The Horus Heresy: Horus Rising Page 18

  Entering the chamber, he was about to hurl the miserable memento away into a corner, but he pulled up short, realising he was not alone.

  Mersadie Oliton stood in the shadows.

  'Mistress.’ he said, setting the broken guard down.

  'Captain, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude. Your equerry let me wait here, knowing you were about to return. I wanted to see you. I wanted to apologise.’

  'For what?' Loken asked, hooking his battered helm on the top strut of his armour rack.

  She stepped forward, the light glowing off her black skin and her long, augmented cranium. 'For missing the opportunity you gave me. You were kind enough to suggest me as a candidate to accompany the undertaking, and I did not attend in time.’

  'Be grateful for that.’ he said.

  She frowned. 'I... there was a problem, you see. A friend of mine, a fellow remembrancer. The poet Ignace Karkasy. He finds himself in a deal of trouble, and I was taken up trying to assist him. It so detained me, I missed the appointment.’

  'You didn't miss anything, mistress.’ Loken said as he began to strip off his armour.

  'I would like to speak with you about Ignace's plight. I hesitate to ask, but I believe someone of your influence might help him.’

  'I'm listening.’ Loken said.

  'So am I, sir.’ Mersadie said. She stepped forward and placed a tiny hand on his arm to restrain him slightly. He had been throwing off his armour with such vigorous, angry motions.

  'I am a remembrancer, sir.’ she said. Your remembrancer, if it is not too bold to say so. Do you want to tell me what happened on the surface? Is there any memory you would like to share with me?'

  Loken looked down at her. His eyes were the colour of rain. He pulled away from her touch.

  'No.’ he said.

  PART TWO. BROTHERHOOD IN SPIDERLAND

  ONE

  Loathe and love

  This world is Murder

  A hunger for glory

  EVEN AFTER HE'D slain a fair number of them, Saul Tarvitz was still unable to say with any certainty where the biology of the megarachnid stopped and their technology began. They were the most seamless things, a perfect fusion of artifice and organism. They did not wear their armour or carry their weapons. Their armour was an integument bonded to their arthropod shells, and mey possessed weapons as naturally as a man might own fingers or a mouth.

  Tarvitz loamed mem, and loved them too. He loathed them for their abominable want of human perfection. He loved them because diey were genuinely testing foes, and in mastering them, the Emperor's Children would take another stride closer to attaining their full potential. 'We always need a rival.’ his lord Eidolon had once said, and the words had stuck forever in Tarvitz's mind, 'a true rival, of considerable strength and fortitude. Only against such a rival can our prowess be properly measured.’

  There was more at stake here than the Legion's prowess, however, and Tarvitz understood that solemnly. Brother Astartes were in trouble, and this was a mission - though no one had dared actually use the term - of rescue. It was thoroughly improper to openly suggest that the Blood Angels needed rescuing.

  Reinforcement. That was the word they had been told to use, but it was hard to reinforce what you could not find. They had been on the surface of Murder for sixty-six hours, and had found no sign of the 140th Expedition forces.

  Or even, for the most part, of each other.

  Lord Commander Eidolon had committed the entire company to the surface drop. The descent had been foul, worse than the warnings they had been given prior to the drop, and the warnings had been grim enough. Nightmarish atmospherics had scattered their drop pods like chaff, casting them wildly astray from their projected landing vectors. Tarvitz knew it was likely many pods hadn't even made it to the ground intact. He found himself one of two captains in charge of just over thirty men, around one third of the company force, and all that had been able to regroup after planetfall. Due to the storm-cover, they couldn't raise the fleet in orbit, nor could they raise Eidolon or any other part of the landing force.

  Presuming Eidolon and any other part of the landing force had survived.

  The whole situation smacked of abject failure, and failure was not a concept the Emperor's Children cared to entertain. To turn failure into something else, there was little choice but to get on with the remit of the undertaking, so they spread out in a search pattern to find the brothers they had come to help. On the way, perhaps, they might reunite with other elements of their scattered force, or even find some geographical frame of reference.

