Eye of Terra Read online

  ‘Adept, bring up the tally of enemy launch-to-impact ratios,’ he ordered. Instantly, a glowing pane of data light appeared in the air before Sejanus. He ran his eyes down the statistics and saw his suspicion confirmed.

  ‘Their damage capability assessment is far above average,’ he said. ‘They’re on-target with over seventy-five per cent of their launches.’

  ‘That’s got to be a mistake,’ said Ezekyle.

  ‘The Mechanicum do not make mistakes, First Captain,’ said Regulus, his voice like steel wool on rust and pronouncing mistakes like the vilest of curses. ‘The data is accurate within tolerances of local parameters.’

  ‘Greenskins are as likely to hit their own ships as any other,’ said Sejanus. ‘How are they doing this?’

  Horus pointed towards the crackling outline of Gorro and said, ‘Because these greenskins are atypical in that I suspect they are ruled, not by warriors, but by some form of tech caste. It’s why I petitioned Adept Regulus to join the Sixteenth Legion in this prosecution.’

  Sejanus looked back at the display and said, ‘If you suspected that, then it makes all this doubly confusing. If I may be candid, my lord, our fleet tactics make no sense.’

  ‘What would make them more tactically sound?’

  Sejanus considered this. ‘Tarik’s right. If we had another fleet element here, our current strategy would be sound. We’d have them between hammer and anvil.’

  ‘Another fleet?’ said Horus. ‘And I am supposed to simply conjure one from thin air?’

  ‘Could you?’ asked Tarik. ‘Because that would be really useful right now.’

  Horus grinned and Sejanus saw he was savouring this moment, though he couldn’t imagine why. The commander looked up to one of the tiered galleries rising up behind the command deck. As if on cue, a solitary figure stepped to the ironwork rail, bathed in the lambent glow of a spotlight whose arc of illumination was too providential to be accidental.

  Slender and spectral in her white gown, the Vengeful Spirit’s Mistress of Astropathy, Ing Mae Sing, pulled back her hood. Gaunt-cheeked and with sunken, hollowed-out eye sockets, Mistress Sing was blind to one world, while being open to another secret world Sejanus knew little about.

  ‘Mistress Sing?’ called out Horus. ‘How long now?’

  Her voice was faint. Thin, yet with an authority that carried effortlessly to the main deck.

  ‘Imminent, Primarch Horus,’ she said with a faintly scolding tone. ‘As well you know.’

  Horus laughed and raised his voice for the entire strategium to hear, ‘You’re quite right, Mistress Sing, and I hope you will all forgive me this little moment of theatre. You see, something magnificent is about to happen.’

  Horus turned to Adept Regulus and said, ‘Send the manoeuvre order.’

  The adept bent to the task, and Sejanus asked, ‘Sir?’

  ‘You wanted another fleet,’ said Horus. ‘I give you one.’

  Space parted as though cut open by the sharpest edge.

  Amber light spilled out, brighter than a thousand suns and simultaneously existing in many realms of perception. The blade that cut the void open slid through the passage it had made.

  But this was no blade, this was a void-born colossus of gold and marble, a warship of inhuman proportions. Its prow was eagle-winged and magnificent, its length studded with vast cities of statuary and palaces of war.

  It was a starship, but a starship unlike any other.

  Built for the most peerless individual the galaxy had ever known.

  This was the flagship of the Emperor himself.

  The Imperator Somnium.

  Flocks of battleships attended the Master of Mankind. Each was a titanic engine of void-war, but the immensity of their master’s vessel rendered them ordinary.

  Still crackling with shield ignition, the Imperial warships surged into battle. Molten spears of lance fire stabbed into the exposed rear and flanks of the greenskin hulks. A thousand torpedoes slashed through space, followed by a thousand more. A glittering flurry of booster contrails painted the void in a web of glittering vapour-wakes.

  Ork ships began exploding, gutted by timed warheads or cut in half by precision-aimed lances. Secondary explosions rippled through the hamstrung xenos fleet as raucous plasma reactors achieved critical mass and engines running insanely hot spiralled into explosive death throes.

