Valdor: Birth of the Imperium Read online

Valdor was taller, it was true, but there was something absolutely brutal about the man before her – a kind of amplified viciousness that made her eyes sting.

  ‘Lord Primarch Ushotan,’ she said, respectfully. ‘It is good to finally meet you.’

  The Thunder Warrior inclined his ridged helm. ‘You, too,’ he said. His voice was horrific – a corroded scrape, dragged up from strained vocal cords and strangled by a damaged vox-unit. For all that, he was still just about in control, still just about sane. ‘Didn’t know if you had the spine to see this through. Pleased to have my faith confirmed.’

  ‘I had to be sure,’ Kandawire said, feeling as though she made the same apology to everyone she met. ‘I never wanted things to come to this.’

  ‘None of us did.’

  ‘I wish to remind you – no more bloodshed than is needed. No anarchy. We are restoring, not destroying.’

  Ushotan came closer. His helm was frosted with ice, vented from the outlets on his rebreather. She remembered how Valdor had described him, up in Maulland Sen at the extremity of the world.

  I thought he looked like the ghost of all murders.

  ‘We never broke our oaths,’ he growled. ‘Why do you think we’d do so now?’

  It was hard not to be cowed by this one, and yet she had spent her life standing up to warriors such as these. All these fighters, all these men, genhanced or otherwise, all they saw was a specimen of physical weakness. And yet, here she was, standing her ground, giving the orders. That was progress.

  ‘Then I take you at your word, primarch,’ she said, firmly. ‘Be true to your promise, and the city will be yours this night.’

  Ophar had been convinced from the start. He had been the surest, when the evidence was thin and the circumstances unclear, and remained the surest once the corroborating factors started to mount up. It had taken Uwoma longer to be persuaded, but then in so many ways it had always taken her longer than it should have done to make up her mind.

  People thought of Kandawire as impulsive, brash and prickly. All those things were true, but only some of the time. Her rise up from such a lowly station to one of the high offices of Terra had made her sensitive to slights from those who had found the ascent to power easier, and that led to the occasional outburst of bruised pride. In truth, though, she was not much different from the girl who had immersed herself in learning all those many years ago, who had wanted to stay in her father’s compound even as it became clear that the end had come. She took her time. Before acting, she wanted all the facts to be laid out before her.

  So it had taken a long time for the High Lord to truly believe that the Imperium’s boasts of civilian suzerainty were hollow, and that the Senatorum’s legal apparatus was simply a flabby shell designed to mask the actions of its soldiers. It had taken her a long time to believe that the Emperor could be either deceived or cynical, and that much of the rhetoric of Unity had only ever been superficial.

  Perhaps all the gold and splendour of this place had ­dazzled her. Ophar had never been deceived – he understood why the Custodians looked the way they did. If you concealed your killers in the armour of gods, then they would be worshipped even as they raised their blades. Ophar had lived through the darkest of times, witnessing atrocity from coast to mountain, and knew murderers when he saw them. It didn’t matter what they wore, nor how politely they expressed themselves – Valdor’s soldiers had been created to kill, and kill, and kill again. They had no other function. Emotion had been knocked out of them, replaced by a horrifying sangfroid that bordered on the mechanical. They were devils. They were products of an age of nightmares.

  He could, perhaps, have tolerated that had Ararat never taken place. The Thunder Legion had been the figurehead of the grand crusade, the image of the Emperor’s consolidated might. Children would dress in mock-ups of their heavy armour plate and pretend to take on gene-witches or mutant-walkers. Adults would donate their tithes to the Cataegis, sending the credit-notes bound in screeds of thanks and admiration. When the Emperor’s armies were spoken of, it was the Thunder Warriors who were venerated.

  That must have rankled, even with such a dry soul as Valdor. Perhaps that had been the motivation for it all – nothing more elevated than jealousy. Kandawire had thought the Legio Custodes above such concerns, and in that Ophar had to admit she was probably right. There were other possible motivations, though – the well-known issues with genetic stability, the furious battles for influence and prestige between the various Thunder Legions that weakened their unified voice, the naked desire for power.