  The dropsite environs was disconcerting. Under an enamel-white sky, fizzling and blemished by the megarachnid shield-storms, the land was an undulating plain of ferrous red dust from which a sea of gigantic grass stalks grew, grey-white like dirty ice. Each stalk, as thick as a man's plated thigh, rose up straight to a height of twenty metres: tough, dry and bristly. They swished gently in the radioactive wind, but such was their size, at ground level, the air was filled with the creaking, moaning sound of their structures in motion. The Astartes moved through the groaning forest of stalks like lice in a wheatfield.

  There was precious little lateral visibility. High above their heads, the nodding vertical shoots soared upwards and pointed incriminatingly at the curdled glare of the sky. Around them, the stalks had grown so close together that a man could see only a few metres in any direction.

  The bases of most of the grass stalks were thick with swollen, black larvae: sack-things the size of a man's head, clustered tumorously to the metre or so of stalk closest to the ground. The larvae did nothing but cling and, presumably, drink. As they did so, they made a weird hissing, whistling noise that added to the eerie acoustics of the forest floor.

  Bulk had suggested that the larvae might be infant forms of the enemy, and for the first few hours, they had systematically destroyed all they'd found with flamers and blades, but the work was wearying and unending. There were larvae everywhere, and eventually they had chosen to forget it and ignore the hissing sacks. Besides, the fetid ichor that burst from the larvae when they were struck was damaging the edges of their weapons and scarring their armour where it splashed.

  Lucius, Tarvitz's fellow captain, had found the first tree, and called them all close to inspect it. It was a curious

  thing, apparently made of a calcined white stone, and it dwarfed the surrounding sea of stalks. It was shaped like a wide-capped mushroom: a fifty-metre dome supported on a thick, squat trunk ten metres broad. The dome was an intricate hemisphere of sharp, bone-white thorns, tangled and sharply pointed, the barbs some two or three metres in length.

  What is it for?' Tarvitz wondered.

  'It's not for anything.’ Lucius replied. 'It's a tree. It has no purpose.'

  In that, Lucius was wrong.

  Lucius was younger than Tarvitz, though they were both old enough to have seen many wonders in their lives. They were friends, except that the balance of their friendship was steeply and invisibly weighted in one direction. Saul and Lucius represented the bipolar aspect of their Legion. Like all of the Emperor's Children, they devoted themselves to the pursuit of martial perfection, but Saul was diligently grounded where Lucius was ambitious.

  Saul Tarvitz had long since realised that Lucius would one day outstrip him in honour and rank. Lucius would perhaps become a lord commander in due course, part of the aloof inner circle at the Legion's traditionally hierarchical core. Tarvitz didn't care. He was a file officer, born to the line, and had no desire for elevation. He was content to glorify the primarch and the Emperor, beloved of all, by knowing his place, and keeping it with unstinting devotion.

  Lucius mocked him playfully sometimes, claiming Tarvitz courted the common ranks because he couldn't win the respect of the officers. Tarvitz always laughed that off, because he knew Lucius didn't properly understand. Saul Tarvitz followed the code exactly, and took pride in that. He knew his perfect destiny was as a file officer. To crave more would have been
overweening

  and imperfect. Tarvitz had standards, and despised anyone who cast their own standards aside in the hunt for inappropriate goals.

  It was all about purity not superiority. That's what the other Legions always failed to understand.

  Barely fifteen minutes after the discovery of the tree -the first of many they would find scattered throughout the creaking grasslands - they had their first dealings with the megarachnid.

  The enemy's arrival had been announced by three signs: the larvae nearby had suddenly stopped hissing; the towering grass stalks had begun an abrupt shivering vibration, as if electrified; then the Astartes had heard a strange, chittering noise, coming closer.

  Tarvitz barely saw the enemy warriors during that first clash. They had come, thrilling and clattering, out of the grass forest, moving so fast they were silver blurs. The fight lasted twelve chaotic seconds, a period filled to capacity with gunshots and shouts, and odd, weighty impacts. Then the enemy had vanished again, as fast as they had come, the stalks had stilled, and the larvae had resumed their hissing.

  'Did you see them?' asked Kercort, reloading his bolter.