  The ork attack paused, turning to face this new threat.

  Which was just what Horus Lupercal had been waiting for.

  The XVI Legion fleet – which had been on the verge of being overwhelmed – halted its dispersal, its vessels turning about with astonishing speed and banding together in mutually-supporting wolf packs.

  And what was once a fleet in apparent disarray transformed in minutes to a fleet on the attack. Individual greenskin vessels were overwhelmed and bombarded out of existence. Larger groups banded together, but they were no match for two coordinated war fleets led by the galaxy’s greatest warriors.

  The greenskins drew together around their monstrous asteroid fortress as the Vengeful Spirit and the Imperator Somnium bore down upon it. Escorting warships blasted a path through the stricken reaverhulks, clearing the way for Horus and the Emperor to deliver the killing blow.

  Coming in at oblique angles, both ships raked the asteroid with unending broadsides. Void flare and electromagnetic bursts from the cataclysmic volume of ordnance wreathed the hulking fortress in flaring detonations. This was planet-killing levels of fire, the power to crack open worlds and hollow them out as thoroughly as ceaseless industry had done to Cthonia.

  At some unseen signal, the Imperial vessels pulled away as hellish firestorms engulfed the asteroid. The nightmare machinery at its heart, which empowered the guns and engines, exploded and split the rock apart.

  Geysers of green-white plasma energy, thousands of kilometres long, arced around its corpse in crackling whips of sun-hot lightning. Like attracted like, and the lightning sought out the plasma cores of the greenskin vessels and ripped them apart in coruscating storms that burned everything it touched to ash.

  Barely a handful escaped the tempest of destructive energies, and those that did were savaged by the prowling wolf pack squadrons.

  Within the hour of the Emperor’s arrival, the ork fleet had been reduced to a vast cloud of cooling debris.

  An incoming vox-hail echoed through the Vengeful Spirit’s strategium. The storms of plasma boiling in the greenskins’ graveyard made inter-ship vox choppy and unreliable, but this transmission was so clear the speaker could have been standing next to Lupercal.

  ‘Permission to come aboard, my son?’ said the Emperor.

  The moment was so sublime, so unexpected and so awe-inspiring that Sejanus knew he would remember it for the rest of his life. It had been a long time since Sejanus had found himself awed by someone other than his primarch.

  The Emperor went without a helm, his noble countenance bearing a wreath of golden laurels about his brow. Even from a distance it was the face of a being worthy of eternal fealty, conceivable only as an impression of wonder and light. No god ever demanded respect and honour more. No earthly ruler had ever been so beloved by all.

  Sejanus found himself weeping tears of unbridled joy.

  Father and son met on the main embarkation deck of the Vengeful Spirit, and every legionary aboard had mustered to honour the Master of Mankind.

  Ten thousand warriors. So many that every Stormbird and Thunderhawk in the deck had been flown out into the void to make room.

  No order had been given. None had been needed.

  This was their sire, the ruler who had decreed the galaxy to be humanity’s domain and wrought the Legions into being to turn that dream into reality. No force in the universe could have kept them from this reunion. As one, the Luna Wolves threw back their heads and loosed a howling cheer of welco
me, a pounding, deafening roar of martial pride.

  Nor were the legionaries the only ones who came. Mortals came too – waifs and strays the Luna Wolves had swept up in the course of the Great Crusade. Itinerant poets, would-be chroniclers and promulgators of Imperial Truth. To see the Master of Mankind in the flesh was an opportunity that would never come again, and what mortal would miss the chance to see the man who was reshaping the galaxy?

  He came aboard with three hundred members of the Legio Custodes, god-like warriors cast in the mould of the Emperor himself. Armoured in gold plate with crimson horsehair plumes streaming from their peaked helms, they carried shields and long polearms topped with armed photonic blades. Warriors whose sole purpose was to give their lives in order to protect his.

  The Mournival followed Horus at the head of the entire First Company, marching in a long column alongside the warriors of the Legio Custodes.

  As all warriors do, Sejanus measured them against his own strength, but could form no clear impression of their power.

  Perhaps that was the point.

