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The Will of the Legion – Andy Clark

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Solar War’

A Black Library Publication

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The Will of the Legion

Andy Clark

Captain Hashin Yonnad squeezed his bolt pistol’s trigger. The gun boomed as it spat self-propelled micro-missiles down the length of the corridor. Around him the warriors of Breacher Siege Squad Tybo added their fire to his, each Iron Armour-clad battle-brother expertly plying his boltgun over the rim of his shield.

At the corridor’s far end, their targets were blown messily apart. Rangy human warriors in brightly patterned enviro-armour detonated as though each had swallowed a grenade in some obscene suicide pact.

In turning their guns upon the ships of the Third Expeditionary Fleet, these Driftborn may as well have done just that, thought Yonnad. He advanced, reloading as he went. Blood and pulverised meat dripped from the walls and ceiling onto the Imperial Fists as they passed.

‘No small thing, to see such bloodletting aboard the Tribune, eh, captain?’ asked Sergeant Tybo over the squad vox as they clattered up a flight of iron steps. They passed their Legion’s sigil, embossed upon the walls in semi-precious metals and lit red by the strobe of alarm lumens.

‘It will not last long,’ Yonnad replied. ‘Our enemies fight with vicious tenacity, but they have nothing to truly threaten the Legiones Astartes. When the ships of the Third Expeditionary Fleet entered their domain, they should have capitulated at once. The Consus Drift might have been a staging post. Instead they force us to make of it a mass grave.’

He shook his head and sighed. ‘Wasteful.’

They emerged into an intersection and were met by another hail of bullets that clanged from power armour and boarding shields.

This latest band of boarders had dragged heavy munitions crates into a crude barricade. Checking his auto-senses’ map of the Tribune he saw that the fighting had brought him almost to the ship’s outer hull.

‘This position was intended as a last-ditch defence for the enemy’s beachhead,’ opined Tybo.

‘Perhaps, in their ignorance, they never believed it would be needed,’ Yonnad replied. Certainly, the fire from behind the barricade was ragged and haphazard, easily shrugged off by Tybo’s legionaries.

‘Break them,’ Yonnad ordered.

Shields interlocking, bolters fore, the Breachers pressed forward. Their guns thundered, the sound filling the intersection and drowning out the terrified screams of their enemies. Pale-skinned, dark-eyed Driftborn were torn to pieces and the stench of blood and ordure filled the air. Some tried to fire back with their boarding rifles and wide-muzzled pistols.

Futile, thought Yonnad, pitifully so.

The bullets barely marred the legionaries’ shields. By comparison, simply standing against the Space Marines’ blizzard of fire was to die. A dozen Driftborn did so in the first seconds of the gunfight; another half a dozen followed them moments later, and then the last of their number were fleeing down the corridor in animal terror.

‘Follow. We finish this.’

At their captain’s command the Breachers bulled their way through the ill-fated barricade, their heavy boots crushing ruptured corpses into the deck plates as they strode relentlessly after the retreating Driftborn.

Through another bulkhead door, down a chevroned ramp between thumping pistons the size of gunships; Yonnad noticed amber warnings appearing on his auto-senses as air-oxygen content and external temperature both dropped steadily.

‘The fools must have made an imperfect breach with our hull,’ said Sergeant Tybo in disgust. ‘Sloppy.’

Yonnad passed through one last doorway, a wide portal whose mechanisms still sparked where the Driftborn had forced entry. Then the enemy were before him, what was left of them at least. Twenty-two men and women knelt upon the decking of a fire-damaged servitor bay, looking as pale and lifeless as the corpse-machines that dangled on armatures above them. They were shivering violently, Yonnad saw, those without respirator masks gasping for breath in the thin air.

Behind them yawned the boarding jaws of their attack craft, its ramshackle interior lit by stuttering lumens. Before them lay their weapons, set down in obvious surrender.

Yonnad’s auto-senses highlighted four separate micro-fractures around the boarding craft, where its rudimentary blast-foam dispensers had failed to properly seal the craft into the hull. At the rate the air was whistling away through those gaps and the cold of the void creeping in, he estimated the defeated Driftborn could survive in this chamber for a few minutes more at most.

‘What do we do with them?’ asked Tybo, his voice dispassionate.

‘They have surrendered and will be made Compliant,’ Yonnad replied, allowing his words to echo from his helm’s vox-grille. ‘They are not tainted xenos, but lost children of humanity and as such shall be afforded the light of the Imperial Truth.’ He had heard the Driftborn giving orders and shouting battle cries, and while their dialect was somewhat adrift of Terran standard, it was close enough that mutual understanding could be easily achieved. Sure enough he saw some amongst the Driftborn relax minutely. A few faces looked up in hope.

That hope spread, if only slightly, as the Imperial Fists gestured with their bolters for the captives to rise and exit the chamber. They did as they were bidden, walking two by two, hands on their heads with Brother Lordyan walking at their fore and the rest of the squad bringing up the rear. Yonnad was the last to leave, runemarking the site for immediate attention by the ship’s servitor repair clades.

‘We do not want to risk their boarding craft wrenching free from the hull and causing a breach,’ said Yonnad, then froze as script flowed across his auto-senses. A priority summons for him and the veteran legionaries of Squad Tybo, issued from embarkation deck six.

‘Other side of the ship,’ Tybo commented, already detailing two of his brothers to detach themselves and deliver the prisoners.

‘We will take the turbolifts,’ replied Yonnad.

‘What do you suppose this means?’ asked Tybo.

‘We will find out soon enough, sergeant,’ said Yonnad and set off with Tybo and his squad following close on his heels.

