‘None shall depart!’ he roared. ‘I go first! None shall take skulls on the Throneworld’s soil before I!’
Khârn ran in his genefather’s footsteps. Where the daemon primarch trod, the metal smoked. Heat as much as anger radiated from Angron. Mortals ran from him. Those that did not fell convulsing, bleeding from their eyes, or else attacked one another in awful outbursts of violence.
‘Khârn, I have reports of a demi-company attempting to breach hangar nineteen, not far from your position.’
‘Hnnnh,’ Khârn swallowed bloody spittle. ‘We are nearly there, Lotara,’ he said. ‘Angron knows.’ Speaking with the shipmistress calmed his fury a little, but not much. He struggled to concentrate.
’That is not good.’
‘I… I… hnnnh, I would agree,’ Khârn finally managed.
‘You will not land before me!’ Angron roared, and sprinted ahead. ‘I will be first!’
‘I must go.’ Khârn swore, and ran after him. Angron pulled ahead easily. His sword was ready and trailing black vapours.
Khârn caught up as the primarch was slaughtering his way through a hundred World Eaters. The fools had been throwing themselves against the hangar doors, despite all of them being sealed at Khârn’s order. The heavy portals were scarred with melta burns. The disobedient company had made little headway before their father arrived to punish their presumption.
Angron’s lessons came at the edge of his sword, and all were fatal.
‘You dare? You dare!’ Angron roared. He cut one of his sons in half from helm to crotch. The sword wailed as it swung, blood boiling from its edges. Always huge, Angron had grown to immense stature since his change, dwarfing his sons. He caught one up in his left hand, his fingers easily grasping the Space Marine’s chest, and slammed him repeatedly into a wall. Armoured fingers prised at Angron’s grip, but nothing the World Eater did could free him.
‘I will be first upon Terra!’ roared Angron. ‘You are not worthy! It is my honour! Khorne demands it! The Blood God decrees it! You shall burn in lakes of fire for your temerity!’
Several hacked at the primarch’s limbs. The blows his brass armour did not turn aside sunk only a little way into his daemonic flesh. Sprays of scalding ichor hissed over the primarch’s assailants, blinding those without helmets. His skin rippled around the wounds, closing them quickly. Angron ignored those who attacked him, and continued to pound the warrior in his fist against the wall.
‘Traitor!’ roared Angron. ‘Usurper!’
The ceramite cracked, followed by the warrior’s ribs. Blood gushed from rupturing flesh. The primarch cast his dead son aside, and turned his blade upon the others.
Angron would not rest until everyone in the corridor was dead. Khârn tried to think of how to calm his primarch, to bring his rage to manageable levels, but the answer eluded him. His own reason was drowning in a tide of blood. The Butcher’s Nails pounded into his skull. The smell of spilt vitae excited his senses. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva, suddenly conscious of a flood of it streaming down his chin. Before he lost himself entirely, he reopened communications with Lotara.
‘Seal decks eighty-four through ninety, portside of the spinal way. Every entrance.’ He could barely speak. His vision swam. He wanted to fight. He needed to kill. With heroic effort he growled out his orders. ‘Order this deck cleared. Dispatch suppression teams to all other hangars, ship-wide. Lock them all down. Prime remote weapons to kill on sight. No one leaves this ship. Angron will slaughter us all if anyone tries. Seal all portals on this deck except forwards gate nine. Open all doors leading to the lower decks beyond. If Angron wants to keep fighting, he can do it among the thralls.’
‘Confirmed. No one runs from the Conqueror,’ Lotara said. ‘What about you? Khârn?’
Khârn could no longer hear. Words belonging to something else forced themselves out of his mouth.
‘Blood for the Blood God!’ he roared, and joined battle at his father’s side.
Ark Mechanicum Pent-Ark, Terran near orbit, 14th of Tertius
Clain Pent’s Ark Mechanicum took its first orbital breach with good graces. Spherical and of a mass similar to a large asteroid, it was not designed for such a landing, but it was not the first void-ship to break Terra’s atmospheric envelope during the siege, and it would not be the last.
