Contents

Cover

The Passing of Angels – John French

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Heralds of the Siege’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

The Passing of Angels

John French

‘If gods did not exist mankind would conjure them into being.

If god did exist He would will monsters into life and cloak them in the light of heaven.’

– attributed to the Unspeakable King

I do not want to be here. I do not want this present, and I want the future that follows it less. Yet the future is inescapable.

My head is bowed, my eyes closed, and I listen as the present rushes past.

The tick-buzz of armour servos…

Breath vibrating inside the tarnished silver helms of the Host…

Wind gliding across the skin of the Storm Eagle as it drops from the dawn sky…

Fire feathering from the wings…

The wind running amongst the clouds…

And beyond that shell of air – silence…

Silence…

There, beyond the sky, is the only place where it is truly quiet. The song of the spheres is not a sound. It is that silence that sits between earth and moon, that marks the passing of comets, and sings the birth of stars. Heaven – from where the angels of an unenlightened past looked down on creation.

‘My lord.’ It is Alepheo. I hear the damage in his voice, the old wound to the throat, still healing. I hear the control, and the deference, and beyond that, pain. ‘We have reached the drop mark,’ he says.

I open my eyes, and the world crowds back in through them, bright and dark and consuming. I see the Host of destruction. I see the scars and burns on their crimson armour. I feel my senses rush to enfold every angle of form, every mutable scrap of colour, every stutter of movement. On and on, each nanosecond a tableau, and each shift of hand or eye causing the universe to shatter and remake itself in my sight.

There is so much in even the smallest moment of life, so much that humans cannot see. My senses pour down through layers of detail. There is tarnish on the tear drops that sit on the cheeks of Alepheo’s mask. There are five droplets. The second droplet is a micron out of alignment. The artisan who made it had been disturbed during the sculpting. The interruption had disrupted his equilibrium. It had taken a heartbeat for him to settle back to his task, but in that time the damage to his work had been done. I can see it in the error, and I can feel the flaw in my heart.

I catch myself, and pull my senses back to the level of the beings that stand at my side – my cruel and beautiful children. I read them and their hearts with a glance. So much is written in the way that Alepheo hangs his head, so much more in the way his hand rests on the holster of his pistol. I see the weight of his fears, even though these half-angels know no fear. You cannot cut the core of fear from a human, you can only make them deaf to the screams. And inside, these angels of death – made to bring enlightenment like falling lightning – all are screaming.

‘Doors opening.’ The pilot’s voice echoes in the compartment.

Red lights begin to pulse. Sirens blare. Doors along the flank of the craft slide open. Sound and air rush out into the brightening night. I can see the Storm Eagles, Lightning Crows and Thunderhawks following us down out of the dome of the sky, red streaks in deepening blue. Like drops of blood. Like tears.

I step to the edge of the open assault ramp. The air pulls at me. I look down. The summit of the mountain city rises from dawn-stained cloud. I turn my back, balancing on the edge. Sixty silver faces look at me from the compartment.

‘Leave none alive,’ I say, and I step back into the rushing air.

Shar-General Galen did not look up from the battle plans as the crowd of officers drained from the strategium. Bright sunlight poured through the dome above. She could feel the warmth on the back of her neck. She knew the plans by heart, but still she did not look up.

He was still there, on the other side of the planning table. He had not moved. She found it hard to look at him sometimes, even after a decade of war at his side. Part of her did not know what she would see.

‘Please, general, ask your question,’ the Angel said.

‘I am…’ She almost looked up at him, but caught herself and began to shuffle sheaves of field reports together. She shook her head, breathed out. ‘I am clear on all of the operational elements involved. There is nothing that needs to be clarified.’

‘But you have a question, Galen,’ he said. His voice was a melody, clear as the note of a struck bell. ‘Not all matters of war exist in bullets and orders. Ask what you wish.’

She stopped, her eyes on the parchment under her hands.

‘Why did you insist on this?’ she said at last, and finally looked at him.

