XII.

Theoretical: deny the Word Bearers the chance to regroup.

Practical: achieve the same for the defenders of Calth.

Result: bring the Ultramarines back into the fight against the Warmaster.

These are the prime directives by which the XIII are operating, but knowing them and achieving them are two very different things.

Gathered around the central plotting table in a gleaming conference chamber that now serves as Calth's command centre are the men and women Ventanus needs to turn that theoretical into a workable practical.

Sydance and Urath stand shoulder to shoulder, his fellow Fourth Company captain half a head taller than the sergeant of the 39th. Though his rank is inferior to that of Sydance, the hard-faced Urath has given fresh purpose to the scattered survivors of Sullus's company.

Ventanus will see to it that he receives a captaincy for that.

Server Tawren consults with her Martian acolytes. He cannot see it, but knows there will be a haze of noospheric information buzzing around their heads in veils of data-light. She sifts invisible information with her hands. Behind her, a brutish skitarii clan chief stands, hulking and primitive looking. He has nothing of the calm poise of Cyramica, and is clearly a much lower ranking battle leader. His limbs are sheathed in metal and the lower half of his skull is a tusked, metallic trap like a greenskin's jaw.

Colonel Hamadri consults a data-slate, her face set in an expression of cold determination. She has a son in the Numinus 61st, but has no knowledge of whether he is alive or dead. Statistical probability favours the latter, but until such time as his death can be confirmed, Hamadri will believe him alive.

This is good. Ventanus needs people around him who can hope against the odds.

Across from Hamadri is Captain Volper Ullyet of the 77th Ingenium Support Division, a heavily-built career officer who in fifty years of service has never left Calth or seen combat before the last few weeks. At first glance, he is an unlikely choice for the command table, but Ventanus sees beyond his service record to his actions during the initial phase of the attack.

Where the shock of the Word Bearers attack left others stupefied, Ullyet reacted in moments. Within four minutes of the attack's commencement, his battalions of construction engines and earth moving machines were raising redoubts and defensive bulwarks around the main gates of Lanshear's central arcology.

This, too, is good. Ventanus needs people who can react with speed.

Ingenium Subiaco stands close to Tawren, and his pleasure at being in the presence of a Mechanicum adept is obvious. Subiaco has only the most superficial augmetics, none that cannot be easily removed, and he hero-worships those who commune so directly with the Machine-God. Ankrion tells Ventanus that Subiaco is doing good work in the tunnels, securing the multitude of potential entry points to Arcology X.

The man is exhausted, but refuses to take his rest.

All the mortals are tertiary forces, reservists or commands designated to be rear-echelon units. Most are filled with raw recruits, soldiers raised specifically for the campaign against the Ghaslakh xenohold, a campaign Ventanus now understands to be entirely fictive. The forces still at Lanshear port when the sun died were the last to be embarked, fresh regiments, engineering units or logistical support elements.

Almost none are front-line certified.

Sydance tells Ventanus repeatedly that they are not ready for what he asks of them, and the stark light of the chamber only seems to confirm this. Every face is pinched and knurled with loss and shock. Sydance is right, they are not ready, but Ventanus believes that treachery has honed their previously unfinished edge. Complacency has been purged from their bones by the devastation above.

None beyond the Legion warriors were known to Ventanus before he made Arcology X his base of operations, but he knows them all now. He has made it his business to learn their strengths, their weaknesses and all the human foibles he must factor into his plans. Some think he wastes his time in attempting to understand mortals, but Ventanus knows better.

The only way Space Marines can now function alongside mortals is to understand them.

'Server?' says Ventanus. 'Apprise me.'

Tawren nods and subcutaneous light shimmers through her fingers as she manipulates the plotting table with quick haptic gestures. A static-washed holographic of a giant, smoke-filled crater appears on the table, a hundred kilometres across. It blights the landscape and always will. Pixelated vapour clouds the size of cities are tugged by rogue thermals and atomic vortices.

'You have all heard the news from CV427/Praxor,' she says.

'And the others,' says Colonel Hamadri, her thin face blotchy with untreated rad-burn. 'We lost more than two million people last night.'

