Текст книги "Age of Darkness"

Автор книги: Кристиан Данн

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THE HORUS HERESY

AGE OF DARKNESS

Edited by Christian Dunn

original release by kilkrazy

edited by fractalnoise

v1.1 (2012.01)

The Horus Heresy

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

CONTENTS

AGE OF DARKNESS

The Horus Heresy

CONTENTS

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

by Graham McNeill

LIAR’S DUE

by James Swallow

FORGOTTEN SONS

by Nick Kyme

THE LAST REMEMBRANCER

by John French

REBIRTH

by Chris Wraight

THE FACE OF TREACHERY

by Gav Thorpe

LITTLE HORUS

by Dan Abnett

THE IRON WITHIN

by Rob Sanders

SAVAGE WEAPONS

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Graham McNeill

HE WANTED TO weep, but the last two years had turned his heart to stone. Too much had been asked of him, too much had been lost, and he had no more sorrow left. Brothers forsaken, a world of Ultramar burned and the golden dream of galactic unity reduced to ashes. Such a singular moment in history should be mourned. It demanded tears, a rending of clothes, a tearing of hair, or, at the very least, an outburst of primal rage.

He indulged none of these cathartic releases.

If he allowed tears of sorrow to fall, they might never stop.

The interior of the Arcanium was a twenty metre square cube with an arched doorway in each wall, softly lit by thick candles held aloft in iron sconces worked in the form of eagles and lions rampant. The floor was of a dark slate, and its walls were formed from bare timbers, polished and worked smooth by a plane wielded by his own hands. He remembered finding refuge here many years ago, when the incessant bickering between the senators of Macragge had become too unbearable for a boy who thrived on action and excitement.

That boy was gone now, drowned in the blood of Konor’s murder and the greater tide of slaughter he had unleashed in the wake of that treachery. Once he had called it justice, but the passage of time gave him the perspective to recognise the truth of his motivation. Revenge was never a worthy reason to send men to war, and he had resolved to never again fall prey to its seductions. Having identified the flaw, he had taken steps to purge himself of that weakness, and the execution of Gallan had been the last time emotion guided his hand.

He returned his attention to the book before him, hearing the bustle of the fortress beyond the lovingly crafted walls of his private sanctum. Once this place had been remote from any petitioners, built hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, but its isolation was now a thing of the past. Acres of marbled walls, glittering geodesic domes, soaring towers and perfectly proportioned structures surrounded it. An entire library had been raised up around the chamber, and though the architects and mathematicians had begged him to consider the harmonious geometry of the golden mean inherent within their plans, he had refused to allow the Arcanium to be demolished.

He wanted to smile, recognising that perhaps Gallan’s execution hadn’t quite been the last time emotion had played a part in his decision-making process after all. But the smile refused to come, and in the face of all that occupied his thoughts now, his determination to hang on to this fragment of his youth seemed a wilfully petty thing.

Seated at a heavy table of dark wood that filled the centre of the chamber, he read the words he had just written in the enormous tome before him. Its spine was a metre long and thick enough to enclose a book fully thirty centimetres deep. Brilliant gold leaf edged the warm leather binding, and the pages were pale vellum that still carried the scent of the beast from which it had been cut. Tightly wound script filled the leftmost page, each letter precisely formed and arranged in perfectly even lines of text.

The work was progressing, and every day brought him closer to completion.

It was to be his greatest work, his Magnum Opus, the undertaking for which he would be forever remembered. Some might consider such sentiment to be vanity on his part, but he knew better. This was a work that would save everything his gene-father had tried to build. Its teachings would form the foundation of what was needed to weather the coming storm. Selflessness, not pride, guided his hand as he set down decades of accumulated wisdom, each chapter and verse a fragment of his biologically encoded genius, each morsel of imparted knowledge a building block that would combine to form a work immeasurably greater than the sum of its parts.

In the wake of the devastation unleashed on Calth, the Legion was looking to him for leadership more than ever. His warriors had suffered a grievous blow to their pride, and desperately needed to see their primogenitor. Helots brought petitions for audiences from his Chapter captains every day, but this endeavour was too important to grant such requests.

They did not understand why he sequestered himself away from his sons, but they did not need to understand. All that was required of them was obedience, even when his orders made no sense and seemed as heretical as those that had set the galaxy ablaze.

In all his years of service to his gene-father, he had never faced so terrible a choice.