Sanguinius, primarch of the IX Legion, Archangel of Baal, stood in the cold light of the strategium. An ivory white tunic and toga was wound and folded over muscle and smooth skin. Golden hair framed a face set in an expression that spoke of wisdom and understanding. It was a perfect face, a face that called to the ideals of humanity. She met his eyes. His furled wings shifted at his back, and she was suddenly struck by the fact that the feathers were not just white, but every hue of shadow. He was beautiful, more beautiful than life, and more terrifying than anything she had seen in half a century’s worth of warzones.

‘It must happen,’ he said, and she felt the terror and adoration fade from her. ‘You were at the assault on the H_____’s settlement. I was not there, and yet I saw it in your words, and in the words you choose not to say.’

Galen felt her eyes twitch as the memory returned…

When the H_____ had detonated the first mine, the gravity for five kilometres around the blast had broken. Even ten kilometres away she had felt herself lift from the ground. Vomit had risen to her tongue. Then she heard the cry of her adjutant, and looked up.

The detonation unfolded in silence, stacking up and up and up to the scuffed blue of the sky. It shimmered like water. She could see through it. Thousands of tiny flecks danced in the expanding column. She blinked. The skin of her face was prickling. Then she realised that the flecks were people: tens of thousands of troops that she had sent in to the settlement and the hundreds of thousands that lived there. Light bent and folded. Motes of darkness grew and burst like bubbles. And out the silence rolled, as though the sound was swallowed by the atrocity of what she was witnessing. Seconds touched eternity as the column of broken reality touched the dome of the heavens.

Then it collapsed.

Everything within ceased to be.

Air rushed in to the space left. The pressure wave ruptured Galen’s eardrums and scattered her command cadre out of their transports.

Where the mine had detonated there was nothing. Just a black wound that hung like mist above the ground, drinking light.

Galen blinked, and the memory vanished into Sanguinius’ gaze.

‘Even so, my lord, even though the H_____ are willing to use such devices…’

‘It is not just the inhumanity of what they have done. Resistance to the truth is a tragedy, but the weapons we choose to fight with speak to eternity. The Emperor has decreed that such weapons will not be tolerated to exist, and their use will earn His wrath.’

‘I have said I understand what must be done, my lord, but…’

He bowed his head. She felt her breath stop in her lungs. There was something in the gesture, something so simple, so human. When he looked up, the pain on his face almost made her cry out.

‘I understand too, general.’ He reached out and took her hand in both of his. His gaze was still steady on hers, but it seemed to her that shadow had drained into the recesses of his face. ‘The question you want to know the answer to is not why I insisted on this, but how I can do such a thing.’

‘The weapons we choose to fight with speak to eternity,’ she said to him.

He nodded at hearing his own words, but she could see only a hardening in his eyes.

‘And I am the creation of the Emperor, Galen. Though I am His son, I was engineered, not born. I am as He made me. I was made to perform a function for mankind.’

‘But by doing this, how can we claim to be better than the people we wish to drag into the light?’

‘We cannot make that claim.’ He half-turned away then. His pupils vanished as his eyes caught the light streaming from the crystal dome above. ‘You and humanity can claim the light that is left after our passing, but I can claim only that I know my nature.’ He looked back at her then, his eyes clear. ‘And even in the myths of the past, angels were not created for kindness.’

I am falling through the light of a new-born day alone. Behind me the Host of destruction falls with me. Clouds whip past. The mountain city grows beneath us, fog peeling back from its flanks. I can see tiers of buildings set behind curtain walls. I can see roads, and people moving in the last shadows of night. The lights of domed force-fields glitter as the fog passes through them. The guns on the high towers do not turn to greet us. We are too few and too small for their machine systems to notice. Those that set them to watch the skies have made the mistake that ancient kings made before their realms burned for pride – they forget the oldest lessons.

The first gunship comes into view high above us. The tower guns see it. Barrels sweep up. Energy flushes into charge chambers. Calculations race through silica.

We fall on, and the city rises.

The guns fire. Columns of blinding light rise into the sky, burning cloud banks away. The air shrieks. The gunship corkscrews through the burning energy.

