Horus Rising (3 page)

In a broad, sloping tunnel of etched silver, Loken caught up with elements of Third Squad. Of all the units in his company, Third Squad – Locasta Tactical Squad – was his favourite and his favoured. Its commander, Brother-sergeant Nero Vipus, was his oldest and truest friend.

‘How’s your humour, captain?’ Vipus asked. His pearl-white plate was smudged with soot and streaked with blood.

‘Phlegmatic, Nero. You?’

‘Choleric. Red-raged, in fact. I’ve just lost a man, and two more of mine are injured. There’s something covering the junction ahead. Something heavy. Rate of fire like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘Tried fragging it?’

‘Two or three grenades. No effect. And there’s nothing to see. Garvi, we’ve all heard about these so-called Invisibles. The ones that butchered Sejanus. I was wondering—’

‘Leave the wondering to me,’ Loken said. ‘Who’s down?’

Vipus shrugged. He was a little taller than Loken, and his shrug made the heavy ribbing and plates of his armour clunk together. ‘Zakias.’

‘Zakias? No…’

‘Torn into shreds before my very eyes. Oh, I feel the hand of the ship on me, Garvi.’

The hand of the ship. An old saying. The commander’s flagship was called the
Vengeful Spirit,
and in times of duress or loss, the Wolves liked to draw upon all that implied as a charm, a totem of retribution.

‘In Zakias’s name,’ Vipus growled, ‘I’ll find this bastard Invisible and—’

‘Sooth your choler, brother. I’ve no use for it,’ Loken said. ‘See to your wounded while I take a look.’

Vipus nodded and redirected his men. Loken pushed up past them to the disputed junction.

It was a vault-roofed crossways where four hallways met. The area read cold and still to his imaging. Fading smoke wisped up into the rafters. The ouslite floor had been chewed and peppered with thousands of impact craters. Brother Zakias, his body as yet unretrieved, lay in pieces at the centre of the crossway, a steaming pile of shattered white plasteel and bloody meat.

Vipus had been right. There was no sign of an enemy present. No heat-trace, not even a flicker of movement. But studying the area, Loken saw a heap of empty shell cases, glittering brass, that had spilled out from behind a bulkhead across from him. Was that where the killer was hiding?

Loken bent down and picked up a chunk of fallen plasterwork. He lobbed it into the open. There was a click, and then a hammering deluge of autofire raked across the junction. It lasted five seconds, and in that time over a thousand rounds were expended. Loken saw the fuming shell cases spitting out from behind the bulkhead as they were ejected.

The firing stopped. Fycelene vapour fogged the junction. The gunfire had scored a mottled gouge across the stone floor, pummelling Zakias’s corpse in the process. Spots of blood and scraps of tissue had been spattered out.

Loken waited. He heard a whine and the metallic clunk of an autoloader system. He read weapon heat, fading, but no body warmth.

‘Won a medal yet?’ Vipus asked, approaching.

‘It’s just an automatic sentry gun,’ Loken replied.

‘Well, that’s a small relief at least’ Vipus said. ‘After the grenades we’ve pitched in that direction, I was beginning to wonder if these vaunted Invisibles might be “Invulnerables” too. I’ll call up Devastator support to—’

‘Just give me a light flare,’ Loken said.

Vipus stripped one off his leg plate and handed it to his captain. Loken ignited it with a twist of his hand, and threw it down the hallway opposite. It bounced, fizzling, glaring white hot, past the hidden killer.

There was a grind of servos. The implacable gunfire began to roar down the corridor at the flare, kicking it and bouncing it, ripping into the floor.

‘Garvi—’ Vipus began.

Loken was running. He crossed the junction, thumped his back against the bulkhead. The gun was still blazing. He wheeled round the bulkhead and saw the sentry gun, built into an alcove. A squat machine, set on four pad feet and heavily plated, it had turned its short, fat, pumping cannons away from him to fire on the distant, flickering flare.

Loken reached over and tore out a handful of its servo flexes. The guns stuttered and died.

‘We’re clear!’ Loken called out. Locasta moved up.

‘That’s generally called showing off,’ Vipus remarked.

Loken led Locasta up the corridor, and they entered a fine state apartment. Other apartment chambers, similarly regal, beckoned beyond. It was oddly still and quiet.

