The Path of Heaven Page 6

  ‘Then let us not waste the chance,’ he said, grinning under his helm-mask. ‘Show me what I came here to best.’

  Four

  Eidolon watched the ships burn and die, though not with the eyes he had once owned. He saw the world in richer colours now, and savoured its agony through a more delicate sensibility. His armour did nothing to impede that – the things the fleshweavers had done to its ancient mechanisms amplified the flood of sensoria, channelling it, filtering out the ephemera and leaving only the core of it to relish.

  He stood on the cusp of his teleportation chamber, unwilling to enter the energy-lashed precincts while the observation portals let him witness the truth of what was happening across the Kalium Gate.

  Fifty kilometres away – a mere speck in the geometry of naval warfare – a White Scars destroyer plunged towards the Keystone, its back broken and its flanks aflame. Gunships harried it, ripping up what scant physical plate remained along its hide. The destroyer kept firing all the while, maintaining the barrage while its structure melted and shimmered into atoms.

  Eidolon could feel the terror coming from that ship. He could smell the raw fear bleeding out of it, sweated from the pores of the gun-crew menials and the mortal bridge officers as they did their duty. He mentally placed himself in their position, under those collapsed decks, crushed and maimed, the air escaping through a lattice of shell-ripped gashes.

  It made his breath quicken.

  I wish it were me, he thought. I wish all these things were mine.

  All around him, his brothers were arrayed for battle. They wore the same armour – what would once have been Mark IV plate, limned with Legion gold, but which now defied all description. Their gorgets and upper torsos were grotesquely large, linked by snaking cables to amplifier clusters lodged amid overlapping sheets of richly decorated ceramite plate. Each warrior carried the same weapon-type – exemplars of the Kakophoni, massive organ guns with bloated echo chambers and psychosonic resonators. Even now, the guns hummed with a deep, deck-shaking harmonic, making loose matter around them jump and tremble.

  The sonic cults had been the creations of Marius Vairosean in the beginning, but had now spread throughout the entire Legion, growing in popularity as their ruinous gifts became more clearly apparent. Eidolon himself, who had embraced the mutations more completely than any other since his resurrection, bore a thunder hammer in his heavy gauntlets, its snarled head flooded with arcane psychic matter. It cast a sick green sheen across the iron of the chamber’s outer gates, strobing in rhythm with the beat of the idling organ guns.

  Still he waited. Beyond, in the void over Kalium, more ships were torn apart and their inhabitants cast into the vacuum. He watched the foremost White Scars run the gauntlet of fire, and saw what it cost them. He saw the ever-loyal Konenos break from the cover of the Necklace’s shadow and enter the dance of ruin. He watched torpedoes scatter like broken glass amid the whirlwind, and knew that every one of them carried a cargo of living warriors.

  He closed his aching eyes, and listened to the sounds. Void or no, they still came to him, ushered across the aether by daemon-whisperers.

  –old the line! Hold the line! Keep up that– By the Emperor! Nadir! More pow–

  –ty-five points about. Release secondary barrage. Watch for counter-strikes from–

  –nnot take this for much longer, lord. The shell will break, the prometh–

  –o! No! Not yet! What is it? What devils are the–

  They were woven like threads, those voices in the depths, each one animated by lusts and desires that were chaff on the face of the immaterium. Soon those speakers would be submerged back within its great tide, no more than fodder for the intelligences that hungrily swam there.

  ‘Lord,’ came Von Kalda’s voice over the comm.

  Eidolon already knew what his equerry would say, but let the creature speak. ‘Yes?’

  ‘They will break the cordon,’ Von Kalda reported, reluctantly. ‘They are losing ships, many ships, but we cannot prevent them landing. The Keystone is reinforced, but if he is among them…’

  Eidolon recognised the faintest catch in his equerry’s voice, and marked him then for sanction. A primarch was a primarch; they were fallible, they had been killed.

  ‘Peace. I will translate,’ Eidolon told him, marching at last through the iron gates and into the heart of the teleportation chamber. As he took his place, the Kakophoni around him saluted, their movements already slurred from combat-stimms, their helm lenses swimming like burnished mother-of-pearl. ‘What do you fear, Von Kalda? Destruction?’

