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Duty Waits – Guy Haley

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Duty Waits

Guy Haley

The Anterior Wall, Gate Anterior Six. Dorn’s fortress is new on Terra’s aged terms, but already the acids of the air and rain have eaten into it, pocking it rough as wave-worn rock. The erosion is getting worse. The processes the Emperor set in motion to clean the toxins from the air have halted. After a period of hopeful remission, Terra’s long illness has returned. Sacrificed to the exigencies of war, the regeneration of mankind’s home world has halted.

A column of warriors in yellow armour march upon the wall. The Imperial Fists are on patrol. There are five hundred of them, a company, with all their attendant officers. At their head is their captain, Maximus Thane.

Cold Himalazian winds cut across a wall-walk large enough for a squadron of tanks to ride down five abreast. In the upper reaches, where the Palace has smothered Earth’s highest peaks, it is snowing dirty flakes flecked with the smuts of industry. On the lower ramparts there is only rain. Once, these lands were dry, high plateaus, now they are a Palace larger than a city. Emissions from its lofty towers create their own storms. Atmospheric regulators spew steam into the sky. Artificial clouds rapidly become rain in the chill, thin air. None of it blesses the torrid earth. The rain runs into drains and thence into funnels that take it down into the spaces between the Palace’s cellars and the hidden bedrock. All the water is sucked back up by the Palace, to be used again and again.

Between the dark clouds, the sky is a sickly vanilla shade. It is a bruise gone past its worst lividity. Ordinarily the armour of the giants stamping along the wall is a rich gold, far cleaner than the ailing skies, a yellow as bright as Terra’s extinct wildflowers. The quality of the sun desaturates the hue of their armour until it is a leper’s pallor. When the clouds scud over the sun, it becomes a murky green.

The wind carries the rain in steeply. In eddies created by angles in the wall, it turns in soaking gyres. The water runs over the armour, gathering in corners, streaking eye lenses, pouring over their emblems of a black fist upon a white field. Both seem grey in the rain.

The Imperial Fists march relentlessly. Their armour is impervious to energy blast, explosion and the void. Mere weather is of no concern to the Legiones Astartes. They must move fast, for they have a lot of ground to cover.

The Anterior Wall is a loop, a rope of stone, rockcrete, plasteel and adamantium, tossed out to snare a great swathe of territory and steal it into the Palace’s embrace. It forms a bailey, though one built to the scale of titans rather than men. Behind the Anterior Wall, the Lion’s Gate let into the Eternity Wall. Whereas the Anterior Wall is only stupendous in scale, the Lion’s Gate defies human senses. There are mountains smaller than the gatehouse. Though two hundred miles from the Anterior Wall, it is clearly visible. Even through the rain, it is a squat, brooding shadow.

The Lion’s Gate is not these Space Marines’ concern. Others of their Legion man its guns and its parapets. Their duty is on the Anterior Wall, and true to the nature of their kind, they give it their complete attention – rain, dirt and all. No place in the Palace is safe. The enemy could come at any time. The enemy have already attacked. Since the Alpha Legion’s assault on Terra, the praetorians of the Emperor have been vigilant.

There are six gates that pierce the wall’s frontage. They are each eighty-nine miles apart. The wall itself is six hundred miles long, though if one were to draw a straight line between the two points where it joins the Eternity Wall, the distance would be only two hundred and forty-six miles.

The Space Marines doggedly tramp along. Their pace does not vary, but remains a jog that an unmodified human could not possibly match. They do it for hours, for mile after mile, thundering past the unblinking eyes of picters, through the spread nets of motion sensors, their patrol logged by every one. To their left the outer ward of the Palace spreads itself across the ground. The buildings there are strategically unimportant, else they would be within the Eternity Wall. Civilian abodes. Offices for non-hegemony organisations. Corporate interests, trade cartel headquarters, charitable foundations, places of education. All the usual trappings of human society. But most of the concerns sheltering in the Anterior loop have either been shut down or subordinated to the growing Imperial bureaucracy. There has never been a state of war like this in all of mankind’s history. Freedom is ever the first casualty of war, and it has been lost notably quickly this time.