Heads nod; the scale of death too terrible to contemplate. Such a vast number is difficult to visualise, too enormous for proper comprehension. Hamadri is a Defence Auxilia colonel, young to hold such rank. Ventanus sees she has heart and that will count for a great deal in the coming years. Hamadri kept her units on the surface as long as possible to allow the greatest number of refugees access to the arcology.

'Do we know what happened?' asks Sydance.

'CV427/Praxor was an armaments stockpile for the orbital platforms and Legion warships,' says Tawren. 'Given the electro-magnetic signatures and recorded yields from the three blast sites, it seems likely that enemy infiltrators were able to modify and detonate a number of warheads from the cyclonic torpedoes stored there.'

'How is that possible?' demands Hamadri. 'Those weapons are under Mechanicum protection. Don't you people have security systems in place to stop that kind of thing? It's your fault they're dead!'

Tawren is visibly distressed by Hamadri's accusation and her knuckles whiten as she grips the edge of the plotter table. Holographic clouds bend towards her in response.

'That's enough, colonel,' says Ventanus. His tone leaves no room to argue, but Tawren raises a hand. She does not need him to defend her and answers Hamadri with remarkable calm.

'Yes, we have ritual protocols to prevent such breaches, but the systemic corruption introduced to the planetary noosphere compromised a great many of our liturgical security systems.'

'I thought your killcode got rid of it,' says Hamadri.

Tawren nods. 'The killcode of Magos Hesst burned the enemy scrapcode in a firestorm of numerical carnage, yes, but one that was indiscriminate in its purging. Many of our own systems were left crippled in the wake of the restoration of command authority. Those systems are even now being restored.'

'So could this happen again?' asks Ullyet.

'I have personally inspected the security protocols at all other such weapon caches,' says Tawren.

'That's not what I asked,' says Ullyet.

'Yes, it is,' replies Tawren and her certainty is palpable.

Ullyet nods, the matter settled.

'So how do we answer this atrocity?' Sydance asks. 'We'll hit the bastards hard for this.'

They respond to Sydance's words, and Ventanus sees the desire for vengeance in every face. He remembers his fellow captain espousing the same retributive mantra upon his arrival at Leptius Numinus. It is a primal and eminently understandable urge to strike back at those who have wronged them, but it is as ill-advised now as it was then.

Ventanus leans forward and places both hands on the edge of the table.

'We answer by staying alive to finish the fight,' he says. 'We continue co-ordinating what forces remain combat-effective and devise a practical from that. The dead of Praxor are gone, and nothing will bring them back. Grieve when Calth is free, but while you are in this room, you all belong to me. Understand and accept that or get out.'

Stony silence greets his words. They hate his cold objectivity, his apparent lack of concern for the dead. Ventanus cares nothing for their approval. But he has to give them something, some spark to light the fire in their hearts. He is not good with such words, and these are the best he can do.

'The Word Bearers will pay for this, but this war will not be won with impulse, it will be won with cool heads and solid practical. We fight for the living and we kill for the dead. Say it with me.'

The silence stretches.

'Say it with me,' he says again.

Heads nod, fists are made over hearts.

'We fight for the living and we kill for the dead!'

XIII.

Radioactive winds howl across Leprium, sounding hot and crackling in his helmet. The counter reads high, but his war-plate can withstand this intensity for days before its systems will need time to recharge. Maloq Kartho looks up into a sky laced with a poisoned borealis and heartsick rainbows of stellar fallout. The cascade of exotic particles and heavy metals will leave Calth a polluted wasteland from now until its star finally burns out and engulfs the entire Veridian system.

For all Kartho knows, that could be in millions of years or it could be tomorrow.

He cares not either way. He will never return to Calth.

It is reckless to stand so brazenly on the surface, but the powers to whom he owes fealty demand no less. Devastation surrounds him, the sprawling ruin of a dead city: twisted steel, shattered permacrete and broken glass. Upturned tanks and supply containers that fell from the ruptured bellies of bulk tenders straining for orbit are scattered everywhere.