Despite the marvels of Imperial technology it still took Yonnad and his companions almost thirteen minutes to reach the embarkation deck, such was the size of the warship aboard which they travelled. On their way they saw plentiful signs that the Tribune was still engaged in the ongoing void war: servitor repair clades lumbered down strobe-lit corridors, their servo-armatures sparking as they sought out battle damage to minister to; Legion helots hastened past, some towing racked ammunition tenders, all pausing every few moments to brace themselves against grab handles and wall stanchions as the Tribune shuddered under the impact of macro munitions; squads of Imperial Fists legionaries jogged with crashing footfalls up ironclad stairways and along swaying gantrywalks.

‘Making for the last pockets of border resistance, no doubt,’ commented Sergeant Tybo as another squad passed them in the opposite direction.

‘The ship will soon be cleansed of their presence,’ replied Yonnad.

‘Do you think it will stop there?’ asked Tybo, sounding almost disappointed at the thought.

‘Doubtful, brother,’ said Yonnad, eyeing his choleric comrade askance. ‘The chance tides of the warp brought us to this place just as they brought its human inhabitants before us. Yet the welcome they showed us was to tear into the vessels of the Imperial Army with boarding craft and the long guns of their asteroid cities. They set upon us like jackylworms upon an ice-stalker’s corpse. Were you the primarch, would you swiftly forgive such an insult?’

‘It is not for us to speak for the thoughts or deeds of our sire, Captain Yonnad,’ Tybo replied, a frown in his voice.

‘True enough, but whether we say it aloud or not, you know that Lord Dorn is not given to mercy nor forgiveness,’ said Yonnad, certainty growing within him that he knew what he would see as they entered the embarkation deck.

Sure enough, as they clattered up a last flight of steps and emerged onto an upper gantry, the embarkation deck spread out before them, full of the rigidly controlled pandemonium that characterised the martial preparations of a Space Marine Legion preparing to unleash its might. Stormbirds idled in launch-clamps, searing energies simmering deep within their ramjets. Squad after squad of veteran Breachers, Cataphractii Terminators and a few Templar brethren stood in serried ranks or knelt as they took their oaths of moment. Ammunition and fuel canisters passed through the air on servo-hoists or moved through the press aboard rumbling carriages. Yonnad saw Captain Ushent of the 177th Company also present, and Captain Paros, the infamous ‘Wall-breaker’ of the 193rd.

It all faded in Yonnad’s sight, though, like the shadowed corners of a chamber illuminated by a single, stark lumen.

‘The primarch,’ breathed one of Tybo’s warriors, awe in his voice.

Dorn stood amidst it all, a pillar of carved stone rising immovable from amidst the whirling tides of motion. His armour was gilded magnificence given redoubtable form. Storm’s Teeth, Dorn’s immense chainblade, hung at the primarch’s hip like the promise of annihilation to come. Yet it was to Dorn’s graven visage that Yonnad found his eyes drawn, as they always were when he found himself in his gene-sire’s presence: set as though in impermeable marble, mouth a humourless line, brows knitted in thunderous displeasure, eyes like chips of mica and lit from within by an uncompromising zeal that Yonnad felt like a physical force, even from this distance.

‘No, there will be no forgiveness this day,’ said the captain as he got Tybo’s squad moving again. ‘We have defended our fastness. Now, I think, we shall test ourselves against theirs.’

The thought should have filled him with righteous joy, for what greater purpose was there in life than to fight in the shadow of the primarch himself in the name of the Emperor’s crusade of unification? Yet as he hastened down a ferrosteel stairway to join the muster, Yonnad could not suppress the surge of disquiet he felt. These people had made a horrible error of judgement in attacking the primarch’s fleet, but their ill judgement did not make them any less human, any less redeemable or potentially Compliant.

‘I hope that when Lord Dorn is done with their punishment, there will be enough of them left alive to learn the lesson he teaches,’ said Yonnad to Tybo.

The sergeant did not offer a response.

Bare minutes later, Captain Yonnad sat in his restraint throne aboard the Stormbird Hammer of Terra as it streaked out from the Tribune’s embarkation deck and into the fire-lit turmoil of the void. Peripheral vid-feeds and data schematics updated constantly in his auto-senses, providing Yonnad with up-to-the-minute intelligence on the war’s progress.

He could see the asteroid cities of the Driftborn where they hung in the darkness, tethered one to the next by bridging spars fashioned from cannibalised shipwrecks. Around them swarmed crimson runes designating squadrons of defensive craft, while more red runes flurried like wind-driven snow across the void field to intersect with the pulsing yellow signifiers of the Third Expeditionary Fleet.

Some of the latter were translucent and cold, marking out warships and supply craft slain while they were still attempting to unshroud their auspicators. Yet many more shone with angry defiance, wheeling and flowing with expert precision as their captains reforged their formation and responded to the ill-disciplined Driftborn ambush.

Watching the data with his strategist’s practised eye, Yonnad could see that the enemy were already faltering.

‘They believed, no doubt, that sufficient surprise, panic and early losses would cause us to capitulate,’ he muttered over closed vox to Sergeant Tybo. ‘I cannot imagine how scarce resources must be in this forsaken reach of space. We must have presented a rich prize indeed to have made them so desperately reckless.’

Imperial warships were surrounding the enemy craft in packs, hammering them from multiple directions and picking them apart even as Imperial Fists assault companies scoured the shocked boarders from the last of the fleet’s compromised craft. Meanwhile, the Tribune drove forward at the spear-tip of a tight flotilla of Imperial Fists warships, carving unstoppably through the enemy’s ramshackle frigates and cruisers towards the cities the Driftborn called home.

All this Yonnad saw and understood. Still, he struggled to keep his attention upon the wider battle for, to his great surprise, Lord Dorn himself had boarded Hammer of Terra before it leapt from its restraints. The primarch now stood near the fore of the gunship’s troop compartment, boots mag-locked to the deck, his white hair touching its ceiling. He was amongst his sons, but ever singular and alone. Dorn’s face was veiled by the crimson shadows of the Stormbird’s interior lumens, but his posture spoke of simmering anger held tightly in check. The gunship shuddered and jolted as munitions detonated in the void around it, but the primarch barely shifted his posture as he rode out the violent motions.