The company approaches a bastion athwart the walk, where a lesser wall projects inwards for a dozen miles, concealing what lies beyond. A roaring of engines and the lights of void ships climbing skywards indicates where they are. The Imperial Fists slow and come to a halt in perfect formation. The rain drums off their armour. Yellow armour in yellow gloom.

Their leader marches to the gate let into the tower. It is one hundred feet high and fifty wide. Automated guns track him as he approaches the sentry post set into the plascrete next to the gate. The post is a cylinder as tall as a mortal human. The cylinder swivels on soundless bearings, opening itself to reveal a half-man meshed with electronics housed inside. The rain spatters his pallid skin.

The captain addresses the servitor.

‘Thane, Maximus. Twenty-Second Captain, Imperial Fists Twenty-Second Company, Second Chapter. Personal ident VII-22-Alpha-Alpha-7709231.’

The Imperial Fists are forced to do this every time they pass a bastion. Treachery brings fear of more treachery. Infiltrators have already breached the Palace once. Lord Rogal Dorn will not have it happen again. Every warrior must present his credentials, no matter his rank. ‘Watchword for today is Europa.’

‘Ident accepted. Watchword accepted,’ says the half-man. His lips are sutured shut, and the mechanisms of speech have been excised from his throat. The voice is mechanical, and issues from a panel over his head. A broad-spread, low-power laser fans out from a lens over the door, measuring every aspect of Thane’s armour. Simultaneously, cogitators within the building link with Thane’s suit and interrogate it independently, reviewing pict data and demanding passwords of their own that only the battleplate’s machine-spirit knows. Above, on the wall, are more warriors of the VII Legion. They are from another company, and ordered to shoot anyone on sight that appears suspicious. Thane knows they will kill him if he so much as hesitates in delivering the pass codes.

‘Remove your helm,’ says the half-man.

Thane complies. Air pressure equalises with a hiss. Cold rain runs down his face. His left eye is momentarily dazzled by a retinal scan. A needle tastes the blood of his cheek.

‘Maximus Thane identification completed. You may pass, captain,’ says the voice.

The lights on an access panel beside the servitor cycle as it contacts devices buried under miles of stone. It chimes. Locking teeth clunk into their housings. The gate slides back, revealing an eight-foot thickness of metal on toothed tracks, slick with grease that is soon beaded with the rain. Like the wall, the gate is barely a few years old, but already it is pitted. Thane passes through. The first of his officers advances to the servitor and repeats the process. Each of them has their own watchword.

A tunnel passes through the bastion. Guns track Thane every step of the way. At the far end is a second gate, where he undergoes a duplicate of the password process. The far gate opens, then closes behind him. Getting his men through will take an hour. There are dozens more towers like this they must negotiate. Every patrol has to undergo the same. The wall is never empty for longer than fifteen minutes. Thousands of checks are made every hour. It has to be this way. The Alpha Legion showed them that.

Thane takes a moment for himself and goes to the wall’s inner edge. Both sides of the wall-walk have a crenellated parapet. Risky, in a fortress, for a covered rear facing allows an enemy that captures the wall to turn it to his own protection, but there is a good reason for it.

Much of the Anterior loop is occupied by the Lion’s Gate Spaceport. The artificial plains of its landing fields stretch from the Anterior Wall to the Eternity Wall, filling the space entirely. Thane ponders the monumental efforts required to build the port. A subsidiary Himalazian mountain range was levelled to accommodate it. It is perfectly flat and currently occupied by hundreds of enormous landers. Ground vehicles speed along its road grid, lights blinking. Ships take off and land in constant cycle. The wall shakes as one lifts off near Thane’s position, burning oceans of fuel to haul its bulk out of Terra’s gravity well.

