The Path of Heaven Page 5

  He activated the guan dao’s energy field again and felt it surge within him – the savage, sharp anticipation of killing that now only came from taking on his own kind.

  ‘For the Khan,’ he breathed. ‘For the Emperor.’

  The attackers came in primed for combat. If they had expected to find the Kalium Gate unprotected, its defences denuded to provide cover for the diversionary raids choreographed at Memnos and nine other scattered sites, they gave no sign of it.

  The main assault was led by the Dictatus-class battleship Lance of Heaven, one of the Legion’s core war vessels, the veteran of a dozen major engagements since they had learned about Isstvan. Its flanks were no longer spotless ivory, its lines no longer purest blood-red. Old plasma burns now ran along the length of its charred gunwales, patched up by hasty battlefield repairs and marred by repeat impacts. Its thrusters were black from incessant overburning, its bridge disfigured with the brown patina of lance-scorch residue. The only part of it that was kept undefiled was the great icon high up on the ship’s crown that bore the Legion sigil: the lightning strike, the vengeance of heaven. That image was restored after every encounter, picked out in rarest gold and flood-lit across its heavy armour plate, for there would be no deception, no attempt to run silent or defy martial honour.

  We are the V Legion. We are the ordu of Jaghatai, the White Scars of Chogoris.

  We are the oath-keepers.

  A million souls had died under the sigil’s gaze in four long years of vicious fighting, each one dying with the gold and red of heaven reflected in their eyes. It had once been a joyous proclamation, an exotic statement of freedom amid the juggernaut of Imperial conformity. Now its aspect was bloody and furious, the mirror of the forgotten barbarian souls who etched it on stone, steel and hide.

  Seven more warships emerged in the Lance of Heaven’s wake: the Namaan, Khamanog, Bloodline, Celestian, Fate’s Arrow, Umaal, Qo Ama – all variants of the Legiones Astartes battlecruiser, each heavily refitted, altered, patched-up, wounded, so much so that their original Martian classifications had ceased to deliver much meaningful information about their capabilities. The Umaal had once been the Tenacious, a Death Guard line-breaker. The Celestian had not changed name, but had belonged to a Word Bearers compliance formation. The white war-paint was thin on both those vessels, scraped over hulls that had once borne the liveries of different masters. The others had always been V Legion.

  All seven ships stayed tight to the centrally placed Lance of Heaven, powering towards the Necklace at full tilt, their shields glittering. Escorts radiated out from the attack axis – destroyers, gun frigates, missile boats – eschewing protection for the punch of unleashed speed. Every movement was deliberate, taken at high velocity, mapped to deliver the most intense shock-hit of ordnance before a counter could be organised.

  Four years ago, such tactics had reaped ruin on the Warmaster’s advance. Accustomed only to the ragged assaults of Isstvan’s hollowed-out dupes, the traitors had taken time to adjust to the Khan’s more orchestrated counter-offensive. The Death Guard had suffered particularly badly, unable to match the voidmastery of the V Legion, but all of them – Fulgrim’s chem-addicted sensation-seekers, Perturabo’s obsessive engineers, Mortarion’s grim foot-sloggers, even the Sons of Horus themselves – had taken their share of pain.

  But that was four years ago. Every Legion was a living thing, gifted with commanders of infinite subtlety and tactical understanding. The Death Guard refined their fleet strategy, bringing to bear greater firepower against the Khan’s wild riders. The Iron Warriors gave their fleet enough heavy physical anti-ship protection to turn their attackers into great lumps of plasma-laced slag. The Sons of Horus did what they always did, responding with such concentrated brutality and directed discipline that the two Legions, once close in understanding and sympathy, became blood-sworn in antipathy through accumulated atrocity.

  The Emperor’s Children had learned just as fast, and from their positions at Kalium they recognised the Chogorian deployment of the False Spear. They knew that the Lance of Heaven and its escorts were not as all-powerful as they appeared, and that the more ephemeral wings of destroyers and frigates had been loaded beyond design capacity. They knew that to meet the main charge with equal force would invite disaster, and that they had to respond to the full spectrum of the incoming flotilla – just as spread out, just as fast.