What are we doing? Yonnad thought as the Stormbird thundered on through the void. He took a deep breath and addressed the silent primarch.

‘My lord. Respectfully, why have we not yet been briefed upon our mission? We would know your plans that we might best serve them.’

Rather than reply directly to Yonnad, the primarch instead activated a priority vox-channel. Yonnad saw that it linked to every Space Marine aboard the six Stormbirds that had leapt from the Tribune’s embarkation deck, and were now streaking in loose formation between the tumbling wrecks and bludgeoning volleys of the void war.

‘My sons,’ Dorn began, and as always Captain Yonnad felt an undercurrent of exhilaration and awe at the low rumble of his primarch’s voice.

Is this what the deluded faithful experience? he wondered, not for the first time. The ones not yet brought into the light of the Imperial Truth? The ones who believe in primitive deities? In gods? The thought unsettled him; the Imperial Fists were loyal to their primarch, utterly and unquestioningly so, but theirs was not the blind zealotry of the superstitious or the fanatical.

‘Our enemies have shown courage and martial prowess,’ the primarch continued. ‘They have displayed, also, a lamentable lack of wisdom. The former characteristics can be harnessed to humanity’s benefit, but only if their foolishness can first be remedied.’

He sounds truly furious, thought Yonnad. He had heard only the tiniest tremor in Dorn’s voice, a miniscule fault line running through the word ‘foolishness’. For one as stonily reserved as the primarch of the Imperial Fists, however, such a small tell meant much. Lord Dorn believed in the Great Crusade and the reunification of humanity – believed in it more completely perhaps than any of his brothers, or so it was said.

That belief makes him the greatest of our species’ champions, save the Emperor Himself, thought Yonnad with fierce pride. But he had also seen what Lord Dorn’s belief had wrought of those who opposed the Emperor’s goals, and his sense of foreboding grew as the primarch spoke on.

‘We will offer these Driftborn one chance to embrace Imperial enlightenment. One chance more than they offered our void-lost dead. As I speak, boarding torpedoes, Caestus assault rams and concentrated bombardments are clearing landing sites for your craft in the heartlands of the largest asteroid cities. Each Stormbird has its own designated objective. Hundreds of your brothers assail the cities’ outer defences and slaved defence platforms to prevent enemy reinforcements responding to our landings. They fight for victory but it is you who shall secure it. This Compliance will be swift and decisive. Fight for Terra, my sons.’

Why only the Legiones Astartes? Yonnad wondered as the Stormbirds’ runes divided in his auto-senses and he felt Hammer of Terra accelerating again. Why no supporting units of Imperial Army? Would that not see Compliance achieved all the more swiftly? Were it up to him Yonnad would first have neutralised the enemy’s outnumbered void assets and picked off the long guns that jutted from their asteroid cities. Once the foe’s fangs had been pulled, neat and efficient, he would have enfolded the enemy’s civilisation and struck with overwhelming force. Such methods had ensured swift Compliance before, and while they certainly would have led to a more protracted conflict they would have ensured Imperial losses were minimised.

Their craft shuddered as explosions rippled outside of its hull, and Yonnad felt the telltale jolts as the Stormbird fired back. He accessed the craft’s external vid-feed in time to see several light trans-atmospheric fighter craft disintegrating into puffs of fire and spinning wreckage that rattled from the Stormbird’s hull. The heavy gunships swept on untroubled, and now Yonnad saw their designated asteroid city swelling amidst the blackness of the void. It was a nugget of light and shadow the size of a coin, then it was a mass of rock and metal and glowing lights the size of his fist, then larger and larger and Yonnad could see illuminated city-domes and tunnel networks sprawling across the trammelled asteroid. Scavenger-built bridgeways lashed it to smaller asteroidal townships and clan-halls that in turn joined with other, more distant masses in a fragile bond of survivors’ unity.

Fires burned where Imperial Fists assault forces had already touched down, or where the relentless pounding of lance batteries and barrage bombs had flayed hab-domes open to the airless void.

Bodies floated in space, clouds of them thick as ash-flakes rising from a pyre.

Ruby beams of light leapt up to claw at Hammer of Terra as the beleaguered Driftborn sought to prevent yet more Imperial Fists landing within their city’s bounds. The pilots of the VII Legion knew their duty, however, and few of the panicked blasts even came close. The strategic map showed that battle-brothers from the 88th and 193rd companies were pushing into the city from the south and east. Meanwhile Breacher squads had penetrated the tunnel network that honeycombed the asteroid and were striking from below at its orbital defences, neutralising them one after another. Yet the Imperial Fists were certainly not having it all their own way.

‘Looks as though the Driftborn are putting up a fight to be proud of, eh?’ said Tybo over a private vox-channel. ‘Sounds like they’ve got some serious firepower down there!’

‘Who knows how many centuries they have maintained this civilisation, how many warships they’ve scavenged from, what fragmentary shards of Old Night weapons tech they may have access to?’ Yonnad replied as the Stormbird howled and shuddered in its final descent. The primarch, he noted, had deigned to take hold of a grab handle for this last steep dive but otherwise he had moved not a muscle. Nor did he speak, and in Dorn’s silence Yonnad read that responsibility for ground command would, for now, lie with him as senior ranking officer.

‘Legionaries of the Seventh, make ready to prosecute the foe,’ Yonnad barked through his helm’s vox-grille. Twenty veteran Space Marines responded, Breachers crashing fists against breastplates. Weapons were raised and flight restraints released. From outside came the muffled roar of weapons discharge, then a dull crump as something exploded with enough violence to make the Stormbird lurch.