  ‘Jaghatai taught it to me,’ said Horus in answer to a question of the Emperor’s. ‘He called it “the zao”. I can’t pull it off anything like as fast as the Warhawk, but I make a passable fist of it.’

  Sejanus saw Horus was being modest. Not enough to keep pride from his voice, but just on the right side of arrogant.

  ‘You and Jaghatai were always close,’ said the Emperor as they marched between the proud lines of Luna Wolves. ‘Of all of us, even me, I think you know him best.’

  ‘And I hardly know him at all,’ admitted Horus.

  ‘It is how he was made,’ said the Emperor, and Sejanus thought he detected a note of profound regret.

  They marched between the thousands of cheering legionaries, leaving the embarkation deck and moving up through the grandest processionals of the Vengeful Spirit. Companies of Luna Wolves peeled off the higher they went, until only Ezekyle’s Justaerin elite and the Mournival remained.

  They marched down the Avenue of Glory and Lament, the soaring antechamber with embossed columns of dark wood that bore the weight of a shimmering crystalline roof, through which the roiling, plasmic death throes of the greenskin fleet could be relished. Coffered panels running fully half the length of the avenue bore hand-painted lists of names and numbers, and the march to the bridge only stopped when the Emperor paused to kneel by the newest panel.

  ‘The dead?’ asked the Emperor, and Sejanus heard the weight of uncounted years in that simple question.

  ‘All those where the Spirit was present,’ said Horus.

  ‘So many, and so many more yet to come,’ said the Emperor. ‘We must make it all worthwhile, you and I. We must build a galaxy fit for heroes.’

  ‘We could fill this hall a hundred times over and it would still be a price worth paying to see the Crusade triumphant.’

  ‘I hope it will not come to that,’ said the Emperor.

  ‘The stars are our birthright,’ said Horus. ‘Wasn’t that what you said? Make no mistakes and they will be ours.’

  ‘I said that?’

  ‘You did. On Cthonia, when I was but a foundling.’

  The Emperor stood and put a mailed gauntlet upon Lupercal’s shoulder, the gesture of a proud father.

  ‘Then I must prove worthy of your trust,’ said the Emperor.

  They met later, when the order for war had rung out all across the Vengeful Spirit. There was much yet to be done, battle group formations to be decided upon, assault preparations to be run through and a thousand other tasks to be completed before the attack on Gorro could begin.

  But first this.

  ‘I don’t have time for your pointless little ritual, Hastur,’ declared Ezekyle. ‘I’ve a company to ready for war.’

  ‘We all do,’ said Sejanus. ‘But you’re doing this.’

  Ezekyle sighed, but nodded in acquiescence. ‘Fine, then let’s get on with it.’

  Sejanus had chosen a seldom-visited observation deck in the rear quarters of the ship for their meeting. A vivid screed of plasma storms blazed beyond the crystalflex dome, and forking traceries of lightning danced on the polished terrazzo floor. The walls were bare of ornamentation, though scratched with Cthonian murder-hexes, bad poetry and gruesome images of murdered aliens.

  A deep pool of fresh water filled the heart of the chamber, glittering with starlight and made bloody with light from the system’s bloated red star.

  ‘It’s not even a proper moon,’ said Ezekyle, staring at the pallid reflection of Gorro in the mirror flat waters.

  ‘No, but it will have to do,’ answered Sejanus.

  ‘The Justaerin are going to be fighting alongside the Emperor,’ said Ezekyle, mustering one last objection to a ceremony he’d never liked being party to. ‘And I’ll not have us shown up by those golden martinets.’

  ‘We’ve been doing this since Ordoni,’ said Tarik, kneeling to set the gleaming silver of his gibbous moon token next to Aximand’s half-moon medal at the edge of the pool. ‘It’s what keeps us honest. Remembering Terentius.’

  ‘I don’t need keeping honest,’ snapped Ezekyle, but he too knelt to place his lodge medal. ‘Terentius was a traitor. We’re nothing like him.’

  ‘And only by constant vigilance will that remain so,’ said Sejanus, and the matter was settled. He set his crescent-moon token next to those of his brothers and said, ‘The Legion looks to us. Where we lead, they follow. We’re doing this.’