He watches its slow progress to orbit. His eyes are drawn to the heavens, which heave with the false stars of spacecraft and high anchor orbitals.

Where will Horus strike first, he thinks, when he finally comes into the system? Will he stop at Mars to tip the civil war there in his favour? Will they fall upon Luna, to neutralise the defence stations? Will they make a direct attack?

The situation appears hopeless. Those loyal to the Emperor are outnumbered and scattered. It does not matter that Lord Dorn has been joined by his brothers Leman Russ, Jaghatai Khan and lately Sanguinius upon Terra. It appears a mighty force, but all their Legions have been mauled. Dorn’s other loyal siblings are scattered across the galaxy. A little hope has filtered down into the populace at the four’s gathering, at the abatement of the warp storm and the arrival of reinforcements from across the Imperium. Thane does not share it. He has a fine strategic mind. The odds are stacked against Terra. He believes something terrible, though he does not want to, and tries hard to change his opinion. But he cannot. He believes that Horus will win.

Time ticks on. Terra has been waiting for years for the attack. The fortress has been ready for months, the battlefield is set.

Still the enemy does not come.

A thousand miles away, in a tower facing towards sunset, another of Dorn’s sons performs his repetitive labours. It would take a month of ceaseless marching to get to this other place from Thane’s position, but unbelievably the fortifications are the same. The wall is part of the same defence system. The road atop it is the same road. A man could walk between the two places uninterrupted, save for Lord Dorn’s multiple layers of security.

The name of this second Imperial Fist is Kolo. Only Kolo; if he once had another name, he does not remember it. The Legion recruiters did not mark one down. Like many of his kind he recalls little of his origins, though sometimes he has flashes of hot nights and hotter days. The burnt-sugar shade of his skin and his accent marks him out as a native of Mid-Afrik. The rest of his past has been wiped away by the Emperor’s gifts. He is Terran, he knows that, one of many recruited when the warp storm made transit to Inwit impossible. It is only two years since his admittance to the Legion, but he has already forgotten who he was.

The wall is called the Dusk Wall. Kolo is deep inside it, a hundred yards beneath the surface, under layered plascrete, ferrocrete and rockcrete. The walls are riddled with cysts of reactive liquid plasteks and braided cables of adamantium wire. Kolo is within a gallery lit by orange screen glow. The cathode screens in the gallery are deliberately primitive electronics that are easy to produce and resistant to enemy subversion. The great sciences of the Imperium have been bypassed in favour of robust simplicity. This change in attitude, though expedient, will cost mankind in the years to come.

Kolo was raised in the hope of defeating mankind’s extra-terrestrial foes, but his dreams of fighting for a greater future remain unrealised. Kolo has never left Terra. In the stead of alien nightmares, he faces the horror of fighting those he should have named brother.

‘Anything?’ Kolo asks. For the baseline humans he commands, his moods are difficult to read. His features are blocky on a square face not designed to convey emotion. Even so, his hopefulness is apparent. It has been a long wait. He wishes to fight.

‘Nothing, my lord Imperial Fist,’ says the individual manning the station. The flickering lines of ray-painted light on the glass remain devoid of content. There is a sole block of text at the top containing the operator’s details. There are no messages beneath that, no picts of invading fleets, no radar or augur returns. The orange-and-black screen is void of data as the sky is void of foes. There is only a blinking cursor beneath the man’s digitised identity. Nothing else.

‘Inform me as soon as you have anything,’ Kolo says, words he has said a thousand times in the last two months. He moves on down the rows of operatives.

Kolo is a line trooper, the lowest rank of Legionary. Yet the Praetorian’s sons are so thinly spread across the fortress-Palace, many have duties that exceed their rank. His task, for the moment, is to act as a link between the fortress’ eyes and its armaments.