I can see the force-field beneath us, a glittering skin. There are figures on the roads and ramparts looking up, and one of them raises a hand and points. I spread my wings, the dew-heavy air catching in the feathers. Above me, my sons trigger their jump packs. Fire cuts their fall just as we touch the force-field dome and pass through.

Above us the air is burning; beneath us the waking city sees us. My wings are spread, and my spear is raised in my hand. I can see the condemned. I can see their faces. I can see the terror in the face of a soldier as he steps into the light beside his squad. I can see his eyes. I can see that he was not a soldier until the coming of war. I can see that he has killed. I can see his fear of death and his cruelty in the tremble of his rising gun. I can see his love of life in the eye behind the gun. I can see all humanity in that look. The tip of my spear strikes him in the middle of the forehead.

The first blood of this reaping sprays up to fleck the beat of my wings as I land.

Alepheo, commander of the Second Seraphic Host of the IX Legion, held his breath and counted. As he felt the time seep into his muscles, he lifted the brush. Its tip was black, heavy with soot ink. He had ground the pigment himself using charcoal that he had made from a single tree he had felled in the forest of Macragge during his time amongst the XIII. The handle of the brush was bone, in this case human. Hollow-cored, it was light and perfectly balanced when the bristles were loaded with the correct amount of ink. The bone had been his birth brother’s, given to him after the last of his kin fell in the trials to become one of the Angels.

He smiled as the sorrow of that memory touched his thoughts. He let it settle, feeling it combine with the subject he had chosen. A paper scroll hung in front of him as white as fresh snow, seeming to glow in the dusk light entering his chamber from the high windows. The ruined fortress they had taken for their base in the compliance of the H_____ was filled with shadows and marked with the scars of forgotten wars, but here in the high central tower there was light.

The tip of the brush touched the paper. Alepheo paused a second and then his thoughts unfolded through his nerves and muscles. The brush slid over the surface of the paper, leaving a black trail. Now it was in motion, it did not stop. The flow of strokes followed a rhythm set by the beating of his hearts and the song of his thoughts. The dipping of the brush, the flick and flow of ink, the smell of it as it dried, all were the rhythm of creation.

When he was done, he stepped back and looked at what his soul had brought into being.

‘“And by my being is desolation wrought,”’ said a voice from behind him. ‘“And by the shadow of my sword does dew fall and the sun rise” – the Harabic scholars of the past would wonder at such an evocation of their tongue and art.’ Alepheo turned and knelt in a single movement. His black robes rustling, the brush still in his hand.

‘My lord,’ he said.

‘Rise,’ said Sanguinius. ‘You must clean that brush before the ink clots the bristles.’

Alepheo obeyed, moving the brush between seven stone bowls of water and drying it with the cloths he had folded and set beside them. Sanguinius took a single step forwards, eyes fixed on the calligraphic poem spiralling across the paper screen.

‘Dead languages speak more clearly than the voices of the living, don’t you think?’

‘Are they dead if some still speak them?’ asked Alepheo, dabbing the brush head on the soft black fabric of the second cloth. ‘A song sung is still a song even if it has not sounded for millennia.’

‘Quite so, my son,’ said Sanguinius, and lapsed into silence as Alepheo returned the clean brush to its stand.

‘How may I serve, lord?’ said Alepheo, turning back to his primarch.

‘I have given the order – the H_____ are to be decimated. The population once compliant will be scattered across the Imperium. Others will come and make new cities under this sun. But they and all they have made here will cease to be. Their name will be obliterated, their cities levelled.’

Alepheo was still for a second and then nodded once.

‘It was written as soon as they used such weapons.’

Sanguinius’ eyes moved over the black words painted onto the paper screen.

‘The judgement decreed requires more,’ he said.

Alepheo was very still, and then turned to the bowls of water used to clean his brush. He began to pour them into a rough clay jug. Black ink swirled in the splash.

‘We must all bear the burden of our nature,’ said Alepheo, without looking up as he poured ink and water from the sixth bowl.