Pent’s lair was situated right at the centre of the vessel, in an armoured sub-sphere that could be ejected in the event of the ark’s destruction. It was a ship within a ship, equipped with its own void shields, drives and external weapons systems. Throughout the descent, Pent’s metaphorical hand hovered over the activation codes in the ship’s infosphere.
<Great magos,> said Acolyte Penta-7, who hunched low over the auspex scopes cramming the forwards portion of the command dome. <The Palace Androcline Battery has acquired us as a primary target. Defence lasers cycling to fire.>
<Blind their augurs,> Pent blurted. He used direct voxwave communication, always. The body he wore had a mouth, but it was not his own. Pent’s preferred disciplines were those of biomancy and cybertheurgy. He kept a stable of bodies of his own design to wear. He’d chosen his current one for its combat efficacy. It was large, heavily muscled, being vat-grown from abhuman gene stock, and heavily modified with bionics. Not that he intended to do any fighting; he wore it for appearance’s sake.
Outwardly, he showed no sign of fear. Within his suit of flesh, it was a different story. Pent was little more than a brain in a jar hidden in the armoured chest cavity of his host. He had no face of his own to display worry or similar emotions, while that of his temporary body was immobile. Pent found joy in manipulating biological matter, but he saw no need for the humanity in them; the biological was merely another form of machine. The face had been cured upon the skull and painted brightly so that it looked like a carnival figure, and in whose permanently open mouth Pent’s glowing sensor array hid. But a magos can betray himself in other ways than an unguarded scowl or frown, and Pent kept a tight rein on his external links in case an involuntarily expelled data packet revealed his dismay.
<Maintain void shields at maximum intensity. Increase displacement index to highest value.> The command, delivered as electric pulses, was transmitted instantaneously via augmitter wired into his host’s vestigial brainstem. The ship shook when the order was executed. Air is remarkably hard and hot when encountered from the void, and the shields treated it as they would any other threat, shunting it partially into the warp.
The violence of the reaction was alarming. The ship dropped by sudden degrees as the voids annihilated huge pockets of atmosphere, and accelerated into the lacuna, then decelerated abruptly when air rushed back in.
An outside observer would have seen Pent in his grotesque body and his eight servants, all augmented to more or less horrific degrees, working quietly but for a gentle bleeping passing between them. The peacefulness of the data exchange belied the ferocious argument it conveyed.
<I respectfully demand that the void opacity matrix be reduced to allow free passage of air,> spoke Acolyte Penta-1.
<The terse nature of your request denies protocols of respectful behaviour,> rejoined Acolyte Penta-2.
<Penta-1, regardless of respectfulness and appropriateness of irony in delivery of honorific, has valid concerns,> said Penta-5, who was female once, but had transformed herself into a waving shock of metal tentacles arranged around a metal box. <Current accelerative/decelerative forces risk terminal hull compromise.>
The shi
p lurched to the side. External gravity was taking hold, throwing the grav-plating’s effects out of true. Miniature gravitic vortices tugged at the adepts’ black robes.
<Hold course and current void parameters,> commanded Clain Pent. <This I so command. Atmospheric void shock is preferable to atomisation by ground battery fire.>
Attacks from the ground were coming in hard. Machines sang their hosannas of alarm as the first of the void generators burnt out. Immediately, servitors detached themselves from deep-set alcoves and clomped off the bridge to enact repairs. Pent reviewed the damage in his internal data-feeds. They were wasting their time.
<Quaternary void generator burn out,> buzzed Acolyte Penta-3. <Time to next ground volley, zero point nine seconds. Primary, secondary, quintenary void generators holding. Tertiary nearing collapse.>
By the time Penta-3 had finished, the next hit slammed home.
<Blind their augurs!> demanded Pent. Fear suppressant swirled into the fluids of his cerebrarium, dulling the panic.