One day, Kolo will bear the name Bulwark for his actions in the siege. He will earn it for the acts he will perform upon the wall in the months to come. He will be dauntless, implacable. That day is far ahead of him. And though he will be reckoned a hero, he will find no glory in the name’s earning. He will yearn for the boredom of the instrument gallery before the end.

He stops again by another operative.

‘Anything from the outer system?’

‘Nothing, my lord,’ says the man. ‘I will inform you as soon as we see anything,’ he adds quickly, pre-empting Kolo’s ritual command.

Caught on the verge of saying it, Kolo instead nods, and continues with his endless pacing up and down the gallery, like a beast in a cage driven mad by confinement.

Six days later, Thane’s company is on guard rotation over the Katman Road. They line the walls of the artificial canyon the road runs down. Hundreds of Space Marines in golden yellow stand as still as statues. Maximus Thane has forbidden his men to move. Attention to detail and discipline are the Imperial Fists’ defining characteristics, and they obey. Thane wishes his company to present the appearance of an indomitable wall of ceramite-clad flesh, because that is what his primarch expects. The Space Marines of the loyal Legions will be the Palace’s true defence against the traitors, no matter how high Lord Dorn piles his fortifications.

Only the parchments bearing the Imperial Fists’ oaths of moment stir in the breeze. The moment was long ago. The moment has stretched, become weeks, months, years. The ink of the neat, Inwitian script declaring intentions to fight to the death has faded from black to russet. Many of the scrips are tattered. Some of Thane’s men have begun to replace them. The words on the parchments are not the only things to have lost their vibrancy. The canyon is of lustrous black stone. It appears grey under sickly skies. It is as if colour has been leached from the landscape.

The civilians feel it. They rarely pause to look at the wonders around them. In the early days of Thane’s vigil, they would congregate to talk around the monumental statuary lining the way. In their rest periods they would take refreshments in the restaurants and taverns that occupied the arcades at the feet of the canyon wall. They would point out the sentinels in yellow and be comforted by their presence. Not anymore. Food is administered centrally. The places of entertainment have closed. The clothes of the civilians are worn and hang off frames made spare by rationing. The civilians’ walks have lost their briskness. They shuffle where once they strode.

Thane looks down on them from a soaring bridge of stone. They move slowly from their hab-blocks. They have a walk of half a mile from the outer edges of the Demesne of Recorders to their work units. The flow of the crowd never stops. It is divided into two by a line of dirty red rope strung from tarnished poles. On the left, fresh shifts walk towards their employment. The rightward lines are returning home. The honk of the shift horns blare with merciless regularity, chopping Thane’s watch into four-hour blocks.

Thane supposes the civilians are luckier than some in the Palace, for they at least have a variety of workplace and home. For many others who labour in the Emperor’s fortress, the two have become one and the same. When Thane came to the Palace, the civilians were freer, they came and went from Palace and planet. The war grinds down their freedoms. Travel is difficult, secured only by permission chits that must be validated by multiple authorities. The likes of the Recorders remain trapped where they were employed when the war broke out. The rebellion on Mars, the early battles in the outer system and Alpharius’ incursion; each event has chipped away another facet from their lives, until only service remains.

The Recorders are part of the machinery of government. During the Great Crusade they logged the growing possessions of the Imperium, parsing data into forms useful to the colonial authorities. Despite their name, the Recorders are assessors, of a sort. Thane does not know what they are assessing now, or if the information they process is useful any longer.

Thane wonders if things will ever return to normal.

The reports that crackle periodically in Thane’s ear sound at exactly the same times, every single day. They report the same information. In the main they are sign offs from his squad sergeants, announcing incoming data bursts conveying the physical status of his warriors and their wargear. All of them are hale. If he were to examine the data more thoroughly, and bring up rune displays for each one, then the outline diagrams of their war suits would show green. Their ammo counts would read at full. Their biological signifiers would all be within normal parameters. There have been no problems in his company with implant degradation or rejection, and all their equipment functions at peak efficiency. Garrison duty gives his Apothecaries and the Techmarines plenty of time to minister to their charges.

