the planet in a panoply of shrieks, insanity and waving banners. Fulgrim’s warriors followed their devotees onto the surface, basking in the adulation and forming up with a rigour that had surprised Forrix.

Resplendent in their battle armour of gold and purple, iron and bronze, Fulgrim and Perturabo climbed to the peak of the first tower Forrix had built and took in the vista of the city-sized sepulchre they were to capture.

‘A city of the dead,’ Perturabo had remarked.

‘But one to recognise that there is beauty in death,’ Fulgrim had responded.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13