Its weight was crushing.
The chamber was part of a bulbous chapel on the west side of the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor’s exterior wall. The space was an ecumenical one, an architectural statement of the essential identity of the Imperial Creed and the Cult of the Omnissiah. The Black Templars of the Last Wall had insisted the decryption of the visual feed occur on sacred ground. Its transmission had been among the last acts of a Venerable Brother, and it had emerged from a battle where many Black Templars had died.
The chapel did double duty as site of worship and laboratorium. It would serve. The Mechanicus adepts fed the data through cogitators, assisted by Black Templars serfs. The air was thick with incense.
The operation was performed under the supervision of Eternity. He was of the Last Wall now, and wore the colours of the Imperial Fists, but he had come from the Black Templars. His arms were folded, his head bowed in reverence.
Koorland watched from the rear of the chapel with Thane. They were alone. Eternity had refused to allow any of the High Lords to bear witness, and Koorland did not blame him. Their presence would have disturbed the solemnity of the ceremony. Though Koorland did not care for the religiosity of the ritual, he accepted it. Even if he hadn’t, he would have barred the High Lords. There was no place for them and dignity to coexist.
‘Any speculations?’ Koorland asked Thane.
‘None.’ The Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar spoke with a grim, flat tone. He sounded like a man bracing himself for the worst.
‘We know it is important. And to our advantage, if it emerged from a victory against the orks.’
‘I know,’ said Thane, as if Koorland had pointed out what he most dreaded.
Koorland said nothing else. Thane was surrounded by his own version of the crushing silence. Koorland could not dispel his own. There was nothing he could do for the Exemplar.
The silence settled over them. The chanting of the tech-priests and the crackle of energy discharges did little to pierce it. Koorland watched the ritual, but barely saw it. His vision narrowed to a dark tunnel. His consciousness sank into the tunnel and he stayed there, numb. The suffocation of the silence held off the piercing blade of loss, guilt and defeat for the moment. It was not a respite. It was only a different quality of pain.
He was so far in the tunnel he didn’t realise at first that he was being addressed.
‘Lord Commander Koorland,’ the voice repeated, its augmetic larynx buzzing.
Koorland blinked. The chapel snapped back into place about him. He looked down at the adept. Her name was Segorine. A cluster of servo-arms, segmented so that they flexed like tentacles, emerged from her torso. Her face was a steel mask dominated by compound eyes.
‘The decryption is complete,’ Segorine said.
‘Thank you,’ said Koorland. He and Thane followed her down the chapel aisle to where the other tech-priests waited. Behind the altar, a large pict screen pulsed with snow.
‘Faith,’ said Eternity.
Koorland waited.
‘Faith,’ Eternity said again. ‘That is what we are about to witness. That is what will grant us victory against the Beast.’
‘I see,’ Koorland said, noncommittal.
Segorine snaked out a limb to a control panel built into the altar. She depressed a dial, and the screen came to life. The images flickered and jumped, and the muzzles of beam weapons flared everything to white. Explosions broke up the picture.
But the worst distortion came from unleashed psychic energy. Koorland saw the Black Templars at bay, fighting hard against the ork horde. He saw the greenskin psyker, its power ferocious, seeming to destroy reality along with the images. He saw the Black Templars pray as they fought. The sound was a riot of distortion, a grating rhythm barely recognisable as gunfire. Breaking through in fragments were deep, sonorous chants, magnified by vox-casters. The voices of faith travelled across destruction and time to frame their moment of victory.
For a moment, the sound cleared altogether. The yowls of the orks and the concussions of the guns vanished. There was only the stern, martial prayer of the Black Templars. The energy flares of the witch stuttered, then spread out as if they had hit a wall. They curled away from the Space Marines. Koorland leaned forward, astonished. Arcing waves of power slammed back into the greenskin psyker. The beast’s mouth opened wide, its face contorted, and still there was only the sound of the chanting. The ork’s eyes burst. It exploded into flame. The energy flashed across the frame of the feed, utterly uncontrolled, blasting every ork to ash. The energy storm swallowed up the chanting. The chapel filled with a shattering feedback shriek, and the visual feed disintegrated.
The screen returned to snow, then went black.
‘The visible energy,’ Thane said slowly. ‘I didn’t see it come from the Black Templars.’
‘No,’ Koorland agreed. ‘It was all from the ork psyker.’ To the tech-priests he said, ‘Will you play that back again? Slowly.’
They watched. At the end, Thane said, ‘Are the orks and their witches linked?’
‘In some way, they must be,’ said Koorland. He could see no other interpretation. The psyker’s death had triggered the immolation of the horde.
‘So if we can target their psykers…’
‘A possible weakness, yes.’ Koorland turned to Eternity. ‘That was not the work of a single warrior, was it?’ Certainly not a Librarian. The Black Templars allowed no psykers within the ranks of their battle-brethren.
‘That was the faith of all my brothers present in that battle,’ said Eternity. ‘A collective strength.’
‘Against a single ork witch,’ said Thane.
‘Its fall destroyed its entire force,’ Eternity pointed out.
‘Yes,’ said Koorland. ‘Yes, it did.’
If only we’d known. The words came to him unbidden, a canker on his soul. He tried to push them away. He tried to tell himself the Imperial tactics on Ullanor would not have been altered, but his grief would permit no such comfort.
If only they had known. They would have fought differently. They would have made a greater priority of finding and taking out the ork psykers. They would have targeted the source of greenskin strength and turned it into a weakness.
He thought of Vulkan. The primarch had wished for the aid of the Sisters of Silence. He had recognised the need for a strong counter to the psykers.
He must have known, Koorland thought. He tried again to tell himself that they would not have fought any differently.
He knew that wasn’t true.
Neither were many things, he thought, that he had been telling himself of late. He had worked hard to maintain an illusion of self that made it possible for him to carry the responsibility he had shouldered. It made it possible for him to lead. But he had led nowhere except to disaster. He had nothing but contempt for the High Lords. At this moment, though, he was not sure how he was any different from them.
He forced himself to focus on the moment. ‘We may not see the key to the weakness in this data,’ he said. ‘But it is a weakness, and we will exploit it.’
But an hour later, he was still thinking about difference, his mind chasing itself in a toxic spiral. He walked alone on the ramparts of Daylight Wall, looking up into the night of Terra. There was a strong wind, and the sulphurous clouds over the Imperial Palace roiled, broke and reformed. In the gaps of their anger, the light of two moons reached down. Luna was a narrow, waning crescent. The reflected glow of the ork attack moon was paler, colder and more baleful. That threat was over, or at least contained. The orks were gone, the moon blockaded. But it was still a presence in the Terran sky, an insult and a wound to the heart of the Imperium. No enemy, even defeated, should ever have come so close.
He pictured another moon. He pictured several. Next time, the orks might not hold back from deploying their gravity weapons against Terra. They might have lost interest in conquest. They had been bloodied on Ullanor. Their vengeance might well take the form of total destruction.