Know no fear. The Battle of Calth hh-19, Page 2

  Maybe Warmaster Horus is aware of this disparity, that even in his triumphant election, he has been outstripped by a brother who does not even want for the honour of Warmaster any more. Perhaps that is why Horus needs to exercise his authority and give orders to the XIII. Perhaps that is why he is conjoining them with the XVII, a Legion they have never been comfortable with.

  Or perhaps the new Warmaster is rather more creative than that, and sees this as a chance for Lorgar’s rabble to borrow a little gloss from Guilliman’s glory by association and example.

  Aeonid Thiel, Ultramarine, has said these thoughts out loud.

  They are not the reason he is marked for discipline and censure.

  [mark: -111.02.36]

  They are loading munitions crates at the docks on the south shore of the Boros River. Numinus City faces them across the wide grey water.

  The work is hard, but the men, Imperial Army, every one, are laughing. After the loading, a meal break, a last drink, then lifters to orbit.

  The crates are scuffed metal, like small coffins, full of local-pattern lasrifles, the Illuminator VI, a refined variant pressed out at Veridia Forge. The men hope to be using them within a fortnight.

  The wind blows in along the estuary, bringing scents of the sea and the coastal dredgers. The men are all from the Numinus 61st, regular infantry. Some are veterans of the Great Crusade, others are new recruits inducted for the emergency.

  Sergeant Hellock keeps the spirits up.

  ‘Will it be greenskins? Will it be the greenskins?’ the rookies keep asking. They have heard about greenskins. He assures them it will not.

  ‘It’s an exercise in cooperation,’ Hellock says. ‘It’s an operational show of force. This is Ultramar flexing its muscles. This is the Warmaster flexing his muscles.’

  Hellock is lying to them. He lights a lho-stick, and smokes it under the shade of a tail boom, the collar of his dark blue field tunic pulled open to let the sweat on his collarbones dry. Hellock is on good terms with his captain, and Hellock’s captain confides in him. Hellock’s captain has a friend in the Ultramarines 9th Company, part of the encouraged fraternisation. His captain’s transhuman friend says that the threat is not theoretical. He calls it a ‘likely excursion of the Ghaslakh xenohold’, which is a shit-stupid way of describing it. Bastard greens. Bastard orks. Bastard bastards, gathering at the sector edge, working up the courage to come and ransack Calth. Not frigging theoretical at all.

  That’s why you take the whole bastard XIII and the whole bastard XVII and all the Army units you can scare up, and you throw them at the Ghaslakh bastard xeno-bastard-hold, thank you so very much. You drive a bastard system-killing compliance force through their precious xenohold, and put them down dead before they put you down, and you kill their barbarian empire at the same time. Just kill it. Dead, gone, bye-bye, clap the dust off your hands, no more threat, theoretical or bastard otherwise.

  You take a compliance force the scale of which hasn’t been seen since Ullanor or the early days of the Great Crusade, two full Legions of the Emperor’s finest, and you piledrive it through the septic green heart and rancid green brain and green frigging spinal cord of the Ghaslakh xenohold, and you end them.

  This is how Sergeant Hellock sees it.

  Sergeant Hellock’s forename is Bowe. None of the men in his command know this, and only one or two who survive will learn it later when they read his name on the casualty lists.

  Bowe Hellock will be dead in two days’ time.

  It will not be an ork that kills him.

  [mark: -111.05.12]

  Sergeant Hellock has gone for a smoke. The men slow the pace. Their arms are aching.

  Bale Rane is the youngest of them. He is absolutely raw, a week out of accelerated muster. There’s been a vague promise he’ll get an hour to say goodbye to his bride of six weeks before he lifts that evening. He cannot bear the idea of not seeing her. He is beginning to suspect it was an empty promise.

  Neve’s on the other side of the river, waiting for him on a public wharf; waiting for him to wave from the ferry rail. He can barely stand the idea that she will be disappointed. She will wait there all night, in the hope that he’s only late. It will get dark. The refinery burn-pipes will glitter yellow reflections off the black river. She will be cold.

  The thought of this hurts his heart.

  ‘Pull your collar up,’ Krank tells him, clipping his ear. Krank is an older man, a veteran.