‘Which way now?’ Vipus asked.

‘We go find this “Emperor”,’ Loken said.

Vipus snorted. ‘Just like that?’

‘The first captain bet me I couldn’t reach him first.’

‘The first captain, eh? Since when was Garviel Loken on pally terms with him?’

‘Since Tenth breached the palace ahead of First. Don’t worry, Nero, I’ll remember you little people when I’m famous.’

Nero Vipus laughed, the sound snuffling out of his helmet mask like the cough of a consumptive bull.

What happened next didn’t make either of them laugh at all.

TWO

Meeting the Invisibles

At the foot of a Golden Throne

Lupercal

‘C
APTAIN
L
OKEN
?’ H
E
looked up from his work. ‘That’s me.’ ‘Forgive me for interrupting,’ she said. ‘You’re busy.’ Loken set aside the segment of armour he had been polishing and rose to his feet. He was almost a metre taller than her, and naked but for a loin cloth. She sighed inwardly at the splendour of his physique. The knotted muscles, the old ridge-scars. He was handsome too, this one, fair hair almost silver, cut short, his pale skin slightly freckled, his eyes grey like rain. What a waste, she thought.

Though there was no disguising his inhumanity, especially in this bared form. Apart from the sheer mass of him, there was the overgrown gigantism of the face, that particular characteristic of the Astartes, almost equine, plus the hard, taut shell of his ribless torso, like stretched canvas.

‘I don’t know who you are,’ he said, dropping a nub of polishing fibre into a little pot, and wiping his fingers.

She held out her hand. ‘Mersadie Oliton, official remembrancer,’ she said. He looked at her tiny hand and then shook it, making it seem even more tiny in comparison with his own giant fist.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, laughing, ‘I keep forgetting you don’t do that out here. Shaking hands, I mean. Such a parochial, Terran custom.’

‘I don’t mind it. Have you come from Terra?’

‘I left there a year ago. Despatched to the crusade by permit of the Council.’

‘You’re a remembrancer?’

‘You know what that means?’

‘I’m not stupid,’ Loken said.

‘Of course not,’ she said, hurriedly. ‘I meant no offence.’

‘None taken.’ He eyed her. Small and frail, though possibly beautiful. Loken had very little experience of women. Perhaps they were all frail and beautiful. He knew enough to know that few were as black as her. Her skin was like burnished coal. He wondered if it were some kind of dye.

He wondered too about her skull. Her head was bald, but not shaved. It seemed polished and smooth as if it had never known hair. The cranium was enhanced somehow, extending back in a streamlined sweep that formed a broad ovoid behind her nape. It was like she had been crowned, as if her simple humanity had been made more regal.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

‘I understand you have a story, a particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

‘Which story?’

‘Horus killing the Emperor.’

He stiffened. He didn’t like it when non-Astartes humans called the Warmaster by his true name.

‘That happened months ago,’ he said dismissively. ‘I’m sure I won’t remember the details particularly well.’

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I have it on good authority you can be persuaded to tell the tale quite expertly. I’ve been told it’s very popular amongst your battle-brothers.’

Loken frowned. Annoyingly, the woman was correct. Since the taking of the High City, he’d been required – forced would not be too strong a word – to retell his first-hand account of the events in the palace tower on dozens of occasions. He presumed it was because of Sejanus’s death. The Luna Wolves needed catharsis. They needed to hear how Sejanus had been so singularly avenged.

‘Someone put you up to this, Mistress Oliton?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘Captain Torgaddon, actually.’

Loken nodded. It was usually him. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I understand the general situation, for I have heard it from others, but I’d love to have your personal observations. What was it like? When you got inside the palace itself, what did you find?’

Loken sighed, and looked round at the rack where his power armour was displayed. He’d only just started cleaning it. His private arming chamber was a small, shadowy vault adjoining the off-limits embarkation deck, the metal walls lacquered pale green. A cluster of glow-globes lit the room, and an Imperial eagle had been stencilled on one wall plate, beneath which copies of Loken’s various oaths of moment had been pinned. The close air smelled of oils and lapping powder. It was a tranquil, introspective place, and she had invaded that tranquillity.

Becoming aware of her trespass, she suggested, ‘I could come back later, at a better time.’

