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Recongregator – David Annandale

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’

A Black Library Publication

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Recongregator

by David Annandale

Lord Inquisitor Otto Dagover to Ephrael Stern:

This was about six months before I found you in the Imperium Nihilus. I did not know where you were, but I was confident that I was on your trail. You cut a swath through the darkness, Sister Superior. I learned to recognise the signs of your passage, and I don’t think you appreciate the kind they were. You experienced the fury and the destruction of the battle against the Ruinous Powers. You did not stay for the aftermath. And that aftermath was order. Stability. A chance for the system to draw breath and reknit itself, perhaps become stronger.

I don’t say certainly. I say perhaps. But perhaps is better than extinction, don’t you think?

I want to make something clear. I know my reputation. I know what is thought of those of us who call ourselves Recongregators. You may well share that opinion. The truth is you may be more like us than you think. No, no, there’s no need to protest. I won’t try to convince you. Not this time, at any rate. What I want you to understand is that those who think we act only to destroy are wrong. Our destruction is creative, as a forest fire is the catalyst for renewal. The Imperium is not what it could be, and what it must be, if our species hopes to survive.

Please remember that this principle governs all of my decisions, and all of my actions.

So. To my tale, then.

Aboard my battle cruiser, the Iudex Ferox, I arrived in the Sacramentum System. It was one in which the transmissions from its primus world were relatively orderly – not a constant scream for help. There are too many systems on that side of the Cicatrix Maledictum where there are no transmissions at all. Something had happened to bring order here, and that something, I was certain, was you. My intention was to make for Sacramentum Primus, to see what I could learn, get a sense of when you had passed through, and where you might have gone next. There was rarely anything useful to glean, but the effort was a necessary one.

I never made it to Primus. The Iudex Ferox was crossing the mid-system asteroid belt when my vox-officer intercepted a distress call from the mining habitat Anaphora. It had been the victim, apparently, of a drukhari raid.

I could not ignore this cry. I am an inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos after all, even if the conditions in the Imperium Nihilus frequently meant that the battles I fought would normally have been the remit of my comrades in the Ordo Malleus. During most of the long years I was trapped in the Imperium Nihilus, xenos depredations were the least of the problems there.

Here, though, was a system that appeared to be reasserting itself, and this was a threat I was sworn to investigate. And who knew? Perhaps fate or the Emperor was pointing me to a location that might have some information about you.

As it transpired, neither fate nor the Emperor had anything to do with my arrival on Anaphora.

I ordered a hail and acknowledgment sent to the habitat, and the Iudex Ferox docked with it four hours later, next to a resupply freighter. Anaphora was a disordered conglomeration of cylindrical and disc-shaped habitat units linked by a tangle of communication tubes. It sat between three captured asteroids like a spider’s web. The planetoids, each no more than a few tens of miles in diameter, formed the points of an elongated triangle, and were held by the mining pylons of Anaphora. These drilling assemblages, the size of a manufactory, plunged like daggers deep into the surface of the asteroids. The docking hub was part of the command unit, the largest of the discs, positioned at the approximate centre of the web.

My crew was a mere skeleton of what it had been, and I left my ship alone. My power armour gives me little to fear, as well as keeping this ruin of a body of mine alive. On the other side of the airlock there was a welcoming party waiting for me. At its head was the commander of Anaphora, Hera Misharin. She took half a step back when she saw me. I am used to this reaction. I don’t know I can say that I am as feared as you are, Sister Superior Stern, but I am not a welcome figure. I know the effect of this dead face of mine, of my pointed teeth, of my lips and the mechanised hooks I use to move them. I flatter myself that when people have bad dreams about the Inquisition, I am the figure they see. We have to take our pleasures where we find them, don’t you think?

Misharin did manage to recover herself fairly quickly. ‘We are grateful that you are here, lord inquisitor,’ she said.

I did not accuse her for lying. No one has ever been grateful for the presence of the Inquisition. ‘You have been attacked by the drukhari,’ I said. I have no patience for ceremonies, except when I can put them to useful ends.

‘We believe so.’

‘You believe so?’

‘We’re not sure. There were no surviving witnesses to the attack. Sacramentum Primus needs to know definitively one way or the other before they commit any of the system’s forces to this position.’

‘I see. Then show me where the attack occurred.’

We headed off through the maze of habitat units and communication tubes towards the damaged unit, which was one of the drill operation modules.

The corridors of Anaphora were typical prefab crudities. Their plasteel walls were emblazoned with the aquila, though there was little other adornment. Their ceilings were vaulted but low, barely two feet above my head. The grime of years of mining work was deeply engrained into every texture of the station, as it was in the pores of the people who ran it.

I did think that Anaphora was an unusual target for a drukhari raid. The only resources to be plundered here were mineral, and of a mundane nature at that. There could not have been more than a few hundred souls on the station – perhaps worth enslaving, but I had trouble seeing what would have drawn the xenos pirates here. Even then, my estimate of a hundred was a generous guess; we crossed paths with almost no one as we made our way to the damaged module.

‘How many dead?’ I asked.

‘Ten,’ said Misharin.

Again, that seemed odd. The raid struck me as rather pointless. Still, the commander and her crew were clearly on edge. They were brittle, fragile. I saw no strength in them at all. I didn’t think they were worthy of the chance you had given them. If the Imperium is to rebuild itself, then it cannot rely on its saviours.