  ‘Work in the sun,’ he scolds, ‘it’ll burn you, boy. Cap on, collar up, even if you sweat. You don’t want skinburn. Trust me. Worse than a broken heart.’

  [mark: unspecified]

  The ‘mark’ of Calth means two things. First, it refers, as per XIII Legion combat record protocol, to the elapsed time count (in Terran hours [sidereal]) of the combat. All Ultramarines operations and actions of this period may be archivally accessed for study, and their elapsed time count mark used as a navigation guide. An instructor might refer a novitiate to ‘Orax mark: 12.16.10’, meaning the tenth second of the sixteenth minute of the twelfth hour of the Orax Compliance record. Usually, this count begins at either the issuing of the operation order, or the actual operational start, but at Calth it is timed from the moment Guilliman ordered return of fire. Everything before that, he says, wasn’t a battle: it was merely treachery.

  Secondly, the ‘mark’ of Calth refers to the solar radiation burns suffered by many of the combatants, principally the human (specifically non-transhuman) troops.

  The last of these veterans to die, many years later, still refuse graft repair and wear the mark proudly.

  3

  [mark: -109.08.22]

  Remus Ventanus, Captain of the 4th, has command of the Erud Province muster. It’s supposed to be an honour, but it doesn’t feel like it.

  It feels like a desk job. It feels like labour for a bureaucrat or an administrator. It feels as if the primarch is teaching him another valuable lesson about the responsibilities of transhumanity. Learn to take pride in the work of governance as well as war. To be a ruler as well as a leader.

  Remus Ventanus understands this. When the war is done, as it must eventually be done, when there are no more enemies to end and no more worlds to conquer, what will the transhumans who have built the Imperium do then?

  Retire?

  Pine away and die?

  Become an embarrassment? A gore-headed reminder of older, more visceral days when humans needed superhumans to forge an empire for them? War is acceptable when it is a necessary instrument of survival. When it is no longer needed, the very fact that it was ever a necessary instrument at all becomes unpalatable.

  ‘It is the great irony of the Legiones Astartes,’ Guilliman had told his captains and masters, just a week ago. ‘Engineered to kill to achieve a victory of peace that they can then be no part of.’

  ‘A conceptual failure?’ Gage had asked.

  ‘A necessary burden,’ Sydance suggested. ‘I build your temple, knowing that I will not worship in it.’

  Guilliman had shaken his head to both. ‘My father does not make mistakes of that magnitude,’ he had said. ‘Space Marines excel at warfare because they were designed to excel at everything. Each of you will become a leader, a ruler, the master of your world and, because there is no more fighting to be done, you will bend your transhuman talents to governance and culture.’

  Remus Ventanus knows that his primarch believes in this sincerely. He doubts the likes of Primarch Angron or Primarch Russ regard the prospect of a peaceful future with such optimism.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ asks Selaton, at his side.

  Remus glances at his sergeant.

  ‘Was I smiling?’

  ‘You were looking at the data-slate and smiling, sir. I was wondering what was so amusing about a manifest list of eighty superheavy armour pieces.’

  ‘Very little,’ Remus agrees.

  Beyond the observation port, mass-loader engines carry four-hundred-tonne tanks into
the bellies of bulk liftships.

  [mark: -108.56.13]

  Brother Braellen is young, and has not yet fought the greens. His captain has. In the sunlight of the ground camp in the Ourosene Hills, some impromptu training takes place while they wait for the signal to stow and board.

  ‘Ork, theoretical,’ says Captain Damocles.

  ‘Head or spine, mass-reactive,’ replies Braellen. ‘Or heart.’

  ‘Idiot,’ grumbles Sergeant Domitian. ‘Heart shot won’t stop one. Not guaranteed. Filthy things soak up damage, even boltguns.’

  ‘So, skull or spine,’ says Braellen, corrected.

  Damocles nods.

  ‘Ork, practical?’ he asks.

  ‘What do I have?’ asks Braellen.

  ‘Your bolter. A combat sword.’

  ‘Skull or spine,’ says Braellen, ‘or both or whatever works. Maximum trauma. If it comes to close combat, decapitation.’

  Damocles nods.

  ‘The wrinkle is, don’t let it ever get that close,’ says Domitian. ‘They’ve got strength in them. Shred your limbs off. Sometimes, the damned things keep going when their skulls are off or open. Nerve roots, or something. Keep them at bay, if you can – ranged weapons, bolter fire. Maximum trauma.’