‘No, now’s fine.’ He sat back down on the metal stool where he had been perching when she’d entered. ‘Let me see… When we got inside the palace, what we found was the Invisibles.’

‘Why were they called that?’ she asked. ‘Because we couldn’t see them,’ he replied.

T
HE
I
NVISIBLES WERE
waiting for them, and they well deserved their sobriquet.

Just ten paces into the splendid apartments, the first brother died. There was an odd, hard bang, so hard it was painful to feel and hear, and Brother Edrius fell to his knees, then folded onto his side. He had been struck in the face by some form of energy weapon. The white plasteel/ceramite alloy of his visor and breastplate had actually deformed into a rippled crater, like heated wax that had flowed and then set again. A second bang, a quick concussive vibration of air, obliterated an ornamental table beside Nero Vipus. A third bang dropped Brother Muriad, his left leg shattered and snapped off like a reed stalk.

The science adepts of the false Imperium had mastered and harnessed some rare and wonderful form of field technology, and armed their elite guard with it. They cloaked their bodies with a passive application, twisting light to render themselves invisible. And they were able to project it in a merciless, active form that struck with mutilating force.

Despite the fact that they had been advancing combat-ready and wary, Loken and the others were taken completely off guard. The Invisibles were even hidden to their visor arrays. Several had simply been standing in the chamber, waiting to strike.

Loken began to fire, and Vipus’s men did likewise. Raking the area ahead of him, splintering furniture, Loken hit something. He saw pink mist kiss the air, and something fell down with enough force to overturn a chair. Vipus scored a hit too, but not before Brother Tarregus had been struck with such power that his head was punched clean off his shoulders.

The cloak technology evidently hid its users best if he remained still. As they moved, they became semi-visible, heat-haze suggestions of men surging to attack. Loken adapted quickly, firing at each blemish of air. He adjusted his visor gain to full contrast, almost black and white, and saw them better: hard outlines against the fuzzy background. He killed three more. In death, several lost their cloaks. Loken saw the Invisibles revealed as bloody corpses. Their armour was silver, ornately composed and machined with a remarkable detail of patterning and symbols. Tall, swathed in mantles of red silk, the Invisibles reminded Loken of the mighty Custodian Guard that warded the Imperial Palace on Terra. This was the bodyguard corps which had executed Sejanus and his glory squad at a mere nod from their master.

Nero Vipus was raging, offended by the cost to his squad. The hand of the ship was truly upon him.

He led the way, cutting a path into a towering room beyond the scene of the ambush. His fury gave Locasta the opening it needed, but it cost him his right hand, crushed by an Invisible’s blast. Loken felt choler too. Like Nero, the men of Locasta were his friends. Rituals of mourning awaited him. Even in the darkness of Ullanor, victory had not been so dearly bought.

Charging past Vipus, who was down on his knees, groaning in pain as he tried to pluck the mangled gauntlet off his ruined hand, Loken entered a side chamber, shooting at the air blemishes that attempted to block him. A jolt of force tore his bolter from his hands, so he reached over his hip and drew his chainsword from its scabbard. It whined as it kicked into life. He hacked at the faint outlines jostling around him and felt the toothed blade meet resistance. There was a shrill scream. Gore drizzled out of nowhere and plastered the chamber walls and the front of Loken’s suit.

‘Lupercal!’ he grunted, and put the full force of both arms behind his strokes. Servos and mimetic polymers, layered between his skin and his suit’s outer plating to form the musculature of his power armour, bunched and flexed. He landed a trio of two-handed blows. More blood showered into view. There was a warbled shriek as loops of pink, wet viscera suddenly became visible. A moment later, the field screening the soldier flickered and failed, and revealed his disembowelled form, stumbling away down the length of the chamber, trying to hold his guts in with both hands.

Invisible force stabbed at Loken again, scrunching the edge of his left shoulder guard and almost knocking him off his feet. He rounded and swung the chainsword. The blade struck something, and shards of metal flew out. The shape of a human figure, just out of joint with the space it occupied, as if it had been cut out of the air and nudged slightly to the left, suddenly filled in. One of the Invisibles, his charged field sparking and crackling around him as it died, became visible and swung his long, bladed lance at Loken.