The Path of Heaven Read online

  ‘Lord commander,’ voxed Mortarion to Eidolon, watching as the III Legion formation ran the gauntlet of lance-strikes. ‘You may wish to adjust your speed. You are pulling clear.’

  There was a hesitation before the reply came back – a sign of irritation, perhaps. ‘They are coming in fast, my lord,’ Eidolon said, evenly. ‘We have the power to match them.’

  ‘Do as you must,’ said Mortarion, watching as the Endurance sent the first coruscating lance-beam spitting out into the void, striking a V Legion destroyer at long range and crippling it. ‘But not too far. Our advantage is our numbers – do not squander it.’

  Another pause before the reply. ‘As you advise.’

  The link cut out. Mortarion smiled to himself. It had been a command, not advice, but Eidolon was wise not to take it as such. They were a proud Legion, the Emperor’s Children, even in their growing debasement, and that was as it should be. ‘Maintain cruising speed,’ he commanded Ulfar. ‘If they truly wish to break their necks in some contest of velocity, let them.’

  As he spoke, the Death Guard deployment was already recovering from the initial attacks, resuming its shape and bringing its more powerful guns to bear. The Endurance was joined by the other major battleships, the Indomitable Will, Reaper’s Scythe, Moritatis Oculix and Stalwart. Accompanying them came a horde of support craft – frigates, destroyers, gunship-carriers and light cruisers. Some had taken a beating on emergence, but most had weathered the storm and were now shifting into defensive lattice-patterns, adopting the overlapping fire-lane doctrine that had guided the Legions for more than two centuries.

  The Emperor’s Children detachment, less numerous and more thinly spread, had suffered worse and continued to do so, taking on the White Scars on their own terms – with flamboyance, trusting to daring to bring their close-range guns to bear.

  Watching that, Kalgaro grunted his displeasure. The Siegemaster was conservative in matters of void warfare, trusting heavy armament over mobility. ‘They will race to their deaths.’

  Mortarion nodded in agreement. ‘Yet their vigour serves us well. Let them soak up the fury – we will reap the harvest.’

  As if to underline to the point, the first of many White Scars frigates swam into the Endurance’s sights. It had just emerged victorious from a vicious fire-fight with a III Legion escort of a similar displacement, and was coming about to power alongside Eidolon’s starboard flank.

  ‘Now, demonstrate the virtue of patience,’ Mortarion ordered, addressing Lagaahn, the gunnery master.

  The order raced along the command-hierarchy, filtered down to the sweltering depths of the battleship’s macrocannon decks. Amid these humid, cramped spaces, where cannons the size of Imperator Titans were hauled and serviced by teams over nine hundred strong, coordinates were deployed, crane-chains hauled tight, shells clanged into breeches and gunwale-plates slammed open.

  ‘Fire,’ commanded the primarch.

  The Endurance complied, and its starboard flanks disappeared behind a wall of belched smoke. Shells shrieked in ramrod-straight lines, ploughing their way across the space separating the vessels before crashing hard into the oncoming frigate’s angled prow.

  The barrage shattered the ship’s main void shield aegis and exposed its underbelly. More shells rammed home, one after the other, tearing up hull plates and driving deeper inside.

  If they had been conventional armaments, the crippled ship might yet have survived, but these were phosphex shells, triggered on detonation to explode in clouds of metal-eating corrosion. Hundreds of the bombs exploded, flooding the frigate’s lower decks with boiling green fogs that churned and hissed their way through solid adamantium. The crew, even those in protective armour, were eaten alive, their atmosphere-filters blown and their eye-masks fizzing. When the corrosion hit the main engine containment units, it took mere seconds to gnaw into the reactors, triggering the explosions that blew the frigate apart from the inside and scattered its still-burning parts across a swathe of space.

  On the Endurance’s bridge, there was no cheering, no roars of aggression, just a near-silent murmur of satisfaction from Kalgaro. The first kill-rune of the encounter glowed into life on the main status lens.