There is no guard rail or parapet to line the edge of the Katman road, and the drop from the edge would probably kill Thane if he fell. The distant ground is hard rockcrete paved with marble. As he scans the crowds, Thane thinks about the drop.

If he took one step, he would plummet for exactly twelve point three seconds. He knows this because he has calculated it several times. At impact, the ceramite of his armour would crack open. The plasteel framing beneath the outer plates would buckle. Kinetic energy transferred to his body an instant later would rupture his internal organs. His fused ribs would burst. In all probability, only the soft bodyglove worn under his battleplate would retain its integrity. Nevertheless, he is a Space Marine. He might live. His armour and enhanced body would afford him a one-in-four chance of survival, if an Apothecary were to reach him quickly. Any unfortunate person he landed upon would surely die, though if he were to hit one of the civilians below, his own chance of survival would go up to around forty per cent.

In his head, Thane calculates differing outcomes under differing circumstances. If he were to twist, or fling out his arms, or abandon his weapon, or fire his suit stabilisation jets on full burn at the last moment, or in brief bursts, or all the way down, or what would happen were he unarmoured. When he has exhausted all the variant scenarios he deems likely, he uses the idle processing power of his battleplate’s cogitator to check his results.

He is never wrong. It would surprise him if the cogitator gave him a different answer. His Legion’s talents are in planning, and the complete command of probability. Such calculations are second nature. But an Imperial Fist never takes anything for granted, they deal in certainty, and certainty only comes by exploring every single variable. That is their way – Dorn’s way.

Of course there is one flaw to this mathematical exercise. Thane is never going to step off the precipice. It is an impossible situation. His calculations are pointless, done for the sake of doing.

He considers that he might be bored.

Thane allows himself to abandon the discipline of stillness and moves his head, inclining it a few degrees skywards. He has been looking at the sky more and more often in recent days. Not one of the civilians passing below would notice the motion even if they were looking up at him, which none of them are. Space Marines are far more observant. His lieutenant sees, though he too is staring down at the civilians passing below.

The vox clicks.

‘Captain Thane, is something wrong?’

His lieutenant is named Guntren. In seven months’ time, he will be dead.

Thane does not answer. The sky is strangely empty. The vast orbital plates have been torn down, or converted into fortresses and moved away from the planet. The Skye plate, now festooned with giant cannons, is the sole platform of any significance that remains visible from his position. Before there were many. Without them the heavens look naked and sad.

Held aloft by the labouring of thousands of giant gravitic motors, Skye hangs in geosynchronous orbit to the west of the Palace, where the watery sun is making its way towards the horizon. Thin cloud obscures Skye’s details, but its presence remains obvious from the huge shadow it casts on the mountains. High above, the artificial stars of more distant satellites and the fleets of the Emperor make firefly swarms in the void. Thane watches them wordlessly.

That Thane has disobeyed his own order concerns the lieutenant.

‘Thane?’ Guntren repeats.

‘Why do they not attack?’ asks Thane. ‘How much longer must we wait?’

Guntren has no answer. The sky has no answer.

The enemy do not come.

Days bleed into weeks. Life is duty. Thane lives to fight, but garrison duty is a monotony of patrolling, analysis, weapons drill, planning and replanning. This is not living for the Imperial Fists, it is existence of the most tense and tedious kind. Thane is weary for lack of action. Kolo is tired of looking at screens.

One day, it changes, but only for the worse, and it is not the day the enemy comes.

Thane’s duty has taken him to the Lion’s Gate, where he is on a rota to command from its strategic centre for twenty-eight days. His warriors man the guns and patrol its walls. To the naked eye nothing seems different. The void ships continue their thundering. The civilians their toils, the defenders their vigilance. Even so, things are not the same. There is a thrill to the air, the queasy foreboding of danger.

