Torias Telion:
The Eye of Vengeance

Graham McNeill

Macragge City’s coast sweated under a bone-white sky and a sun like a heated bronze disc. It wasn’t Quintarn hot, which was something to be thankful for, but it wasn’t far off.

Torias Telion nodded to Sergeant Kaetan, and they pulled a chromed ammo case from the back of the Cargo-6 parked next to the two idling Thunderhawks on the Evanestus platforms.

‘Careful now,’ said Telion as they carried the heavy crate into the gunship. ‘These are custom-made stalker shells.’

‘I’m not one of your bloody neophytes,’ snapped Kaetan, nodding towards the squad of Scouts seated along the fuselage. ‘And this isn’t the first time I’ve loaded a Thunderhawk.’

‘These are delicate, precision-made kill rounds that don’t take kindly to your rough handling,’ said Telion as they set it down in a recessed stowage bay in the deck.

Kaetan’s fingers moved in Scout sign.

‘Careful,’ grinned Telion as they went back for the last crate. ‘Language like that and I could cite you for conduct unbecoming.’

The platforms were thick with shouting voices, machine noise and hot fumes. Orbit-capable ships came and went in rigorously controlled schedules, and the backwash of atmospheric jets filled the air with light and noise. A pair of translifters from the Helion demi-plate were one platform over, offloading a host of blinking pilgrims. Other ships were spread further afield, bringing yet more pilgrims, workers and hopeful aspirants to Macragge.

Armed provosts in blue frock-coats escorted them all, guides and security combined. They would see them to the culmination of their pilgrimage at the Temple of Correction. Some pilgrims carried sling bags filled with their few worldly possessions, but most arrived on Macragge with nothing but the clothes on their back.

‘Loading a gunship yourself, Telion?’ asked Captain Fabian, standing at the ramp of a Third Company Thunderhawk. ‘Accipiter won’t wait for us.’

Just the sort of thing a captain would say to an officer inferior to him in rank, but whose depth of experience far outweighed his own. Telion’s eyes met Kaetan’s and the younger sergeant looked away to hide his smirk.

‘Get them to do it and let’s be on our way,’ said Fabian, gesturing to the brutish servitors, with their over-muscled torsos and piston-augmented limbs.

‘If it’s all the same, sir, I’d rather not trust my load-out to their clumsy hands.’

‘I won’t be delayed because you’re getting all precious about your ammo,’ said Fabian. ‘Get it loaded and get airborne.’

Telion nodded as the assault ramp of Fabian’s gunship lifted with a pneumatic whine. Its engines spooled up to launch power. Kaetan opened his mouth to say something, but Telion beat him to it.

‘Don’t say a word,’ Telion warned Kaetan. ‘He’s still a captain, and we’re both sergeants.’

Kaetan nodded and they turned back to the Cargo-6. Telion took hold of the last crate, but paused as something caught his eye from the opposite platform. Something out of place.

Around six hundred pilgrims were in the process of being formed up for the long march towards the gates of the Servian Wall and into the mountains.

‘You heard the captain,’ said Kaetan, when Telion didn’t lift. ‘Let’s get this on board.’

Telion stared at the people on the opposite platform. The pilgrims’ faces were filled with wonderment at the sight of Ultramar’s heart, staring up at the glittering might of the Fortress of Hera, the crenellated majesty of the Castrum, the Senatorial Halls and the great relic of the Residency. Telion’s eye fixed on one man in particular.

Shaven head, narrow features. Borderline malnourished.

Nothing unusual for someone who’d travelled a mendicant’s path to Macragge, but something about him raised Telion’s hackles. He followed the man’s eye-line.

Telion snapped his fingers and made the Scout sign for enemy sighted.

Kaetan’s body language changed instantly.

Where?

North. One hundred metres, shaven head.

Acquired.

Telion eased his way around Cargo-6, lifting his Stalker from the running board and silently working a round into the chamber. He kept the vehicle between him and the pilgrim, never once losing line of sight.

Kaetan moved in the opposite direction.

Target threat?

‘He’s spent the last year or so in pilgrimage,’ said Telion, activating his sub-vocal vox-bead. ‘He’s just arrived on Macragge, but doesn’t look up at the Fortress of Hera? No, he’s looking for someone.’

‘Who?’

Telion scanned the platform.

‘Him,’ he said, spotting a man dressed in the oil-stained overalls of a stevedore. He was moving against the crowd towards the pilgrim, a heavy kitbag over his shoulder.