  ‘Good advice,’ says Captain Damocles to his grizzled sergeant. He looks at the brothers in the circle. ‘And from a man who has fought greenskins six times more than I have. It is six, isn’t it, Dom?’

  ‘I think it’s seven, thanking you, sir,’ replies Domitian, ‘but I won’t grieve if you won’t.’

  Damocles smiles.

  ‘You have left out one caveat on the practical assessment, though,’ he says.

  ‘Have I, sir?’ asks Domitian, honestly surprised.

  ‘Anyone?’ asks the captain.

  Braellen raises his hand.

  ‘Round count,’ he says.

  Domitian laughs and tuts to himself. How could he have forgotten to cover that base?

  ‘For the benefit of the others, Brother Braellen?’ prompts Captain Damocles.

  ‘Round count,’ says Braellen. ‘Maximum trauma, maximum damage, but watch your load counter and try to balance damage delivery against munitions rationing.’

  ‘Because?’ asks Damocles.

  ‘Because, with orks,’ says Domitian, ‘there’s always a shit load of them.’

  Brother Androm has also not fought greenskins before. When the captain breaks the circle and sends them to duties, he speaks to Braellen.

  They have both recently rotated up from the reserve companies, ready to complete their novitiate period through service in the active line. Both are grateful and proud to have been given places in the 6th Company, to serve under Saur Damocles, and to etch – if only temporarily – the company’s white figure-of-eight serpent emblem onto the blue fields of their shoulder guards.

  [mark: -99.12.02]

  Oll has land on the estuary at Neride.

  The land is about twenty hectares of good black alluvial soil. The hectares are service-shares. Oll has service, and a yellowing record book at the bottom of a store-room drawer to prove it. Good years of service, marching behind the Emperor’s standard.

  Oll is Army.

  His service ended on Chrysophar, eighteen standard years past. Then, he was known as ‘Trooper Persson’. He got his papers, and his service ribbon, and a stamp on his record book, and service-shares, proportionate to years served. The Army always rounds down.

  Oll spent two years on a cattle-boat coming to Calth from Chrysophar. The posters and the handbills all called Ultramar ‘the New Empire’. The slogan seemed a little disloyal, but the point was made. The rich new cluster of worlds that great Guilliman had made compliant, and wrangled into a brawny frontier republic, had the look of a new empire about it. The posters were trying to appeal to the settlers and colonists streaming out towards the Rim on the coattails of the expeditionary fleets. Come to Ultramar and share our future. Build your new life on Calth. Settle on Octavia. New worlds, New destinies!

  If you claimed your service-shares on a rising world like Calth, the administration paid your passage. Oll came with the thousand people who would be his neighbours. By the time he reached Calth, he was known as ‘Oll’, and only those who saw the fading ink on his left forearm knew about his past in professional killing.

  The fusion plants of Neride generate the power that lights the lamps of Numinus City and Kalkas Fortalice. The plants pump river water to wash the smudge-carbon off their clean-stroke turbines, and thus warm the estuary with a rich black swill that makes the river valley one of the most fertile places on the planet. It’s good land. There’s always a stink of beets and cabbage in the humid air.

  Oll has no wife, and knows only toil. He grows swathes of bright flowers to decorate the tables and vases and buttonholes of the Numinus City gentry, and then, on the season turn, he cycles a second crop of swartgrass for the sacking industry. Both crops require seasonal labour forces. Oll employs the young men and women of neighbouring families: the women to cut and pack the flowers, the men to harvest and roll the swartgrass. He keeps them all in line with an ex-Army loader servitor called Graft. Graft cannot be conditioned not to call him ‘Trooper Persson’.

  Oll wears a Catheric symbol around his neck on a thin chain, the gift of a wife he had barely got to know before she died and was replaced by Army life. The symbol, and his faith, are two of the reasons he came to Ultramar. It is, he feels, easier to believe out here in the Ultima Segmentum.

  It’s supposed to be, anyway.

  Some of his neighbours, who have been his neighbours these eighteen years and whose children he employs, laugh at his faith. They call him ‘pious’.

  Others attend the little chapel on the edge of the fields with him.

  It’s swartgrass season, and the men and boys are in the fields. Two weeks of hard work to go.