  'I saw something...' Tarvitz admitted, doing the same.

  'Durellen's dead. So is Martius.’ Lucius announced casually, approaching them with something in his hand.

  Tarvitz couldn't quite believe what he had been told. They're dead? Just... dead?' he asked Lucius. The fight surely hadn't lasted long enough to have included the passing of two veteran Astartes.

  'Dead.’ nodded Lucius. "You can look upon their cadavers if you wish. They're over mere. They were too slow.'

  Weapon raised, Tarvitz pushed through the swaying stalks, some of them broken and snapped over by frantic

  bolter fire. He saw the two bodies, tangled amid fallen white shoots on the red earth, their beautiful purple and gold armour sawn apart and running with blood.

  Dismayed, he looked away from the butchery. 'Find Varras.’ he told Kercort, and the man went off to locate the apothecary.

  'Did we kill anything?' Bulle asked.

  'I hit something,' Lucius said proudly, 'but I cannot find the body. It left this behind.’ He held out the thing in his hand.

  It was a limb, or part of a limb. Long, slender, hard. The main part of it, a metre long, was a gently curved blade, apparently made of brushed zinc or galvanised iron. It came to an astonishingly sharp point. It was thin, no thicker than a grown man's wrist. The long blade ended in a widening joint, which attached it to a thicker limb section. This part was also armoured with mottled grey metal, but came to an abrupt end where Lucius's shot had blown it off. The broken end, in cross-section, revealed a skin of metal surrounding a sleeve of natural, arthropoid chitin around an inner mass of pink, wet meat.

  'Is it an arm?' Bulle asked.

  'It's a sword.’ Katz corrected.

  'A sword with a joint?' Bulle snorted. 'And meat inside?'

  Lucius grasped the limb, just above the joint, and brandished it like a sabre. He swung it at the nearest stalk, and it went clean through. With a lingering crash, the massive dry shoot toppled over, tearing into others as it fell.

  Lucius started laughing, then he cried out in pain and dropped the limb. Even the base part of the limb, above the joint, had an edge, and it was so sharp that the force of his grip had bitten through his gauntlet.

  'It has cut me.’ Lucius complained, poking at his ruptured glove.

  Tarvitz looked down at the limb, bent and still on the red soil. 'Little wonder they can slice us to ribbons.’

  Half an hour later, when the stalks shivered again, Tarvitz met his first megarachnid face to face. He killed it, but it was a close-run thing, over in a couple of seconds.

  From that encounter, Saul Tarvitz began to understand why Khitas Frome had named the world Murder.

  THE GREAT WARSHIP exploded like a breaching whale from the smudge of un-light that was its retranslation point, and returned to the silent, physical cosmos of real space again with a shivering impact. It had translated twelve weeks earlier, by the ship-board clocks, and had made a journey that ought to have taken eighteen weeks. Great powers had been put into play to expedite the transit, powers that only a Warmaster could call upon.

  It coasted for about six million kilometres, trailing the last, luminous tendrils of plasmic flare from its immense bulk, like remorae, until strobing flashes of un-light to stern announced the belated arrival of its consorts: ten light cruisers and five mass conveyance troopships. The stragglers lit their real space engines and hurried wearily to join formation with the huge flagship. As they approached, like a school of pups swimming close to their mighty parent, the flagship ignited its own drives and led them in.

  Towards One Forty Twenty. Towards Murder.

  Forward arrayed detectors pinged as they tasted the magnetic and energetic profiles of other ships at high anchor around the system's fourth planet, eighty million kilometres ahead. The local sun was yellow and hot, and billowed with loud, charged particles.

  As it advanced at the head of the trailing flotilla, the flagship broadcast its standard greeting document, in

  vox, vox-supplemented pict, War Council code, and astrotelepathic forms.

  This is the Vengeful Spirit, of the 63rd Expedition. This vessel approaches with peaceful intent, as an ambassador of the Imperium of Man. House your guns and stand to. Make acknowledgement.'