There has been much activity in orbit. Ships are leaving Terra’s anchorages in number. Dorn has called a Great Muster at Beta Garmon. Some of Thane’s brothers are bound there, to join the greatest assemblage of Imperial arms since the war with Horus began. Thane is not. His company is among many ordered to remain at the Palace. He hides his disappointment poorly, and he is short with his men.

Upon the Throneworld, tension grows.

Kolo is no longer staring at screens. To his immense relief, his new assignment has him out of doors. He has returned to his squad and they are patrolling the Lion’s Market; his company are spread wide across the district. The market was the commercial heart of the Lion’s Quarter, but it is not the gaudy place it once was. Most of its stalls have been cleared. In their place are stacks of ammunition containers salvaged from Mars. Some of the stacks are almost as tall as walls, though nothing can match the height of the Lion’s Gate. The containers are empty, their contents removed far underground to hardened magazines. The remaining market stalls are small and sad in their shadow, and without exception their scuffed surfaces are bare. No one trades here anymore. It is not permitted. The shops around the periphery of the square are mostly shuttered, their keepers drafted to more pressing labours. The few that are open have little to sell.

The Imperial Fists sweep the square in twos. It is an open show of force. Reassure the civilians, seek out malcontents and potential traitors. That is the idea. Those are their orders. But in the faces of the few people abroad Kolo sees no reassurance. All he sees is fear.

‘We are frightening them,’ Kolo says aloud.

‘Keep your mind on your duty, brother,’ his sergeant, Benedict, voxes back, but he is troubled too.

A gaunt man shivers as Kolo checks his papers. It is cold, and the man’s once-fine clothes are inadequate for the climate of the Himalazian massif.

‘You should not be out here,’ Kolo tells him.

‘Where can I go?’ says the man miserably.

‘You should not be out here,’ Kolo repeats. ‘You do not have clearance.’

The man’s situation is not unusual. There are many people trapped in the Palace by the war. Most are travellers who cannot return to their proper place in the Imperium. Many of them have no legal residence. Lords from the Imperium’s far-flung dominions sleep rough alongside dispossessed workers, all finding themselves victim to bureaucracy’s mercilessness. The population of the Palace is in the millions. Keeping track of who should and should not be there is a never-ending task.

‘Never mind,’ says Kolo. He presses the tattered identity papers back into the man’s hands. ‘Find somewhere. Stay off the streets.’

The man bobs his head in fearful gratitude, and hurries away.

‘You shouldn’t let them go,’ growls Kolo’s brother, Berthan. He is a veteran, and from Inwit. He has yet to fully accept Kolo into the squad. ‘All unregistered persons are a risk.’

‘His papers were in order,’ says Kolo. ‘As much as can be. We have to show some mercy.’

‘If he were an infiltrator, his papers would also be in order,’ says Berthan, watching the man depart. ‘Mercy is dangerous.’

‘You think we should kill them all, just to be safe?’ says Kolo harshly.

‘No,’ says Berthan. He lets the man go. He could stop him, but he doesn’t.

Kolo wonders how long Berthan will reply that way, if the same question is asked again. It will be. It is inevitable. He can see Berthan killing the man in his imagination. He can see himself doing the same.

‘Squad,’ their Sergeant Benedict voxes. ’Move out, now, to the Westway. There’s trouble.’

‘What kind?’ asked Berthan. He is eager for action. Anything to dispel the awfulness of waiting.

‘The civilian kind,’ says the sergeant. His voice is tense.

Civilian trouble is the worst kind of trouble for a warrior to deal with.

Maximus Thane watches a picter feed of the brewing riot. A servo-skull swoops dizzyingly over a crowd of people. There are a few dozen enforcers in a line, far too few to hold back so many, and they are nearly as underfed and anxious as the crowd they oppose. The crowd had been in lines, waiting patiently to collect their rations in the Lion’s Market from the western entrance, where some of the empty cargo containers have been repurposed into a distribution centre. Doors have been cut into the sides, with counters to allow the allocation of food held within. But today the shutters didn’t open. They remain closed. That is the problem.

