Legion Read online

  THE HORUS HERESY

  Dan Abnett

  LEGION

  Secrets and lies

  v1.2 (2011.11)

  The Horus Heresy

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

  Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

  Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

  As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

  CONTENTS

  LEGION

  The Horus Heresy

  CONTENTS

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  PART TWO

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  EPILOGUE

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Primarchs

  ALPHARIUS , Primarch of the Alpha Legion

  The Alpha Legion

  INGO PECH, First Captain

  (MA)THIAS HERZOG, Captain, 2nd Company

  SHEED RANKO, Captain, Lernaean Terminator Squad

  OMEGON, Lord, Effrit Stealth Squad

  The 670th Imperial Expedition Fleet

  JAN VAN AUNGER, Master of the Fleet

  TENG NAMATJIRA, Lord Commander of the Army

  Imperial Army

  (Geno Five-Two Chiliad)

  SRI VEDT, Uxor Primus of the Geno Five-Two

  HONEN MU, Uxor

  RUKHSANA SAIID, Uxor

  HURTADO BRONZI, Hetman

  KAIDO PIUS, Hetman

  DIMITER SHIBAN, Hetman

  PETO SONEKA, Hetman

  FRANCO BOONE, Genewhip

  (Zanzibari Hort)

  NITIN DEV MAJOR, General

  KOLMEC, Bajolur

  (Lucifer Blacks)

  DINAS CHAYNE, Bajolur-Captain

  EIMAN, Companion

  BELLOC, Companion

  (Crescent-Sind Sixth Torrent)

  WILDE, Lord

  (Outremars)

  Khedive Ismail Sherard

  (Legio Xerxes)

  AMON JEVETH, Princeps

  (Regnault Thorns)

  GAN KARSH, General

  Non-Imperial personae

  THE CABAL

  JOHN GRAMMATICUS

  GAHET

  SLAU DHA

  G’LATRRO

  ‘God has given you one face and you make yourself another.’

  — attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire, fl. M2

  ‘Of the fabulous hydra it is said, cut off one head and two will grow in its place.’

  — antique proverb

  ‘No one is enough of a fool to choose war instead of peace. In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.’

  — attributed to the chronicler Herodotus, fl. M0

  ‘War is simply the galaxy’s hygiene.’

  — attributed to the Primarch Alpharius

  MY NAME IS Hurtado Bronzi.

  There, I’ve said it. I’ve said it and I can never take it back. The secret is out.

  Ah. The rest? Well, if I must, sir. My name is Hurtado Bronzi, a hetman (which is to say, a senior captain) of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, Imperial Army, glory of Terra, beloved of the Emperor. I am an Edessa-born man, proud of my liberty, Catheric by devotion, a brother to two sisters and a brother. My ears hear only the orders of my estimable Lord Commander Namatjira, my hands know only the purpose of the Emperor and the correct business of a carbine laser, my mouth… well, my mouth knows a great deal more, and knows when not to say it.

  Because he has taught us to be scrupulously secretive. No, I will not be drawn to say his name. I said, he has taught us to be scrupulously secretive. That is his way, and we love him for it. The greatest gift he has bestowed on us is to share his secret with us.

  Why? Because we were there, I suppose, at Tel Utan and Mon Lo Harbour and now the Shivering Hills. If it hadn’t been us, it would have been others.

  Why are you whispering? I can hear you whispering. What don’t you want me to hear? What secrets are you plotting?

  Pain? Is that it? Is that all you have to offer me? Well, yes, it does open secrets. Some secrets, some mouths. What have you planned for me? Ah, I see. Well, if you must. I won’t welcome it. What will it be? Eyes? Genitals? The gaps between my toes and fingers? First, you should know—

  Nnnhhhhh!

  Oh. Merciful—

  Mhh. Quite the expert, your little man. Quite the expert. He’s done this before, hasn’t he? No, wait, I—Nhhhhghhh!

  Beloved Terra! Ahh. Shit. Nhh. That little bastard. Let me finish, please! Let me finish what I was saying. Please? Yes?

  All right, then. This won’t work. This simply won’t work. Because I’m telling you it won’t.

  I will not tell you anything. It doesn’t matter what you do to me, really it doesn’t. Burn me all you like, my mouth is shut.

  Because that’s all he asks of us. The only thing. I can tell you who I am, and who I was, but I can’t – I won’t – betray his confidence.

  Gnnhhhhhhh!

  Oh shit! Holy fire! Bastard!

  Mhhhh…

  What? What? Ask what you like. Burn me again, if you must.

  My name is Hurtado Bronzi.

  That’s all you’re getting.

  PART ONE

  REPTILE SUMMER

  ONE

  Tel Utan, Nurth, two years before the Heresy

  THE NURTHENE UTTERED some of the usual gibberish before he died. He pointed at his enemies with his dust-caked fingers and jabbered, spitting out curses on their families and dependants, and particularly miserable dooms on the heads of their children, far away. A soldier learns how to ignore insults, but there was something about the Nurthene way of cursing that made Soneka blanch.