The door to the mining module was sealed. Misharin and her cohorts stood back from it, waiting for me to take the next step. They had all turned pale. They feared what was on the other side.

‘They’re not likely to come back and attack empty corridors,’ I said.

They looked cowed, and as frightened of me as they were of phantom drukhari.

Useless, I thought, and turned to the door. ‘Is there atmosphere on the other side, at least?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Misharin. ‘We patched up the hull, but that’s all. The module is unstable.’

‘All right. Wait here for my return.’ I tapped the control panel. The door slid up. I entered the corridor beyond and shut the door behind me.

The module housed the controls of the mining engines. It was a single wide chamber, with the control stations lining the walls. They were massive iron assemblages of levers, hinting at the scale of the machines they commanded. Power conduits ran from the stations and through the wall at the far end. There was a small access hatch at its centre, but the wall was otherwise a thick slab, safely isolating the workers from the monstrous drills on the other side.

That, at any rate, was how things were supposed to work. It was immediately apparent what Misharin had meant when she said the module was unstable. There were cracks in the protective wall. All work here had stopped, but the machines were restless. At irregular intervals, there were heavy bangs, as of a huge creature trying to break through its prison, and the wall trembled. The solidified foam patches covering gouges in the side walls held, but the cracks in the barrier facing the asteroid were spreading.

Blood had sprayed everywhere in the chamber. It slicked the floor and controls. It was spattered across the ceiling. Corpses lay in pieces, cut so fine that it was hard to tell how many dead there were. The elegance of the slices and the enthusiasm of the slaughter had the earmarks of a drukhari attack, that much was true. Monofilament weaponry had been used on the victims. The slaughter looked like the drukhari had been here. It felt wrong, though.

‘What was the point of this?’ I muttered.

The scene suggested the xenos raiders had come, killed everyone in this hall, and then left. Why bother? As far as I could see, they hadn’t taken any captives. The drukhari enjoy a good massacre, but their cruelty is rarely simple. It is refined. There were no complexities in what I saw. It was theatre dressing. I didn’t believe it.

I finished my examination of the module and started back to the exit. I had questions for Misharin and her crew, and I didn’t think they were going to enjoy them. I was halfway there when there was a series of muffled explosions beyond the barrier wall, and then it blew in. I crouched low, protecting my head as chunks of three-foot-thick plasteel flew across the chamber. Conduits exploded out of the side walls, filling the space with live steam and flammable lubricant. The fluid ignited, and a firestorm swept over me, devouring oxygen.

Wreckage surrounded me. I punched through it, fighting to reach the door. The flames died quickly, and I could hear the hiss of escaping atmosphere. I pulled out my rebreather from my armour’s belt and donned it. I reached the door, and was not surprised to find it would not open. I took a krak grenade, fastened it to the door, then drew back. The blast melted the door, and I charged through, just ahead of the foam sealant that poured out of ceiling nozzles, cutting off the ruined, breached limb of Anaphora.

The lumen strips in the corridor flickered, and stayed dull. Smoke drifted. There was no sign of Misharin and the others. They would have retreated when they heard the explosions, of course. But when I tried to contact Misharin on the station’s vox-channel, there was no answer.

I switched to the Iudex Ferox’s channel. ‘Vox,’ I said, ‘do you have communications with anyone on Anaphora?’

No answer from my ship, either.

I marched down the hall to the connecting tube, making for the command module. That was also the most direct route back to the Iudex Ferox. I saw no one. The farther I went, the more I was convinced the station was deserted. Partway to my goal, I found a viewport that looked towards the docking bays. The battle cruiser was there, undamaged from what I could see. The supply ship, though, was gone.

I moved on, more warily now. I drew my plasma pistol. I ran through scenarios, looking for an explanation. I had fallen into a trap. But a trap set by whom? The drukhari? Had they chosen this moment to come back, load the remaining crew onto the freighter, and abscond with them? That seemed unlikely. No, the trap had been designed for me, and the idea that the drukhari had prepared something so inane was absurd.

Misharin was not my enemy here, either, though she and her crew had played a part in the deception.

No, my foe was someone else altogether, and was dangerous. I had been lucky in the mining control module. The explosion could have easily torn the chamber in half and thrown me out into the void.

I reached the command centre. I stood in the doorway, scanning the gloomy interior. There were three other doors leading off the circular chamber. Viewports covered most of the walls, interspersed with data screens. The workstations surrounding the command pulpit were empty. The amber and green glows from their screens suggested the habitat’s systems were still functioning.

Most of the lumen strips were out. My bionic eyes adjusted to the low visibility. I saw no one. I stepped inside, braced for an attack. When it didn’t come, I moved to the command pulpit. I wanted access to Anaphora’s central cogitator. I was planning a system scan for life readings anywhere on the station.

I didn’t have to trouble myself. A soon as I was in the centre of the room, the other doors opened, and armed figures in flak armour emerged. They even came in from the door I had entered. They had been following me, waiting for me to walk into an ambush. Twenty warriors surrounded me, aiming bolters at my head.

‘Don’t move, Dagover,’ said a voice. ‘I would prefer to have a last conversation with you before you die.’

‘Task,’ I said.