  Mortarion observed the wider theatre of slaying unfold. He watched the V Legion react, pulling back, forming up for the fighting retreat that would bring them into range of their own line battleships. He noted the dimensions of the greater sphere, and the location of the lesser sphere, and the positioning of the Khan’s assets between them. Everything was assessed, ordered, gauged and accounted for.

  The numbers were in his favour. There was no way out. The hunters had been trapped.

  ‘Run them down,’ he ordered, observing with approval the way his commanders brought their heavy battleships in train with the Endurance, opening up with their own salvoes of long-proscribed bio-weapons. ‘Get me the coordinates of the flagship. That is the target now.’

  The Suzerain accelerated hard, driving ahead of the III Legion warships around it. Cario watched them fall back, already diverted by the thousand tiny battles that made up a void war, their commanders fielding a flickering hellstorm of las-beams. He had no such concerns, for his quarry was singular. Every sensorium drone on the ship was now bent towards the same task, ignoring all other targets.

  The void around them was already a mass of burning metal. Hemmed in by the aether-clouds, the carnage had been concentrated and brutal. Starships crashed into wheeling wreckage, smashing apart the burning shells and succumbing to the flames themselves. Torpedo volleys scythed through whole nebulae of exploding promethium, igniting as they flew and spraying debris over reeling squadrons of gunships and fighters. The greater ships swam through the midst of it all, lumbering and massive, their hulls already blackened from collisions and lance-hits.

  Cario found the experience exhilarating. He relished the swerve of the Suzerain as it barrelled ahead, engines roaring. The brothers of his fraternity were already poised to take the boarding-tubes, waiting for the command. The gunnery serfs were primed to unleash the ship’s arsenal at his order, though in truth Cario gave little thought to such weaponry, for its only function was to keep him alive long enough to get close.

  I will take him with the sabre, he promised himself. I will rip the metal mask from him and look into his eyes as the killing edge ends him. And before the end I will know his name.

  Above them, a large V Legion destroyer was tumbling towards nadir, its hull punctured with pinpoints of savage light. A slew of pursuing missile-boats followed it down, hammering it brutally and making its void shields shimmer. Below that was an arrowhead formation of gunships, spinning clear of a foundering Death Guard escort.

  Harkian, busy overseeing the sensor-crew pits, nodded suddenly in recognition. ‘There it is.’ He looked up towards the throne. ‘The Kaljian. We have it.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Real-viewers zoomed into a segment of the battlesphere, cycling past a hundred other craft. The ship was close, heavily engaged at the heart of the fighting, marshalling wings of interceptors in its wake. It was being flown expertly, and had just despatched a vessel of its own size before powering into contact with another. Cario watched it come about, tilting severely, then thrusting at close to full power.

  That was better than expert. That was beautiful.

  ‘Lock in coordinates,’ he ordered. ‘Take us in.’

  Even as the Suzerain responded, leaping like a hound from the slips, the proximity grid flashed red. Klaxons blared out, forcing Harkian to engage a last minute shift to zenith.

  Cario rounded on the source – another III Legion warship, far bigger than the Suzerain, powering up underneath them on an intersecting course.

  ‘Hail them!’ Cario shouted. ‘If they do not give way, loose guns on them.’

  Harkian grinned. He was perfectly capable of doing that. In the event, though, the
ship barely made any adjustment – just enough to slide into a parallel course, less than five hundred metres below the Suzerain.

  ‘What ship is that?’ demanded Cario, ready to make the order.

  ‘Prefector,’ said a voice over the comm-link from the other ship, which was identifying itself as the Ravisher. ‘Did you not heed the tactical plan I sent? We are to be a unified spearhead, you and I.’

  Konenos. Eidolon’s lap-dog. What was this madness?

  ‘You have your battles, orchestrator,’ Cario responded, keeping his voice cool. ‘We have ours.’

  Konenos laughed. ‘My brother, this thing is about more than you.’

  The comm-link cut out. The Ravisher remained on a parallel trajectory, neither pulling ahead nor dropping back. Together, the two ships carved their way through a shoal of lesser craft, each maintaining the same blistering pace.