Amidst the destruction, a statue fashioned from bronze, but now heavy with grey ash, stands at the end of a grand processional. It is a heroic representation of the mortal who raised Guilliman as his own.

Konor, the first Battle King of Macragge.

Bodies lie in drifts around the statue, as though the doomed populace of Leprium believed his legacy might somehow protect them from the slaughter. Kartho pities them their ignorance of the galaxy's true divine masters.

A wrecked Imperator Titan stands sentinel over the ruins, hot, neutron-rich vortices gusting between its legs and sagging carapace. Its chest battlements are blown out and half its head section is missing. Grey dust falls in drifts from its listing carapace, but it is impossible to tell whether its loyalty was to Horus or the Emperor.

'One of ours or one of theirs?' asks Hol Beloth, emerging from the shelter of a tumbledown ruin of flooring plates and corrugated roof slabs. The commander has embraced his duty of atrocity with all the zeal one would expect of one of Lorgar's sons. The murder of the civilian shelters has galvanised him, and the touch of the Bloody One fills his body with power.

That he thinks such banal deaths will be enough to save him makes Kartho's lip curl in a mixture of amusement and contempt.

'Who knows?' says Kartho. 'At this point it hardly matters.'

'Could it be salvaged? Turned against the Thirteenth?'

Kartho shakes his head in disbelief. Hol Beloth mistakes this for his answer.

'I suppose it is too badly damaged,' says Hol Beloth.

That the fool believes there is still a war to be won on Calth is laughable. The Word Bearers' victory has already been achieved and the fate of this rock is irrelevant.

Yes, the Ultramarines were not as humbled as Kor Phaeron desired, but they are broken as a fighting force. Spent. They will waste their efforts to reclaim a world that has no value. Lorgar has likely already forgotten Calth.

The powers beyond the Great Eye have their gaze turned upon the Golden One, and the burning of Ultramar is just the beginning of his grand schemes.

Maloq Kartho has ambitions of his own, and what he does here is simply the next step on his path to glory. He already feels his unnamed shadow moving through the darkness, an ink-black leviathan that swallows worlds and exterminates species for its fleeting amusement. He senses it hunting fresh prey even now, mortal beings who have somehow managed to escape Calth by means that should be impossible.

His hand slips over the glass surface of his warp-flask as he senses its squirming, reptilian hunger. Whoever it hunts must be special indeed to have elicited such pleasure in one so vast as to be beyond human understanding.

'We shouldn't be out here,' says Hol Beloth, breaking into Kartho's thoughts. The commander looks up into the wide sky. He feels too exposed to enjoy its technicolor death-throes. 'You saw what happened to Lanshear.'

'I did,' agreed Kartho. 'And it was wondrous. But still we wait.'

'You will see us all killed,' says Hol Beloth, lapsing into uneasy silence.

Hol Beloth feels acutely vulnerable here without his army, but to bring such numbers to the surface would bring the wrath of the Ultramarines orbital guns down upon them within moments. Besides, thinks Kartho, the brotherhoods will soon serve a much grander purpose where they are.

Kartho cast his augurs wide in choosing the legionaries who would accompany them. To achieve his goal, only the deadliest warriors could hope to survive. Only the most devoted and ruthless.

There are few as single-minded in their adoration as Eriesh Kigal.

Encased in a war-scarred suit of Terminator armour, Kigal stands head and shoulders above Kartho, his arched pauldrons and slab-like breastplate dancing with static and irradiated dust. Each fist is a lightning claw and his daemon-visaged helm now bears two curling horns. Six similarly clad warriors stand with Kigal, armed with a mix of combi-bolters, lightning claws, chainfists and energised warhammers. They bear the mark of the Octed upon their shoulders, and Kartho has inscribed each veteran's scarred faceplate with his own personal sigil.

Towering over them all is a silent Dreadnought with a casket-plate bearing the etched name of Zu Gunara. Kartho knows nothing of that warrior; whatever flesh-scraps once sloshed in amniotic grease within have now been devoured by a void-hard darkness with teeth and eyes. The hulking war-machine is no longer simply a Dreadnought, but a thing of the night with iron fists.