He stepped in front of his troops. He wore carapace armour, its red ceramite and plasteel plates attached to a black underskin. He wasn’t as well shielded as I was. He would, though, move much more quickly than I could.

‘You remember me, then,’ said Task. ‘Should I be flattered?’

‘No. You should be worried.’

His nose wrinkled in contempt. Task wasn’t one to engage in banter, or a duel of wits. His features were sharp and very narrow, as if his skull had been caught in a press. He looked perpetually displeased, and I think he truly was. Even now, with me at bay, his ambush successful, the moment presumably playing out as he had desired, he did not look happy.

I think it’s a shame some people can’t even take pleasure in victory, don’t you?

Task was a Puritan, and a Monodominant at that. I suppose I could find it in myself to respect his idealism, and perhaps, were I in a generous mood – which is not often the case – his single-mindedness of purpose. His doctrinal inflexibility, though, was beyond tiresome. I had made it a point to keep the composition of my Deathwatch kill teams a deep secret from the likes of Task.

‘So,’ I said, ‘we find ourselves together in the end times.’ So many years had passed since the Astronomican had disappeared, I had come to, if not accept, at least believe that the Emperor was no longer. This was not the creative destruction I advocated. This was precisely the annihilation I had feared, and striven to prevent.

‘We are not together,’ Task said. ‘We are present at this time and place, briefly, and only because I arranged for this encounter to take place.’

‘I’m surprised. I thought we were happier as far apart as possible. Why, by the Throne, would you seek my company?’

‘To stop you. To strengthen what is left of the Imperium, and to avenge what has fallen.’

‘That’s a heavy burden to place on one meeting.’

‘Your mockery is hollow.’

‘Is it? Then why don’t you stop speaking in generalities and tell me what you want. Stop me? Stop me from doing what?’

Task was looking more and more angry, which was impressive, given how put out he looked in the best of circumstances. ‘I know what you are doing,’ he said. ‘You are looking for her.’

‘Her?’

‘Ephrael Stern.’ I’m afraid he spat your name, Sister Superior. He really did. ‘The heretic. The witch. I know, because I am seeking her too.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I was being as insultingly disingenuous as I could. There wasn’t any other way of dealing with him. At the same time, I kept an eye on the bolters surrounding me, and weighed my options. I still held my plasma pistol, but as soon as I brought it up, dozens of mass-reactive shells would fly at my head. ‘In that case,’ I went on, ‘we should be joining forces.’

He wasn’t amused. ‘Help you corrupt what remains of the Imperium even further? I don’t think so. She must be destroyed, inquisitor.’

‘Lord inquisitor, if we’re being formal.’

He ignored me. ‘I am going to kill her.’

I smiled. That puts most people off their stride. He didn’t much care for what my rag of a face did, either. ‘She’s already been killed twice,’ I said. ‘What makes you think death will take this time?’

‘I’ll make sure it does. I’ll practise with you.’

Though I will never be sure, I believe that was a moment of deliberate wit on his part. That’s what I like to think.

‘You staged that false drukhari attack,’ I said, playing for a bit more time as I settled on my course of action.

‘When I learned Stern had been through this system, I knew you would not be long in coming. I have been aware of your movements, Dagover, ever since I picked up Stern’s trail. I saw the chance here to put an end to your crimes.’

‘The staging was rather well done,’ I said, ‘at least superficially. I don’t blame you. I don’t expect anyone from the Ordo Malleus to be able to mimic a xenos attack beyond the surface details. Who did you have killed, though?’

‘There were heretics aboard Anaphora.’

‘Of course there were.’

‘They were purged.’

I smiled again. ‘Of course they were. The rest of the crew? Evacuated by freighter after baiting your trap, I take it.’

‘They have, for the moment, shown themselves to be faithful, and eager to repent of their sins.’

‘Has my crew been extended the same mercy?’

‘They are unharmed,’ Task said. ‘For now. We have jammed your vox. The docking bay is under guard. They cannot help you.’

I didn’t tell him that they would not have been able to even if I could communicate with them. Our casualties over the decades in the Imperium Nihilus had been severe. I was the only one left who could take to the battlefield. If Task had effectively sealed them on the Iudex Ferox, he had done me a favour.

‘Where does that leave us, then?’ I asked. ‘If you had planned to kill me, you would have done so already.’ I knew the answer, but was playing for a little more time. I held my plasma pistol at my side, barrel pointed down. Task and his retinue were keeping an eye on my right hand, waiting for me to try to shoot my way out of the ambush. While we talked, I had been moving my left hand, in minute stages, towards my belt.

‘You should have died in the drill control module. That you did not is the fault of those who prepared the ambush, and they know they will be chastened in due course.’

‘Why am I still alive now?’

‘Because I decided, since you had survived the trap, that it was important for you to understand why you were going to die. This is an execution, Dagover. I hope you will repent in your final moments.’

I was out of time, then. But I was ready. I laughed in Task’s face. ‘I will never repent for trying to save the Imperium from itself,’ I said. My left hand dropped a krak grenade to the floor.

Task threw himself back. I crouched next to the grenade, throwing up my arms to protect my head. Task’s squad fired at me, but I had caught them by surprise; they were a second slow and I’d thrown their aim by just enough. The grenade went off, and I was close to the centre of the melt. It scorched the left side of my armour, and my boots began to melt, but the ceramite that protected me was stronger than the floor of the station, and in another crucial second the entire centre of the floor collapsed, taking me and the nearest work module with it.