‘We must. It is a terrible thing to be the bearer of the wrath of an enlightened age.’

Alepheo looked around as he heard a soft clink of something metal being set down on the stone floor.

A helmet lay at Sanguinius’ feet. A serene face moulded in tarnished silver looked up at Alepheo with empty eyes. Tear drops marked its cheeks and a rayed halo ran across its crown. It was a death mask, made by a dying brother of the Legion in the last hours of his life and then cast in silver. They were worn only by those called to put aside their names and serve amongst the Legion’s Destroyers. To hide one’s face behind such a mask was to take on the burden of atrocity, a necessary evil in an age both of enlightenment and war. It was a burden shared by all the Legion, to be taken up and then put aside when all was done.

‘I would call you to be the Dominion of the Destroyer Host,’ said Sanguinius.

Alepheo looked at the helm but did not pick it up. The seventh bowl of water was still in his hands. The surface of the liquid within was mirror smooth.

‘Of course, my lord,’ he said, aware of the control in his voice.

‘You will not be yourself in this, my son. You will be your function. Alepheo dies for the time when your hands do this deed.’

‘But you are always yourself, my lord. If I must be a part of this why am I granted the absolution of anonymity when you are not?’

Pain ghosted across the Angel’s face as he smiled, the expression equal parts affection and sorrow.

‘You were all made from humanity, my son. I am not. The darkness that we must bring is not something I can put aside. It is me. In the shadow of my wings life withers and blood salts the ground.’

Alepheo bowed his head, and knelt to pick up the silver helm. Then he stood, the bowl of black-stained water still held in his other hand.

‘I will become death,’ he said, and poured the seventh bowl onto the stone floor.

My sons descend around me. Grenades scatter from them like seeds. Phosphex ignites, burning white as it flares and eats the stones of buildings. Radiation grenades land, and rest silent amongst the spreading flames. They will not kill now. They will linger here, the shadow of our passing.

Troops pour from towers. Light shatters from the angles of their black glass armour. One of my sons lands on a tower top. The launcher slung under his arms roars, the radiation missile bursting amongst a dense cluster of soldiers. I can taste the uranium and barium as it salts the air.

A buzzing clank echoes up the streets. I turn, knowing what I will see. The H_____ have kept many wonders from the ages before Old Night, but have also preserved many of its horrors. The things that stalk over the stone and steel road are black mirror-skinned, beetle-carapaced, and skitter on seven legs. Eyes held in crystal capsules stud their abdomens. Human eyes, lidless, blood-shot and rolling. These creations were punishment for the crimes of dissent or treachery against the monarchs of the H_____. Each one is a family stripped of flesh and remade. Brothers, mothers, sisters and fathers – their nerves, mutilated brains and sense organs spliced into a single cyborg frame. At their core is blind rage and confusion, and lethal purpose.

I look into the eye clusters of the nearest one as it races up the road. A blur of needle-fine rounds sprays from its weapon pod. My wings raise me into the air. It looks up at me, guns and blood-shot eyes tracking as I rise. I throw my spear. It strikes the first abomination and lightning rips through it. Shards of black glass armour, chrome and flesh scatter out. For a second the reek of static blots out the smell of the burning city. I land on top of the dead thing as it collapses, pull the spear free and am striking the second and the third cyborgs without pause, spinning and bounding through the air.

Above me, I see the shield pylons topple from the summit of the mountain city. The skin of its energy shields blinks out of being in a boom of dry thunder. The gunships and fighter bombers come out of the cloud layer an instant later. They loose their payloads. Inferno bombs, phosphex cylinders and radiation missiles burst amongst the tiers of already burning buildings. The heat lights the edge of my wings. Through and above it, my sons, my destroying angels move, silver-faced, armour darkening with soot, firing at anything that moves.