Then the craft was on the ground, its ramp slamming down to admit billowing smoke and screaming human voices. Yonnad led his brothers out into the hard glare of Asteroid City Six.

The Stormbird had blasted a hole through the roof of a squat, armoured dome and put down amidst a rockcrete-floored plaza in which Yonnad realised a market must have been in full swing less than an hour before. Emergency void fields had snapped on the moment the dome had been breached, preventing explosive decompression from emptying the structure. That had done little to spare the place, however.

Wrecked stalls and lean-tos burned fiercely, plastek sheeting spewing filthy fumes as it curled and melted. Barter-goods carpeted the floor in surreal profusion: pieces of machinery, from scatterings of tiny brass cogs to man-high enginarius blocks and excised servitor augmetics; vac-wrapped nutri-blocks and charred vermin on sticks; brightly pigmented jars of paste; glittering gewgaws and gaudy items of jewellery; scavenged firearms and improvised mauls fashioned from plasteel rebar; a parchment parasol, lying miraculously open and unscathed amongst singed heaps of clothing – the profusion was bewildering.

Amongst the wreckage of the barter-market lay human bodies, dozens of them sprawled and burst and blackened by the fury of war. They looked miserably pitiful, thought Yonnad, despite the melted guns they still clutched in death. More figures haunted the dome’s fringes, however, and these still lived. With bullets and las-bolts whipping in towards the disembarking Space Marines, and the primarch now striding down the ramp in their wake, he had no time to offer the fallen Driftborn anything more than a glance.

‘Shields up,’ ordered Yonnad, allowing his voice to ring out as a vox-amplified boom that filled the dome. His warriors complied with a crash of metal on metal then advanced, shots pinging and whining from their armoured bulwark to little effect. A new designator was flashing on Yonnad’s auto-senses now, just as the primarch had said it would. Their objective, he saw, was a larger dome, heavily defended and located a bare four hundred metres to the north.

Command and Control Asset alpha-primus, he read as it flashed below the rune. Strategic and… environmental regulation hub. Yonnad’s disquiet became dread as he read those words and understood what his gene-sire intended. It was strategically sound, ruthlessly efficient and utterly black and white in its nature.

Capitulate, you fools, he thought as he gunned down another Driftborn. Yet they did not. Instead, the servo-hatch at their back yawned open and vomited forth another wave of screaming warriors clad in brightly patterned enviro-suits and wielding powerful las-blasters. To Yonnad’s right a howling energy beam punched through Brother Lorsan’s shield and the armoured torso behind it. To his back the primarch advanced, brows knitted in a thunderous frown, weapons not even drawn.

He does not deem these foes worthy of the fight, Yonnad thought and knew what was expected of him. And no matter his reservations, Hashin Yonnad of the 39th Household of Inwit always did his duty.

‘Advance and destroy,’ he ordered in his booming voice, firing his pistol again and again as he broke into a charge. ‘In the name of Lord Dorn and the Emperor!’

They met the stiffest resistance within the strategic hub. As Yonnad and his warriors stormed through the smouldering remains of the armoured bulkhead doors they were met by a hail of las-fire that tore glowing rents in shields and punched lances of light through armour, flesh and bone.

The captain advanced through billowing smoke and flicker-strobes of light. War cries boomed and voices screamed in pain around him. Heavy brass control consoles and banks of glowing monitors showered sparks as bolt shells and las-blasts ploughed through them. Figures moved, half-glimpsed wraiths amidst the turmoil of battle.

‘Brothers, place your shots, do not damage instruments that you need not,’ Yonnad commanded, then ducked aside reflexively. An energised blade cut the air where his head had been, crackling angrily as its wielder swung it with desperate strength. The warrior emerged from the roiling smoke, her enviro-suit more heavily armoured than those he had seen so far, her face a riot of colourful clan sigils and vivid warpaint.

Some caste of elite warriors, thought Yonnad, bringing his power sword up to parry her next swing. She was smaller than him, her armour more lightweight and flexible, but if she had hoped lithe speed would be a match against lumbering brute strength, she was soon disappointed. The captain traded a flurry of blows with the guard, her energy blade spitting and sparking each time it met his. Then, spotting a miniscule opening in her balance, he lunged inside her guard and drove the hilt of his blade into the woman’s face.

Bone cracked. Blood sprayed. The warrior flew backwards, rebounded from a console and lay still, her blade crackling and burning.

Yonnad had no time to enjoy his victory as ruby beams of light stabbed out at him. He dodged again but not before one of the blasts had raked an agonising wound down the captain’s right arm.

‘Enough of this, Lord Dorn expects,’ cried Yonnad.

Raising his bolt pistol, he fired back into the murk and saw a humanoid figure burst bloodily apart.

‘Breachers, corral and contain. Eliminate the marksmen then finish the swordsmen.’

On his auto-senses, Yonnad saw his remaining battle-brothers move to obey with rigid efficiency. Where las-blasts flashed out, hails of bolt shells answered. Where energy blades cracked and fizzed in the gloom they rebounded from sturdy boarding shields while their wielders were overwhelmed and beaten down by the Imperial Fists’ sheer, armoured might.

The smoke was clearing now, drawn away by chugging atmospheric filtrators. As it went Yonnad saw that precious few foes remained to oppose them. Three Imperial Fists had fallen, but in return the enemy had lost perhaps thirty of what must surely have been their finest troops. The last survivors were surrounded, making a stand from a raised circular dais ringed with brass consoles and crowned by a dangling mass of screens, pipes and cables. Pale-skinned civilian personnel could be seen cowering behind them, their faces drawn in rictuses of terror.

Before the Imperial Fists could finish the slaughter, a huge figure moved at their backs. Lord Dorn had not rushed to keep pace with their advance, instead simply striding through the enemy’s fastness as though walking the corridors of the Phalanx itself. Now, though, he ducked through the hub’s ruined doorway and the sheer crushing weight of his presence seemed to expand until it filled the entire room. The defenders’ weapons dropped from their nerveless fingers. They raised shaking hands in surrender, most sinking to their knees as they stared aghast at the god of war who had stepped into their midst.