I dropped down into a tangle of power cables and honeycombed metal. The outer hull was a few feet away. I dropped another krak grenade.

‘Your ship is my prisoner!’ Task shouted. ‘You cannot escape.’

Bolt-shells drove into the wreckage and punched chunks out of my armour.

‘Who said anything about escape?’ I asked, and the other grenade went off, breaching the hull.

Air shrieked out of the station, carrying me with it. As I dropped through the breach, I exhaled, forcing the air from my lungs so they wouldn’t rupture. I grabbed the edge of the breach, took another second to orient myself and spot my ship. It wasn’t far. As long as I wasn’t clumsy, I could launch myself across the void at it and not worry about missing.

I pushed off.

In response to the vacuum, my armour routed oxygen directly through the intravenous links to my body. Even without a helmet, I could survive a few minutes. The additional damage to my flesh would hardly be noticed. There are advantages, Sister Superior, to being a grotesque. Unlike you, I can only die once, but there is so little left of me that can die.

I floated through the darkness. I brushed past a module protruding like an abscess from the control centre. I pushed against it, correcting my course and accelerating. I used the thermal outflow from my armour’s power pack to push me a bit faster. The Iudex Ferox loomed ahead. My lungs kept trying to draw air, and their futile hitching was agonising. I retained my consciousness, cursing my body for its weakness.

A short distance above the Iudex Ferox was the Unwavering, Task’s ship. It took no more than a glance to know that it had weathered the years in the Imperium Nihilus far better than my own, though it was clearly limping too. I did not have to guess if its weapons were trained on my cruiser. If it came to a void battle between the wounded cruisers, I did not fancy our chances. Getting back onto the Iudex Ferox, then trying to fire the engines and get off a broadside, was not a solution. I had to get rid of Task some other way.

I hit the hull of the battle cruiser. It was an endless wall above and below me. I grabbed the head of a protruding gargoyle to hold myself in place, turned around, and activated the mag-grips of my boots. It was getting harder to think as I started walking up the hull. There was an access hatch less than fifty yards away. It seemed miles. By the time I reached it, it was as if my armour were the sentient being bending down to unscrew the hatch, and I a distant spectator, rapidly falling into the numbness of eternal cold.

Then I was inside, and cycling through an emergency airlock, and finally drawing breath again. I ran to the nearest grav-lift, took it to the bridge level, then pounded down the hall to my quarters. I crossed paths with Bathia Granz, the auspex officer. She was startled to see me.

‘My lord inquisitor,’ she said, falling into pace beside me. ‘We didn’t know you were back on the ship. We’ve been trying to contact–’

‘Keep trying,’ I said, interrupting her. ‘Return to the bridge and keep trying to contact me. Give no indication that you have seen me.’

‘As you command,’ she said, and left me.

I keep many trophies from my foes. I have sanded skins and mounted skulls. I also have other, more pragmatic artefacts. I don’t think you would approve of them, Sister Superior. Then again, your friendship with a Harlequin tells me you understand the value of flexibility. In my study, I opened my vault and removed a stasis cylinder. I had kept the object within for more than a century and a half. I had always thought I might use it for something more ambitious than what I had in mind now. But needs must.

I had to leave the ship again, but this time I took a helmet with me.

Emerging from a hatch on the top of the conning cathedral, I launched myself towards the Unwavering. I was so small an object, moving so slowly, I would not be picked up by an auspex scan. I was beneath notice. What I had to hope was that Task was still searching for me elsewhere on the station. Even if he boarded the Iudex Ferox, I would be satisfied. There would be nothing for him to find there, and he would have other concerns very shortly.

‘Why are you hiding, Dagover?’ he voxed, confirming the fact that he did not know where I was. ‘I took you for many things. A coward was not among them.’

I smiled to myself.

It took ten minutes for me to cross the distance between our ships. I touched down on the hull of the Unwavering only long enough to maglock the cylinder. Then I deactivated the stasis field and pushed off back towards the Iudex Ferox.

Inside the cylinder was a relic of Commorragh. Or part of one, to be more precise. The rest, missing a twisted limb, is still in that dark city. Do remind me, some other time, to tell you the story of how I acquired it. Its importance to this story is that, when not in stasis, the limb cried out to the drukhari. It sought to make the relic whole again. Its cries were powerful, and I counted on them reaching a long way now, though not necessarily through the materium.

I had just re-entered the Iudex Ferox when my efforts bore fruit. The engines of the Unwavering flared. Minutes later, the shuttle that had brought Task and his troops to Anaphora shot away from the station to rejoin the battle cruiser. By the time I reached the bridge, the Unwavering was pulling away hard, its plasma drive a glaring sun in the void.

I approached the command pulpit and nodded to my shipmaster, Reya Avaxan. ‘Are communications still being jammed?’ I asked.

‘No, lord inquisitor.’

‘Multiple contacts,’ Granz called.

‘Not arriving from the warp,’ I predicted. ‘And their trajectory is aimed at the Unwavering.’

Granz looked up from her station, but did not ask how I knew. My officers knew better. ‘They are drukhari,’ she confirmed.

‘Should we join the Unwavering?’ Avaxan asked with a half-smile.