  ‘What does he purpose?’ asked Harkian, intrigued.

  Cario snorted. ‘Let him follow, if he needs to. We will outpace him to the prize.’

  Far ahead, the cumulative punishment was beginning to tell on the White Scars’ formations. They had done what they had come to do – hit the incomers hard on emergence – but now the weight of numbers was against them. They were turning, swivelling tightly on their axes and firing engines for the run home. The Kaljian would be no different, though its position left it near the rearguard now, a victim of its headlong race for glory.

  ‘Keep fixed on it,’ Cario ordered, watching the frigate loom larger on the real-viewers, already feeling a twitch of febrile excitement. ‘No deviation. Konenos can do what he wishes, but that one is ours.’

  A smooth orb of utter blackness rushed out from the epicentre of the vortex detonation, instantly devouring Veil and the closest legionaries. Yesugei, thrown back by the explosive matter-compression wave, hurled everything he had against the rapidly expanding warp bubble. Where his power met the racing event horizon, both energies shattered into flailing tongues of phosphorescent flame, and the fractured chamber blew apart around him.

  The vortex effect had already cut through the conduits lining the walls, sending pure promethium gushing into the path of jetting plasma, and an inferno of liquid immolation joined the destructive crescendo, atomising the floor.

  Yesugei plunged, crashing through dissolving decking, propelled through the chaos by chain-reaction detonations in the feeder lines around him. Thrown wildly from side to side, he experienced a blurred series of cartwheeling sensations – the receding warp bubble chewing through metalwork in an orgy of destruction, generating fresh bursts of fire as burning physical matter met the raw stuff of the empyrean.

  Only the power still humming in his staff had saved him from the initial blast, warding against the full potential of the lone charge, preserving a kernel of psychic defiance amid the howling conflagration. Now, though, as he smashed through collapsing deck-plates, his armour driven in, torn free, his helm ricocheting, the psychic backlash became the greater threat.

  He cried out, feeling his exposed flesh begin to bubble, before smashing into solid ground at last, his head cracked back, his staff cleaved in two. He sucked in a flame-hot breath, and coughed it back out, spraying blood up from his seared lungs.

  Yesugei rolled over, dragging his tortured frame across a new deck, even as flaming debris from the chambers above rained down around him, thudding and slamming and sending cracks lancing across rockcrete.

  He spat out more blood. His helm display splurged into a messy mosaic of bright reds. He crawled on his hands and knees, panting hard, needing to get clear of the rolling waves of sun-hot rubble. He had no idea where he was, no idea which direction was up or down, only that he had to somehow keep moving, keep breathing, keep his hearts beating. He could feel his genhanced systems trying to repair themselves, and knew then that he had been brutally hurt. The aether’s stink pressed in all around him, weighing him down, sending spikes of savage agony lancing through his mind.

  Somewhere far above him, explosions were still booming out – there must have been plenty to ignite in that chamber, full of volatile compounds, full of esoteric devices.

  He collapsed, his arms skidding out from under him. For a moment, his shaky vision dropped to perfect black and a stifling numbness shot up his limbs. He picked himself up, crawling onwards, dragging himself through the wavering sheets of flame, roaring with defiance as the heat seared his body.

  Agonisingly, grindingly, he pulled clear of it. The rain of wreckage fell away behind him and the ferocious heat ebbed. Darkness pooled once more amid the struts and deck-brace columns. He twisted his head and looked back the way he had come.

  The fires still thundered, and molten metal cascaded down, framing the black skeleton of Dark Glass’ battered underbelly. He tried to send a message, but his helm comm-system was smashed. Something was wrong with his respiratory unit, too. It was ferociously hot. It was freezing.

  He crawled on, reaching a circular blast portal, already cracked open by the pressure of the destruction that had been unleashed. He got to his knees, clamping his hands on either slide-door, heaving them apart. It took him four attempts, and each one tore another muscle-bundle. A new light flooded across from the gap, this time composed of many colours. He heard a deep, deep roar from up ahead, like the tide coming in. Then he was through. For a moment, he could see nothing but a whirl of hazy, merged hues dancing in the air.