Dorn didn’t spare them a glance. Instead he looked to Yonnad and issued commands the captain had hoped not to hear.

‘Captain Yonnad. Have Techmarine Covenants move up and interface with City Six’s environmental master controls. Route all functionality through a single console then await my command.’

The task took bare minutes to complete. Several of the Legion’s Techmarines went to work, aided by vacuous servitor thralls. As they laboured over sparking instrument panels and installed lengths of trunking cable, the last handful of the hub’s defenders were led away at gunpoint. Yonnad arranged Tybo and Pollas’ surviving Breachers in defensive positions through the hub’s adjoining corridors. As he did so he kept half an ear on the exchanges flitting across the strategic vox-net, both throughout Asteroid City Six and further afield where the other Stormbirds had touched down.

‘This is Captain Jorian reporting strategic hub secure, City Four. Minimal losses. Techmarines attending as ordered…’

‘…moving up to flank their barricades, brothers. Hold position until…’

‘…Gun nest confirmed neutralised. Nothing but wreckage now. Advancing on…’

‘…Brother-Sergeant Maxim is down, assuming command and repeating request for reinforcement against enemy counter-push at…’

‘They’re still resisting us,’ Yonnad muttered. ‘Everything they have is here. Their families. Their lives. They think we mean to do to them what they would have done to us, rob and strip and subjugate, and they will not give in to that without a fight. They don’t realise the magnitude of what they face. But they soon will.’

By this point, he was back in the strategic hub and stood before the control bank into which all of City Six’s environmental controls had been routed. A heavy set of switches jutted from the console’s right-hand panel, rubber-handled things that looked weighty and ominous to Yonnad’s eye. Perhaps it was only because he knew now what they would extinguish, should they be flipped.

Light. Air. Heat. Life.

No wonder we were ordered to remain helmed, he thought. No wonder the primarch did not want the army here.

He glanced back at Dorn, who stood unmoving as a statue at the heart of the strategic hub. The primarch had listened to the vox reports as each strategic hub was secured, as the Techmarines moved in to do their work, as the defenders of City Three launched a frantic counter-assault and were annihilated by Cataphractii battle-brothers who teleported direct from the Tribune.

Now, at last, as the final confirmation came in of readiness at City One, he took a slow, deep breath. With a thought, the primarch sent a command rune beaming out to every single Imperial military asset engaged throughout the Consus Drift.

Cease fire. Hold and await further instruction.

Yonnad could imagine the bewilderment of the Driftborn as their enemies suddenly put up their weapons. Warriors who moments before had cowered behind ragged barricades now found their attackers falling back to defensive positions of their own. Ship captains would be seizing their chance to limp away from the behemoths that surrounded them, hastening to order corpsmen and engineers in to do what they could.

Only the very foolish will believe this a reprieve, Yonnad thought. The wise will see this silence for the ominous pause that it is, and wonder what horrors come next.

They did not have to wait long to find out. Raising his head, Rogal Dorn began to speak. As he did so, his voice was carried through the Imperial comms networks to broadcast from every Space Marine vox-grille, every sequestered speaker horn and transmission emitter throughout the asteroid cities.

‘Driftborn, I am Primarch Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists Space Marine Legion,’ he began, and his voice echoed like menacing thunder through the tunnels, domes and warships of the enemy. ‘I address you on behalf of the Emperor of all mankind and I give you this one chance to surrender. Were we to press this conflict we would have to all but exterminate you before you would capitulate, and for that I honour you. But I tell you now, you will not have that chance.’

Yonnad stood before the console, breathing slowly and steadily, feeling his twin hearts thump sickly in his chest. It was not that he shrank from the righteous prosecution of the foe, for no threat to the Imperium could be permitted to endure, be it xenoform or human in nature. Yonnad would fight any battle, face any foe, and he would do it gladly. But what might come next was not battle; it was extermination.

‘I see you, who you are, what you value most,’ Dorn continued. ‘Understand me now. When I finish speaking, you will offer your immediate and unconditional surrender. You will submit to the Imperial Truth and offer your immediate compliance. If you do not do this, I will extinguish all life support systems throughout your asteroid cities. Your armies, those they fight to protect, your very civilisation, all will perish at my command.’

Capitulate, thought Yonnad, his hands hovering over the switches. In the name of whatever heathen gods you hold dear, do not doubt that my Lord Dorn will give the command. And do not doubt that I will follow it.

Yonnad felt something akin to horror at that thought. In that moment he was more deeply conflicted than he had ever been in all his long and bloody years. Not because he doubted whether he would have the will to follow his primarch’s deadly command, but because he knew that he would follow that order without a moment’s hesitation should it be given.

We are meant to be liberators, not butchers, Yonnad thought. Is it so easy for me to obey him in this without question? Should it be?

Yonnad tried to tell himself that he could do this because he recognised the threat that these people represented to the fledgling Imperium. He dismissed the notion impatiently as soon as it came; what threat could a stranded civilisation of scavenging pirates offer to the star-spanning glory of the Imperium?

Perhaps it is because I see, instead, the greater peril to Imperial morale should the Emperor’s Legiones Astartes show leniency, he thought. If we were to issue such an ultimatum and then fail to carry it out, how might that story spread? How might word of it empower those who truly do present a threat to the Emperor’s realm?

He hoped that was the case. Yet in truth, Captain Yonnad thought it likely that his obedience would come from the simple fact that his gene-sire had issued a command and, no matter its cost or consequence, his sons would see it done.

What does that say of our enlightened Imperium, or we its exemplars?