‘I think not,’ I said. ‘We are in no condition to be of use. Set a course out of the system. But signal Sacramentum Primus. Confirm the presence of a drukhari threat in the system. Tell them to send their fleet.’

You look disapproving, Sister Superior Stern. You do not find the irony of Task’s plight amusing. You think I may have undone your good work in the Sacramentum System. Perhaps. I do not know. There was a war raging when last we received signals from that region. I do not know if Task survived or not. I do not know if the Sacramentum forces were victorious or not.

I make no apologies.

It was good that you saved Sacramentum from the Ruinous Powers. Good, but not sufficient, even if we consider an isolated system on the other side of the Cicatrix Maledictum. Sacramentum had to prove itself worthy of survival. It had to show itself capable of strength and renewal. I hope it has done so.

Neither the past nor stasis will save the Imperium, Sister Superior. The future holds salvation, and the path to the future is through flame.

About the Author

David Annandale is the author of the Warhammer Horror novel The House of Night and Chain and the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. His work for the Horus Heresy series includes the novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint, Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, and several stories involving the Grey Knights, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood and Neferata: The Dominion of Bones. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.

‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.

‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’

But that was yet to come.

‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’

Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.

‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’

They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.

Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.

The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.

Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.

There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.

The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.

Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.

The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.

Tactical information scrolled down his helmplate, near environs only. He had little strategic overview of the situation. The vox-channels were choked with a hellish screaming that made communication impossible. The noosphere was disrupted by etheric backwash spilling from the immaterial rifts the daemons poured through. Messinius was used to operating on his own. Small-scale, surgical actions were the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but in a battle of this scale, a lack of central coordination would lead inevitably to defeat. This was not like the first Siege, where his kind had fought in Legions.

He called up a company-wide vox-cast and spoke to his warriors. They were not his Chapter-kin, but they would listen. The primarch himself had commanded that they do so.

‘Reinforce the mortals,’ he said. ‘Their morale is wavering. Position yourselves every fifty yards. Cover the whole of the south-facing front. Let them see you.’ He directed his warriors by chopping at the air with his left hand. His right, bearing an inactive power fist, hung heavily at his side. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles, back forty yards, single firing line. Prepare to engage enemy breakthroughs only on my mark. Devastators, split to demi-squads and take up high ground, sergeant and sub-squad prime’s discretion as to positioning and target. Remember our objective, heavy infliction of casualties. We kill as many as we can, we retreat, then hold at the Penitent’s Arch until further notice. Command squad, with me.’

Command squad was too grand a title for the mismatched crew Messinius had gathered around himself. His own officers were light years away, if they still lived.

‘Doveskamor, Tidominus,’ he said to the two Aurora Marines with him. ‘Take the left.’

‘Yes, captain,’ they voxed, and jogged away, their green armour glinting orange in the hell-light of the invasion.

The rest of his scratch squad was comprised of a communications specialist from the Death Spectres, an Omega Marine with a penchant for plasma weaponry, and a Raptor holding an ancient standard he’d taken from a dusty display.

‘Why did you take that, Brother Kryvesh?’ Messinius asked, as they moved forward.

‘The palace is full of such relics,’ said the Raptor. ‘It seems only right to put them to use. No one else wanted it.’

Messinius stared at him.

‘What? If the gate falls, we’ll have more to worry about than my minor indiscretion. It’ll be good for morale.’

The squads were splitting to join the standard humans. Such was the noise many of the men on the wall had not noticed their arrival, and a ripple of surprise went along the line as they appeared at their sides. Messinius was glad to see they seemed more firm when they turned their eyes back outwards.

‘Anzigus,’ he said to the Death Spectre. ‘Hold back, facilitate communication within the company. Maximum signal gain. This interference will only get worse. See if you can get us patched in to wider theatre command. I’ll take a hardline if you can find one.’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Anzigus. He bowed a helm that was bulbous with additional equipment. He already had the access flap of the bulky vox-unit on his arm open. He withdrew, the aerials on his power plant extending. He headed towards a systems nexus on the far wall of the plaza, where soaring buttresses pushed back against the immense weight bearing down upon them.

Messinius watched him go. He knew next to nothing about Anzigus. He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was funereal. His Chapter was mysterious, but the same lack of familiarity held true for many of these warriors, thrown together by miraculous events. Over their years lost wandering in the warp, Messinius had come to see some as friends as well as comrades, others he hardly knew, and none he knew so well as his own Chapter brothers. But they would stand together. They were Space Marines. They had fought by the returned primarch’s side, and in that they shared a bond. They would not stint in their duty now.

Messinius chose a spot on the wall, directing his other veterans to left and right. Kryvesh he sent to the mortal officer’s side. He looked down again, out past the enemy and over the outer palace. Spires stretched away in every direction. Smoke rose from all over the landscape. Some of it was new, the work of the daemon horde, but Terra had been burning for weeks. The Astronomican had failed. The galaxy was split in two. Behind them in the sky turned the great palace gyre, its deep eye marking out the throne room of the Emperor Himself.

‘Sir!’ A member of the Palatine Guard shouted over the din. He pointed downwards, to the left. Messinius followed his wavering finger. Three hundred feet below, daemons were climbing. They came upwards in a triangle tipped by a brute with a double rack of horns. It clambered hand over hand, far faster than should be possible, flying upwards, as if it touched the side of the towering gate only as a concession to reality. A Space Marine with claw locks could not have climbed that fast.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium! The enemy is upon us!’