  Sejanus drew his sword and his Mournival brothers drew theirs. The XIII Legion favoured the short, stabbing gladius, but Lupercal’s sons bore long-handled war blades, capable of being wielded one-handed or as brutal double-handers.

  ‘Who are we?’ asked Sejanus.

  ‘We are the Luna Wolves,’ said the others.

  ‘Beyond that,’ said Sejanus, almost growling the words.

  ‘We are Mournival.’

  ‘Bound together by the light of a moon,’ roared Sejanus. ‘Sworn to a bond that only death will break.’

  ‘We kill for the living,’ shouted Ezekyle.

  ‘We kill for the dead!’ they cried in unison.

  Their swords lowered, each warrior resting the tip of his blade on the gorget of the man to his left.

  Sejanus felt Ezekyle’s sword at his neck as he held his own on Aximand, who in turn placed his at Tarik’s neck. Lastly, Tarik placed his sword on Ezekyle, grinning at the faintly treasonous action of baring a blade to the First Captain.

  ‘You have your Censures?’

  Each warrior held out a folded square of oath paper that would normally be used to record an objective to be achieved in battle. Such oaths would be affixed to a warrior’s armour, a visible declaration of martial intent.

  Each Mournival brother had written upon their paper, but instead of a deed of honour, they had chosen a punishment for failure. These were Oaths of Censure, something Sejanus had instituted in the wake of the war in the Ordoni star cluster against the traitor Vatale Gerron Terentius.

  His brothers had resisted the idea, claiming that to threaten punishment was to impugn their honour, but Sejanus had insisted, saying, ‘We hold to the essential, unchanging goodness of the Legions, in their rational appraisal and rejection of evil. We invest our primarchs with divine qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make them both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of the galaxy by believing there is an unbreakable wall between good and evil. The lesson of Terentius is that the line between good and evil is all too permeable. Anyone can cross it in exceptional circumstances, even us. Believing that we cannot fall to evil makes us more vulnerable to the very things that might make it so.’

  And so they had reluctantly agreed.

  Sejanus held out his helmet, its transverse crest pointed to the deck. His censure paper was already in the helmet, and the
other three dropped their punishment in with it. Then, each warrior reached inside and selected a paper at random. Aximand and Ezekyle tucked theirs into their belts. Tarik placed his into a leather loop on his scabbard.

  Sejanus had read of the tradition from the ancient texts of Unity, where the ochre-painted warriors of Sarapion each crafted censures and cast them into a vast iron cauldron on the eve of battle. Each man would file past and draw a punishment should they fail their king. None knew which punishment they had chosen, thus no warrior could devise a lighter punishment and expect to receive it himself.

  By the time the drop pods launched, each of the Mournival would have an Oath of Censure wax-sealed onto a secret place upon his armour.

  In the years since the first censure had been written, not one had ever been read.

  And none ever will, thought Sejanus.

  The Oaths of Moment had been sworn, the straining Stormbirds let fly. The Luna Wolves were en route to Gorro. Drop pods and gunships in the tens of thousands raced to the surface, ready to hollow the scrapworld from the inside out.

  Gorro’s death was to be won the hard way.

  Field technology unknown to the Mechanicum bound the layered depths of Gorro together, and those same technologies made it virtually invulnerable to bombardment.

  Macro cannons capable of levelling entire cities barely scratched its rust-crusted surface. Magma bombs and mass drivers with the power to crack continents detonated in its atmosphere. The lethal radiation of destroyer warheads dissipated into the void, half-lives of tens of thousands of years degraded in hours.

  Lupercal watched his warriors race to battle from the golden bridge of his father’s vessel. He wished he was part of the initial wave, the first to set foot on Gorro’s alien surface. A wolf of ash and fire, bestriding the world as an avenging destroyer god.

  Destroyer? No, never that.

  ‘You wish you were with them, don’t you?’ asked the Emperor.

  Horus nodded, but didn’t turn from the viewing bay.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Horus, feeling the might of his father’s presence behind him.

  ‘What don’t you understand?’