‘Do not fool yourselves that I will show compassion. Do not tell one another that it cannot be, that I would not do something so monstrous. I am an architect of humanity’s galactic destiny, and set against the interstellar unification of our entire species, your lives and those of all you hold dear are as nothing at all. Choose now, Driftborn. Surrender and become part of that magnificent destiny, or die here, now, as a people, and be forgotten amidst the airless, frozen dark.’

Dorn fell silent. Yonnad watched the seconds ticking past on his helm-chronometer. His hands hovered over the controls that would slaughter a city, his breath stilled in his chest. He felt the moment draw out, felt his hope for these people fade and somehow sensed his hope for himself fading with it.

They won’t do it. They don’t believe him. They’re going to choose death, and Terra preserve me I will give it to them.

‘They’re setting down their arms!’ came a voice over the vox, and Yonnad froze, barely daring to believe it.

‘City Three, visual confirmation of enemy capitulation,’ came another voice. ‘The Driftborn have surrendered. Repeat, the Driftborn have surrendered.’

‘City Five, here also. They have set down their arms.’

‘This is Captain Tolas of the Redemption, reporting enemy ships shrouding guns and powering down their thrusters. We have surrender in the void.’

The reports kept flooding in, but Yonnad barely heard them. He moved his hands away from the controls and brought them carefully back to his sides. At his back he sensed rather than saw Dorn nod in satisfaction then turn and sweep from the hub, his work complete.

Did he ever really doubt they would surrender? Yonnad wondered. He took a breath, then began barking out orders over the vox. Compliance had been achieved; what came next would require his full talents as an organiser and logistician to help coordinate and he threw himself into the duties gladly. Yet as he too strode from the command hub to be about his duties, Hashin Yonnad could not quite purge one lingering question from his mind.

Do we obey the primarch because we know him to be right, or do we obey simply because he is our primarch? And in the end, are those two facts truly one and the same, or are they not…?

About the Author

Andy Clark has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Fist of the Imperium, Kingsblade, Knightsblade and Shroud of Night, as well as the novella Crusade and the short story ‘Whiteout’. He has also written the novels Gloomspite and Blacktalon: First Mark for Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and the Warhammer Quest Silver Tower novella Labyrinth of the Lost. Andy works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham, UK.

An extract from The Solar War.

On the first of Primus the sirens rang across Terra.

On the myriad worlds conquered and ruled by the Imperium of Man, they talked of year divisions, of time sliced into a thousand equal slivers. First division, second division, third, and so on, without variation or character, until the weight of counting reached a thousand, and one year tipped over into the next. On worlds of endless night or blinding days, a year was the same. In an empire spanning a galaxy, anything else would have been meaningless.

0000014.M31 was how surviving records would mark the first moment of that day, stamped and corrected for temporal accuracy, standardised and stripped of any meaning. But, here, on the world whose night and day and seasons had given mankind its concept of time, the old counting still meant something and so did the moment that one year died and another was born: the Feast of Two Faces, the Day of New Light, the Renewal – on and on went its names. But for longer than memory it had been the first of Primus, firstborn of the three hundred and sixty-five days that would follow, a day of hope and new beginnings.

The turning of that year began with snow on the northern battlements of the Imperial Palace, where three brother demigods watched the night skies above. It began with the dawn light and icy chill reaching into a tower-top chamber and stirring the painted cards dealt by a man who was older than any knew. It began with the sirens calling out, one at first, high on the Palace spires, before the cry was picked up by others, on and on across the turning globe. The sound echoed through the mountain-sized space ports and rasped from vox-horns in the deep strata of the Atlantean Hives.

On and on it went, stilling the hands of people as they ate and worked. They looked up. In caves beneath the earth, and hive vaults, and under the smog drifts, they looked up. Of those that could see the sky, a few thought they could make out new stars amongst the firmament and froze at the promise of each pinprick of light: a promise of fire and ash and an age of loss. And with the sound of sirens, fear spread, unnamed but still spoken.

‘He is here,’ they said.

Prison ship Aeacus, Uranus high orbit

‘I understand you have a story…’ she said. The wolf stood before her, the fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. ‘A particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

The wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.

‘Which story?’

‘Horus killing the Emperor.’

Mersadie Oliton woke from the memory-dream with sweat on her face. She breathed, and pulled the blanket over her from where it had slipped onto the floor. The air was cool and dank in the cell, scented with the tang of air that had been exhaled too much. She blinked for a second. Something was different. She reached out a hand and touched the metal wall. Moisture clung to the rivets and rust scabs. The thrum of the ship’s engines had gone. Wherever they were, they were stationary in the void.

She let her hand drop and let out a breath. The tatters of the memory-dream still clung to her eyelids. She focused, trying to pull back the threads of the dream even as they slid into darkness.

‘I must remember…’ she said to herself.

‘The prisoner will stand and face the wall.’ The voice boomed out of the speaker set above the cell door.

She stood instinctively. She wore a grey jumpsuit, worn and faded. She put her hands on the wall, fingers splayed. The door unlocked with a clang, and footsteps sounded on the grated floor. The guard would be one just like the rest: crimson-clad and silver-masked, the humanity in its voice concealed by vox distortion. All the gaolers were the same, as constant as the ticking of a clock that never struck the hour.

Small spaces, locked doors, questions and suspicions – such had been her world for the seven years since she had come back to the Solar System. That was the price for what she had seen, for what she remembered. She had been a remembrancer, one of the thousands of artists, writers and scholars sent out to witness the Great Crusade as it brought the light of reason to a reunited humanity. That had been her purpose: to see, to remember. Like many clear purposes and shining futures, it had not worked out that way.

She heard the footsteps stop behind her, and knew the guard would be placing a bowl of water and a fresh jumpsuit on the floor.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, hearing the question come from her mouth before she could stop it.

Silence.