He looked to the mortals. Their faces were blanched with fear. Their weapons shook. Their bravery was commendable nonetheless. Not one of them attempted to run, though a wave of terror preceded the unnatural things clambering up towards them.

‘We shall not turn away from our duty, no matter how fearful the foe, or how dire our fates may be,’ he said. ‘Behind us is the Sanctum of the Emperor Himself. As He has watched over you, now it is your turn to stand in guardianship over Him.’

The creatures were drawing closer. Through a sliding, magnified window on his display, Messinius looked into the yellow and cunning eyes of their leader. A long tongue lolled permanently from the thing’s mouth, licking at the wall, tasting the terror of the beings it protected.

Boltgun actions clicked. His men leaned over the parapet, towering over the mortals as the Lion’s Gate towered over the Ultimate Wall. A wealth of targeting data was exchanged, warrior to warrior, as each chose a unique mark. No bolt would be wasted in the opening fusillade. They could hear the creatures’ individual shrieks and growls, all wordless, but their meaning was clear: blood, blood, blood. Blood and skulls.

Messinius sneered at them. He ignited his power fist with a swift jerk. He always preferred the visceral thrill of manual activation. Motors came to full life. Lightning crackled around it. He aimed downwards with his bolt pistol. A reticule danced over diabolical faces, each a copy of all the others. These things were not real. They were not alive. They were projections of a false god. The Librarian Atramo had named them maladies. A spiritual sickness wearing ersatz flesh.

He reminded himself to be wary. Contempt was as thick as any armour, but these things were deadly, for all their unreality.

He knew. He had fought the Neverborn many times before.

‘While He lives,’ Messinius shouted, boosting his voxmitter gain to maximal, ‘we stand!’

‘For He of Terra!’ the humans shouted, their battle cry loud enough to be heard over the booming of guns.

‘For He of Terra,’ said Messinius. ‘Fire!’ he shouted.

The Space Marines fired first. Boltguns spoke, spitting spikes of rocket flare into the foe. Bolts slammed into daemon bodies, bursting them apart. Black viscera exploded away. Black ichor showered those coming after. The daemons’ false souls screamed back whence they came, though their bones and offal tumbled down like those of any truly living foe.

Las-beams speared next, and the space between the wall top and the scaling party filled with violence. The daemons were unnaturally resilient, protected from death by the energies of the warp, and though many were felled, others weathered the fire, and clambered up still, unharmed and uncaring of their dead. Messinius no longer needed his helm’s magnification to see into the daemon champion’s eyes. It stared at him, its smile a promise of death. The terror that preceded them was replaced by the urge to violence, and that gripped them all, foe and friend. The baseline humans began to lose their discipline. A man turned and shot his comrade, and was shot down in turn. Kryvesh banged the foot of his borrowed banner and called them back into line. Elsewhere, his warriors sang; not their Chapter warsongs, but battle hymns known to all. Wavering human voices joined them. The feelings of violence abated, just enough.

Then the things were over the parapet and on them. Messinius saw Tidominus carried down by a group of daemons, his unit signum replaced by a mortis rune in his helm. The enemy champion was racing at him. Messinius emptied his bolt pistol into its face, blowing half of it away into a fine mist of daemonic ichor. Still it leapt, hurling itself twenty feet over the parapet. Messinius fell back, keeping the creature in sight, targeting skating over his helmplate as the machine-spirit tried to maintain a target lock. Threat indicators trilled, shifting up their priority spectrum.

The daemon held up its enormous gnarled hands. Smoke whirled in the space between, coalescing into a two-handed sword almost as tall as Messinius. By the time its hoofed feet cracked the paving slabs of the square, the creature’s weapon was solid. Vapour streaming from its ruined face, it pointed the broadsword at Messinius and hissed a wordless challenge.

‘Accepted,’ said Messinius, and moved in to attack.

The creature was fast, and punishingly strong. Messinius parried its first strike with an outward push of his palm, fingers spread. Energy crackled. The boom generated by the meeting of human technology and the sorceries of the warp was loud enough to out-compete the guns, but though the impact sent pain lancing up Messinius’ arm, the daemon was not staggered, and pressed in a follow-up attack, swinging the massive sword around its head as if it weighed nothing.

Messinius countered more aggressively this time, punching in to the strike. Another thunderous detonation. Disruption fields shattered matter, but the daemon was not wholly real, and the effect upon it was lesser than it would be upon a natural foe. Nevertheless, this time it was thrown backwards by the blow. Smoke poured from the edge of its blade. It licked black blood from its arm and snarled. Messinius was ready when it leapt: opening his fist, ignoring the sword as it clashed against his pauldron and sheared off a peeling of ceramite, he grabbed the beast about its middle.

The Bloodletters of Khorne were rangy things, all bone and ropey muscle, no space within them for organs. The false god of war had no need for them to eat or breathe, or to give the semblance of being able to do so. They were made only to kill, and to strike fear in the hearts of those they faced. Their waists were solid, and slender, and easily encompassed by Messinius’ power fist. It squirmed in his grip, throwing Messinius’ arm about. Servo motors in his joints locked, supplementary muscle fibres strained, but the White Consul stood firm.