  And so they did. The Proudheart, the battle-group’s flagship, equal in displacement and heritage to the Lance of Heaven, emerged from the shadow of the Keystone with its cruiser-class escorts, the Mortal Splendour, Excessive, Infinite Variety and Aquiline. These heavy warships were outnumbered by the V Legion formation bearing down on them, but bolstered by the defensive emplacements on the Keystone and Necklace. Fixed cannon batteries opened up, spiralling glowing lines of armour-rending shells into the battlesphere. Threading through the spider’s web of coruscation came the Emperor’s Children escorts, each one prepared and engine-keyed for rapid-attack manoeuvres.

  For the space of a human breath, the void between the two fleets remained intact – scored by projectile trails, as silent as the grave, bounded by movement, but pristine. Long-range guns opened fire, shield generator crews placed their last power feeds into immense promethium coils, bridge pilots made their final calculations of distance, heft, mass and velocity.

  Then the gap closed.

  Shells slammed into armour-plate, las-fire raked across the void, assault boats slammed into hull-lines, lance-beams fizzed home. Bulkheads smashed, plasma-conduits exploded, armourglass shattered, spine-ridges shook with impacts, transverse bracing dented. Vast blooms of fire lit up the void, punched through by more spears of iridescence. The flanks of the Keystone turned red, banishing the void’s eternal shadow as the power of suns was kindled and let fly.

  The ships became cauldrons of fire, ringed about by focal webs of destruction. Smaller vessels screamed around those nodes, hammering out their payloads. Mortal cries rang out, thousands-strong, unheard over the claustrophobic tumult within each vessel but relished in the deeper geometry of the immaterium beyond.

  And so again the abyss witnessed the raging death of aeon-machines, as the finest of humanity set about, with the perfect efficiency they had ever been gifted with, destroying themselves in the fires of choler, ambition and vengeance.

  Cario entered the restraint cage of the boarding torpedo, placed his sword in its steel casing and felt shackles descend to press against his armour. The other four warriors of his unit were already in their places ahead of him, each one a dark profile against the subdued lumen-strips. Before the coffin-lid of the torpedo hissed closed, he noted the deployment of the Suzerain’s menials, their eyelids sewn shut and their movements governed by spatial cogitator stimuli. He watched the other torpedoes along the rack take on their payloads, and counted every one of his brothers as they took their places.

  Most were like he was – still arrayed in the old armour of Chemos, their outlines much as they had been from the very start, sigils unaltered, blades straight, gold polished. Even among his brothers, though, the changes were beginning. A ceramite panel here, a helm-lens there, a frozen scream imprinted onto a vox-communication, a sheen of never-dry blood glossing a breastplate.

  It would come. Their gene-father’s mutation would spread like poison in a wound, and they would all become half-breeds, caught between the physical and the daemonic.

  But not yet. Not while mortal perfection had yet to be achieved – the cleanest kill, the most perfect agony.

  The coffin lid clamped shut, and Cario closed his eyes.

  ‘For the beloved primarch,’ he said softly, speaking by closed vox to the shadowy outlines within the boarding torpedo’s chassis, as well as those in the other tubes. ‘That we remain worthy of his immortal trust.’

  From outside the torpedo, he heard the clangs of blast doors closing, followed by lifter hooks ret
racting. A boom and whine of escaping air was replaced by silence from beyond the confines of his armour – just the thud, thud of his hearts and the low pull of his breathing.

  ‘In this thing, as in all things, be artful.’

  The torpedo’s interior went pitch-dark, and its chassis shivered as the rail took it clattering out to the launch mechanisms at the hull’s edge.

  ‘These are our savage cousins. Bleed them, just as in ages past we bled the dead to preserve the living.’

  Cario felt the torpedo shift onto the ignition track, and braced himself for the sudden surge of speed. Just as he did so, he heard the old whisper again, dancing around the inside of his helm. The muscles of his left shoulder twitched, and he saw the flicker of an old image chase across his visual field – a horned creature, immense, seductive, beckoning him onwards, curling a long black tongue across fleshy lips of purest pink.