A human is in front of me, gun rising, and then ceases to be as I strike, and I am not stopping. I am amongst the throng that pours into the streets, picking men up and casting them down to burn, splitting armour, turning, piercing, slicing. And I do not hesitate. I do not pause in thought or consideration. The condemned run from me, burning, blind as their eyes boil. I release them from life as I pass. I do not even feel the spear strikes. Gunfire rips from buildings to tatter my wings. Blood marks my passing, scattering from the slaughter. I am not alive. I am not a creature that lives. I am just judgement. I am death. And for now I feel no sorrow.

Horus Lupercal, primarch of the XVI Legion, smiled as his brother stepped through the door. He was unarmoured, his grey-white battleplate shed, hanging from a rack at the chamber’s edge. In place of armour, he wore a tunic of plain black. The room was small and bare, and the light of the single glow globe did not reach into its corners. The audience and command chambers of the Vengeful Spirit could have swallowed it many times over, but it was here, in a space that a mortal human could cross in ten strides that the two brothers had chosen to meet.

‘You are late,’ said Horus, without rising.

‘I am,’ said Sanguinius, glancing over the chamber’s sparse furnishing: a low table set with a game board and two metal stools. ‘But I did not want to deprive you of the opportunity to point it out.’ He looked at his brother, his face emotionless. ‘So, I did not hurry.’

Horus laughed. Sanguinius smiled and sat. He wore a black and red robe, tied at his waist by a golden cord. His wings were tucked tight against his back, and he had cropped his golden hair close so that he seemed the image of ancient heroes given life. He picked up the clay cup from beside the board and took a mouthful. Horus watched his brother as Sanguinius nodded slowly, looking down into the dark liquid in the cup.

‘If I did not know better, I would suspect that you went to considerable trouble to find something that tastes this bad.’

Horus took a swig from his own cup, paused, and frowned.

‘You are wrong…’ He took another swig. ‘I did not go to much trouble.’ He winced and then began to laugh again. ‘But it does taste truly terrible.’ He gestured at the board set out between them. Tall pieces carved from blood ivory and ebony sat on hexagons of mother-of-pearl and jet. ‘Something new that might entertain, it is–’

‘A variant of Ullatur played by the scholar caste of the Noon-reach cluster, in form similar to its Terran forebears but with the addition of two pieces – the Messenger, and the Fiend.’ Sanguinius picked up one of the blood ivory pieces and turned it in his fingers, letting light play over the three fanged heads sprouting from its top. ‘These were made by the blind master Heydosia after she lost her sight.’ He put the piece down on a different space to the one he had picked it up from. ‘Your move.’

Horus raised an eyebrow.

Sanguinius blinked slowly. ‘It is all right, brother. In this variant, going first is considered a disadvantage.’ He took a swig from his cup.

‘I know,’ said Horus, and moved a black raven to take a red crone. He placed the piece next to his cup. ‘It’s just good that you think you can give me an advantage and win.’

‘Oh, I know I can win, brother – I just like watching you think you can win too.’

Horus did not reply, and the sound in the chamber faded to the distant rumble of the Vengeful Spirit’s engines pushing it through the void. The walls vibrated, the note just enough to send ripples across the surface of the two cups of wine.

‘You are troubled,’ said Horus at last. Sanguinius’ eyes flicked up from the board. A frown creased the perfection of his face.

‘As are you,’ said the Angel, taking two pieces one after another, the base of his messenger tapping the board as it jumped from kill to kill.

‘True,’ said Horus, switching the positions of his light bearers and knights. ‘But I asked first.’ Sanguinius sat back. His wings twitched. ‘The old question?’ said Horus.

Sanguinius nodded.

‘The paradox of our existence,’ said Horus, looking back to the board. ‘It is not a paradox, though – it is simply a fact. We exist to destroy and by doing so we create.’

‘And what of that we must destroy?’ asked Sanguinius.

‘Tragedies, necessities, sacrifices – everything that shall come shall be greater than anything that is lost.’

Silence slid back into the space as pieces clicked across the polished wood and seashell.

‘And you, my brother?’ said Sanguinius. ‘Your star shines brighter and brighter. Your sons honour you by rising to be exemplars to all. Our father calls you to his side in war and council more than any other…’ Horus’ gaze was fixed on the board. He reached out and placed a finger on a black prince. ‘And yet you are troubled.’ Horus looked up, his gaze dark and hard for an instant, and then he shook his head.