The Imperium was lost. Everything he knew told him so, and this betrayal was the one thing that would save the dream at its heart from extinction.

The body of the Imperium was dying, but the ideals of its foundation could live on.

His father would understand that, even if others would not.

Roboute Guilliman wrote two words at the top of the right-hand page: words of treachery, words of salvation. Words to herald a new beginning.

Imperium Secundus.

Engagement 94

HIS NAME WAS Remus Ventanus of the Ultramarines 4th Company, and he was a traitor.

This sat ill with him, but there was little he could do to change it. The orders came directly from the primarch, and if there was one thing drilled into Ultramarines from the earliest days of their training it was that orders were always obeyed, no matter what.

Intermittent flashes lit the mountains of Talassar with a scratchy, pale glow as bright streamers of fire dropped burning traceries like phosphor tears across the night sky. The retreat from Castra Publius had been long and gruelling, made more so by the relentless, dogged pursuit of their attackers. Like razorfins with the scent of blood in the water, the warriors of Mortarion never gave up, never let up the pressure and never, ever, stopped attacking once battle had been joined.

It was a trait Remus had once admired.

He had no idea how the war across the rest of Talassar went. All he knew was what the planners in the grand strategium fed him through his helmet, but they jealously guarded their secrets and were miserly when it came to distributing information.

Eighteenth Company had held Castra Publius to the last man, long enough for the remainder of the Ultramarines to escape, falling back to pre-prepared positions raised by helots, Talassar Defence Pioneers and the monstrous construction engines of the Mechanicum. Those engines were proving key to their strategy, and Remus was grateful the primarch had seen fit to demand a permanent presence of the Martian priesthood on each world of Ultramar before the Red Planet had fallen to the Warmaster’s allies.

Remus pushed himself to his feet and lifted his bolter from the rocks beside him. He ran through the readiness checks and snapped home the safety, the action so ingrained it was automatic. Just like everything a warrior of the XIII Legion did. He clamped the weapon to his thigh and looked out over the landscape around him.

The mountains of Talassar snaked across the planet’s single continent like a buckled spine, each vertebra a gnarled peak and each gap a series of corrugated valleys with hairline fractures that penetrated deep into the rock to form hidden valleys, dead-end grabens and narrow gorges whose floors never saw sunlight. It was terrain to favour the defenders, and every scenario of invasion relied upon the mountainous bulwark and its linked fortresses.

What those scenarios hadn’t counted on was a foe as implacable as the Death Guard.

An angled wall of compacted rubble and rapid-setting rockcrete sealed this particular valley with a series of fortified redoubts and strongpoints. Remus was no stranger to the speed and completeness with which the Mechanicum could sculpt landscapes, yet the sight before him was still incredible.

The valley had grown wider and deeper, its flanks blasted, excavated, drilled and dug out to form the linked series of earthworks that spanned its width. He and the 4th Company had deployed from here less than half a day ago, when the valley floor had been smooth and empty, and the black, volcanic walls were coloured by hardy lichen and projecting evergreen firs. All that was gone; the once verdant highland valley now resembled a quarry that had been worked for decades. Talassar Auxilia units manned artfully wrought redoubts formed from pre-stressed slabs, and Ultramarines heavy guns occupied revetments that hadn’t been there ten hours ago.

It had been a hard retreat, with the forward units of the Death Guard harrying them every step of the way. Remus had balked at the idea of allowing the enemy to maintain the initiative, but the new doctrine required them to give ground.

Gathered in carefully placed groups, the three thousand Legiones Astartes of the 4th Company took their rest behind the high wall, and Remus threaded his way through them. He shivered as he passed beneath the shadow of one of the Mechanicum’s construction engines. It towered over him, longer and wider than the Gallery of Swords on Macragge; and set the earth trembling with the low bass note of its mighty engine core. Its enormous bulk was a dusty ochre colour, studded with weapon mounts, striped with hazard chevrons and stamped with monochrome representations of the Cog Mechanicum.

His warriors were deployed behind the wall, each squad placed exactly according to the new tactical doctrines recently put in place. As part of a radical shake-up of the way the Legion was organised, a series of new regulations and orders of battle had come down from the Fortress of Hera, imposing strict guidelines upon how each warrior and squad operated within the Legion as a whole. It felt strange to devolve command autonomy to a set of predetermined strictures, but if there was anyone who could devise a tactical doctrine to meet any foe and any situation, it was Roboute Guilliman.