  But not yet.

  ‘So we remain now what we have ever been,’ he said, banishing the spectres with a mental command. ‘The true and only children of the Emperor.’

  The torpedo’s engines ignited, and the chassis exploded into straight-line speed. Cario was thrown back against the restraint cage and relaxed his body, letting his power armour take the strain. He felt the sudden shift in trajectory as the torpedo left the hull and plummeted down towards the battle-plane. It was jerked sideways violently by some huge detonation, then slewed hard back towards the attack run trajectory.

  Data cascaded down his inner helm display, recording the progress of the entire brotherhood. He watched dispassionately as the torpedo bearing Brother Ramarda’s squad was taken out by heavy bolter-fire from a V Legion gunship, and equally dispassionately as the same gunship was flayed by a vicious salvo from the Suzerain’s close defence grid. He could trace the progress of the entire engagement through that data – the hulking cargo vessels attempting to pull clear to enter the warp, the two White Scars frigates harrying the incoming fleet, the nine ships of his own Legion closing in inexorably to prevent the convoy’s escape.

  Then the torpedo reached its target, and everything smeared into a juddering crash of static.

  Cario was shunted forwards, rocking as the torpedo punctured through plates the width of a man’s arm and careened onwards through a fusing mass of melting deck-plates.

  Even before it had finished its grinding progress, Cario activated the release rune. Melta-blisters on the torpedo’s outer flank ignited, burning a cocoon clear around it. The internal lumens switched on, and the shackles of the restraint cage snapped free. The coffin lid slammed back, ushering in a howling flood of heat laced with the smell of burning metal, and the Palatine Blades sprang from their transport.

  Cario retrieved his sword, mouthed a word of blessing over the long steel edge, and rose from the torpedo’s rocking corpse. His helm display instantly switched from the wide-angle assault range to an interior tactical readout, isolating the positions of his brothers and marking their ingress routes.

  He shoved aside a burning spar and hauled his way clear of the torpedo’s wreckage. Behind lay a long gouge in the bulk carrier’s outer hull, terminated by a smouldering ring framing the naked void; ahead was a contorted mass of broken struts and the flame-wreathed discharge of escaping oxygen.

  The squad of Palatine Blades strode through it, cutting out with sword-edge where the path was blocked. They reached an intact transit passage with working void hatches, and closed the seals, cutting out the tempest. They met up then with a second five-man squad and started to run, their longswords crackling. The twin kill teams passed into the bulk carrier’s sepulchral interior, watching the feedback energy-snarls from their disruptor fields flare up into the darkness above.

  As he sprinted, Cario watched the support columns soar away, towering above container-stacks over five hundred metres high. They reached a lifter shaft that ran into the heights, still operative, but exposed. They ignored the turbo-platforms and clamped on to the inner drive-tracks, climbing them hand over hand. They ascended quickly, gaining the approaches to the bridge without firing a shot or using a blade.

  Only towards the end, as they crested the shaft’s summit and blasted through sealed environment barriers, did any sign of the recent carnage show itself. They went watchfully then, going stealthily from bulkhead to bulkhead, swords held ready. Cario remained at the forefront, the hairs on the back of his arms rising with anticipation. A long, wide chamber ran away from them, studded with branching portals every five metres. On either side, bodies lay in piles on the decking, heaped together carelessly under the rows of arches, their limbs bent double and their unseeing eyes gaping up towards the vaulted roof. The narrow lumens flickered, leaving deep shadows to fester in the perma-dark.

  The Palatine Blades silently adopted a diamond formation, Cario at the leading tip, followed by the sub-prefector of the second squad, Avanarola. Haiman was next, followed by the rest, with the taciturn Urelias covering the rear. Their helm lenses sent pools of light rippling over the heaped corpses in the vaults, exposing motley expressions of terror, surprise, shock, nausea. The bulk carrier’s crew had been slaughtered far beyond what was necessary to control the ship, then shoved out of the way like slabs of meat.