The queues began to form at dawn. They reached a mile in length before it became evident the doors were not going to open. Soon after, the lines began to fragment. The people that made up the lines are pressing forward. A mob is forming. This would necessarily be a cause for concern. A quick thinker might have soothed their fears with words. But there does not appear to be one such among the enforcers, and there is a hard kernel to the crowd. A man is shouting something Thane cannot hear, but which is clearly inflammatory. People are listening. As a snowflake gathers around a fleck of dust, so danger accretes around this man.

‘Why don’t they arrest him?’ growls Thane. He was not made for police work, only war, but his mind is adaptable and expansive, and the solution to this brewing problem is obvious to him.

‘There are too few of them,’ says Guntren.

Thane’s crag of a brow narrows in on itself. ‘Have they sent out a call for aid?’

Guntren is quick in retrieving the relevant information. ‘No, my lord.’

‘Do we have a squad in the vicinity?’

‘There is a battle squad of twenty, sweeping the market. They are of Hanfeld’s company.’

‘Find me the relevant link codes and put me through to them,’ says Thane.

‘They have not called for aid. We should leave this to the enforcers,’ warns Guntren.

‘Noted,’ said Thane. ‘Do it anyway.’

Kolo’s finger tightens on the trigger. He and his brothers face down the angry mob. There are thousands of them, and more are coming every minute. Fifty enforcers attempt to keep the peace. It is hopeless. The Space Marines have not helped the situation. When Kolo’s squad arrived, the crowd calmed a moment, but then its fury leapt back up, like a wildfire creeping across damp ground suddenly encountering dry grass. They are angry to see the Imperial Fists.

‘Stand down. Return to your quarters. There will be food tomorrow,’ says Sergeant Benedict. He sounds calm, reasonable, but the mob hears his words as provocative.

There is a man at the heart of the trouble, standing upon a stall. Around him surge the crowd. Kolo has his helm zoom in on his face. There is light in his eyes Kolo does not like. Has desperation made him eloquent, or is there something more sinister at work?

‘There is no food!’ says the man. He waves his finger around, accusing everyone and everything of something undefined but monstrous. ‘There will be no more food! The warriors of Terra depart and leave us to our fate!’

He gestures to the sky wildly, the crowd lets out a loud, animal moan.

‘They go to do the work of the Emperor,’ said Benedict. ‘They go to win the war. Patience. There will be food tomorrow. Return to your quarters.’

‘Then why do the wolves of Leman Russ not obey? Why does the Emperor leave Terra? Why is this so? Has our sacrifice not been great enough?’

Both of these rumours have been gathering currency in the last few days. The first rumour is true. The Space Wolves have departed at odds with Kolo’s own primarch. They have refused to join the Great Muster. The second rumour is not. The Emperor remains on Terra, though only Dorn and The Imperial Regent know where. No one else has seen him. The people are losing faith.

The demagogue is furious beyond reason. The crowd are less fanatical, but they are scared, and their individuality is being subsumed into the volatile groupthink of the mob. Their minds melt together, like discrete cubes of ice in a bucket turning to indivisible water.

Space Marines are not made to suppress riots. They are not made to arrest people and calm situations. Kolo can see what is about to happen. The energy of violence is on the air, as electric as in any battle. More and more people are joining the crowd. He reflects that this is the first time he has aimed his weapon at another living being. He hates that this is so.

‘Return to your quarters!’ shouts Benedict. His voxmitter booms loudly. His harsh, grating voice should have had the crowd running. It has the opposite effect.