‘I am not troubled. Questions are part of understanding, part of wisdom.’

‘And if they go unanswered?’ said Sanguinius. ‘I can see it, Horus. I can feel it. You are letting something small feed on the silence inside you.’

Horus moved the prince, but kept his finger on its carved head.

‘We are creating a future. We are making it with blood and ideas and symbols and words. The blood is ours and we are the symbols. But the ideas? Has our father ever spoken of the future to you?’

‘Many times, and many more times to you.’

‘He has spoken of ideas of both unity and humanity in grand terms, but has he ever said what will happen between the bloody present and that golden time?’

Sanguinius’ frown sent shadows across his face.

‘To think of such things does nothing good, brother.’

Horus smiled.

‘Surgeon, heal thyself.’

Sanguinius’ expression did not change.

‘The present is far from complete, Horus, and the future will hold many sorrows and many honours. The stars remain wild and unconquered.’

Horus held his brother’s gaze for a second, and then shrugged.

‘What happens after that? What happens to angels after a new heaven is made?’

Horus gripped the black prince and moved it. The angel looked at the play, and toppled his red king onto its side.

‘Shall we play again?’ asked Horus.

Sanguinius smiled, his frown clearing like clouds from the face of the sun.

‘By all means – I think you might even be getting better.’

I stand on the topmost tower of the mountain city. The heat of the flames is crawling into the bare flesh of my face. Soot marks my features. My hair has burned to my scalp, and the gold of my armour is black with the touch of fire and blood. My cheeks are blistered by radiation and charred by the fire I have passed through. It will heal in the time it takes me to return to my ship in orbit, but for now I do not look like an angel of light and beauty – I am the angel of ruin, whose passing makes the sleeping wake in terror.

Alepheo drops into the ruins beneath me. His red armour is scarred and flame darkened. He looks up at me with a dead silver face that is shedding eternal tears.

‘It is done,’ he says. I can hear the weight in the words. He will bear the scar of this in his dreams, and it will creep into the poems he paints in the languages of the dead. He will understand then that we are angels. Beauty does not belong to us; it is what we must burn to be what we are.

Beneath us in the city, the stones of the buildings have begun to melt in the sea of fire.

I look up. Beyond the pall of smoke, the clouds are clearing to greet the dawn. The sun touches my eyes.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It is done.’

And then I stretch my wings and take to the air, rising from flames and atrocity towards the light of the future.

About the Author

John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection and Incarnation for The Horusian Wars and two tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies and Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

An extract from Heralds of the Siege.

The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.

Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty god-machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.

Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.

But those mass conveyors would not come.

With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.

Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.

A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such god-machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.

Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transport Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.

It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.

Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. While she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eyepatch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chainblade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.

‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.

The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Lennox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.

It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.

In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.

When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.

‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.

‘Ratchek,’ she called to her former moderatii and the Mole’s goggled operator. ‘Kill the main drive. Open outer doors.’

The layered bulkheads sighed hydraulically, and slipped aside to reveal the shadowy interior of the scaffold complex.

Lennox nodded. ‘Go.’

The structure was swarming with afflicted constructs going about their duties, and before long Lennox and her rebels found themselves fighting up through the blind spots and gauntlets of the scaffold interior. Meanwhile, heavily armed security forces – drawn from their perimeter posts by the Mole’s emergence – were running across the assembly yards and converging upon the Titan.

The compartments and ladderwells of the towering complex were filled with the cacophony of gunfire. The Omnissian Faithful had to make use of whatever untainted weaponry they could scavenge and could not afford god-pleasing uniformity. Laslocks blasted bolts across the darkness of the decks. Shells from stub-carbines tore up through catwalks. Arc rifles threw streams of lightning along gantries. Lennox anticipated the arrival of the rebels by tearing grenades from her bandolier and throwing them up through the ladderwells and into the levels above.