He saw Sergeant Barkha at the steps leading to the fighting platform, listening to the reports from the 4th Company Scouts on the cliffs above. Of all the warriors of the Ultramarines, these warriors had the toughest time adapting to imposed rules, but such was the comprehensive nature of their new operating procedures that even the 4th Company’s irascible Head Scout, Naron Vattian, was finding it near impossible to find fault with them.

‘Any sign yet, sergeant?’ asked Remus.

Barkha turned and hammered his fist to his chest, the pre-Unity salute. It felt strange to see his sergeant make such a gesture, but Remus supposed it was more appropriate than the aquila, given that they were now traitors.

‘Lots of activity around Castra Publius, but no sign yet that they’re on their way,’ said Barkha, his hands now ramrod straight at his side, as though he stood on a parade ground instead of a battlefield.

‘We’re not on Macragge, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘No need for such arch formality.’

Barkha nodded, but his stance remained unchanged.

‘Standards, captain,’ replied the sergeant. ‘Just because we’re on a war footing is no reason to let them slip. That’s how this mess began after all. Standards slipped. Won’t happen on my watch.’

‘Is that a rebuke?’ said Remus, wiping the coarse black dust of the mountains from the azure surfaces of his battle-plate.

‘No, sir,’ replied Barkha, staring at a point over his right shoulder. ‘Simply a fact.’

‘You’re absolutely right, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘If only the Warmaster had been attended by a naysmith like you, then this could all have been avoided.’

‘I was being serious, captain,’ said Barkha.

‘So was I,’ replied Remus, climbing the steps to the ramparts and casting his gaze down the mountains. Barkha dutifully followed him and stood at his side, ready to enact whatever order he gave. Though Remus couldn’t see them, he knew Death Guard units were probing the lower valleys, seeking the weakness in the Ultramarines defence line.

‘I’m no engineer, but even I can see we won’t hold this wall,’ said Barkha.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘They’ve built the wall too far out. The narrowest part of the valley is behind us.’

‘And?’

‘That’s made the wall too long,’ said Barkha, as though unable to comprehend how his captain couldn’t see what was so obvious to him. ‘We don’t have enough warriors or heavy guns to repel a serious assault.’

Barkha gestured over his shoulder. ‘Yaelen’s Gorge is to the south, but it’s too narrow to move heavy armour at any speed. Castra Maestor blocks the Helican Stairs to the north. This is the only viable route through our line, and the Death Guard will see that swiftly enough.’

‘All of what you say is true, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘Do you have a point?’

‘Of course. It’s almost like you wantthem to attack here. What I don’t understand is why we are letting them when we should be taking the fight to them.’

‘The Death Guard advance like a surge tide,’ said Remus. ‘If we meet them head on, their strength will sweep us away. But we pull back, drawing them ever onwards until they are thin and spent. Thenwe will strike them.’

‘This is your plan?’

‘No,’ said Remus. ‘It is our strategy as decreed by the primarch’s writings.’

‘Permission to speak freely, captain?’ asked Barkha.

‘Granted.’

‘Are we really going to play this out basing our tactics on a book?’

‘The primarch’s book,’ Remus reminded him.

‘I know, and I mean no disrespect by these questions, but can any book – even one written by a primarch – cover everytactical eventuality?’

‘I suppose we are about to find out,’ said Remus, as he heard chatter over the vox.

Death Guard units were moving into the lower reaches of the valley.

‘Stand the men to arms, sergeant,’ ordered Remus.

‘Aye, captain,’ said Barkha. He saluted and turned to get the 4th Company moving.

Remus Ventanus stared off into the distance, seeing a glitter of fires from further down the mountains. Castra Publius was gone, Ultramarines were being lost and the Death Guard were coming to destroy them.

How had it come to this?

THE DEATH GUARD attacked fifty-two minutes later, a brutal assault spearheaded by heavy armour and Dreadnoughts. It was a mailed fist, calculated to bludgeon the defenders into insensibility before the follow-up punch slammed home to complete their destruction. Mechanised infantry squads rumbled forwards in the wake of olive-painted Land Raiders that hurled incandescent bolts at the defenders. Disciplined phalanxes of warriors armoured in the same livery deployed from the armoured transports and began their inexorable advance upon the Ultramarines position.