  There are a lot of ships in the top of the sky today. Troop ships. Munitions ferries. Oll squints into the sun as they pass over. He recognises them. Farmer, colonist, believer, whatever he is, he’s still Army underneath it all.

  He recognises them.

  He feels an old feeling, and it reminds him of the lasrifle hanging over his fireplace.

  [mark: -68.56.14]

  At Barrtor, east of the Boros River, 111th and 112th Companies of the Ultramarines are stationed in pre-fab cities in the forest hem. At the word from Vared, Master of the 11th Chapter, they will mount their Land Raiders, Rhinos and long-body Rhino Advancers, and advance to Numinus Port for embarkation.

  Ekritus has just taken the captaincy of the 111th from Briende, who fell on Emex. It was a hard loss for the company. Ekritus is a fine commander in the making. He wants a good fight, a fight that will hammer the 111th back into shape and show them he’s a worthy replacement for the beloved Briende.

  ‘I’ve never seen a man so eager to make shift,’ says Phrastorex, Captain of the 112th. ‘Have you, Sergeant Anchise?’

  ‘No, sir,’ says Anchise.

  They’ve come to join Ekritus on the embankment below the trees. It forms a natural viewing platform. They can see the floodplain, the encampments of Word Bearers companies who made planetfall the night before, the tent cities of the Army, and the fields of Titans. The war-engines are powered-down, dormant, standing in groves like giant metal trees. A column of armour and towed artillery pieces is grumbling down the highway below. Interceptors flash by on a low pass. There is a blue haze.

  Ekritus grins at them. Phrastorex is a veteran, an old soul. Ekritus understands that Vared has pushed Phrastorex into a mentoring role during the transition. A company is a considerable entity: you do not take on its command lightly.

  ‘I know one should not be in haste to greet war,’ Ekritus says. ‘I know, I know. I have read my Machulius and my Antaxus, my Von Klowswitts–’

  ‘And your Guilliman, I hope,’ says Phrastorex.

  ‘I’ve heard of him, certainly,’ says Ekritus. They laugh. Even Anchise, at att
ention, has to cover a grin.

  ‘I need to close the men on a target. A practical threat, not a theoretical one. There’s only so many rousing speeches I can give before they need me to simply lead by example.’

  Phrastorex sighs.

  ‘I commiserate. I remember when I accepted the commander’s stave after Nectus passed. I just needed that first match to blood the men. Hell, I needed it. I needed them to bond with me against an enemy, not bond against me as an outsider.’

  Ekritus nods.

  ‘Is that right, sergeant?’

  Anchise hesitates.

  ‘Perfectly correct, sir. The theory is sound. The focus of battle makes men forget other issues. It is an excellent way to bind them to a new commander. Gives them an experience they have shared. Of course, in the specific case of Captain Phrastorex, he’s never been able to bond with us or prove his worth.’

  All three of them laugh out loud.

  ‘I might have wished for something more streamlined,’ says Ekritus. ‘The scale of this mobilisation is ridiculous. The logistics alone are slowing everything down.’

  ‘They say we’ll be away by tonight,’ says Phrastorex. ‘Tomorrow at the latest. Then what? Two weeks’ ship time, and you’ll be up to your eyes in ork blood.’

  ‘It can’t happen soon enough,’ says Ekritus, ‘because no damn thing is ever going to happen here.’

  [mark: -61.20.31]

  If you start with many and end with a single victory, then the cost in between is acceptable.

  Guilliman reads back what he has written. The tactical sentiment is not original to him: it was told to him by a T’Vanti wartriber. He has… polished it.

  He’s not even sure if he believes it, but all military concepts and aphorisms are worth recording, if only to understand how an enemy’s mind works.

  The wartribes believed it. They were honourable allies, able fighters. Low tech, of course, nothing compared to his Legion. The T’Vanti had agreed to serve as auxiliaries. It had been a diplomatic move on Guilliman’s part. If he allowed the locals to share in the victory, then they might also take responsibility for maintaining the compliance of their world. But the orks moved mercurially that day; some unpredicted pulse of contrariness fluttered through their mass. They turned west, against all sense. Guilliman’s force was delayed by a day. The wartribes went ahead without them, and took the hill at Kunduki, decapitating – literally – the greenskin command.