Know No Fear Page 13

  At the top of the slope, in the deeper forest, Ekritus turns as he hears the gunfire.

  He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing.

  Around him, other men turn and stand, dumbfounded. They watch the slaughter unfolding as though it is some trick or illusion that will be explained later.

  Men in the stunned formation around Ekritus start getting hit. Heads snap back. Carapaces explode. Brothers are flung backwards. Others sag, life leaking out of them.

  Ekritus shakes, too stunned to make a decision. What he’s seeing is impossible. Impossible.

  He sees Phrastorex, far below.

  He sees him rise, gun in hand. In the wrong hand.

  Then he sees him smashed backwards, headshot. Dead.

  Ekritus roars in fury. He starts down the slope, into the hail of gunfire. Anchise grabs him and stops him.

  ‘No,’ the sergeant shouts. ‘No!’

  He shakes Ekritus and turns him.

  Titans advance through the forest to their right. Trees crash down, uprooted or snapped by the massive fighting engines. War horns boom. Ekritus smells the stink of void shields.

  The Titans begin to shoot.

  [mark: -0.11.21]

  Sergeant Hellock shouts orders. No one is listening.

  Bale Rane stands, open-mouthed, dazed by the overload of shock. Men run in all directions. Fireballs scream down out of the blood-clotted sky and explode all around them. Rane tenses and ducks as the pieces of orbital debris swoop over and hit. A kitchen tent explodes on the far side of the parade ground. The medicae section is thrown into the air as though mines have been triggered beneath it.

  Each blast makes Rane flinch, but his eyes never leave the main wonder. A ship just crashed about thirty kilometres west of them. A whole ship. It’s sitting there now like a newly raised mountain range, broken, smoking. Ripples of explosions fire-cracker across its fractured hull.

  It’s beyond anything he can imagine. It’s too big to be real.

  All he can think of is Neve on the far side of the river. She’ll be scared. She should be alive; he reassures himself of that, at least. The starship fell on the Kalkas side of the river. Numinus was spared, though debris is fireballing the whole region. Whoever knew there was so much stuff up there in space that could fall out of it? She’ll have gone to her aunt’s, most likely. She’s a smart girl. She’ll have gone to her aunt’s and got in the cellar. Safe as houses.

  Rane swallows hard.

  He realises he doesn’t love her. He probably never did. He sees that with clarity, suddenly. It was all so easy, so romantic. He was going to be a soldier, and go off with the Army muster, so their time was precious. They’d probably never see each other again. So it was easy. It was easy to commit. It was easy to make grand gestures when nothing had to last. Everything was romantic. Everything was poignant. Everything took on a significance because they had so little time. They got married. It was like a huge send-off. Everyone cried. So romantic. So romantic.

  So unreal. As unreal and unlikely as a broken starship sitting where Kalkas Fortalice used to be. As unreal as this whole day.

  It’s as though he’s gone from a daydream into a living nightmare where everything makes more sense.

  Krank knocks him over.

  ‘What the hell–?’ Rane gasps.

  Something that is almost definitely a wheel from a battle tank, glowing red hot, has come bouncing across the compound, flattening tents and water bowsers. It would have mowed him down, but for Krank.

  ‘We’re moving!’ yells Krank.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The dug-outs!’ Sergeant Hellock is shouting. ‘Get into the dug-outs!’

  That makes no sense either. There are several thousand troopers in the immediate zone, and a few dozen dug-outs, constructed for air raids as per regulations. And if another starship falls on them, a bastard hole in the ground isn’t going to save them anyway.

  ‘Look!’ Trooper Yusuf calls out. ‘Look at the wire!’

  They look at the fence dividing their compound from the Army auxiliaries serving the XVII. They were chanting earlier. Now they’re up against the fence. They’re pressing pale hands and woeful faces against the metal link. They’re calling out. Rane can see flames licking on the far side of the neighbouring compound.

  ‘They’re trapped,’ Hellock says. ‘Bloody bastards. They’re trapped in there. They can’t get out.’

  Some of the men run forward to see if they can open the connecting gate.

  ‘Wait,’ says Rane. ‘Don’t.’