  The Nurthene lay on his back on a slope of dry, red sand, where the blast had thrown him. His pink silk robes were stiffening in places where his blood was drying rapidly in the late afternoon sun. His silver breastplate, with its engraving of stylised reeds and entwined crocodilia, winked like a mirror. His legs lay in a limp position that suggested his spine was no longer properly connected.

  Soneka trudged up the dry bed of the wadi to
inspect him. A terribly dark, terribly blue sky met the red horizon. The sinking sun picked out the facing edges of rocks and boulders with a bright orange sheen.

  Soneka was wearing glare-shields, but took them off out of courtesy so that the Nurthene could see his eyes. He knelt down, the small gold box around his neck swinging like a pendulum.

  ‘Enough with your curses, all right?’ he said.

  The troop stood around him on the slope, watching, their weapons ready in their hands. The desert wind brushed their embroidered, waist-length coats and made them flutter. Lon, one of Soneka’s bashaws, had already snapped the Nurthene’s falx with his liqnite, and flung the broken stump away over the rim of the wadi.

  Soneka could still smell traces of the liqnite spray in the warm air.

  ‘It’s over,’ he told his enemy. ‘Will you speak to me?’

  Looking up at him, grains of sand stuck to his face, the Nurthene murmured something. Bubbles of blood formed at the corners of his lips.

  ‘How many?’ Soneka asked. ‘How many more of you are there in this sink?’

  ‘You…’ the Nurthene began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You… you are carnal with your own mother.’

  At Soneka’s shoulder, Lon raised his carbine sharply.

  ‘Relax, I’ve heard worse,’ Soneka told him.

  ‘But your mother is a fine woman,’ said Lon.

  ‘Oh, now you lust for her too?’ asked Soneka. Some of the men laughed. Lon shook his head and lowered his carbine.

  ‘Last chance,’ said Peto Soneka to the dying man. ‘How many more?’

  ‘How many more of you?’ replied the Nurthene in a dry whisper. His accent was strong, but there was no denying that the Nurthene had mastered the Imperial language. ‘How many more? You come from the stars, in your droves, and you do nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing, except prove the universal presence of evil.’

  ‘Is that what you think of us?’ Soneka asked.

  The Nurthene stared up at him. His eyes had gone glassy, like the sky at dawn. He burped, and blood welled up out of his mouth like water from a borehole.

  ‘He’s dead,’ observed Lon.

  ‘Well spotted,’ said Soneka, rising to his feet. He looked back at the men gathered on the slope behind him. Beyond them, two Nurthene armoured vehicles were burning, sweating soot and smoke up into the blue sky. From the other side of the wadi, Soneka could hear sporadic las-shots.

  ‘Let’s dance,’ Soneka said.

  FROM THE RIM of the wadi, looking west, it was possible to see Tel Utan itself, a jumble of terracotta blocks and walls capping a long, loaf-shaped hill ten kilometres away. The intervening landscape was a broken tract of ridges and ancient basins and, in the sidelong evening light, the basins had filled with shadows so black they looked like pools of ink. Soneka felt a comparable blackness in his heart: Tel Utan was proving to be their nemesis. For eight months, it had held them at bay, through a combination of terrain, tactics, stoicism and plain bad luck.

  The Geno Five-Two Chiliad was one of the oldest brigades in the Imperial Army. An elite force of one thousand companies, it had a martial tradition that stretched back through the time of the Great Crusade and into the era of the Unification Wars that had preceded it. The geno was a proud member of the Old Hundred, the Strife Epoch regiments that the Emperor, in his grace, had maintained after Unification, provided they pledged loyalty to him. Many thousands of others had been forced to disband, or had been actively purged and neutered, depending on their level of resistance to the new order.

  Peto Soneka had been born in Feodosiya, and had served, in his youth, in the local army, but he had petitioned eagerly for transfer into the Geno Five-Two, because of their illustrious reputation. He’d been with the geno for twenty-three years, achieving the rank of hetman. In that time, they hadn’t met a nut they couldn’t crack.

  There had been tough dances along the way, of course there had. Off the top of his head, Soneka could mention Foechion, where they had slogged toe to toe for six weeks with the greenskins in lightless, frozen latitudes, and Zantium, where the Dragonoid cadres had almost bested them in a series of running battles and ambuscades.

  But Nurth, Tel Utan in particular, was as stubborn as anything they’d ever met. Word was the Lord Commander was getting edgy, and no one wanted to be around Namatjira when that happened.

  Soneka pulled his glare-shields back on. He was a lithe, slender man of forty-two years standard, though he could pass for twenty-five. He had a striking, angular head, with hard cheek and jaw lines, a pointed chin and a generous, full-lipped mouth full of gleaming white teeth that women found especially attractive. Like all of them, his skin had bronzed in the Nurthene light. He made a signal, and his bashaws brought the troops in along the rim of the wadi and down into the dry basins beyond. Geno armour followed them, bounding along on their treads, and spuming wakes of red dust behind them as they churned out across the basin floor. Soneka’s Centaur was waiting, its engine revving, but he waved it on. This was a time for walking.