‘Tell your master he is not welcome on Terra,’ he said. His words were calm, a deliberate defiance of the waves of rage pulsing off the daemon.

He closed his hand.

The daemon’s midriff exploded. The top half fell down, still hissing and thrashing. Its sword clanged off the paving and broke into shards, brittle now it was separated from its wielder. They were pieces of the same thing, sword and beast. Apart, the weapon could not survive long.

Messinius cast down the lower portion of the daemon. There were dozens of the things atop the wall, battling with his warriors and the human soldiery. In the second he paused he saw Doveskamor hacked down as he stood over the body of his brother, pieces of armour bouncing across the ground. He saw a group of Palatine Sentinels corner a daemon with their bayonets. He saw a dozen humans cut down by eldritch swords.

Where the humans kept their distance, their ranged weapons took a toll upon the Neverborn. Where the daemons got among them, they triumphed more often than not, even against his Space Marines. Support fire rained down sporadically from above, its usefulness restricted by the difficulty of picking targets from the swirling melee. At the western edge of the line, the heavy weapons were more telling, knocking daemons off the wall before they crested the parapet and preventing them from circling around the back of the Imperial forces. Only his equipment allowed Messinius to see this. Without the helm feeds of his warriors and the limited access he had to the Lion Gate’s auspectoria, he would have been blind, lost in the immediate clash of arms and sprays of blood. He would have remained where he was, fighting. He would not have seen that there were more groups of daemons pouring upwards. He would not have given his order, and then he would have died.

‘Squad Antiocles, engage,’ he said. He smashed a charging daemon into fragments, yanked another back the instant before it gutted a mortal soldier, and stamped its skull flat, while switching again to his company vox-net. ‘All units, fall back to the Penitent’s Arch. Take the mortals with you.’

His assault squad fell from the sky on burning jets, kicking daemons down and shooting them with their plasma and bolt pistols. A roar of promethium from a flamer blasted three bloodletters to ash.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius commanded, his words beating time with his blows. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles to cover. Devastators maintain overhead fire.’

Squad Antiocles drove the enemy back. Tactical Space Marines were retreating from the parapet, dragging human soldiers with them. An Ultramarine walked backwards past him, firing his bolter one-handed, a wounded member of the Palatine Guard draped over his right shoulder.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius roared. He grabbed a human by the arm and yanked him hard away from the monster trying to slay him, almost throwing him across the square. He pivoted and punched, slamming the man’s opponent in the face with a crackling bang that catapulted its broken corpse over the wall edge. ‘Fall back!’

Mortal soldiers broke and ran while Squad Antiocles held off the foe. Telling to begin with, in moments the assault squad’s momentum was broken, and again more bloodletters were leaping over the edge of the rampart. The Space Marines fired in retreat, covering each other in pairs as they crossed the square diagonally to the Penitent’s Arch. The mortals were getting the idea, running between the Adeptus Astartes and mostly staying out of their fire corridor. With the fight now concentrated around Squad Antiocles, the Devastators were more effective, blasting down the daemons before they could bring their weight of numbers to bear upon Antiocles. Sporadic bursts of fire from the retreating Tactical Marines added to the effect, and for a short period the number of daemons entering the square did not increase.

Messinius tarried a moment, rounding up more of the humans who were either too embattled or deaf to his orders to get out. He reached three still firing over the parapet’s edge and pulled them away. A daemon reared over the parapet and he crushed its skull, but a second leapt up and cleaved hard into his fist, and power fled the weapon. Messinius pumped three bolts into its neck, decapitating it. He moved back.

His power fist was ruined. The daemon’s cut had sliced right through the ceramite, breaking the power field generator and most of the weapon’s strength-boosting apparatus, making it a dead weight. He said a quick thanks to the machine’s departed spirit and smashed the top of his bolt pistol against the quick seal release, at the same time disengaging the power feeds by way of neural link. The clamps holding the power fist to his upper arm came loose and it slid to the floor with a clang, leaving his right arm clad in his standard ceramite gauntlet. A century together. A fine weapon. He had no time to mourn it.

‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Fall back to the Penitent’s Arch!’

He slammed a fresh clip into his bolt pistol. Squad Antiocles were being pushed back. The Devastators walked their fire closer in to the combat. A heavy bolter blasted half a dozen daemons into stinking meat. A missile blew, lifting more into the air. Messinius fell back himself now, leaving it to the last moment before ordering the Assault Marines to leap from the fray. Their jets ignited, driving back the daemons with washes of flame, and they lifted up over his head, leaving four of their brothers dead on the ground. Devastator fire hammered down from above. Anti-personnel weapons set into casemates and swivel turrets on the walls joined in, but the daemons mounted higher and higher in a wave of red that flooded over the parapet.

‘Run!’ he shouted at the straggling human soldiery. ‘Run and survive! Your service is not yet done!’

The Penitent’s Arch led from the square onto a wall walk that curved around to another layer of defences. His Space Marines were already making a firing line across the entrance. A gate could be extended across the arch, sealing the walk from the square, but Messinius refrained from requesting it be closed, as the humans were still streaming past the Adeptus Astartes. Kryvesh waved the banner, whirling it through the air to attract the terrified mortals. The Space Marines fired constantly into the mass of daemons sprinting after them, exhausting their ammunition supplies. Shattered false bodies tumbled down, shot from the front and above, yet still they came, overtaking and dismembering the last warriors fleeing away from the parapet.

