Only the Imperial Fists had been swift and strategic enough to summon their successor Chapters in force to the core systems before the enemy had swarmed the inner segmentum. Only the Imperial Fists had been wise enough to seek the aid of the only living primarch and courageous enough to strike with him at the heart of the ork empire. Only… the last Imperial Fist was dead, slain by the monstrous ork that had made the Imperium his plaything and the galaxy his own. In that one horrific moment, everything changed. The last Imperial Fist had died and hope died with him. A Chapter of the First Founding had been exterminated: the Defenders of Terra were no more.
If the citizens of the Imperium, for all their suffering and screaming, could comprehend such a thing, they would have lost their minds. Every exhausted Guardsman would have laid down his lasgun. Every captain of every vessel would have walked from their command decks. Every Space Marine would have been forced to confront a truth buried deep: that they might have been engineered to be superior exemplars of their species, but in the evolutionary arms race with the greenskin plague, they had lost. For if one Chapter could be destroyed then they all could — and without the Adeptus Astartes, the Imperium was doomed.
Two
The sun rose over the Imperial Palace.
Rays of light felt their way through the towers, citadels and hives beyond. The elegant architecture of the surrounding fortifications was cast in shadow, while the lamps punctuating the battlement walkway began to dim. Drakan Vangorich walked the ramparts of the Celantine Wall, the tails of his robes gliding along the polished stone. The Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum weaved through the clutter of rare and decorative plants, many of them of off-world origin, and beneath streaming red pennants. He passed statues of long-forgotten Thunder Warriors and monoliths listing in gold the tribes, clans and techno-barbaric warlords gathered under the Emperor’s banner at the end of the Wars of Unification.
Where the battlements widened into a platform overhanging a breathtaking drop from the Palace walls, Vangorich found smooth stone blocks serving as benches, but he did not sit. Instead he stood before the crenellations with his arms folded and his hands buried in his sleeves. A casual observer might have imagined the Grand Master of Assassins to have hidden weapons in there. He did, in fact — but the truth was that it was an unconscious habit, one that he had indulged in increasingly over the past months. He might have been a killer, the overlord of an army of similarly deadly agents of the Imperium, but he was still human and not immune to the anxiety of the times. Vangorich feared no man living or dead, and even held his nerve in the towering presence of humanity’s finest, but the Beast was a raging hurricane of green death swallowing the galaxy, and any man would be a fool to stand fearlessly before the apocalyptic savagery of such a creature.
Vangorich looked down between the crenellations and gave a shiver in the morning chill. It seemed like an unimaginably long way to fall. Stretching his neck in his hood he looked up, glad that the terrible shape of the ork attack moon no longer hung in the heavens. Beyond the dawn skies the Grand Master knew that there was the cold, black void — within which was an empire of broken and besieged worlds. Now, as a High Lord of Terra and with a seat on the Council of Twelve, Vangorich received daily and comprehensive reports: astropathic intelligence gathered from thousands of worlds, star forts, fleets and systems. Robed aides brought him piled stacks of data-slates on a daily, indeed hourly, basis. The reports were no different to those that Vangorich had acquired for himself, previous to his appointment as a High Lord. Now they simply carried an official seal.
His station had changed Drakan Vangorich, despite his best intentions. Palace intrigue and the political games he played seemed more important than ever, given that the tiniest ripples created by the High Lords — for good or for ill — had the power of tsunamis out across the Imperium. Now with a seat at their table himself, Vangorich felt not just the power of his new position but the crushing weight of responsibility. In this terrible game, the Beast held all the cards and had bet every wretched greenskin life on the likelihood that the Imperium would fold. That it would be consumed, as ever, by petty conflicts of its own making and therefore be ripe for destruction. The Beast knew its opponent well.
It was the combination of such feeble bureaucracy and an enemy the like of which the Imperium had never seen that had convinced the Grand Master of the need for action. Intervention. Drastic change — in himself and everyone else. He was convinced that now was the time for such determination. Every delay cost not lives but entire sectors. Every poor decision was not just a political setback but could break the collective will of humanity. Every failure carried with it not only horrific collateral damage but the very real possibility of existential doom. The Beast was coming and Terra was far from ready. His fellow High Lords and the common citizens of Terra were unified in only one thing: they both would only truly realise the need for such readiness with orks in the corridors of the hives and the palaces of the mighty.
It was time for decisive action from people with the backbone to act — High Lords who truly understood that their own private empires and armies were nothing without the Imperium, and that the Imperium was on its knees. High Lords like him.
A pair of Excoriators Space Marines approached along the battlements. Their plate, like the ramparts upon which they strode, was battle-scarred and annotated, a commemoration of the time when their brothers had held the wall against the besieging forces of the Warmaster, centuries before.
Between them they escorted a member of the Ecclesiarchy, a cardinal who cut quite an imposing figure even next to the two Space Marines. Cardinal Creutzfeldt was tall and heavy-set, but carried the extra weight well. He wore his robes and mitre with grizzled authority, while his large belt jangled with smouldering censers and tomes bearing chunky locks. In a tattooed hand he held a crosier that was crowned with a furiously burning brazier.
‘Eminence,’ Vangorich acknowledged.
Up close, Creutzfeldt’s face was a fearful mess. Horrific scars, long-healed, ran down the right side of his face like the tributaries of a delta. They twisted half of his mouth into a permanent snarl. A patch, decorated with the symbol of the Ecclesiarchy, covered his right eye. Creutzfeldt had served as a Ministorum priest in the ranks of the 401st Vymbari Pontificals, earning his scars against the orks of Fendrik’s World in an extended engagement that had all but claimed the regiment.
‘My lord,’ Creutzfeldt returned. Having taken a spear to the chest against the selfsame orks, his voice was a rasp. Still strong with a warrior’s pride and used to carrying a cardinal’s authority, he felt slightly awkward in expressing deference to a High Lord of Terra. Being used to sycophants and flatterers, many on the Council would have taken umbrage at such reservation. Men like Creutzfeldt made them nervous — men who had seen some of the Imperium and had suffered with it.
Vangorich liked him. He was exactly what the Grand Master needed.
‘My condolences,’ Vangorich said, ‘on your great loss, cardinal.’
‘My thanks,’ Creutzfeldt said. ‘With so many weighty matters on the mind of a High Lord, it is kind of you to spare a thought for the people of Aquillius.’
‘And for Fleur-de-Fides before,’ Vangorich added. After losing the cardinal world of Fleur-de-Fides to the Beast, Creutzfeldt had been reassigned to the seat of Aquillius but before he could even reach his new world, it too had been taken by the orks. ‘Tragedies both.’