Two potential targets. No time to request backup.

‘Lock him,’ said Telion.

‘Done,’ said Kaetan. ‘Risky shots.’

Telion shook his head. ‘No shots at all. Could be wrong.’

Kaetan looked at him in askance.

‘Since when?’

Kaetan was right. Telion’s instincts were almost never wrong, but he wasn’t about to shoot a potentially innocent man without being sure he was dangerous.

‘They’re closing,’ said Kaetan, as Fabian’s Thunderhawk lifted into the air on a screaming column of jetwash.

The stevedore put down his kitbag and two men came together, embracing like long lost friends. Telion saw the pilgrim pass something to the stevedore. Something metallic from beneath his robes. A piece of machinery? A weapon? A relic of the Pilgrim Trail brought to Macragge for an old friend?

It was just about credible that the two men knew one another, but Telion doubted it. They moved like soldiers. Again, nothing unusual in Ultramar, where every civilian received training.

The stevedore bent to his kitbag. The pilgrim’s face shone.

Telion’s heart sank. He’d seen this before: the joyous release of tension, a job almost finished, the shimmer sweat of zealots.

No, not zealots.

Martyrs.

The pieces fell into place. Bloodborn posing as pilgrims, bringing a disassembled weapon to the surface, piece by piece so as not to trigger the chem-auspex or rad-counters.

And this was the last piece.

‘Drop them,’ he said, bringing his bolter to his shoulder.

Kaetan’s pistol was on target a heartbeat later.

Telion centred the curve of the pilgrim’s scalp in the scope and squeezed the trigger. The bolt carved a valley through the top of his skull without exploding. A kill shot, but one aimed high enough to not detonate the mass-reactive warhead and harm innocent people nearby.

The second man fell with Kaetan’s pistol round ripping his arm off at the shoulder. Screams of panic erupted from the pilgrims, who scattered from the epicentre of the bolter impacts.

Provosts yelled at people to move. Defence Auxilia at muster points ran to the source of the shooting.

Telion saw the stevedore slumped over his kitbag. Half his side was missing from the torso up to his shoulder. A crudely assembled device sat exposed in the kitbag, all crudely-wrapped wiring and improvised components. The stevedore’s other hand held a primitive trigger mechanism.

Telion fired again, putting a round through the man’s wrist and sending his hand flying.

He and Kaetan ran over to the two dead men, weapons scanning for threats as yelling provosts corralled the pilgrims back aboard their vessels.

Telion knelt beside the kitbag. He’d built enough battlefield explosives in his time behind enemy lines to recognise what he was seeing.

‘Tactical atomic,’ said Kaetan.

Telion nodded. Something didn’t feel right.

‘This won’t be the only one,’ he said.

A second later, he was proved right as a blinding flash threw Telion’s shadow out before him. He shielded his eyes and turned to see a miniature mushroom cloud of detonation claw its way into the horizon.

‘One of the littoral platforms,’ said Kaetan. ‘Socus?’

‘Too far,’ said Telion. ‘It’s Lysis Macar.’

The rumbling blast wave billowed over the coastline, but the saw-toothed peaks of the Evanestus peninsula directed most of it out to sea. The ground shook and the fire of the expanding cloud rolled in on itself to spread dark tendrils of smoke in all directions.

‘Shit,’ said Kaetan, looking out to sea.

Captain Fabian’s Thunderhawk plunged towards the ocean, its engines trailing smoke and flames.

‘E-mag pulse,’ said Telion. ‘Must have blown out its avionics and engine controls.’

The Thunderhawk slammed down into the ocean, and came apart in an explosion of debris. Nor was it alone. A transloader fell out of the sky, its pilots helpless to keep it in the air as every machine aboard was overloaded and blown out by the devastating pulse. Dozens more aircraft were spinning down to the sea.

Warning sirens blew from the Servian Wall and multi-spectral lightning flared overhead as citywide voids were lit. Alert aircraft scrambled airborne from blast-hardened shelters.

Macro-cannon batteries unmasked and every aircraft currently still flying was warned off and directed out to sea.

‘What is this?’ asked Kaetan. ‘A precursor to another attack? An invasion?’

‘No,’ said Telion, making safe his bolter. ‘This is just spite. This is the Bloodborn showing us that even though we beat them, they can still hurt us.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Graham McNeill has written a host of novels for Black Library, including the ever popular Ultramarines and Iron Warriors series. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.

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