<Negatory,> responded Acolyte Penta-7. <Augur clouding ineffective. Palace noospheric security network impenetrable. Enemy cogitation reaction time superior to Pent-Ark data illusion capability.>
Pent’s brain twitched. Well-protected noospheres were the bane of the Mechanicum’s war. He cursed the day Koriel Zeth had conceived them. Though the one at Calth had been easily corrupted, the slaves of the Emperor had learned quickly. When any lesser system could be subverted, a noosphere on guard was nigh impossible to breach.
Like Dorn’s walls.
He was reminded there would be no lesser systems in the battle below, whether in the warp, the materium or the electronic ether world of machines. They were assailing the Palace of the Emperor Himself.
Another thrill of fear, more deeply felt this time, shook his amygdala. He really ought to have it removed.
<Bring us down more quickly!>
<Confirmation,> said Penta-4. Thrusters fired on the upper surface of the ark, pushing it faster into Terra’s churning atmosphere.
There were no windows on the Pent-Ark. They were weaknesses. Pent was in full agreement with the primarch Perturabo on that. Views of the exterior were displayed via hololithic representation and pure-data displays comprised of abstract symbols. Less dramatic to view, perhaps, but so much more efficient.
<A second battery has locked on to your vessel, oh great eminence,> Penta-7 reported.
So unfair, thought Pent. The ark ships of the other seven disciples were also coming down, and all of them were screened by fleet assault. Why was he being singled out? He would petition the lords of the warp for more favourable luck after they landed.
<Predicted intersection of plasmic streams in four, three, two, one…>
If they landed.
The Pent-Ark shook, flinging the adepts about in their restraints. The reactors warbled at having to increase their power output, but the ship stabilised.
<Damage minimal,> Penta-7 reported.
<Shields holding,> Penta-3 added.
<Incoming wideband datapulse,> Penta-2 code-blurted. <Infiltration attempt by Throne-slaved Mechanicum. Releasing data-jinn. Thwarting.> A pause of several microseconds had Clain Pent fearing the worst. He’d always had an active imagination. During battle that was a curse.
<Thwarted,> Penta-2 finally reported. <Ongoing interference from external Throne-slave sources. Cogitation efficiency compromise at thirteen per cent. Holding.>
<The ship nears the landing zone. Preparing for impact reduction.>
‘Show me Terra. I wish to see our target.’ This time Clain Pent spoke aloud in the standard Gothic, his rasping voice emanating from a voxmitter stapled to his host’s flesh. An indulgence, but it seemed appropriate to the occasion.
<Compliance,> Penta-2 responded.
The middle of the room vanished, replaced by a view of the ground. The last streamers of ash cloud smothering Terra’s skies wriggled past the external augurs, giving Pent a view of his destination. He was looking directly down, but the image was presented vertically, so that it appeared, from Pent’s point of view, as if he were running towards it. Back when he had such things as a vestibular system, effects like that had made him feel mightily nauseous. Thankfully, such weaknesses were far behind him.
As a biologian, Pent was apt to draw comparisons with fauna. From above, the Palace resembled a chelonian beast. He saw the inner precincts, isolated from the main body of the city behind the edifice of the Lion’s Gate, as a head extended on a neck. Being roughly circular and several times larger than the Sanctum Imperialis, the other Palace districts resembled the great shield of a turtle’s shell.
The impression was fleeting. The Pent-Ark was coming down to the east, near the Helios Gate in the Daylight Wall, and on a parallel with the Eternity Wall space port. As the ship neared the ground, perspective shifted, and Pent’s view of the Palace as a whole was lost.
Thousands of fires burned on a cratered plain fronting the eastern walls. Defensive lines wriggled their way across the terrain, like the marbling of fat in meat. Flights of attack ships from both sides swarmed thickly over the battlefield.
<There, the Daylight Wall,> he said, his thoughts highlighting the fortification on the hololith. Thread-thin from that altitude, it was rapidly thickening into significance.