Squad Antiocles roared through the arch, landing behind their brethren. Messinius passed between them. For a moment he surveyed the tide of coming fury. Endless red-skinned monsters filling the square like a lake of spilled blood, washing over a score of brightly armoured Space Marine corpses left behind in the retreat. Several hundred humans lay alongside them.

He opened a vox-channel to Gate Command.

‘Wall batteries three-seven-three through three-seven-six, target sector nine five eighty-three, Penitent’s Square, western edge. Five-minute bombardment.’

‘On whose order?’

‘Captain Vitrian Messinius, White Consuls Chapter, Tenth Company. I have the primarch’s authority.’ As he dealt with gunnery control, he was also datapulsing a request for resupply, and checking through layered data screeds.

‘Voice print and signum ident match. Transponder codes valid. We obey.’

The far side of the square erupted in a wall of flame. Heavy cannon shells detonated in a string along the rampart. High-energy beams sliced into the square, turning stone and metal instantly to superheated gas. The approaching daemons were annihilated. A few bolt-rounds cracked off as the last daemons nearing the Space Marine line were put down.

‘Company, cease fire. Conserve ammunition.’ Nobody heard him. Nobody could. He re-sent the order via vox-script. The boltguns cut out.

Penitent’s Square was a cauldron of fire so intense he could feel the heat through his battleplate’s ceramite. The ground shook under his feet and he considered the possibility that the wall would give way. The noise was so all-consuming the idea of speech lost relevance. For five minutes the Lion’s Gate tore madly at its own hide, ripping out chunks of itself in a bid to scrape free the parasites infesting its fabric, then, as suddenly as it had begun, the bombardment ceased.

Where the Penitent’s Square had been, a twisted mass of black metal and shattered stone remained. So formidable were the defences of the Lion’s Gate that the structure beneath had not been penetrated, but it was like this, in small bursts of destruction, that they could lose this war.

Messinius accessed the gate’s noosphere. No daemons had as yet rounded the projecting Penitent’s Spur to come up against their new position. When the attack came again, which it would, it would come from the front.

An ammunition train raced down the walkway from the fortress interior and came to a squealing stop fifty yards away. Medicae personnel jumped down. A Space Marine Apothecary came with them. Human peons rushed about with heavy sack bags full of bolter magazines, passing them out to the transhumans. Spent magazines clattered to the floor. New ones were slammed home. Messinius contacted his squad leaders, taking a quick census of his surviving men, not trusting the digits that read ‘Company Casualties 23%’ blinking in the upper right of his visual field.

Through the smoke given off by burning metal on the far side of the ruined square, he saw movement. Auspex returns tripped his armour’s machine-spirit, and it blinked warnings in his helm.

<threat detected.>

‘They’re coming again,’ he said.

‘My lord?’ A soft voice, one that did not belong in that moment. He ignored it.

‘Engage at fifty-yard range. Make every shot count.’

The ammunition train was hurriedly relieved of their allotted supplies, and sped off, bearing the worst-wounded, to aid whichever beleaguered unit needed it next.

‘Stand ready.’

‘My lord?’ The voice became more insistent.

The voidships in orbit were beginning to fire. Their targeting systems were perturbed by the boiling warp energy and the vortex in constant motion over the Imperial Palace, and many shots went wide, crashing down into the Anterior Barbican, a few falling as far out as Magnifican.

Red monsters bounded towards them, as numerous as before, as if their efforts to thin them had been for naught.

‘Fire,’ he said coldly.

‘My lord, your duty rotation begins in half an hour. You told me to wake you.’

This time he heard. Bolters boomed. Messinius froze them with a thought, and with another he shut down the hypnomat entirely.

Vitrian Messinius awoke groggily.

‘My lord,’ his servant said. Selwin, he was called. ‘You are returned from your recollections?’

‘I am awake, Selwin, yes,’ Messinius said irritably. His mouth was dry. He wanted to be left alone.

‘Shall I?’ Selwin gestured to the hypnomat.

Messinius nodded and rubbed his face. It felt numb. Selwin flicked a number of toggles on the hypnomat and it powered down, the steady glow of its innards fading to nothing and winking out, taking the immediacy of Messinius’ memories with it.

‘The wall again?’ Selwin asked.

The hypnomat’s primary use was to instil knowledge without active learning on the subject’s part, but it could reawaken memories to be lived again. Full immersion in the hypnomat required cooperation from Messinius’ catalepsean node, and coming out of the half-sleep was never as easy as true waking. Reliving past events dulled his wits. Messinius reminded himself to be guarded. He forgot sometimes that he was not on Sabatine any more. The local saying ‘This is Terra’ encompassed a multitude of sins. Spying was among them.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Personal debriefing.’ He shook his head and unplugged the hypnomat’s input cables from the neural ports set into his arms and neck. ‘Nothing new learned.’

Selwin nodded, then hesitantly said, ‘If I may be so bold as to ask, why do it, my lord, if you expect to learn nothing?’

‘Because I can always be wrong,’ Messinius said. He pointed at the hypnomat. It was a bulky machine set on a trolley, but not too big for an unaltered man to move. ‘Take that away. Inform my armourer I will be with him in a few minutes.’

Selwin bowed. ‘Already done, my lord.’

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