The first stone rings off Kolo’s helmet with the sound of a muffled bell. A gun goes off in the enforcers’ line. There is a scream. The crowd’s mood switches instantly, from hostile to murderous. They make more inchoate noises, speaking with one, mindless voice. Debris rains down on the Space Marines from all sides; metal poles from the abandoned stores, empty ration packs, cans, ordure, dead vermin. The Imperial Fists stand stock still, guns braced in firing positions. Waiting.

‘You claim to protect us!’ shrieks the demagogue. Now his voice is almost lost under the bellowing to the crowd. It is the last shred of reason in a mind turning insane. ‘You oppress us! You are all the same, so-called sons of the Emperor! You will be the doom of us all!’

The crowd attack in earnest. The fear transhumans engender in individuals has no hold on the gestalt entity of the mob. They are of a single thought now, a seething, multi-limbed creature driven by hunger, inured to fear. Feeble fists beat against Kolo’s armour. The cargo containers of the distribution centre rock as hundreds of men attempt to upset them. The enforcers are dragged down.

‘End this now,’ says a voice. It comes in over Chapter-level vox. It carries a captain’s signum. Captain Thane. Kolo knows him only by name, but he is duty bound to obey him.

Benedict switches from voxmitter to suit to suit vox. He says one word.

‘Fire.’

The Imperial Fists do not hesitate. Their fingers squeeze triggers. The crackle of rocket ignition sounds from every gun, followed by the raucous, belching explosions of bolt-rounds.

The effect of a bolt-round on unarmoured bodies is ugly. The rioters go from contained packages of life, neatly wrapped in clothes and skin, to a red mess. The demagogue dies with his anger frothing from his lips. The people at the edges of the crowd come to their senses and flee. Those at the centre are too far gone to relent immediately, but by the time Kolo’s fourth round takes a life, they are running. All of them are running. The resulting stampede kills hundreds, crushing bodies underfoot, or squeezing the breath out of them against the unyielding walls of the container stacks as they push to squeeze through narrow gaps. They scream as they run blindly into one another, knocking each other down, bouncing off obstacles. They turn on each other in their desperation to get away. The young and the old fare the worst.

The Imperial Fists fire only as many times as strictly necessary. Four shots apiece.

‘Cease firing,’ said Benedict emotionlessly.

Thane stares grimly at the pict units. Drones sweep over the square, providing him multiple angles to examine the Legion’s handiwork.

The dead litter an area two hundred yards across by fifty deep. The centre is an abattoir scene where not one body remains intact. At the edges the bodies are whole, asphyxiated mostly, lying down like they are playing a childish game. They are in the same orientation, heads away from the massacre. They are like the petals of a flower around a red corolla, or iron filings displaying the delicate lines of force around a magnet. He estimates over a thousand dead. The action, stampede and aftermath lasted less than six minutes.

The Imperial Fists have returned to the statue stillness. Their guns are smoking. Blood drips from yellow battleplate. The paving before the distribution centre is awash with gore. It gathers thickly in the messages of peace and hope engraved into the flagstones. Fyceline wisps drift over the slaughter, merging with the steam rising from opened bodies. The screams of the crowd recede as they run, terrified, from their protectors.

‘What are we doing?’ says Guntren.

‘Keeping the peace before the fight,’ says Thane.

‘Was it truly necessary?’ says Guntren.

‘Yes,’ says Thane. He turns away from the screens. ‘Find me the official responsible for this travesty,’ he orders his company vox master. ‘If there is no food for the civilians,’ he says to his logister, ‘see what the Legion can spare. I want contingencies formulating to prevent this happening again.’

Guntren gives him an angry stare. ‘Blood cannot be soaked up by bread,’ he says.

Thane does not reply.

It is quiet in the square now.

And still the enemy do not come.

About the Author

Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Pharos, the Primarchs novel Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

Inquisitor Crowl, who serves on Holy Terra, follows the trail of a conspiracy that leads him to the corridors of the Imperial Palace itself…

A Black Library Publication

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.

Duty Waits © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Duty Waits, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-845-7

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