2
Aboard the Samothrace, Sorot Tchure performs his second ministry.
His men are already killing most of the ship’s primary crew. Advancing to the main bridge, burning through blast hatches that had been closed in desperation, Tchure comes face-to-face with the ship’s captain, who solemnly announces his disinclination to assist Tchure, no matter what threat is made.
Tchure ignores the officer. He is a yapping gatehouse dog that is too ignorant to know better. He is barking futile defiance at the carnodon that has just entered through the gates.
Tchure grasps the captain’s head in his right hand and squashes it like an uncooked egg. He lets the body drop. The bridge crew gawps at him, realising that their predicament is far worse than they ever imagined. When a ship is seized, bridge crew can ordinarily safeguard their lives in exchange for their vital technical services.
The bridge officers of the Samothrace see their captain murdered, and realise their services are not required.
Several pull sidearms, despite the fact that they are unmodified humans dressed in cloth and braid, despite the fact that they are outnumbered by martial transhumans who have just cut their way into the main bridge space, despite the fact that their laspistols will not even dent the armour of the invaders.
Tchure is in the newer Maximus plate, as befits his command status. Crimson is the first colour his suit has ever been painted.
‘Death,’ he instructs as a las-round tangs off his shoulder plate.
The Word Bearers use their fists, guns slung. Tchure doesn’t want mass-reactive shells destroying the vital control stations of the bridge. They break men. They grab them and snap spines and necks, or mash skulls, or tear out soft throats. The officers have nowhere to run, but they run anyway, screaming in terror. They are grabbed and picked up by the hair, by the coattails, by the ankles and wrists, grabbed and picked up and killed. The bodies are slung in a pile in the centre of the deck in front of the late captain’s throne.
Tchure observes the work. He raises his left wrist, and speaks into the glass-and-wire mechanism welded there. It is inscribed with the mark of the sacred Octed. The dark, glistening thing living inside the wire-wrapped bottle does not send his words like a vox. It simply repeats them through other mouths in other places.
Hearing the signal through their own warp-flasks, the Mechanicum magi advance onto the bridge. They are all of the cadre that has sided with the Warmaster. They have turned their backs on Mars and Terra. Subtle variations in their robes and insignia already show this change of alignment, but most of all there is a darkness to them. They wear the mystery of their technological craft around them like a shadow.
‘The ship is seized,’ Tchure tells their leader. The magos nods, and instructs his men to bridge positions.
‘Ten minutes, and we will be mobile,’ the magos tells Tchure. ‘Motivation is coming to yield.’
‘Zetsun Verid Yard,’ says Tchure, naming his destination. The yard is a smaller, specialist facility that forms part of the orbital archipelago where the Samothrace has docked.
The magos nods again. Under the deck, systems are humming up to active power.
Tchure turns to his second, Heral.
‘Locator,’ he says.
Heral’s squad brings forward the locator unit, a warp-flask the size of an urn, and places it in the middle of the deck. They wedge it into the pile of corpses to hold it upright. Blood is sliming the floor under their feet.
They stand back. Something in the flask pulses and ripples, gleaming slug-black. Something whispers in the darkness. Something withdraws into its shell like a glistening mollusc, except the shell is not there, in the flask, on the bridge of the Samothrace, it is elsewhere, in another universe, recessed through the coils and loops and whorls of an interstitial architecture.
Frost forms on the corpse pile. Some of the dead muscles stiffen into rictus, and cause the corpses to jerk and lurch as though they are trying to wriggle out from under the tangle of limbs.
Corposant ignites around the flask, lights up the bodies, twitches and crackles along the ceiling beams like neon ivy. It grows impossibly bright. Tchure looks away.
When he looks back, the glow is fading, the piled corpses have been burned black, and a new figure has joined them, still smoking with teleportation energy.
‘Welcome to the Samothrace,’ says Tchure, bowing his head. The air smells of cooked fat from the incinerated bodies.
‘Sorot. Let us begin,’ says Kor Phaeron.
At Barrtor, the forests east of the Boros are on fire. Traitor Titans lumber through the sparks and smoke billowing up from the canopy. They look like woodsmen tending a brushfire. Their weapon mounts pour destruction into the glades and cavities of the forest.
Air support howls past. Down in the woods, the shattered remnants of the 111th and 112th Companies, Ultramarines, retreat before the reaping assault of the betrayers. Achilles-and Proteus-pattern Land Raiders, dressed in crimson and badged with abominable designs, demolish the tree cover and men alike. Mega bolters, grinding like unoiled fabrication plants, lacerate the world, reducing trees to fibres, rocks to dust, and bodies to paste.
Ekritus moves backwards, firing as he goes. Anchise is nearby, doing the same. Beyond him, a few other trusted men. Ekritus isn’t even thinking about what’s happening any more. To do so would be to confront the unthinkable, and to leave his mind and wits with as much protection as the flimsy trees are currently affording his body.
He is simply surviving. He is firing at anything he can cleanly target, and falling back. They are buying time for the squads he has sent off at an expedited rate of retreat. Throne alone knows if they will draw clear, or find any shelter from the aircover that is sweeping across them.
What’s left of his companies are cut off from their heavy support. They haven’t got anything in their arsenal that will stop the Land Raiders. Each of those beasts is felling a swathe of the forest ahead of it. Nothing at all will stop the Titans. Every time one of the marching giants speaks, booming its speaker horn in a howl of scorn and triumph, Ekritus feels his bones shake.
He scrambles through brush, reloading his weapon on clips taken from the dead. The blood of others paints his armour, turning him crimson, a colour he has an unexpectedly painful need to wash off. Bolt-rounds snap and whine through the trees. One pulps leaves in a mist of sap. One hits a tree trunk, explodes, and collapses the ancient tree wholesale. One destroys Brother Caladin’s head, and flips his corpse into a ditch.
Ekritus finds a mossy slope, ducks under a root mass, and clambers up. Old stonework, the retaining wall of some earthwork built in the early years, when this was estate land. Smoke bores through the woodland space as if driven by an ocean current. Animals and avians are mobbing out of the devastated environment in teeming plague-year swarms.
Nature in rout. A world turned upside down.
He clambers higher still. He is above the tree line. He can see for many kilometres. He can see the world burning. On the plains beyond the forest expanse, he can see vast hosts assaulting the towns along the river and the port. Waves of men, tens of thousands strong, Army or what until an hour ago passed for Army. Waves of men, of armour, formations of Titan engines, phalanxes of Space Marines, all of them hazed in the dust and smoke of their advance.
The blot of their insult.
The stain of their crime.
Here alone, east of the river, he can see a mobilised force large enough to take a continent. A world, probably. And this, just one muster of the Calth conjunction. He watches as it surges, a fluid mass, sweeping aside everything in its path.