  If pressed, Ophar had always thought the latter was most likely. The planet was well on its way to being conquered. The entire globe was awash with fighting men and women, most of whose functions would soon be made obsolete by peace. There would never be room for two Legios – the Cataegis and the Custodes – and Valdor was ruthless enough to ensure that it was his own kind that endured.

  Perhaps, if such inter-order matters had been pursued through the mechanisms of politics or diplomacy, that struggle would have been fair enough – it was not for the Provost Marshal to concern herself with who was in or out of favour with the Emperor in any given week, and the military orders had always been, in the strictest sense, beyond her purview. Wholesale slaughter, though, was a different matter. Ophar had heard all the rumours, both those swirling around the corridors of the High Lords’ citadels and those that wafted their way to his ears from his planetwide lattice of informants. To exterminate an entire branch of the Imperial armed forces in one savage manoeuvre, without reference to the High Council or any other civil authority, was not the action of an enlightened state. It was the action of a petty warlord, and placed the Imperium in the same bracket as the Priest-King’s confederacy, the old tech-bandits of Afrik, and all the rest.

  Perhaps the Emperor had sanctioned it, or perhaps He hadn’t. Whatever the truth, a stand had to be taken. Valdor’s ambition had to be checked, and moreover checked by the true power behind the Lex. As far as the High Lords were concerned, the Thunder Warriors had never been officially erased by statute, and thus they were still in the vanguard of enforcing the Emperor’s peace. This was the entire basis of this endeavour, and the one thing that had finally persuaded Kandawire to act. All she had demanded after that was that they should be certain. In the last days, that had meant one thing only – Valdor had to confess.

  That had always been an impossible aim. Ophar had spent long enough tracking the Custodians within the Palace, and following the trail of the imported weaponry, to understand that they were already preparing to hold on to what they had. They knew something was coming for them, and had been repositioning their strength for days, albeit in ways that often baffled him. Now, with the dice having been thrown and Ushotan’s scraped-together army standing at the gates of the Palace, he needed to see for himself how they would react. A guilty man always gave himself away when faced with the instruments of judgement, and it would be no different here, even if they were somewhat more, and somewhat less, than ‘men’.

  So he retraced the paths he had taken over the past months, back to the western redoubt from where he could observe the preparations at the heart of the city. The roads were crowded with soldiers on the way up, all of them hurriedly summoned to the walls by panicked commanders. Ushotan had not worked especially hard to keep his approach secret, but he had moved quickly once given the order, and the Palace itself had become a complacent place, a haunt of those who believed that all wars were essentially over. Knowing what he did about the numbers involved, Ophar found it hard to believe that the standing defence could seriously hope to keep such an army out for long. The Custodians themselves were so few, so mystifyingly concerned with their duties down in the deep interior of the Senatorum rather than where he had expected them to be – manning the ramparts, maintaining that eternal watch for which they were so universally famed.

  They would surely emerge now, gi
ven the wolves slavering at their doors. There would be no purpose in remaining underground, when the already porous walls were about to be overrun. They would have to come out. They would have to expose all those devices they had been carefully hoarding – no use in keeping it hidden now.

  He reached his favourite location, the one where he had an uninterrupted view of the Senatorum hulk. He squatted down, arranging his awkward limbs against the frozen parapet and cycling up his carefully tuned augmetic reader. For a moment, all he got was the grey-white blur of flying snow, then the rangefinder started to latch on to solid volumes and gave him a false-colour schematic. He scanned out through the storm-profile, looking for the heat signatures of individual Custodians. For a long time all he got were hundreds of false-positives – readings from unenhanced troops moving throughout the maze of interconnected buildings.

  An hour passed. Then another. He did not pick up a single reading. They were not coming out. That was insane. The last living Thunder Legion primarch was at the gates of the Palace, and the guardians of the Imperial city were not moving. Without them, there would be no fight at all – the whole thing would be over before the sun rose.

