The orks watched him steadily. They were calm, motionless, and so even more disturbing.
All it would take on his part was a simple gesture. He could turn his head, nod at Mercado, and the orks would be gunned down.
The consequences of that choice, he knew, would not be pleasant.
‘Follow me,’ he said to Narkissos.
The Lucifer Blacks followed. He led a dark procession to the Great Chamber. Vangorich was conscious of every heavy step of the orks behind him. Xenos boots on Terran marble beat the rhythm of the Imperium’s humiliation, and of the craven failure of the High Lords. He counted himself among the guilty. What did he have to show for his machinations? Playing host to the invader.
Narkissos walked like a man approaching his execution.
‘Tell me who they are,’ Vangorich said.
The trader whispered a terrible word. ‘Ambassadors.’
‘That isn’t possible.’
‘I know.’
So it was true, then. Vangorich felt colder inside with every passing moment.
Their arrival in the Great Chamber was greeted by a collective gasp followed by a growing murmur of rage. Udo rose from his seat. He pointed at Narkissos.
‘What have you brought into this sacred place?’ he thundered.
There was no threat in his bluster. He was an empty gesture given embodiment. Narkissos didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look at the Lord Commander. His eyes were unfocused. He was staring at something more vivid and frightening than the High Lords or the orks. A recent memory, perhaps, or a vision of the near future.
‘They’re ambassadors,’ Vangorich said, the word alien in his mouth. He mounted the dais. The orks remained where they were. Their yellow, sunken eyes watched the High Lords. ‘Are you their interpreter?’ he asked Narkissos, wondering how the man had come to know the xenos tongue.
Narkissos looked up now. He shook his head, miserable.
‘Don’t need an interpreter,’ the lead ork said. ‘We tell you how to surrender, you surrender. Easy.’
Eighteen
The silence was as huge as the great scream had been. The scream had been the one response possible to the immensity of the moon’s arrival. The silence was the one response possible to a few simple words. The earth did not shake. Walls did not topple. Yet it seemed to Vangorich that both events occurred with every syllable that came from the ork’s mouth. Everything that the Imperium believed about the orks was wrong. The mere existence of these new orks, these ambassadors, was a blow whose implications were at least as great as the annihilation of the Proletarian Crusade. Here was proof that the military catastrophe was due to something more than brute power. The orks had numbers, and they had technology, and at least some of them had become a new thing.
Before the dreadful wonder of an ork dictating terms in fluent Gothic, what response could there be except silence? What emotion other than despair?
The ork had a name: Bezhrak. His Gothic was guttural. It sounded like the evisceration of prey. But there was no hesitation. Vangorich realised, to his horror, that Bezhrak spoke not as if he had learned the language of the Imperium, but as if it were his native tongue. The ork’s expression was uncultured, and the fact that word even occurred to Vangorich was obscene. Bezhrak spoke as if he had spawned from a deep underhive.
‘The Great Beast has you by the guts,’ he said. ‘Struggle, he’ll rip ’em out. Surrender, you get to keep ’em.’
The silence stretched on.
Bezhrak looked around the Great Chamber. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘Give up or die. Choose.’
The silence broke. The tiers erupted with screams, curses, wails of defiance and wails of despair. There were prayers to the God-Emperor, and there were what sounded to Vangorich like treasonous pleas for mercy directed at the orks. He tuned out the wider Senatorum. He was surrounded by enough idiocy on the High Lords’ dais.
Mesring turned on Tull. ‘What have you done?’ he screamed at her. ‘You have brought sacrilege into our midst. Holy Terra is defiled!’
‘I didn’t hear you voicing doubts earlier,’ she retorted. She had regained some of her fire. She was in Mesring’s face, giving no quarter, and standing with her back to the orks, as if she could erase the reality of their presence in a contest of rage with the Ecclesiarch.
Ekharth, Gibran, Sark and Anwar surrounded Verreault.
‘Why are you silent?’ Gibran asked, his voice rasping with hysteria. ‘Give the orders! Kill the abominations!’
‘The Lucifer Blacks outnumber them!’ Sark sounded no better. ‘They aren’t armed!’
‘And what does that tell you?’ said Verreault.
That they’re throwing our civilisation in our face, Vangorich thought. The self-inflicted moral wound the Imperium would suffer if it acted with less sophistication than orks would be a septic one.
The Master of the Astronomican was not worried about such concerns. ‘Kill them!’ Sark screamed. ‘Kill them!’
Bezhrak grinned at him. ‘Bad plan, little bug.’
Sark paled. He sank back to his seat, trembling.
The Lucifer Blacks’ rifles were still trained on the orks. The troopers’ faces were strained masks of hatred. They did not fire. Verreault held up a hand, ensuring they did not.
‘If we kill them, we sign our death warrants,’ he said.
Udo sought refuge in bluster.
‘We will not surrender!’ he shouted at Bezhrak. ‘We will annihilate your foul race. You have sealed your doom by coming here. You have…’ he trailed off, seeking a greater curse. ‘You will regret…’ he began again, and stopped again, held by Bezhrak’s gaze. ‘I won’t!’ he yelled. ‘We won’t! You can’t ever!’ He descended into an incoherence of defiance. He was pathetic, Vangorich thought. Before long, he wouldn’t even be howling words.
Kubik had advanced to the edge of the dais and was walking back and forth in front of the orks. He leaned forward, his telescopic vision lenses extending towards the trio. He was speaking quickly to himself. Vangorich doubted the Fabricator General experienced emotion in a recognisable sense. But there was something very like excitement in the flood of auto-dictation and binary. ‘Not a clan. Specialised evolution is a defining characteristic of the Veridi giganticus. An ambassador class? An ambassador species? That might be closer. Yes, yes. Not learned behaviour. Diplomatic skills as genetic trait? Unprecedented. Specimen collection will be needed. And the potential. If the Veridi are capable of this form of development, mutations on command, the possibilities are—’
‘Where are your loyalties, priest of Mars?’ Veritus asked.
Kubik’s neck twitched. He waved a multi-jointed hand, brushing away the irritation of the inquisitor’s voice. He chattered in cant, already lost again in his speculations.
‘Enough, then,’ Veritus said. ‘Bear witness, Father of Mankind,’ he called out. ‘I have tried. But they leave me no choice.’ He stepped down from the dais. In his power armour, he was almost as wide as Bezhrak’s attendants. He brushed past the orks and began the long walk out of the Great Chamber.
Vangorich watched him go. When he dropped his eyes from Veritus’ retreating figure, he met Bezhrak’s gaze. There he saw something that chilled him even more than the ork’s use of Gothic: contempt. The two smaller orks were amused. They were grinning their disdain for the shrieking puppets on the dais. Bezhrak wasn’t smiling. Vangorich didn’t trust his ability to read ork physiognomy. He didn’t want to trust it. He wanted to be wrong. Because Bezhrak’s contempt appeared to be mixed with pity, and if that were true, what then?
What then?
Bezhrak raised his staff and brought it down against the marble floor. The reverberation was the toll of war. It brought a momentary silence to the dais. The High Lords faced the reality of their disgusted foe.