  They’re too close. His squad mates are too close to the wire, too close to the pale, staring faces.

  The fence goes down. It’s been cut in places, and it simply falls flat on the ground, jingling and rattling. The foreign auxiliaries spill over into the compound of the Numinus 61st.

  ‘What the bastard hell is this?’ Hellock says.

  The foreigners have guns. Rifles. Side arms. Blades. Hafted weapons. They’ve got bastard spears.

  The first shots take out the nearest Numinus troops. They buckle and drop. The heathens are howling as they charge in. One rams a spear through Yusuf’s gut. Yusuf screams like no one ought to ever have to scream, and the scream carries on, in broken sections, as the heathen twists and jerks the haft. Seddom, another man Rane has got to know, takes a las-round to the cheek, and his head goes a peculiar shape as he falls over. Zwaytis is shot as he turns to run. Bardra is stabbed repeatedly. Urt Vass is shot, then Keyson, then Gorben.

  Rane and Krank start to run. Haspian turns to flee with them, but he trips over Seddom, and then the heathens are on him, pounding him to death with spears like washer women using beetles at the river side.

  Hellock screams out a curse, draws his autopistol and fires. He makes the first active loyalist kill of the Battle of Calth, though the fact is not remembered by posterity. He shoots a heathen with a spear and puts him down dead.

  Then a spear goes through his arm and another splits his thigh, and he falls. He’s screaming as they pin him to the ground, screaming every insult he can dredge up.

  The Ushmetar Kaul pour past, slaughtering his men. Hellock, through his rage and pain, realises they are chanting again.

  One of the bastards pinning him bends down to slit his throat with a knife, but another bastard stops him.

  Criol Fowst looks down at the man his soldiers have pinned. An officer. Rank has value, ritual significance.

  He can use the wounded sergeant. There are things that will have to be fed, after all.

  [mark: -0.09.39]

  Ventanus carries Arbute through the burning port complex, but she directs the way. Selaton and the seneschal’s aides follow them, escorted by Amant and his squad.

  ‘This way,’ she says. ‘Down that ramp. Down there.’

  There are two huge listening pylons ahead of them, scaffold-frame monsters with a dish receiver set between them. It’s old stuff, very basic, probably constructed by the first pioneers when they began the Calth colonies. It’s military grade, though. No frills. Built to last.

  ‘My father worked the port for thirty years. I spent time here. This was part of the original port authority traffic system, before the Mechanicum arrived and set up a proper manifold. It should have been scrapped a century ago, but they kept it serviced.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Vantanus.

  ‘Because it’s reliable. When the solar storms kick off, every fifteen years or so, they’re much more resilient during the radiation flares than the manifold systems.’

  ‘Good,’ says Ventanus.

  Flaming debris bombs are still slicing overhead. None of the party has quite got over the sight of the Antrodamicus hitting the surface. Some of the aides are tearful.

  The pylons are built on a platform in the middle of a rockcrete basin beside landing platform sixty. It’s a natural shelter. About two hundred port workers and cargo-men have huddled there, under the lip of the platform. It’s not much of a refuge, but it’s better than nothing.
Hot ash is raining down, burning scraps. Every now and then something small but heavy, like a sheared mooring bolt or an airgate handle, hits the ground like a bullet.

  The sheltering personnel move forward when they see the Space Marines. There are questions, a lot of questions, and pleas for help.

  ‘We don’t know anything,’ Ventanus tells them, putting Arbute down and raising his hands. ‘A state of emergency is now in force, obviously. I need to get that listening post operational. Maybe we’ll get some answers that way. I need vox operators.’

  Several men step forward as volunteers. He chooses two.

  ‘Let’s move,’ Ventanus says.

  He’s getting edgy. It’s been almost ten minutes since the disaster struck, and he still knows absolutely nothing.

  The control rooms for the post are a trio of standard pattern module habitats mounted thirty-five metres up on the girder-work frame of the pylon array. An open switchback staircase of grilled steps leads up to them.

  Ventanus picks up Arbute again, and leads the way. The vox volunteers follow, along with a couple of the seneschal’s aides, Selaton and Amant. Amant’s troops spread out to quell the agitated crowd.