She waited. There would not be a punishment for her asking, no beatings, no withdrawal of food or humiliation – that was not how this imprisonment worked. The punishment was silence. She had no doubt that other, more visceral methods were used on other prisoners – she had heard the screams. But for her there had only been silence. Seven years of silence. They did not need to ask her questions, after all. They had taken the memory spools out of her skull, and those recordings would have told them everything they wanted and more.

‘We are still in the void, aren’t we,’ she said, still facing the wall. ‘The engine vibrations have stopped, you see. No way of missing it if you have spent any time on ships… I spent time on a warship once. You never lose the sense of it.’ She paused, waiting for a response, even if it was just the sound of retreating footsteps and the door shutting.

Silence again.

That was strange. She had tried talking to guards in the early years, and their response had been to leave her without reply. After a while, that had felt worse than if they had struck a whip across her back. They had never beaten her, though, or even touched her. Even when they opened her skull to remove the memory spools, they had sedated her, as though that made the violation that followed more acceptable.

She supposed that such small mercies had to do with Qruze or Loken. The former Luna Wolves had watched over her as much as they could. But that had still left her a prisoner of the greatest and darkest prison in the Imperium. Loken had said that he would free her, but she had refused. Even while it pained her, she understood why she had to remain locked up. How could she not? After all, had she not seen the true face of the enemy? Four years of life on the Vengeful Spirit amongst the Sons of Horus, in the shadow of their father, who now had set the galaxy alight with civil war. What other reward could there be for remembering those days? A galaxy shrunk to silence and plasteel walls, with only dreams and memories to speak to her.

She had begun to dream memories after a few months, dreams of her home on Terra, of the sunlight shattering across the edge of the Arcus orbital plate, her mother laughing and calling after her as she ran through the hydro-gardens. And she had dreamed of her time amongst the Luna Wolves, and the Sons of Horus, of people now long dead. She had asked for parchment and pen, but none had been given to her. She had gone back to the old games her mind-nurse had taught her, ways of tucking memories away when she woke from sleep, ways of remembering the past even as it fled into the distance. In the silence, she had found that memories and dreams were all she had, all she was.

‘Are we still somewhere in the Solar System?’ she asked, and twitched her neck to look behind her. Why was she still talking? But then why had the guard not left? ‘The ship doesn’t feel like it’s preparing for translation. Where are we?’

They had come for her in her cell on the Nameless Fortress three nights ago. They had loaded her into a box barely big enough to stand upright in. She had felt the box judder and sway as machines had lifted it and her. They had let her out into this cell, and she had recognised the vibration of a void-ship under power. It had been comforting at first, but her dreams had not been, and now the silence of this moment was feeling stranger with each elongating second.

‘Why was I taken away from the fortress?’ she asked. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Where we all wish we could go, Mistress Oliton,’ said Garviel Loken. She whirled, and the end of her cell was gone and a wolf was rising from a pool of dark water beneath the moon. Its eyes were black spheres, and its bared-teeth grin was wide as it spoke. ‘You are going home.’

In the dark of her cell, Mersadie Oliton woke to silence and lay still, waiting for the dream to fade or for herself to wake again.

Strike Frigate Lachrymae, Trans-Plutonian Gulf

The first ship of the onslaught died as it breached the veil of reality. Streams of plasma reached out from gun platforms. White fire smashed into the ship’s prow. Lightning and glowing ectoplasm streamed behind its hull. Macro shells detonated amongst the molten wounds already cut into its skin. Turrets and spires sheared from its bulk. Towers broke from its spine. It kept coming even as its bows were torn apart. The burning wreck struck the first of the mines scattered across the dark. Explosions burst around it. The front portion of the ship sheared from the back. Prow and gun decks hinged down. Atmosphere vented from the exposed interior. Debris scattered, burning for an eye-blink before the flames ate the air trapped in the wreckage.

‘Ship kill,’ called a sensor adept from across the bridge of the Lachrymae.

Sigismund watched the intruder’s death as it spread across the pict screens above the command dais. He was armoured, his sword chained to his wrist and resting point down on the deck at his feet. He did not blink or move as the dying ship tumbled across his sight. In the still depths of his mind he heard the words that had brought him to this place and time.

‘You must choose where to stand. By the words of your duty, or by your father’s side at the end.’

Around him the command crew was silent. Eyes fixed on instruments and screens. This was the beginning of the moment they had all known would end the years of waiting. Some, perhaps, had thought or hoped that it would never come. But here it was, marked with fire.

I chose, Keeler, he thought, and in his mind, he heard again the words that Dorn had spoken in judgement of that choice.

‘You will continue in rank and position as you have, and you will never speak to any other of this. The Legion and the Imperium will not know of my judgement. Your duty will be to never let your weakness taint those who have more strength and honour than you.’

‘As you will, father.’

‘I am not your father!’ roared Dorn, his anger suddenly filling the air, his face swallowed by dusk shadows. ‘You are not my son,’ he said quietly. ‘And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.’

‘I chose,’ he whispered to himself, ‘and here I stand at the end.’

The fire from the dead warship spread across the displays.

‘If they come at us like this, the slaughter will barely be worth the sweat,’ growled Fafnir Rann.

‘They will not give us that luxury,’ replied Boreas from further back on the platform. Sigismund did not look around at where the holo-projections of the Assault captain or his lieutenant hovered at his shoulders. Each of them stood on the command deck of one of the Lachrymae’s sister ships.

Rann wore void-hardened Mark III armour, with reinforcing studs bonded to his shins and left shoulder. The scars of battles fought here, at the edge of the system, ran beneath the fresh yellow lacquer. His tall boarding shield hung in his right hand, the twin axes mag-locked to its back echoed in the heraldry painted on the shield’s face. Sigismund imagined he could see the warped smile on Rann’s face as he turned to Boreas and shrugged.