  He cycled through the ident-channels on his augur, possessed now by the uneasy feeling that something, somewhere was wrong.

  Even as he did so, the upper reaches of the Senatorum hulk rocked with explosions, a ripple of them running along the high parapet level. He saw bodies moving – not Custodians, but troopers in the dark blue livery of an Imperial Army regiment.

  Half recognising the symbols, he ran a check against the augur’s data-mine. They were Castellan Exemplars, and they were heading inwards, not outwards. More explosions burst out across the sleet-hit walls, cracking adamantium plates and blowing tiles from the covered walkways.

  Ophar got to his feet, shivering under his environment cloak. He looked over his shoulder briefly, south towards the great archway of the Lion’s Gate, already backlit vividly by searchlights whirling. Then he looked back at the Senatorum, barred now by the rising pall of smoke.

  We have this wrong, he realised, sickening. By the gods of old home, we have this all wrong.

  Twelve

  Captain Bordamo did not have a will of his own.

  In the most trivial sense, this mattered little. He could lift his arm when he wished to. He could eat and drink. He could take his lasrifle apart and put it back together again. He could express controversial views in the barracks and consider how he would spend his month’s wages when the credits hit his regimental account.

  And yet, in a deeper sense, there was nothing. His entire life, his entire purpose, was slaved to a single principle. That principle had been implanted in him before he had even become a person, back when his entire existence was accounted for by a few cells floating in a soup of nutrients.

  He was perfectly aware of this. All of the Exemplars were. The entire regiment was composed of men and women from the Imperium who had, from the moment of conception, been destined for its service. They all knew, now that they were adults, that this was the case. None of them minded. This, too, was a consequence of their unique introduction to the world.

  If he had been of a more enquiring disposition, Captain Bordamo might have been inclined to investigate the precise circumstances of this peculiar body of fighting souls. He might have looked into the records of the hundreds of small clinics, scattered across a dozen independent provinces of many different Terran kingdoms. Some facilities had been within the boundaries of the Imperium, some beyond its reach. All had been totally secret. All were now destroyed. The only remnant were his kindred – baseline humans, physically varied, with only a marginal, subtle tinkering of their otherwise unremarkable genetic make-up to set them apart from the greater mass of mongrel mankind.

  In practical terms, the outcome of this was simple. All of them had been drawn, one by one, by roads crooked and hard to trace, to service in the recruiting offices in Newdelii and Agraa and Saac, and thence to action within the regiment of Castellan Exemplars proper. Thereafter, they were loyal, diligent and competent. They were taught, in time, the circumstances of their selection, in order that there might be no unpleasant revelations later on. This never discomfited them.

  Most importantly of all, they became aware of their supreme, in-built allegiance to humanity. Not to the Emperor’s version of humanity, but the true version, taught by the Prophet. Every time they saluted the Raptor Imperialis, they would say the right words and present the outward appearance of rectitude, but in truth every one of them would be internally transmuting the vocalised ‘For Him’ to a silent ‘For Her’.

  For the Prophet was, it must be understood, in a very real sense, their mother. She had moulded and cajoled their DNA with all the skill and dexterity for which she was renowned throughout the Imperium. No special abilities had been conferred, beyond a generalised nimbus of good health and mental acuteness, for they had been created to be a contingency, a hedge against uncertain times. Once the Palace was founded and the walls began to rise, they naturally found themselves stationed in its many garrisons in ever greater numbers. Why should they not have been? They were good troops, stable, dependable. The Exemplars lived up to their name, and never gave cause for concern.

  Until now. The Prophet had finally given them the order they had been waiting for their whole lives, and they swung into action without a second thought. Every Exemplar stationed within the Palace reached for his or her gun, checked the power pack and spare, adjusted their flak jacket and peaked helm, and unfussily left their station.