  ‘We lose troops here, my commander,’ Von Kalda replied. ‘We know they cannot use the Gate. Should we not let them–’

  ‘Every one of them we kill here strips Terra of another defender,’ replied Eidolon, sensing the build-up of aetheric power in the chamber. Snarls of cold lightning flickered up the columns around him, distorting real space. ‘And besides, you omit the crucial point.’

  The air shivered, tensing for the explosion that would turn reality inside out and thrust a living spear of the warp into the realm of the senses. Eidolon hefted his thunder hammer, anticipating the temporary release of translation – the fleeting respite from the living agony of his existence.

  ‘Which is?’ Von Kalda asked, his voice growing faint as the teleport charge built to the apex.

  Eidolon smiled. ‘That we live for this.’

  Then the chamber filled with light, the sensations snuffed out, and the Kakophoni were sent across worlds and minds and into the howling heart of battle.

  Shiban crashed the guan dao down, relying on its weight to smash the sword clear. His opponent parried expertly, heedless of the disruptor sparks showering over his armour. All around them, spread out along the chamber’s shadowed edges, the fighting continued, now brutal and close-range. Beneath their boots, the Terce Falion’s engines were whining to full pitch.

  His enemy was powerful. Skilled with the blade, orthodox as all sons of Chemos were, but intelligent with it. Their weapons clashed again, yielding no advantage. They spun apart, moving warily, each looking hard for the chink in an otherwise perfect defence.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ asked his enemy, glancing at his angular limbs, his awkward armour-plate.

  Shiban said nothing, keeping his mind focused. He slashed out, adding venom to the gesture, aiming to take the swordsman at the neck. The Emperor’s Children champion retreated, evading the strike, returning quickly to bring his sabre to bear.

  ‘You move like a machine,’ his enemy said, dancing back into range with a flurry of strokes. ‘I have killed many of your kind, and they fought more like humans.’

  ‘We have all been changed,’ Shiban grunted, starting to admire the doggedness in his enemy. This one was a step above the other legionaries he had killed – a master of his chosen weapon, an artist.

  ‘All of us, aye.’

  They crashed together again, taking strikes on their armour as the guan dao and sabre ricocheted from one another.

  Shiban punched out with the heel of his staff, missing the target by a hair’s width. Then he had to defend, keeping out the sabre’s edge only marginally. He took a step back, creating space, making use of the motive power his augmentations gave him.

  I, too, used to fight with art. I, too, used to make it beautiful.

  ‘You are not in sickness,’ Shiban observed, the words slipping from his lips almost unbidden.

  In sickness. That was what the ordu had come to call the multifarious mutations and self-mutilations practised by the Traitor Legions. So many were now more beast than man, their genhanced bodies wracked and tortured, a willing hell of constant invention.

  His enemy laughed – a cruel sound. ‘Like my brothers, you mean? No, not yet. It will come.’

  Shiban continued the retreat, letting his enemy come after him. From the corner of h
is eye, he saw his warriors doing the same, just as they had discussed, giving up ground towards the command bridge.

  Below them all, the engine whine grew in volume.

  ‘I will never understand it,’ Shiban said.

  A snort came from his enemy’s face mask. The sword blurred around his armour-profile like a silver gauze. The blades hit again: clang, clang, clang.

  ‘What can you not understand, savage? That we should wish for something greater? You were offered the gift, and you were too simple to see it. You fight for something already gone – all you have before you is limitation.’ The weapons spun around one another, weaving, darting, hammering. ‘For us, though... For us, limitation has ceased to be a factor.’

  Shiban reach the foot of the stairway. He felt the strain in the muscles he still retained. Sweat ran down the inner lip of his gorget. His enemy was faster, stronger, more subtle and he worked the sabre as if it weighed nothing.

  I would have been faster, before. I would have been stronger.

  The surviving White Scars fell back further, retreating up the stairway, step by step. The Emperor’s Children pursued them, all fighting as perfectly as their master. Stone smashed around them, flung from the balustrades by stray strikes. The engine whine throbbed into a grinding wall of sound, flooding up from the deeps.