  Cario studied the auspex scans ahead. At the end of the chamber, a stairway rose to meet a braced pair of doors bearing the rusted griffon emblem of the Memnos Combine. Beyond that was hard to gauge, but he detected heat sources and movement, and the trace signal of energy weapons.

  Without breaking stride, he issued battle-signals to his brothers, and the diamond gave way to a double line. The first squad would hit the doors, destroying them and laying down penetrating fire. Those five would give way quickly as the return volleys came in, but their screening would allow the second rank to storm the chamber beyond, where they could deploy their true strength – the charnabal sabre, aristocrat of blades.

  Cario paused at the foot of the stairway, bolt pistol in one hand, ready to give the command. Just as he was about to act, his eye was caught by a face in the shadows to his right. He turned his head a fraction and saw a mortal woman’s body atop a corpse-pile. She had been killed by a blunt blow, leaving most of her features intact.

  A spark of unease suddenly struck him.

  ‘Fall ba–’ he managed to say, before the chamber exploded in bolter-fire.

  Cario threw himself to the deck, feeling the hard thump of rounds against his armour. He scrabbled forwards, staying low, firing blind with his bolt pistol.

  His brothers were all doing the same thing, scattering out from the centre of the chamber, trying to find cover, returning fire as best they could. Raffel was not moving, his body riddled with bolter impact craters, and several others registered hits.

  Cario broke for the stairway, trying to orientate himself. They needed to get out of the chamber’s open ground and fight their way towards the vaults where the bodies lay in their heaps, but that was impossible – the bolter-fire was coming from the corpses.

  He reached the lowest steps, twisted around and wedged himself up against the nearside railing, firing steadily. All around him, stonework smashed and buckled, throwing a screen of dust into the gloom of the chamber.

  White Scars were emerging now, pushing aside the corpses they had hidden under, their armour streaked with gore-sheen, their bolters pumping. Another of Cario’s squad went down, pulverised by the weight of incoming fire.

  But the shock had faded. Cario’s squad fought back, keeping their discipline. Their armour absorbed the bulk of the hits, just as it had been designed to, giving them precious seconds to fight their way towards cover. He pushed clear of the stairway again, weaving out of the path of more shells, picking out a blood-armoured White Scars legionary amid the wheeling shadows.

  There were nine of them in total. Even with two of his own squad down, those were odds he could live with.

  You do not know who y
ou are taking on, he thought, closing into blade range.

  The warrior he advanced upon fell back, switching to his own curved sword. Cario hit him on the downward sweep, letting the weight of the sabre carry it into contact. The two blades snarled together, dragging a line of sparks down the cutting edge. His enemy responded well, moving quickly, letting the impact subside. They traded more blows, their swords whirling, clanging on the strikes and flexing away.

  It took five strikes for Cario to gain the measure of the legionary. He feinted left, just a fraction, playing on his opponent’s marginal pull the other way, waited for the conscious correction, spun out of the contact and lunged point-forward.

  The tip of his sabre blazed as it slid under the breastplate, delving into his enemy’s stomach and slicing clean through tissue. The warrior staggered, trying to keep his footing, but by then Cario had already withdrawn the blade, hauled it round and whipped it across, decapitating the warrior and sending his helm bouncing bloodily across the deck.

  He was about to launch into the melee further down the chamber when the doors at the top of the stairway juddered open and a figure in steel-grey plate bearing a disruptor-shrouded combat glaive powered through the gap. This one’s movements were different – jerkier, with machine-heavy strength behind them.

  Recognising the master of those he fought, Cario saluted in the old fashion, a swift lowering of the blade before guard was taken once more.

  ‘Brave, to remain in safety while your warriors die,’ he said.

  His enemy lumbered into close range, swinging for the strike. All across the long chamber bolt-rounds continued to snap and boom, punctuated by the rasp and ring of blades in contact.

  ‘You come too late,’ the glaive-wielder said, his voice heavily accented with strange rhythms across the Gothic words. ‘These ships will soon be in the warp.’

  Cario made his final assessment, drinking in information from the way his opponent carried himself, the tenor of his speech, the hundred subtle signs that gave away strength and weakness.