'So what are we waiting for?' asks Hol Beloth, pacing back and forth in the shadow of a soot-blackened metal pressing plant.

'For the bringers of a mighty gift,' says Kartho, seeing a dust cloud threading its way through the ruins. The coughing splutter of a labouring engine echoes dully across the ashen remnants of the broken city. Hol Beloth hears it too and his hand goes to the crowned hilt of his sword.

'Ultramarines?' he asks.

'No.'

'How can you be sure?'

'Because we are still alive,' says Kartho as a wide-bodied industrial vehicle with a transport compartment at the rear comes into view. It ploughs through the knee-high dust between the gutted buildings, riding low on its suspension, heavy with potential. The remains of a spread-eagled skeleton are lashed to the roof of the vehicle. Only the pitted, corroded plates of carapace armour and shreds of uniform hold the body together. No flesh remains on the skeleton, the bones bleached the pallor of ash.

'Major Kadene, I presume,' says Kartho with a throaty chuckle.

Hol Beloth looks strangely at him, but he doesn't satisfy his curiosity.

Though he has dismissed Hol Beloth's concerns, Kartho looks up for any sign of their having been discovered. He has chosen his moment carefully. The clashing electromagnetic storm should render any geo-sats overhead blind to this portion of the city.

'Come,' says Kartho, and he and Hol Beloth step from the shelter of the covering structure.

Kigal's Terminators and Zu Gunara follow them through the detritus of the flattened metropolis. Structures designed to withstand earthquake, fire and flood have been brought low by war, and the sight pleases Kartho greatly.

The vehicle wheezes towards them, finally stopping in the shadow of Konor's statue. Its blue paintwork has flaked off, as though burned away from the inside. The bare metal of its frame and panels is already corroding. The Terminators lock the double barrels of their guns on the driver's window. Kartho hears the buzz of target acquisition lasers and ranging motors over the city's groaning lament of steel and the dusty susurration of the wind.

The vehicle's crew doors open and Kartho smells the rich aroma of decaying meat. A man bearing the mark of the Brotherhood lurches from the cab's interior and Kartho sees death upon him. He wears it proudly, a mass of rotten tissue that weeps milky fluid from the rampant sores covering every visible centimetre of his skin. His eyes are yellow, veined with ruptured capillaries and virtually blind with cataracts.

Hol Beloth draws his sword as he sees the man wears the uniform of the enemy.

He has not yet realised that this man is one of their own. Another brotherhood acolyte emerges from the opposite door, and his afflictions are even worse. Blood leaks from every pore and wind-borne dust abrades the flesh from his bones with every gust.

Kartho sees a third man through the warped glass of the canopy. His skin has peeled from his skull and he stares sightlessly at the Dark Apostle through fluid-filled sockets. His hands are fused with the steering column in some strange biological symbiosis. Blind, and enduring unspeakable torment, he has been guided here by the dark monarchs of the warp.

Hol Beloth reaches into the vehicle and rips the driver's insignia from his uniform. A flap of wet meat comes with it and flops to the dust. He looks at the insignia, and it takes him a second to make the connection. Kartho steps around the vehicle, to where the dying men are pulling back a heavy tarpaulin. Hol Beloth appears at his side as the weapon they have come for is revealed.

It is spherical in shape, and smaller than Kartho had expected. A metre long, including the protective metal case. Its surfaces are smooth, the blue paint gone, leaving its body a dull grey that matches the former colour of the Word Bearers.

An unambiguous warning symbol is acid-etched onto its side.

A circular ring, with three splayed arms radiating from its centre to form three circles in a pyramid form. Since the earliest days, this has been the sigil of an elemental power, an unknowing rendition of the fear of pestilence carried in the hearts and minds of mortals since the dawn of time.

Hol Beloth holds up the driver's insignia. 'These men came from the Praxor shelter before it was destroyed.'

'That they did,' agrees Kartho.

The shadow of Zu Gunara falls over them as the Dreadnought lifts the warhead from the transport compartment. It is heavy and the vehicle visibly lifts from the dust. The men whose flesh is slipping from their frames like wet cloth sigh in pleasure.