  ‘So why did you not seize the chance?’ his enemy asked, sounding genuinely curious. ‘You could not have loved Terra, not like Dorn’s drones. You really had a choice.’

  Shiban started to breathe hard. The glaive felt heavy in his hands, like a bar of lead. He was taking hits now – peripheral ones, chipping away at the margins of his defence. ‘I made my oath.’

  The laugh again. ‘Your oath! I make an oath with every breath.’

  The portal to the bridge beckoned now – a wide arch, crested with the Memnos griffon. Beyond that was the gantry, the bloody servitor pits, the corpse of the shipmaster in her own throne. Shiban saw Jochi fighting hard, now at his shoulder, just as they had been in the canyons on Chondax. There, too, they had been overmatched.

  ‘You make no oaths,’ Shiban rasped, working hard as the sabre whipped in. He was dimly aware of the roof opening out above him, soaring up towards the crystalflex dome of stars. He heard a muffled cry of pain – one of his brotherhood, succumbing to the enemy, another soul lost. ‘Not like we do.’

  A hiss of irritation came from his enemy, who pressed closer, scenting the end. Their weapons locked again, buzzing with feral energy fields.

  ‘Yes, yes, you are finer than we,’ said the Traitor, caustically. ‘We have done what we did because we are weak and vain, and only in you, the doomed defenders of this rotten Throne, is there virtue.’

  They swayed across the gantry, fighting all the time, ceramite flakes now flying in circles around them.

  ‘Your words,’ grunted Shiban, working hard not get his throat cut out.

  ‘Your arrogance,’ blurted his enemy, stepping up the assault into a new pitch of cold fury. ‘My master now walks with gods. You have been lied to, and you know it, and still cleave only to ignorance.’

  The charnabal blade shivered down the glaive’s shaft, grating up against the weapon’s shoulder. Shiban staggered, nearly going down. He was then forced to parry – a crossways brace across his throat as the sword whistled in again.

  ‘Then why not take your new god’s gifts?’ Shiban spat out, falling back again. ‘What are you scared of?’

  His enemy snapped his blade down, pinning the guan dao into Shiban’s guard. Their helm-masks were a hand’s breadth apart, underlit by seething disruptor excess.

  ‘I will take them, and with both hands, when the hour comes,’ the Emperor’s Children champion said, his voice savagely earnest. ‘Until then, speak not of things you do not understand.’

  ‘We know what it is to change,’ Shiban said.

  ‘You know what it is to die.’

  ‘True enough. But not this day.’

  At that, the engine whine reached its full pitch, making the walls of the bridge shake. Shiban heaved with his arms, throwing his enemy back by a single pace. The Emperor’s Children legionary reacted instantly, bringing the point of his sword into range, poising to strike into the heart of Shiban’s off-balance defence.

  But the blow never came. The crystalflex dome above them shattered, showering a cascade of glittering shards across the entire bridge expanse. The air-bubble within burst outwards, thrusting into the void and taking the corpses of the old crew spinning with it.

  The White Scars, prepared for the move, let the tempest carry them. The Emperor’s Children, acting on instinct, activated the grav-locks on their boots, keeping them clamped to the vibrating deck. The two duelling forces were separated, cast asunder by the racing atmosphere.

  Above them all, hovering over the jagged edges of the broken dome, hung a V Legion Stormbird, its twin-linked bolters pumping out more shells into the ruined bridge-space.

  Shiban twisted his body, reaching out for the open crew bay, his fingers clamping on to the edge. He pulled himself to safety, as did Jochi and two others – all who had made it out. When he next glanced down, for a moment he saw nothing but a swirl of bloody corpses, bumping into dislodged debris from the command levels, all of it blown out into the void as the atmosphere streamed into the abyss.

  Then he saw the swordsman, braced against the command throne, staring up at him.

  ‘White Scar!’ the champion shouted over the maelstrom, disgust evident across the open vox-signal. ‘I had heard tales of your bravery.’

  Shiban said nothing, but dragged himself inside. The Stormbird pulled clear of the disintegrating bridge, back into the heart of the void-war beyond.