Ajax Abominata, even in the final stages of its dread assembly, was what she had come to expect from a corrupted god-machine, swarming with twisted artisans prattling scrapcode and insanity.

The rebels moved up at speed and with merciless gunfire delivered at point-blank range. The corrupted army of constructs tending the monstrous Titan were ill-equipped to repel such a direct attack. The assembly yard’s security forces and shock troops hadn’t entertained the possibility of an assault on Temple-Tarantyne coming up through the installation’s foundations. While they babbled and ran towards the towering scaffold, Lennox and her rebels hauled themselves up through the structure. Heavy servitors and cyborg corruptions shrieked as they were blasted aside. Chainblades opened up the traitor constructs in fountains of blood and oil before sending them flailing off the scaffold’s edge.

The rapid advance was not met without resistance. About them the very metal of the Titan’s outer hull and the surrounding scaffolding warped with daemonic presence. Infernal eyes opened in the walls. Hatches opened explosively to vomit acidic ichor or shoot grasping tentacles at the rebels. Deck openings became fang-lined mouths that cut insurgents in half. The fighting got close and tangled on a platform crowded with strapped-down stores and cargo nets. They were rushed by servitors with black filth bubbling from their mouth-grilles and a fell light behind their eyes. Lennox ordered her expendable ferals with their limb-fused weaponry into the fray, supported by engineered hulks who tore the traitor servitors limb from corrupted limb.

Higher up, the rebels became caught in a furious exchange of fire as a twisted member of the Titan crew took charge on the scaffold deck, joined by sentries running up the mobile gantries. The stairwell turned into a horrific kill-zone. Lennox didn’t have time or bodies to spare in pushing on through and so cut up through the mesh flooring with her chainblade. Sending a small group up through the hole with Galahax Zarco, she watched the enginseer swing his power axe about him. With heavy footfalls he took apart possessed servitors and buried the crackling weapon in the Titan crewmember with a sickening thud. With the gauntlet broken, Lennox ordered the rebels onwards and upwards.

The compartments about the Titan’s command deck had been locked off by the time the rebels reached it. Engineering constructs gargled corruption at them through the metal.

‘We don’t have time for this,’ Lennox said to Omnek-70 and Zarco. Levelling his arquebus at the doors, Omnek-70 punched round after transuranic round through the bulkhead and into the cavity compartment beyond. As the sound of the tainted constructs died away, the enginseer buried the crackling cog of his axe in one of the round-punctured doors and heaved it aside. Lennox slipped through, her plasma caliver hugged in at her chest.

The compartment stank of corruption and was wreathed in a lead-coloured smoke. There were warped bodies on the floor with gaping holes through their polluted workings where Omnek-70 had shot them through. A tech-adept came at the princeps, wielding a heavy multi-tool like a club. Leaning into the kick of the caliver, she blasted the thing into oblivion, before turning to face another filth-spewing construct, burning it from existence.

‘Open it up,’ Lennox said to Galahax Zarco as they strode through the compartment and climbed up onto the outer shell of the Titan’s head. From there they could see many other Titans in the gloom of the colossal assembly yard. They were all in different stages of completion, some surrounded by warped scaffolding. Lennox looked down at the corrupted hull of Ajax Abominata beneath her boots. The princeps could feel the suffering of the afflicted machine-spirit within.

‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 called from the scaffold exterior, his optics whirring through different filters. He pointed out across the assembly yard. ‘The Ventorum is powering up.’

Lennox grunted. The Warlord Titan Belladon Ventorum was one of the many god-machines waiting in the assembly yard precincts for transportation off-world – and it had stood there a long time, judging by its relatively uncorrupted appearance. While most of its weaponry was too powerful to use without damaging the precious Ajax Abominata, its mighty gatling blaster was capable of turning the scaffolding upon which they stood into a blur of shredded scrap.

‘Enginseer, work fast,’ she called.

‘As fast as I can,’ Zarco replied. While a simple hatch, even a reinforced one, shouldn’t have been a problem for a priest of Mars, the corrupted metal sickeningly retracted from Zarco’s tools.