  Slowly, the sensory overload slid away. He managed to regulate his breathing. He pulled himself into a seating position, his back against the inner ring of the blast portal.

  He had emerged into the open base of a great shaft. Above him, empty space soared, climbing back up, up and up into the heart of Dark Glass. Its iron walls shimmered with multicolour. The shaft continued, eventually disappearing into a crackling cloud of discharging energies on the edge of vision.

  The decking ahead of him was punctured by pits arranged in a wide circle, and the dancing hues were cast up through their apertures. Without needing to look, Yesugei knew then where he was – directly over the abyss, open to the raw universe-bending corruption of the rift. He had fallen to the very bottom, the foundation of all that had been raised. Under that fragile floor was the great anchor, the metal stave that dropped down into the unfiltered warp, fuelling the abomination that Veil had tried to destroy.

  He might yet succeed. Cracks had formed across the walls. Explosions continued, half audible over the roar of the aether, smashing their way through the innards of the station, burrowing like a cancer through the corpse of Achelieux’s little empire.

  Wincing from pain, Yesugei forced himself to his feet, hauling on the wall behind him to keep from falling. In the centre of the chamber’s circular floor was a spire of iron, tangled with coolant ducts and draped with heavy cables like a spider’s web. Plasma lightning snapped and slipped against it, licking across the gulf between the walls and racing up the thundering shaft where the warp light refracted.

  For the first time, Yesugei saw the truth of it.

  The whole place, the whole void station, was a single machine, colossal in scale and form, its mechanisms built into the walls, threaded throughout Dark Glass’ entire substance. The place was suffused with the warp. It channelled it, pulling the raw aether up and into itself, where it fed greedily. Down here, unlike anywhere else on the station, the mighty energy coils glowed, swollen with stored energy of tremendous potency. Here, the valves were active, the cables trembled and the heat exchangers vibrated.

  Yesugei began to limp. He fell twice, having to catch himself as he staggered out into the open, heading towards the mountain of iron. He passed the apertures but did not peer over their edges, knowing the unfiltered warp would be visible down there, virulent, malignant.

  The iron mountain was grotesque. It could have been xenos, or some nightmare fusion of xenos and human, a hybrid of Martian ambition and alien technotheu
rgy. Just to look on it made Yesugei nauseous – something about it was uniquely hateful.

  At its base, flanked by six mottled granite pillars and crowned with a huge iron aquila, was a single command throne. Thick bundles of cabling threaded into it from all sides, feeding it with power as arteries fed a pulsating heart. The seat itself was greater than mortal dimensions. It had been made for one of the Legiones Astartes, or perhaps for one even greater in stature. Its surface was golden, burnished almost to the red of fire, and its twin arms terminated in the heads of two eagles, one sighted, one blind.

  The seat was occupied. A wasted cadaver, open jaws thrown back in agony, sat in place, flaking hands clamped to the arms. Its robes had burned away, exposing charcoal-black flesh stretched tight over desiccated bones. The eyes were gone, seared away, all three of them. The sapphires over its brow had melted, the olive skin crisped to nothing.

  Yesugei limped up to the throne’s edge. Its power made the air shake.

  So this was Achelieux. What had he tried to do?

  Achelieux was never charting the warp – he was creating the means to bypass it.

  Yesugei remembered the massive, static shock wave the fleet had passed through on the way in – the crystals in the void filled with light. Had the Novator activated his machine? What would that do?

  Gates into hell. You are standing on the threshold even now, and still you do not see it.

  The throne was the machine, the machine was the throne. It had never been made for mortals.

  Only the nominated primarch has the strength to maintain an active link.

  Then he understood. He knew what had to be done. Slowly, his bloody hands trembling, Yesugei reached out to pull Achelieux’s withered remains from the throne.

  Twenty-Two

  The Khan swept up from the docking bays towards the bridge. The corridors were clogged with menials running, many carrying heavy burdens. Warriors of the ordu guided them, driving them harder, pulling those who had fallen to their feet and hurling them back to work.