The holo-image of the First Lieutenant of the Templars did not move. Unhelmed, his face was a single twisted scar, and if there was any emotion beyond cold fury behind his eyes, Sigismund could not see it. Boreas’ sword of office stood almost as tall as he did, its guard the cross of the Templars, its blade etched with the names of the dead.

‘All ships, stand by,’ said Sigismund softly, and heard the orders ripple out.

The vibration in the deck rose in pitch. The dull ache that had been building in his skull for the last hours was sharpening. He noticed one of the human deck crew shiver and wipe a hand across a bead of blood forming in her nose.

‘Hold to our oaths and the strength of our purpose,’ he called.

Whispers buzzed at the edge of his thoughts, razor tips scratching over metal. They had needed to sedate every astropath in the fleet two hours before, as a wave of psychic pressure had sent them babbling and screaming. It had become more intense with every passing moment, and it presaged one thing: it was the bow wave of a truly vast armada coming through the warp, bearing down on the Solar System like a storm front. Horus and the traitors were coming.

‘Etheric surge detected!’ shouted a sensor officer.

‘Here it comes,’ said Rann, and brought his fist to his chest. ‘Honour and death.’

‘For the primarch and Terra,’ said Boreas.

‘For our oaths,’ said Sigismund. The images of his two brothers blinked out.

He reached down and pulled his own helm from his belt and locked it in place over his head. ‘May my strength be equal to this moment,’ he said to himself as the helm display lit in his eyes. The data of the battle sphere overlaid his sight.

The Plutonian Gulf glittered with weapon platforms, torpedo shoals and mine drifts. Together they formed a great web, tens of thousands of kilometres deep, stretching from the very edge of night to the orbits of Pluto itself. Ships glinted amongst the defences: fast gun-sloops and monitor ships that were little more than engines and weaponry. They had been built in the orbital forges of Luna, Jupiter and Uranus and dragged to the edge of the sun’s light. Alongside them lay the fleet of the First Sphere: hundreds of warships, all in motion. And beyond the warships, the moons of Pluto waited. Studded with weapons and hollow with tunnels, each was a fortress that could have stood against a fleet.

The sheet of stars erupted with lightning. Rents opened in the vacuum. Nauseating colours and dazzling light poured out as ship after ship surged from nothing into being. Tens, and then hundreds. The sensor servitors in the Lachrymae twitched and gabbled as targets multiplied faster than they could vocalise updates.

Mines detonated, explosions leaping from one to another in chains that stretched across the dark. Gun platforms opened up. Macro shells, rockets and plasma struck metal and stone, bored in and exploded. Ships died even as they tasted reality, armour stripped by fire, guts spilled into the dark. In the first ten seconds, over a hundred vessels burned to wreckage. Most had been former warships of the Imperial Army, crewed by humans who had given their oath to Horus and been rewarded with the honour of being the first to draw their blades in this battle. They died for that honour, burning too in the ruin of their ships, hulls shredded around them.

But they kept coming.

Ship after ship, tearing reality like flags waving in front of a gun-line. The first Legiones Astartes warship surfaced from the warp. It was named the Erinyes, and it was a bombardment galleon of the IV Legion: a five-kilometre-long hull wrapped around a trio of nova cannon barrels. She loosed all three shots as the void kissed her skin. Each nova cannon shell was the size of a Battle Titan, its core filled with unstable plasma. They had no target, but they needed none. They ran straight into the heart of the defences and exploded with the force and light of a star’s birth. Gun platforms vanished. Mines lit off in spheres of red flame. Fire poured from the defences as more ships rammed past the debris of their dead kin.

The light of the blaze flooded through the Lachrymae’s screens and viewports. Sigismund’s helm display dimmed.

‘Engage,’ he said, and the Lachrymae leapt forwards. Twenty strike cruisers and fast destroyers followed in tight formation. Lance fire speared out from them, slicing into ships as they cut across the front of the enemy fleet. Plumes of ghost-light and ectoplasm stretched like arms through the dark as more ships punched through from the warp.

A backwash of etheric lightning struck the Imperial Fists cruiser Solar Son. It spun, its hull cracking and crumpling as the laws of reality went into flux. The Lachrymae and its sisters did not pause but plunged on. They had one purpose in this moment: to kill as many of the enemy as possible while they clawed from the warp onto the shore of reality. For the moment, the Imperial Fists’ prey was vulnerable, and the First Sphere fleet were predators.

The Lachrymae’s guns found the skin of the gun-barge Fire Oath before it could light its void shields. Macro shells punched through gun decks and exploded. Munitions cooked off in loading hoists. The Fire Oath’s hull bulged, then burst. Building-sized pieces of hull scythed out, caught the flank of a battle cruiser as it emerged from the warp and tore its command castle from its back. The warp breach it had emerged from pulsed and swallowed the wreckage.

‘Hold,’ called Sigismund, his voice passing through the ships of his command via crackling vox-link. ‘For our oaths, we hold true.’

The Lachrymae sliced on while its mortal crew screamed as ghosts and nightmares flooded their sight. Reality in the battle sphere was now little more than tattered scraps blowing in the night. The Lachrymae rolled, her guns finding enemy after enemy. But for each one that died, another three came from the warp.

Deadfall torpedoes set in the void triggered and speared forwards. Carcasses of ships split and burned. Pluto’s fortress-moons found their range to the first of the invaders and spoke. Newly lit void shields flashed as they collapsed. Volleys answered. The reserve fleets holding close to the moons powered forwards and began to kill and die. The light of battle swelled, blurring with the glow of thousands of warp transitions, until which side was firing and which was burning was lost in a rippling blaze tens of thousands of kilometres across. Hours later, the light of that fire would glimmer in the night above the battlements of the Imperial Palace as the sirens called and alarums rang to tell that Horus had, at last, brought his war to the birth system of humanity.

Click here to buy The Solar War.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

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