Laser fire and bolters hammered the advancing warriors, punching holes in the advance but slowing it not at all. What little artillery they had dropped specially manufactured munitions into the enemy ranks, felling enemy squads in shrieks of light and sound. Enemy Dreadnoughts waded into the fight, weaponised arms sawing through the defenders with machine-like precision and lethality.

Remus saw an entire squad of Ultramarines put down by two Dreadnoughts working in concert, and bellowed to his one remaining heavy weapons team to take them out. A trio of missiles leapt towards the Dreadnoughts, and one fell silent as it was struck in the flank by two warheads. The second was dealt with moments later as a multi-melta scored a direct hit on its sarcophagus.

These were fleeting victories, bright moments in the face of overwhelming odds. The Death Guard fought like machines, driving forwards with the unthinking, unfeeling ardour of something soulless and mechanical. Remus was a warrior, a gene-crafted killer of superlative ability, but he had been created to be so much more than that. He took pride in his abilities as a warrior, relishing the chance to match his skill against another, but to see the Death Guard at war was to face an opponent to whom war was simply attrition.

But Remus had no intention of dancing to the Death Guard’s war drums.

Tactical feeds flickered and scrolled on his visor, casualty rates, kill-ratios, projected outcomes, and a dozen other battlefield variables. The flow of information would have left even an augmented Imperial Army Tacticus overwhelmed, but Remus’s genhanced cognitive architecture processed it in the time it took to blink.

As the Death Guard regrouped for another assault on the walls, Remus’s eidetic memory accessed the parameters of battle as contained in the primarch’s tactical schematics. He found a match, following the logic path through its predetermined courses of action. Now was the time to pull back.

Remus clamped his bolter to his thigh and issued the withdrawal order, one of two dozen permitted options available to him. With smooth precision, the Ultramarines began falling back by squads as the Talassar Auxilia filled the killing ground before the wall with las-fire. The Mechanicum engine, though not designed as a war machine, was nevertheless equipped with a fearsome array of defensive weaponry. As its enormous treads ground it away from the battle, the barking roar of its close-in guns ripped overhead, the sound strangely flat and without the usual percussive banging of massed bolters. Artillery pieces launched a last volley over the walls before turning and racing up the winding road through the mountains.

Remus turned and dropped from the wall, joining Sergeant Barkha and the depleted ranks of his command squad. Ithus, Helika and Pilus were gone, which left his squad dangerously under strength, but the primarch’s writings had considered such an eventuality, and Remus acquired replacements from those squads who had come through the fighting unscathed.

Behind them, the Death Guard finally reached the wall, forcing their way over it as the defenders made their escape. As the Ultramarines crested the ridge behind the wall, Remus sent a coded burst transmission to the Mechanicum adept in the gargantuan construction engine. Seconds later, a controlled series of detonations brought down the valley walls in a thunderous avalanche. It was little more than a delaying tactic. The Death Guard would break through before long, but it was enough for now.

Barkha nodded to him as they retreated into the mountains.

‘We’re running out of room,’ said Barkha. ‘You think we’ve done enough to break them against the walls of Castra Tanagra?’

Remus didn’t answer right away. The tactical plots of kill-to-casualty ratios were scrolling down his screen. It made for grim reading, but they were still within the parameters set by the predicted conditions of the engagement. Overviews from the grand strategium filtered through the tactical information, revealing the extent to which the Death Guard had been bled white by constantly hammering the Ultramarines fortifications.

‘It looks like it,’ he replied. ‘The other Chapters have done well.’

‘Not as well as us, though?’ asked Barkha.

‘No, not as well as us,’ said Remus. ‘No one outdoes the Troublesome Fourth, eh?’

‘Not on my watch,’ agreed Barkha.

Remus liked the heart his sergeant displayed, pleased to hear such proud aggression in the warrior’s voice. It seemed the primarch’s purely doctrinal approach to war was holding up to the vagaries of battle.

But this was simply one fight, and one opponent of many ranged against them.

The real tests would come later.

Engagement 136

THE HOLO-PICT projected above the glossy surface of the plotter cast a stark light around the grand strategium. It folded sharp shadows around the gleaming walls and bleached deeply tanned faces of colour. The air was thick and close, redolent with the toxic oils and caustic unguents smouldering in the Mechanicum’s censers. It smelled of engine oil mixed with at least a dozen poisonous elements, and though it was Mechanicum witchery, it was certainly effective. The Legiones Astartes endured these effluvia without effect, but the mortals within the grand strategium coughed and rubbed eyes that constantly streamed with tears.