  Bordamo himself headed down from the Nexus towards the main security portals to the Dungeon. He jogged, his lasgun held two-handed and primed to fire. As he went, sixteen of his unit joined him, running from their various stations and falling silently into position. He knew that all over the Palace, hundreds of others would be doing the same thing. He briefly imagined that mustering, as if seen from above by eyes that could somehow peer through the layers of rockcrete – tiny points of dark blue, coalescing and re-forming like some giant amorphous organism, an infection within the body that would soon reach the vital organs.

  His unit reached an intersection and swung right, now making directly for the turbo-lifts down to the Dungeon itself. As they did so, a six-strong squad of Seneschals challenged them.

  ‘Halt! State your–’

  They were the only words their sergeant managed to get out before sixteen las-beams scythed cleanly through him and his troops. A spatter of blood and fried flesh, a thud and a bounce of limbs, and the Exemplars ran right through the mess, never breaking stride.

  Bordamo heard the first of the charges going off, and felt the floor shudder underfoot. That meant the perimeter-breakers had launched their assault on the inner core. Everything depended on speed now – there were thousands of guards within the near-infinite warrens of the underground kingdom, and they would respond once they had worked out what was going on and who was behind it. Only while the Palace’s many sentinels were still confused and reeling would this thing remain possible.

  They piled into the turbo-lift and hit the drop control. The cage doors slammed closed and the unit fell down the shaft, rattling fast. Once at the next level down, they spilled out again and into a large muster-hall. The space was already filling with Exemplars, more than a hundred of them. The bloodied bodies of Seneschals lay in clumps, as well as greater numbers of menials. Bordamo’s deputies, both lieutenants in regimental colours, were waiting as expected.

  ‘Resistance neutralised three levels down,’ reported the first of them, a woman with valorous service pins on her flak-armoured breast-plate. ‘Comms disabled, suppression actions already underway.’

  Bordamo nodded, and made his way to the next drop-shaft. A wounded Seneschal lifted his head from the floor, and Bordamo absently shot him through his broken helm. ‘And the Prophet?’

  ‘Moving into destiny.’ />
  An alarm went off somewhere down below, swelling up the many pits and transit-tubes, followed by the whine and crack of more las-fire impacting.

  ‘Then we have no time to lose.’ He made for the third drop-cage, hanging precariously over the shaft on taut cables. The unit could carry six, and there were twelve more of the steel carcasses open and ready for the descent. Most of the remaining Exemplars did likewise, leaving only a few dozen to strap incendiaries to their waists and take up position at the chamber’s various entrance portals.

  Bordamo hit the cable-release, and the cage lurched from its shackles. As always, everyone inside staggered, waiting for the swinging deck to level out and the lowering chains to kick into their pay-out.

  This time, though, something caught, and the cage dropped only a few metres before snagging on something and slamming into the shaft’s inner wall. The lumens flickered, briefly illuminating the oil-soaked metal innards of the pit-edge. Bordamo looked up, towards the rectangle of uncertain light overhead, trying to gauge what had halted them.

  It took a moment for his mind to register what his eyes told him.

  ‘Bring it down,’ he ordered, and every Exemplar in the cage shouldered their lasrifles, aiming upwards.

  Hard white las-beams fizzed up the shaft, one after the other, sending bright light shooting up the inner walls. Volley after volley hit home, flashing and spinning as the concentrated spears impacted and refracted from their one massive target. Amid all that dazzling display, it became hard to pick out just what they were aiming at – a jumping, shifting mess of reflections and distortions – but they had already seen enough to know what was reeling them in.

  A single soul, a lone warrior, clad in that hateful gold and pulling on the main support chain, hand over hand, hauling up the tonnes of steel cage with its six occupants like a fisherman spooling in a line. The las-fire barely made it falter – the beams scorched and bounced from that impenetrable hide, leaving long black lines but little else. Steadily, agonisingly, the golden helm drew closer, until the Exemplars were firing at point-blank range, their lasrifles locked in terror.