‘I see them, brother-sergeant.’
Dunecrawlers — squadron after squadron of them, a swarm of massive arachnid walkers, moving in with a ponderous scuttle into the port area. Their eradication beamers were swinging towards the manufactorium.
‘They will leave nothing but a crater,’ said Aloysian.
Van Auken’s voice resounded across the battlefield. ‘Adeptus Astartes, surrender immediately. You have thirty seconds.’
Thane gestured the company back. He opened a channel to the Alcazar Remembered. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said. ‘I need a single bombardment cannon salvo with immediate effect at these coordinates.’
The messages were subluminal reports. As Koorland learned the full details of the battle’s beginning, he received word on the vox of another astropathic communication. It was one whose translation had posed no difficulty. There had been too much urgency in the signal from the choir aboard the Alcazar Remembered, the message too brief and simple to permit misunderstanding.
‘An orbital attack has begun,’ Koorland said.
Kubik rose. ‘End it,’ he demanded.
‘That lies with you,’ Koorland responded.
Imperial Fist and Fabricator General faced each other. The seconds ticked by in silence. The rest of the High Lords watched and said nothing. Hundreds of millions of kilometres away, destruction rained from the Martian skies.
The Dunecrawlers turned their beams on the manufactorium. The Fists Exemplar retreated from the disintegrating collapse. Walls evaporated behind them. The upper floors plummeted. The rubble that fell through the beams vanished. Tonnes of rockcrete and iron and plasteel made it through. Thane crouched against the side wal as slabs came down at an angle. Ruin pressed down on the company. He pushed upwards, straining against the weight that sought to crush him. The pressure grew as more and more of the upper structure fell.
‘Stand fast, brothers!’ he called, shouting over thunder. ‘Our retaliation approaches.’
‘It’s getting lighter,’ Kahagnis said.
‘Do not rejoice,’ Aloysian warned.
The shrieking hum of the eradicator beams drew nearer. They were stripping away the layers of rubble. Soon there would be no shelter.
Daylight appeared over Thane’s head.
He roared and turned to face the Mechanicus armour. And so he was in time to see the streak from the sky. The bombardment cannon’s shot struck the centre of the Square of the Infinite Reach. Auto-senses shutting out the glare, Thane crouched in the vanishing ruins. The blast was light and fire and the concentrated wind of a thousand hurricanes. It blew over the Fists Exemplar., who sank into their positions, clutching shattered foundations. Torn and burned fragments of the Dunecrawlers flew overhead, leaves in the wind. The wind still blowing, the glare barely faded, Thane called the charge.
Smoke and dust everywhere. In the avenue, the heavy armour struggle continued, but the Mechanicus forces, closer to the blast, had been decimated. The Space Marine tanks gained ground. Before the Tharsis Gate, there was now a wasteland with a crater a dozen metres deep at its centre. Its slopes were a landscape of unrecognisable metal fragments and broken stone.
‘Thamarius,’ Thane called as the Fists Exemplar descended the slope.
‘Still here, Chapter Master. Just.’
‘Are you in?’
‘Almost.’
Weylon Kale broke in. ‘Chapter Master,’ said the shipmaster, ‘we are under attack.’
‘How many Mechanicus vessels?’
‘Many.’
Koorland took a step back from Kubik. He spread his arms, taking in the damage to the Great Chamber. ‘Is this what we are coming to?’ he asked. ‘Will we turn the Imperium into a broken, fractured, divided shadow of what it should be? Is this how we honour the Emperor?’ He filled his lungs with air. He filled his being with righteous anger. He bellowed his denial and his loyalty in a single word: ‘No!’
The shout reverberated across the Chamber. The High Lords looked at him in silence. He saw terror in some, shame in others. Vangorich gave a slow nod of approval. Something glimmered in Veritus’ eyes and Koorland had the impression it was something like hope. He was surprised to see the old inquisitor was still capable of the emotion.
Kubik was unreadable. He had no face in the human sense. He was perfectly still.
I have your attention, Koorland thought.
He spoke to the High Lords. His voice carried to the seating tiers, to the spectators who still came to the battered room. If the minor lords and functionaries were still jockeying for political favour, their efforts must have been the result of habit rather than belief by this point. Their numbers were greatly reduced. Many had died in the Proletarian Crusade. Others had been too terrified to return in the wake of eldar and orks being present so deep in the heart of the Imperial Palace.
Koorland spoke to be heard by all. But most of all he spoke to Kubik. ‘The Imperium is tested as it has not been since the Emperor ascended to the Golden Throne,’ he said. ‘If we fail this test, we fail through disunity. We fail the trust the Emperor has placed in us. If division defeats us, we deserve no better. And if we fall, in the name of what? I stand for Terra, and I stand for Mars. Because I stand for the Emperor. I stand for the Imperium. I will walk the ramparts of the galaxy, I will repel all enemies. I know my duty.’ He dropped his voice so that only Kubik could hear. ‘Do you?’
The Fists Exemplar melted their way through the final metres of steel, and the Tharsis Gate was breached at last. The passage was just wide and high enough for the battle-brothers to pass through in single file. To the rear, the tanks had broken the last of the Mechanicus lines and were forming a defensive perimeter around the Gate, preserving the egress once Urquidex had been located.
‘Taking fire,’ Kale reported from the Alcazar Remembered.
‘How long can you hold them off while remaining at anchor?’ Thane asked, pausing at the entrance to the breach.
‘As long as you need, Chapter Master.’ Kale’s answer was an acknowledgement that there was no choice if the mission was to succeed.
‘Our thanks, shipmaster.’
A new wave of tocsins sounded. The wailing was desperate, the tone final.
Standing at Thane’s shoulder, Aloysian said, ‘They will not let us profane Pavonis Mons. They will destroy the complex with us.’
‘I hope you’re wrong,’ Thane said. But as he spoke, immense turrets rose to the east and west, driven upwards by pistons thick as the limbs of Titans. They supported eradication beamer macro-cannons. With glacial majesty, barrels wider than Thunderhawks began to turn and angle downwards.
Aloysian was right. The Mechanicus was ready to atomise the invaded quadrants of the Pavonis Mons complex layer by layer.
The Predators and Whirlwinds unleashed salvoes of cannon fire and missile flights at the turrets. Void shields flared with the impacts.
Thane voxed Kale as he followed Aloysian down the melted tunnel through the Gate.
‘Shipmaster,’ he said, ‘I need an area-wide bombardment.’
Thane felt the mission goal recede into the mists of war. Closing in was only ever-more terrible destruction.
‘Duty,’ Kubik repeated. The Fabricator General spoke slowly, pausing between the syllables, as if anatomising the word. He stood.
‘I believe in the honour of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ Koorland said. ‘I believe in its fidelity to the Emperor.’
Another silence. Not a total one. Koorland listened to the clicks and whirs and electronic humming of Kubik’s form. He imagined he was hearing the sounds of indecision, of logic circuits closing to form a pattern of choice.
Kubik said, ‘Your belief is not misplaced. I am cognisant of all my duties.’ His words were as free of human inflection as ever. There was no trace of the organic in their buzzing enunciation.