  They open one of the modules. There’s still power. The technicians get to work warming up the station’s main caster grid. Ventanus takes a data-slate and records the channel frequencies he wants to raise. Erud muster control. Fleet command. His own company command.

  The vox operators sit down at the main caster desks facing the module’s windows. Whooping static and radiation distort sobs through the old, hefty speakers.

  ‘Was that gunfire?’ Selaton asks.

  ‘Not that I heard,’ Ventanus replies. ‘Probably more debris hits.’

  He goes out onto the narrow gantry outside the module. The view is excellent, though what he can see is not. Large sections of the port facility are now ablaze. The sky over both sides of the river is blacked out with smoke. Meteoritic streaks still stripe against the darkness, like las-bolts. It’s hard to see the huge shipwreck any more, though the pall in the direction of what used to be Kalkas Fortalice is throbbing red like the mouth of hell.

  There’s definitely a distant sound, a booming. It’s almost like a planetary bombardment. Ships firing from orbit.

  He’s still clinging to the notion this is all an accident.

  There’s a shout from far below. Three more squads of Space Marines have entered the basin at the foot of the pylons. They’re dressed in red. XVII. That’s good. Good to get a little collaboration going in this hour of dire need. Maybe the Word Bearers’ comms networks have come through the incident a little more intact.

  He sees Amant’s men and the crowd of port workers moving to greet them.

  Ventanus steps back into the listening station module.

  ‘I’m going back down,’ he tells Selaton. ‘Reinforcements just arrived and I want to find out what they know.’

  He looks at the vox operators, hard at work.

  ‘The moment they get anything, call me back up.’

  Selaton nods.

  Ventanus turns. Pauses.

  ‘What?’ asks Selaton. ‘What’s the matter, sir?’

  Ventanus isn’t sure. He opens his mouth to reply.

  No warning. No damned warning. Just a nanosecond prickle, a sting of intuition, that something isn’t right.

  A nanosecond. Too little, and too damned late.

  Mass-reactive rounds slam into the floor and front wall of the listening station module. Mass-reactive rounds fired from below.

  The floor and front wall shred. Disintegrating metal plating becomes splinters and lethal tatters. Light and flame compress upwards into the module through its ruptured shell from the blast points, driving the splinters in with it.

  The air inside the module fills with expanding flame and whizzing fragments. The forced pressure of the strike blows out the window ports and annihilates the vox-caster desks. Seneschal Arbute is knocked backwards. The head and shoulders of one of her aides become red mist as a round strikes and detonates. White-hot spalling and jagged shrapnel from the floor macerates the two vox-operator volunteers. The other staff aide, a clerk, is thrown into the module’s ceiling by the upward pressure of the blasts. His broken body then falls back and drops out through a floor that is no longer intact.

  Selaton sees the murdered clerk fall, cartwheeling away, dislocated and loose. His corpse disappears down through the girder work of the pylons, just one more chunk in a hailstorm of spinning debris and burning fragments.

  The deck begins to break away from the front wall.

  ‘Back! Back!’ Ventanus orders. The entire module is already shrieking and tilting, as if it is about to shear clean off its mounting. Part of the metal cage supporting the entry staircase rips away and topples.

  The unseen killers fire again. Another rain of explosive rounds brackets and punishes the module. Ventanus assesses frantically, his weapon drawn. The attack is coming from positions down below, on the pylon base.

  Mass-reactive. Detonating on impact. Legiones Astartes munition. Not possible. Not possible. Unless–

  ‘Error,’ exclaims Selaton beside him. ‘False fire. Error. Someone has made an–’

  ‘I said get back!’ Ventanus screams, grabbing Selaton and pulling him towards the rear of the module.

  Ventanus and Selaton start to return fire, blasting down through the hole created as the floor section collapses and peels away. There is only smoke below, no clear target, no true thermal print. They fire anyway. Discouragement.

  Armour inertials don’t lie. The module is slumping backwards. It is going to separate from its mountings and fall.

