Of course I did, Koorland might have said. That’s why I demanded a blockade be maintained. He said nothing. Arguing with the little man would be a form of defeat. It would be descending to the level where nonsense was seriously debated.
‘Teleportation,’ Kubik said, more to himself than to Ekharth. He nodded his head, in satisfied agreement with his own deduction. ‘Confirmed by reports of the destruction of the Iron Castellan. The Veridi giganticus must have employed their teleportation technology to repopulate their attack base. The infiltration capabilities are impressive. So much more to learn.’ He abandoned all pretence of speaking to the Council and began to dictate into a recording unit built into one of his arms. ‘Effective range remains the question. Based on present knowledge, it appears to be effectively unlimited. Without any indication of the origins of teleported bodies, we are forced to the most extreme hypotheses in the interests of strategic extrapolations.’ His flat, machinic tones managed somehow to sound regretful. He switched into the whistles and screeches of binary.
‘Can your teams stop this?’ Lansung asked Koorland. His fleet was bleeding and dying. Already, a third of the vessels surrounding the moon had been destroyed. Lansung sounded desperate.
‘They will,’ said Koorland.
‘How do you know?’ Ekharth shouted. ‘This has never been done before! You have nothing to go on.’
Koorland stopped pacing. This time he would speak. He turned slowly to face Ekharth. ‘They are Adeptus Astartes,’ he said. ‘I have that to go on. I need no more.’
‘But…’ Ekharth began. He trailed off and looked away from Koorland’s glare.
Koorland faced Lansung. ‘How long can the blockade hold?’ he asked.
‘Not long.’
‘I noticed you have pulled the Autocephalax Eternal back to orbit around Terra. And that you are not sending reinforcements.’
‘We can’t. If the orks break through—’
‘When, you mean,’ Vangorich corrected.
‘The defence of Terra is paramount,’ Lansung said.
‘Of course,’ Koorland said. What the Lord High Admiral said was true. It was also convenient. Lansung’s reluctance to commit the flagship Autocephalax Eternal to combat had moved far beyond the craven into a realm so contemptible it did not have a name.
‘The kill-teams must act quickly,’ Lansung said.
‘They will,’ Koorland said.
Mesring had been staring into the middle distance, distracted by inner visions Koorland couldn’t guess at. Now the Ecclesiarch started in his seat. ‘We have not voted!’ he said. ‘Nothing has changed! What was monstrous before is just as monstrous now.’
Silence from the other High Lords greeted Mesring’s outburst. He looked from one to another, pleading for support that had evaporated.
Zeck sighed. ‘What assurances do we have this will not be your coup?’
Vangorich laughed. ‘And would you believe those assurances if you had them? Would they mean anything coming from any of you?’
Zeck said, ‘You find our circumstances amusing?’
‘Hardly,’ said Vangorich, suddenly cold. ‘Your responses to them, though, are quite another matter.’
‘Only one response interests me,’ Koorland. Even there he was stretching a point. He had little interest in anything the Council might say or do. He was here out of brute necessity and for no other reason. ‘You know what you have to do. Vote or be damned.’
‘You knew,’ Ekharth said, sullen with revelation. ‘You knew the orks would come back. You arranged this crisis. Now we have no choice but to embrace your rule as our salvation.’
‘Shut up, Tobias,’ said Tull. She sounded just as sullen, but where Ekharth was slipping into outright paranoia and speaking from genuine fear, in Tull’s voice Koorland heard suspicion shaped by frustrated ambition. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
‘No!’ Mesring shouted. ‘We must not let this pass! It is blasphemous!’
For the first time in the proceedings, Veritus spoke. ‘How?’ he asked.
Mesring hesitated. ‘It is blasphemous,’ he said again. He looked away from the inquisitor. He shrank against the back of his seat, staring at the floor.
Koorland frowned. Mesring’s objections bothered him more than Ekharth’s. The form they took made no sense. Koorland did not understand what was behind them, and that worried him.
The High Lords voted.
Mesring was the only one opposed. Even Ekharth, seeing himself isolated, joined with the others in voting with Vangorich. Veritus and Kubik abstained again. They seemed, Koorland thought, to have deliberately moved themselves to the sidelines. They were observers of an event whose end result could not be affected by their participation, and so they chose to guard their neutrality. They would bear watching. The power games of the High Lords never ceased, and it was the silent ones who were most formidable. They were the ones who, if they had not already seized an advantage, saw the potential of one within their grasp.
The Council feared Koorland’s long-term plans. He wondered how the consequences of what he was about to set in motion would serve Kubik and Veritus. Like the Council, he had no choice.
Koorland left the dais without a word.
Three
Robed, Abathar gazed at the armour he was about to don once more, and thought of the task ahead. He was standing on the precipice of meaning. He needed to understand the nature of his leap, and his armour was the key to that understanding. He knew this at a deep level, one without words — one at the same depths as that which resonated with the needs of the machine-spirits when he listened to their rages and pains.
Outside the Techmarine’s armorium, footsteps rang up and down the corridors of the Imperial Palace barracks reserved for the Dark Angels. He heard the careful tread of Chapter-serfs. He heard the mechanical trudge of servitors. He heard the metallic cacophony of repairs, the murmur of prayers, and the whisper of oaths. Shadows, flickering in torchlight, moved over the armour and its folded servo-arms. The restless dark was deep, rich with imminent knowledge.
The revelation was approaching.
The sounds of the mobilisation seemed hollow and sparse. So many empty armoria and meditation cells. So many brothers lost. It would be easy to hear, in the diminishment, the echo of defeat. After a loss, a smaller muster, a weakened force.
That would be a lie, he thought.
It was true the combined Chapters on Terra could not attack the orks as they had before. It was true the new strategy Koorland had proposed was the product of necessity.
‘Not the full truths,’ the Techmarine muttered.
‘Lord?’ one of his armament serfs asked. They were standing by, waiting for him to permit them to return to their work of repair. His armour had escaped critical damage on Ullanor, but it had been badly scorched by vehicle-mounted flamers. It was blackened across most of its surface. The livery of the Dark Angels awaited restoration.
‘Wait,’ Abathar said.
The full truth was that Koorland’s plan would be a small deployment even if the disaster of Ullanor had never occurred. The plan had come into being through necessity, but its shape surpassed necessity. It was a new thing. In the demands it placed on the members of the kill-teams, it was an extraordinary thing. Abathar thought about the Space Marines at whose side he would be fighting. An Ultramarine. A Blood Angel. A Space Wolf. The composition of the teams was astounding. It would never have been possible before Ullanor.
Here again, was a product of necessity, and again the form of the act surpassed what was forced and entered into the realm of true daring and unprecedented innovation. Small squads of uniform composition would have been understandable. There were enough survivors of each Chapter to have mounted operations on that scale. But Koorland was urging them all to go further. The orders were to forge squad-level bonds with Space Marines who were strangers to him and to the ways of his brothers. At least one, he would have regarded with so much suspicion he would have refused to be in the same room as that warrior in other circumstances.