  On the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit, Master Com-nenus sat at his station and waited. Given its great size and number of personnel, the bridge around him was curiously quiet. There was just a murmur of low voices and the whir of instrumentation. The ship itself was protesting loudly. Undignified creaks and seismic moans issued from its immense hull and layered decks as the superstructure relaxed and settled from the horrendous torsion stresses of warp translation.

  Boas Comnenus knew most of the sounds like old friends, and could almost anticipate them. He'd been part of the ship for a long time, and knew it as intimately as a lover's body. He waited, braced, for erroneous creaks, for the sudden chime of defect alarms.

  So far, all was well. He glanced at the Master Companion of Vox, who shook his head. He switched his gaze to Ing Mae Sing who, though blind, knew full well he was looking at her.

  'No response, master.’ she said.

  'Repeat.’ he ordered. He wanted that signal response, but more particularly, he was waiting for the fix. It was taking too long. Comnenus drummed his steel fingers on the edge of his master console, and deck officers all around him stiffened. They knew, and feared, that sign of impatience.

  Finally, an adjutant hurried over from the navigation pit with the wafer slip. The adjutant might have been about to apologise for the delay, but Comnenus glanced up at him with a whir of augmetic lenses. The whir said,

  'I do not expect you to speak.’ The adjutant simply held the wafer out for inspection.

  Comnenus read it, nodded, and handed it back.

  'Make it known and recorded.’ he said. The adjutant paused long enough for another deck officer to copy the wafer for the principal transit log, then hurried up the rear staircase of the bridge to the strategium deck. There, with a salute, he handed it to the duty master, who took it, turned, and walked twenty paces to the plated glass doors of the sanctum, where he handed it in turn to the master bodyguard. The master bodyguard, a massive Astartes in gold custodes armour, read the wafer quickly, nodded, and opened the doors. He passed the wafer to the solemn, robed figure of Maloghurst, who was waiting just inside.

  Maloghurst read the wafer too, nodded in turn, and shut the doors again.

  'Location is confirmed and entered into the log.’ Maloghurst announced to the sanctum. 'One Forty Twenty.’

  Seated in a high-backed chair that had been drawn up close to the window ports to afford a better view of the starfield outside, the Warmaster took a deep, steady breath. 'Determination of passage so noted.’ he replied. 'Let my acknowledgement be a matter of record.’ The twenty waiting scribe
s around him scratched the details down in their manifests, bowed and withdrew.

  'Maloghurst?' The Warmaster turned his head to look at his equerry. 'Send Boas my compliments, please.’

  Yes, lord.’

  The Warmaster rose to his feet. He was dressed in full ceremonial wargear, gleaming gold and frost white, with a vast mantle of purple scale-skin draped across his shoulders. The eye of Terra stared from his breastplate. He turned to face the ten Astartes officers gathered in the centre of the room, and each one of them felt that the eye was regarding him with particular, unblinking scrutiny.

  'We await your orders, lord.’ said Abaddon. Like the other nine, he was wearing batde plate with a floor length cloak, his crested helm carried in the crook of his left arm.

  'And we're where we're supposed to be.’ said Torgad-don, 'and alive, which is always a good start.’

  A broad smile crossed the Warmaster's face. 'Indeed it is, Tarik.’ He looked into the eyes of each officer in turn. 'My friends, it seems we have an alien war to contest. This pleases me. Proud as I am of our accomplishments on Sixty-Three Nineteen, that was a painful fight to prosecute. I can't derive satisfaction from a victory over our own kind, no matter how wrong-headed and stubborn their philosophies. It limits the soldier in me, and inhibits my relish of war, and we are all warriors, you and I. Made for combat. Bred, trained and disciplined. Except you pair.’ Horus smirked, nodding at Abaddon and Luc Sedirae. "You kill until I have to tell you to stop.’

  'And even then you have to raise your voice.’ added Torgaddon. Most of them laughed.

  'So an alien war is a delight to me.’ the Warmaster continued, still smiling. 'A clear and simple foe. An opportunity to wage war without restraint, regret or remorse. Let us go and be warriors for a while, pure and undiluted.’

  'Hear, hear!' cried the ancient Iacton Qruze, businesslike and sober, clearly bothered by Torgaddon's constant levity. The other nine were more modest in their assent.