As he finally forced the grotesque thing open, Omnek-70 pointed his arquebus down into the musty darkness of the bridge space. There was no crew on the command deck and Lennox didn’t have time for the intricacies of sabotaging such a complex machine. All she knew was that the most sophisticated piece of equipment on a Titan was the manifold interface and mind-impulse technologies that would link the crew to the machine. Zarco stood aside to let Lennox get past him to the hatch.

‘Pass them along,’ the princeps ordered, as her rebel followers formed a line.

One by one they passed along the demolition packs they had carried with them. Zarco primed the timers before handing the devices over to Lennox, who dropped them down through the hatch.

‘Go!’ she called, moving the Omnissian Faithful off the Titan’s afflicted hull and back into the scaffold complex.

A mobile gantry completed its ponderous swing into position, connecting with the scaffolding, and Lennox’s constructs began exchanging heavy fire with enemy forces running the length of the groaning platform. A tech-thrall exploded in gore and workings as the beam of some tainted weapon hit him. Servo-automata were blasted to shreds and gun-servitors received glowing auto-rounds to the head.

‘Get back!’ Lennox ordered, unleashing a storm of plasma up the ladderwell.

She felt the metal of the walls about her retract and tremble with fury and pain as the plasma stream burned up through both opening and flooring to turn the deck above into a light storm. The half-bodies of smouldering constructs thudded down on top of them.

A daemoniac artisan screeched at the rebels. ‘And you, afflicted thing!’ Lennox roared back, slapping another tri-flask into her plasma caliver and blasting a response. She felt the metal hand of Omnek-70 on her shoulder.

It was time to leave.

‘Tactical withdrawal,’ she ordered, prompting a vat-engineered work-hulk carrying a heavy stubber to stream suppressing fire along the length of the mobile gantry, allowing the rebels time to slide back down through the lower decks. Throwing the caliver across her back on its strap, Lennox clasped the edge of a ladder with the inside of her boots and a loose-gloved grip. Sliding down through the corpse-strewn decks of Ajax Abominata’s rig, she hit the bottom and got out of the way for Omnek-70 and the much larger Zarco.

The ground floor was a storm of thin, dark beams and arc streams tearing through the scaffolding from reinforcements closing in from outside. The assembly yards were huge and it had taken the installation’s sentries some time to converge upon the Mole and the targeted Titan. The gunfire of Dark Mechanicum constructs cut through the jabbering scrapcode and klaxons shrieking across the assembly yard. As rebels stumbled through the lower level, many were cut down by infernal shock troops closing on their transport.

‘Ratchek, reverse drill,’ Lennox called to the moderatii as she hauled herself up to the scratched hull of Archimedex. Slapping thralls and limping battle-automata in through the Mole’s hatch, Lennox felt the scaffold’s superstructure tremble.

The explosives fired.

Ajax Abominata’s command deck exploded, blasting the head of the Titan into nothing more than shattered wreckage, raining flaming debris down through the scaffold rig.

‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 said with a cyborg’s lack of emotion and urgency, and pulled Lennox towards the waiting Mole. She nodded. The mighty Belladon Ventorum was also sending quakes through the assembly yards with its every step, the monstrous Titan moving into position. The rebels’ work here was done. Ajax Abominata would be going nowhere without a command deck.

With Zarco and Omnek-70 in, Lennox stepped inside the transport and heaved the bulkhead shut.

Safe once more below ground, Archimedex nonetheless rocked with the quaking force of the explosions above as Belladon Ventorum opened fire upon the scaffolding complex of its sister engine.

Climbing down through the Mole, Lennox felt the rumble fade as they ploughed down through the bedrock to safety. Not even a Warlord’s terrible weaponry could reach them down here.

It was a job well done. She had denied the Warmaster Ajax Abominata, saving the countless loyalist lives that the monstrous machines would have claimed. She turned and hit the internal vox-stud.

‘Ratchek, fire up the noospherics,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Have Invalis Base advised – mission success. Tell them we’re inbound.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Sons of the Emperor: An Anthology in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by David Hudnut.

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