Idle curiosity led him to superimpose old orbital views over the scene – first, the old Himalazian mountains and valleys, then over that the artificial plain the Emperor had levelled around His sprawling creation. After millions of years of stasis, the area had gone from the natural repetition of geoforms to rigidly imposed order to the void-ship graveyard in less than a few centuries. The plains were shattered. The corpses of fallen vessels were scattered everywhere, and the tides of armies moving over the land stained it black.
Lower they went. The augurs flashed with every hit upon the shields. His acolytes burbled their status reports, but Pent paid them little attention. Instead his view was fixed upon the actions of the Palace aegis. It shimmered under the bombardment, revealing its complex, cellular structure. Far superior to standard void shielding, it was one of a kind. If Pent still had a digestive tract to call his own, his mouth would have been salivating at the prospect of learning its secrets.
But first the aegis had to fall. He was proud to be playing a part in that.
The wall grew larger and larger under the ship’s keel, perturbing Pent with its scale. Then that moved off to the left as they came down. The Katabatic Plains filled the holo side to side. The sights of individual skirmishes became clear, rapid, chaotic exchanges of las light slashing across blackened ground, and the flash of explosions like flowers on bare earth.
More impacts were troubling the ship now as smaller weapons drew a bead on it. The void shield arrays chimed constantly. Large hits shuddered the shielding still, taking down two more of the Pent-Ark’s layered protective fields.
<Landing cycles initiated,> intoned Penta-4. A great shaking took the craft. Pent saw individual men on the ground briefly, before the vibration blurred focus away from the augurs, reducing the ventral view to a brown smear.
Bringing down a ship the size of the Pent-Ark was no small feat, and deleterious to its physical condition. It would likely never ply the void again once it set down, but the sacrifice of his personal ship was nothing compared to what Clain Pent would gain should the Warmaster be victorious.
Screaming alarms forewarned of imminent arrival on Terra’s soil. Thrusters roared and the bombardment intensified, taxing the vessel’s shielding hard.
Clain Pent gritted the memory of teeth.
<Touchdown complete,> Penta-4 announced, when the screaming of the thrusters seemed about to break open the world.
The ship settled. The engines cut out. The thunder of battle reasserted itself as the dominant noise.
Pent drew himself up. Now was his moment.
<Prime all automata. Redirect shield focus. Divert reactor power to shield generators.>
His acolytes worked fast, both physically and within the sacred world of the machines. The void shields were realigned, clamping hard onto the earth, and extending outwards to cover an area around the ship emanating two hundred metres out from its hull.
<Prepare external portals.>
<Automata awoken,> reported Penta-2.
<Tech thralls active,> added Penta-1.
<Machine-spirits awakened,> said Penta-5.
<External portals primed for opening,> said Penta-3.
Pent’s grotesque body leaned forwards, huge hands gripping the railing around his command pulpit.
<Execute.>
The sides of the Pent-Ark opened like petals. Ramps slid out from housings. Armoured doors opened.
The servants of the Order of Nul marched out.
At seven other equidistant points around the Palace, the same procedure was undertaken by the rest of the disciples of Sota-Nul. Their ark ships put out a stream of cyborgs and semi-autonomous mechanisms, forbidden machine intelligences and things motivated by essences of darker sorts. They began working as soon as they walked off the ships, ignoring the weapons fire that punctured the void shields of their transports and shot them down, neat and as orderly as ants. Though each device had a governing mind of its own, be it human, machine or otherwise, all were slaved to the will of the Machine-God, as enacted by the eight. Under the disciples’ direction they began the next phase of the Warmaster’s plan.
Such variety there was among these creations. Giant, armoured earth-moving machines came out first, beginning to heap up high banks of stone extending from the sides of the grounded arks as soon as they emerged. Teams of noo-linked servitors armed with melta-cutters followed behind, burning tunnels into the stone to house command centres, and carving trench networks behind the banks. Machines and prefabricated sections of buildings were wheeled out, their erection commencing before the fusion-smoothed ground had cooled. Among them went heavily armoured adepts and followers of the myrmidon creed, who strode the battlefield with arrogant disdain for the fury the enemy threw at them.