‘I do not care about their ingratitude,’ Bohemond muttered darkly. ‘It is their ineptitude that concerns me.’
‘If it will keep the Council on my side then having you and the others join the Fists Exemplar at Phall is a small price.’
‘And if the orks simply lie in wait for such an opening? There could be millions yet in the attack moon’s core, biding their time, and as the Mechanicus did not permit us to delve deeper we cannot say for certain that we destroyed the only teleportation device they have.’
‘Phall is little more than a month away at worst, and fifty Space Marine veterans is no token force.’
To be counted amongst a Space Marine Chapter’s finest was no small thing, and from the First Companies of the Fists Exemplar, Black Templars, Crimson Fists, Excoriators and Iron Knights, Koorland had reconstituted the shield corps. Daylight. Hemisphere. Tranquility. Bastion Ledge. Ballad Gate. Zarathustra. Lotus Gate. He meant no disrespect to the Lucifer Blacks, who had stepped up to fill the Imperial Fist-sized breach in Fortress Terra, but they were not Space Marines. War would undoubtedly come again to the Imperial Palace, and when it did, then like the Arch-Traitor before them, the orks would meet walls defended by the sons of Dorn.
‘Can you hold for that long?’ said Bohemond.
‘It is ground, brother. I can hold it.’
Bohemond revealed his twisted grin, as if he were showing off a knife, and he nodded across Koorland’s shoulder. The enforcer had approached and halted about two metres away and threw a salute.
‘I know you, enforcer,’ said Koorland.
The part of the woman’s face that was visible between her chinstraps and visor seemed suddenly to glow. It was a look that Koorland had become wearily familiar with amongst the Palace’s mortal defenders. The sort of look reserved for saints and saviours. ‘Galatea Haas, lord, and,’ she rolled her shoulder to show her rank stripes, ‘it’s proctor now.’ She bit her lip, as though worried she might have offended her transhuman lord by wasting his time with something as trivial as mortal hierarchies, then added, tentatively: ‘You remember me?’
‘I seldom forget,’ said Koorland. ‘Thank the Emperor for designing me thus.’
‘I… I will.’
‘Praise be,’ Bohemond murmured.
‘Can I help you, proctor?’
‘Yes, lord.’ She snapped another salute and held it. ‘The provost-colonel demands the return of Daylight Pad Theta to the Adeptus Arbites.’
‘Tell her no.’
Haas smiled. ‘Thank you, lord.’
With a growl, Bohemond turned his back on the woman who reached barely as high as his elbow and made to head back to his shuttle.
‘They demand your protection, but only so long as you do not inconvenience their little fiefdoms. I leave you to it, brother, and may I never find myself embroiled in politics again.’
Koorland nodded his agreement. ‘From my shuttle, I saw rioters outside of the Great Chamber itself. I am not surprised.’
‘They should be put down,’ rumbled the fourth Space Marine present, Eternity, standing at the near edge of the platform opposite Daylight. ‘The expression of such dissent within the Palace grounds is a capital sin.’
The Black Templar who had become Eternity had demanded that wall and that duty, had insisted that he be the last line between the Custodes and the rest of the universe. He, more than anyone, served as a reminder that an Imperial Fist was more than just the colours that he wore. Haas looked towards the towering wall-brother, a sudden wariness, fear even, causing her face to tense, as if she had heard this particular Black Templar’s voice before.
‘Go to them then, brother,’ said Koorland, turning to meet the glowing red lenses of Eternity’s helm. ‘Let them see that they are safe, that it is an Imperial Fist that walks amongst them.’ He glanced to Haas. The woman was almost shaking, worse than when she had been rescued from the orks’ captivity. ‘Let them all see.’
Three
The Great Chamber had been the institutional heart of Terra for as long as Terra had been the heart of an Imperium of Man. At capacity, it could hold half a million citizens. It was a coliseum, a public arena of awesome scale, built to the grand demands of Unitarian dreams. The restoration work enacted in the aftermath of the Great Heresy had been largely sympathetic, cosmetic re-imaginings of the occasional mural where a pict of the original could not be found or showed an inconvenient contradiction to the Creed notwithstanding.
Vast tiers of empty seating surrounded a central dais. Twelve large chairs were spaced evenly across its centre line, backed by the heraldic banners of the twelve great pillars of Imperial government. A speaker’s podium, raised by the spread wings of a golden aquila, glittered under the triangulated beams of focused lighting. The dais rotated almost imperceptibly, and a more potent metaphor for the pace of decision-making by said great pillars of Imperial government Vangorich could not imagine.
The last vestige of representative and accountable governance stood at the far east end of the chamber: a statue of the great Rogal Dorn, raised in commemoration by his brother, the first Lord Guilliman. The primarch watched the council of the day with an expression of infamous severity.
Drakan Vangorich was not a man given to idle dreams, but the thought of what a living, breathing primarch would make of the small men trying to fill their superhuman boots gave him a little pleasure.
‘Order, please,’ said Tobris Ekharth, Master of the Administratum, reading tiredly from the data-slate in his hands. His voice mumbled back to him on a time-delayed echo from the vox-casters set up around the vast auditorium. Small-arms fire in the distance — but not all that distant — broke up the carefully calibrated augmitter system with pernicious static. ‘I’m sure that the situation is under control… I…’
He blinked myopically at a second data-slate on the lectern in front of him, then bent to listen to some aide unseen behind the beam-bright podium lights and visibly pulled himself together.
‘I’ve been made aware that the situation is well in hand. If you could all now please access your agenda packets, cryptex key kappa-tribus-septum-septum-omega, and once we’re all here we can begin.’
Scattered around the swathes of empty seating, lesser lords and meme-serfs approved by the Administratum’s increasingly stringent vetting lists peeled the security tape off their packets and tapped in the cryptex key.
Vangorich did as everyone else did. As a man of medium height and medium build, dressed in black with oiled-back black hair like any aide or staffer present, he was adept at discouraging notice. His skin shared the pale tone of the trillions who lived their lives on lightless Terra, his few features of note being his dark, wide-set eyes and a tiny scar that bridged the lower part of his face between jaw and chin.
He had, of course, memorised the contents of an unredacted version of the package, and his agents had furnished him with the cryptex key to the final document as soon as it had been disseminated amongst the High Twelve.
It had been a hundred years since a Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum had been seated amongst that number, but one grew accustomed to certain privileges of access, particularly if one possessed the means to retain them. Indeed, Vangorich considered it the patriotic duty of his office to keep his finger, as the saying went, on the Senatorum’s pulse.
Scanning the ninety-seven-page abstract, he flagged up the most glaring omissions from the original agenda. It was always an amusing mental exercise to attempt to deduce who was responsible for removing what.
A complaint from the Admiralty on the costs imposed on them by the transfer of the blockade from the Last Wall to the Navy? Fabricator General Kubik. Too easy. The Fabricator General would accept any cost to get his mechadendrites on the orks’ technologies, particularly if it could be loaded onto another.