  Arbute is dead. There isn’t a wound on her, but Ventanus knows that the overpressure and kinetic slam of the mass-reactive strikes will have pulped her human organs. Amant has been dropped. Two, perhaps three mass-reactive rounds have taken him from below. He is lying on his back on the rapidly perishing deck. His feet are gone, and the blasts have sliced the armour and flesh from his shins and thighs, his torso and his face. He is still alive, clotting blood filling the cavities of his wounds.

  A few moments to stabilise, and they could get him clear. Get him to reconstruction. Even with the front of his body skinned and scourged away, a month or two in biotech conditioning would see him fighting again.

  The module doesn’t have a few moments.

  They don’t have a few moments.

  Ventanus sees Amant’s eyes, wide in a mask of blood and broken visor, staring in helpless disbelief. Ventanus understands what he sees there. Amant knows it’s the end, not just of his own existence, but of the galaxy as they understand it.

  Ventanus kicks out the rear hatch with one savage thump of his heel. The support staircase is gone. There is nowhere to go. The module starts to fall, like a boat rolling over in a rush as the water it is taking on suddenly hits the tipping point.

  ‘Jump!’ yells Ventanus.

  An order is a damned order.

  They jump.

  [mark: -0.03.59]

  Guilliman is almost rigid with fury. He’s got a stylus out, a pen, and he’s at the bridge windows, recording everything he can see on his data-slate. Ship losses, dispersement. Formation.

  The moment the flagship’s system reboot and power comes to active yield, he wants data he can act on.

  ‘I want that link!’ he yells over his shoulder, sketching the relative placements of the Cornucopia and the Vernax Absolom.

  ‘Do we raise shields?’ asks Gage.

  ‘The moment you have them,’ Guilliman replies. ‘Communicate that to the whole fleet the moment we have capability.’

  Gage nods.

  ‘Do we return fire?’ he asks.

  Guilliman looks at him.

  ‘This is a tragedy. A tragedy, a mistake. As soon as we can protect ourselves, we do that. But do not make this worse. We do not add to the death toll.’

  Gage’s jaw tenses.

  ‘I would kill them for this
,’ he says. ‘Forgive me, but this is a crime. They must know this is wrong. They shame us–’

  ‘They are hurt,’ Guilliman says. ‘They believe they are under mortal threat. All their fears are real to them. Marius, we do not compound their folly. We do not add our mistake to theirs, no matter what the cost.’

  ‘We have a link!’ Zedoff cries.

  Guilliman turns. ‘Lithocast?’

  ‘Barely. Principally audio.’

  Guilliman shoves the data-slate to Gage and moves to the hololithic platform.

  Light blooms around him again. It is not as healthy as it was before, not as stable. There are figures that aren’t quite there, crackling phantoms at the edge of resolution. Guilliman sees only the outline of Argel Tal, the shadow of Hol Beloth, a skeletal sketch of light that might be Foedral Fell.

  Only Lorgar is visible. His resolution is black and white, jumping and interrupted. His eyes are in shadow, his head down. Wherever he is standing, there is a very local light, a glow just above him that casts his face in inky darkness.

  ‘Stop this,’ Guilliman says.

  Lorgar does not answer.

  ‘Brother. Cease fire now!’ Guilliman says. ‘Cease fire. This is a mistake. You have made a grave error. Stop your reprisal. We are not your enemy.’

  ‘You are against us,’ Lorgar whispers, his voice made of white noise whine.

  ‘We have not attacked you,’ Guilliman insists. ‘This I swear.’

  ‘You turned on us once. You shamed us and humiliated us. You will not do so again.’

  ‘Lorgar! Listen to me. This is a mistake!’

  ‘Why in all the stars would you presume this to be a mistake?’ asks Lorgar. He still does not look up.

  ‘Cease fire,’ Guilliman says. ‘We have not attacked you, nor allowed you to be attacked. I swear this, upon our father’s life.’

  Lorgar’s reply is lost in a crackle of noise. Then the image of him vanishes too, and the hololithic platform dies.

  ‘Contact lost,’ Zedoff announces. ‘He’s refusing our attempts to restore the link.’

  Guilliman looks at Gage.

  ‘He’s not going to back down,’ Guilliman says. ‘He’s not going to stop this unless we stop him.’