  ‘How many of the convoy are taken?’ he asked the pilot, clamping his glaive wearily to the wall-mounted rack.

  ‘All are now in the hands of the enemy,’ came the emotionless reply.

  Shiban nodded. Across the far side of the crew bay, Jochi leaned against the inner wall, breathing heavily through a damaged vox-grille.

  ‘Signal all units to withdraw to the frigates. We make for the void.’

  He considered moving back to get a final glimpse of the warrior who had bested him so easily. He might have been tempted to salute, or offer some word of defiance.

  Not now. I am sick to my soul.

  ‘Enough, then,’ he snarled, hitting the controls to raise the ramp. ‘Power the engines. Get us out of here.’

  Perturabo had destroyed the Keystone’s impregnability forever, but the defences subsequently installed by the Emperor’s Children remained formidable. Chain-linked cannons spat out from radial spans placed across the face of the docking levels, clogging local space with interlaced lines of las-fire, which joined the glowing trails of ship-hunting missiles.

  The V Legion had sent their void craft diving and angling through the hail of projectiles. The interceptors came in first, staggered waves of them raking gun-placements as they swooped and tilted. The pilots hugged the curving flanks of the Keystone’s armoured walls insanely tightly, screaming across adamantium plates while letting loose with their rotary launchers. Soon the outer shell was aflame, crackling out into the vacuum as gunnery magazines ignited and fuel-lines were kindled.

  After the softener runs came the heavy gunships, each one carrying a cargo of infantry. Thunderhawks, Stormbirds and Fire Raptors thrust through the defensive cordons, their bolters hammering and down-thrusters flaring. Many were destroyed, smashed apart by shells launched from the static positions, but dozens more got through, blasting their way under the shadow of the great ship-docks.

  Once past the portals, the Fire Raptors unlocked their own close-range armoury, and the enemy positions were momentarily lost behind rippling waves of neon-white. Thunderhawks powered through the whirling debris, sinking down across the colossal docking-plates to unload breacher squad
s. Stormbirds, with heavier armour and heavier payloads, pushed on further still, absorbing concentrated fire to reach their deployment points. Transporters set down behind the beachheads, disgorging assault tanks, troop carriers and mobile gun platforms.

  Bolstered by the building torrent of fixed ordnance, fast-attack squads of White Scars legionaries raced out from their embarkation points, charging through the juddering rain of defensive fire. They broke the first bulwark circles, storming gun-pits and pushing onwards, clearing room for more squads to move up and contribute to the onslaught. More heavy guns were swung down from the gaping holds of the hovering transporters, and the rain of artillery from deeper inside the void port was answered by punishing fire from the attackers. Every strike was fast, hard, relentless, coordinated – just as the Legion had always enjoyed, albeit now tempered by years in the crucible of grinding civil war.

  Docks Four and Five, the outermost tendrils of iron reaching out into the abyss, were swiftly taken, their berthing-zones overrun and strongpoints established. Dock Three was soon severely contested, though savage resistance from dug-in Emperor’s Children legionaries halted the advance. Fighting soon spread to the refit yards equipped for void-going behemoths, lighting up the towering grav-cranes and railheads. Immense flying gantries and lifter-coils were lit by the flash and flare of munitions, then obscured by the roiling palls of smoke coiling up through the docks’ atmosphere-bubble.

  As the Emperor’s Children deployed extra forces to Dock Five, opening up a second front along the right flank of the White Scars’ advance, the wild riders of the V Legion launched their planned second-wave assault – squads of grav-speeders and jetbikes, held in reserve during the initial impact and now let loose. The speeders shrieked out across the burning quays, streaking past advancing infantry and breaking deep into the maw of darkness beyond. More heavy transports braved the halo of anti-ship fire to reinforce the growing beachhead. Land Raiders were dropped from the caged hulls of Thunderhawk transporters, hitting the deck-plates heavily before trundling forwards, their lascannons spitting beams deep into the heart of the enemy lines. Sicaran battle tanks thundered to attack speed, rocking wildly as they smashed through the smoking ruins of static defences. Ever more attack speeders were dropped into position and shot off immediately, swerving and skidding through the oncoming barrage.