  There was half an hour of daylight left. Night, they had learned to their cost, belonged to the Nurthene. Soneka hoped to run his troop as far as the forward command post at CR23 before they lost the light. The last tangle with the Nurthene had slowed their advance considerably. Dislodging them from this country was like pulling out splinters.

  Soneka’s troops looked very fine as they strode forwards. The geno uniform was a bulky, tight-buckled bodyglove of studded leather and armour links, with a waist-length cape of yellow merdacaxi, a Terran silk, much rougher and more hard-wearing than the pink silks of the Nurthene. The ornate leather armour was marked with devices and trimmed with fur, and the backs of their capes were richly embroidered with company emblems and motifs. They carried lightweight packs, munition slings, long sword bayonets, and the bottles of their double water rations, which clinked against the liqnite cylinders they had all been issued with. Standard weapons were laser carbines and RPG sowers, but some men lugged fire poles or support cannons. They were all big men, all genic bred and selected for muscle. Soneka was slight compared to most. Their headgear was spiked helms, either silvered steel or glossy orange, often edged with brims of fur or neck veils of beaded laces. The glare shields were goggle-eyed: bulbous, paired hemispheres of orange metal with black slits across them.

  Soneka’s troop was coded the Dancers, a name that they’d owned for almost eight hundred years. In those last few minutes of daylight, the Dancers were going to take the worst beating they had ever known.

  ‘SO, WHO’S THAT?’ asked Bronzi quietly. ‘Do you know?’

  Bashaw Tche, busy with the wrapper of a ration, shrugged. ‘Some kind of something,’ he grunted.

  ‘You’re a world of use, you know that?’ Bronzi replied, punching Tche in the arm. The bashaw, of the regimental uterine stock and considerably bigger in all measurements than Bronzi, gave his hetman a tired look.

  ‘Some kind of specialist, they said,’ he volunteered.

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘The Uxor’s aides.’

  The Jokers had reached the CR23 forward command post about an hour earlier, and had been billeted in the eastern wing of the old, brick-built fort. Chart Referent 23 was a Nurthene outpost captured two weeks before, and lay just eight kilometres from the Tel. It formed part of the ‘noose’ that Lord Commander Namatjira was tightening around the enemy city.

  Hurtado Bronzi, a sixty-year veteran possessed of boundless charisma and a stocky body going to seed, leaned out of the billet doorway and took another deliberate stare along the red brick passageway. At the far end, where it opened out into a central courtyard, he could see the newcomer standing in conversation with Honen Mu and some of her aides. The newcomer was a big fellow, really big, a giant dressed in a dust-grey mail sleeve and a head shawl, with a soot-dulled bolter slung over his shoulder.

  ‘He’s a sizeable fugger, though,’ said Bronzi, idly toy
ing with the small gold box dangling on the chain around his neck.

  ‘Don’t stare so,’ Tche advised, gnawing on his bar.

  ‘I’m just saying. Bigger than you, even.’

  ‘Stop staring.’

  ‘He’s only where I happen to be aiming my eyes, Tche,’ Bronzi said.

  Something was going on. Bronzi had a feeling in his water. Something had been going on for the last few days. Uxor Honen was unusually tight-lipped, and had been unavailable on several occasions.

  The man was big. He towered over Honen, though everyone towered over her. Even so, he had to be two twenty, two twenty-five maybe. That was gene-build big, Astartes big even. Honen was looking up at him, craning up, nodding once in a while at a conversation Bronzi couldn’t catch. Despite the fact that she was conferring with a giant, Honen’s posture was as tenacious as ever: spiky and fierce, like a fighting cock, full of vigour and attitude. Bronzi had long suspected Uxor Honen’s body language was a compensation for her doll-like physique.

  Bronzi looked back into the billet hall. His Jokers were busy sacking out, drinking and eating, playing bones. Some of them were cleaning off weapons or polishing armour scutes, wiping away the red dust that had slowly caked on during the long day in the field.

  ‘Think I might go for a little stroll,’ Bronzi told Tche. The bashaw, munching, simply stared down at the hetman’s feet. Bronzi was still fully armoured, but he’d taken off his boots when they’d arrived. His thick, dirty toes splayed out through the holes in his woollen socks.

  ‘Not cutting a dash?’ Bronzi asked. Tche shrugged.

  ‘Well, fug it.’ Bronzi pulled off his embroidered cape, his webbing and his weapon belt, and dumped them on the baked earth floor. He kept hold of his water bottles. ‘I just need a refill,’ he said.

  Bronzi padded out into the passageway, his water bottles dangling from his pudgy fingers. He was disappointed to see that the giant had vanished. The Uxor and her aides were heading away across the courtyard, talking together.

  Honen turned as Bronzi wandered into the yard. The air was still warm and the day’s heat was radiating out of the shadowed brick. Evening had washed the sky overhead a dark, resiny purple.