Remus Ventanus didn’t know if they were tears engendered by the petrochemical irritants in the burners or the sight of so beautiful a world being destroyed. A measure of both, he surmised.

He stared at the desolation of Prandium and wanted to weep. The most beautiful world of Ultramar by any reckoning, its wondrous forests, sculpted mountains and shimmering lakes were either burning or wreathed in smoke and choked with pollutants.

Never afraid of extreme measures, Angron had let slip his World Eaters in the most vicious way imaginable. Remus had once heard his primarch say that Angron’s Legion could succeed where all others would fail because the Red Angel was willing to go further than any other Legion, to countenance behaviour that any civilised code of war would deem abhorrent.

Seeing what had been done to Prandium, Remus understood completely.

This was no honourable war, this was butchery and destruction embodied. The primarch’s great work could surely never have contemplated war with so terrible a face.

The World Eaters had dropped on Prandium after a punishing saturation bombardment that levelled most of its great cities and set the world ablaze from pole to pole. In truth, there was little worth saving. Millions of people were dead and the detonations of volatile munitions had polluted the atmosphere and seas for millennia to come.

Yet Prandium was still valuable. Its orbital track passed close to the coreward jump-point, meaning that whoever controlled Prandium could control entry to Ultramar. Even if Prandium was reduced to a barren, lifeless rock, it was still a world of Ultramar, and nowhere trod by Roboute Guilliman would be surrendered without a fight.

Coming so soon after the devastation wrought on Calth’s sun, it seemed to Remus that their worlds were being torn apart piece by piece. Like an ancient, crumbling standard removed from its stasis vault in the Fortress of Hera, the warp and weft of Ultramar’s fabric was coming undone. Alone among the many savage assaults tearing at the Ultramarines empire, the invasion of Talassar had been repulsed. Driven on by their apparent success, Mortarion’s warriors had over-extended their forces and been left dangerously exposed when they finally hurled themselves at the mountain fastness of Castra Tanagra.

Elements of the 4th, 9th and 45th Companies had garrisoned the fortress, and as the Death Guard attacked, the encircling horns of the 49th, 34th, 20th and 1st Companies drew in and completed the destruction. It had been an uplifting moment, yet Remus could not see how something similar could be done here.

Surrounding the plotter, their faces grim and carved from granite, were the captains of fourteen of the Ultramarines battle companies, together with their lieutenants, senior sergeants and savants. Battle-logisters pumped information into the plotter, real-time strategic data that depicted a world torn apart by war.

A world dying before their very eyes.

‘Fifth Company manoeuvring into position,’ said Captain Honoria of the 23rd. ‘Seventeenth moving in support.’

‘Enemy forces engaging the Twenty-fifth,’ said Urath of the 39th.

‘Eastern flank of Adapolis is folding,’ commented Evexian of the 7th. ‘They’ll break through in a matter of hours. I’m ordering the Forty-third and the Thirty-seventh to fall back.’

‘Are the Thirteenth and Twenty-eighth in position to meet the northern push?’ asked Remus.

‘They are,’ confirmed Honoria. ‘World Eaters Third, Fifth and Ninth are pushing hard at the borders of Zaragossa Province. If we don’t send in reinforcements, we could lose the entire western flank.’

Remus circled the plotter with his hands behind his back, looking for some flaw in Angron’s battle plan. As senior captain in the grand strategium, he had overall command of Ultramarines forces on Prandium, a level of command he had never before held, but the primarch himself had made the appointment.

Why had he been chosen? There were others in the grand strategium with more experience. Since Talassar, Remus and the 4th Company had fought dozens of smaller actions, each time emerging victorious, but each of them had been a company-level engagement, with no more than a few thousand warriors at his command.

This was another strata of warfare entirely. To command the defences of an entire world was something that Remus had, of course, trained for but never actually done. The primarch’s teachings were indelibly etched on his mind: options, variables, parameters, action paths, outcome responses and a thousand detailed plans covering every possible eventuality of war.

It had worked on Talassar, and Remus had to trust that it would work here.

He stepped up to the tactical plotter and took in the strategic overview in a heartbeat. The motion of armies, divisions and cohorts – a thousand elements of planetary warfare – was a spider’s web of furious advances, flank marches, brutal battles and encirclements. At Pardusia, the 19th Company had been all but destroyed, and the World Eaters had powered north through the wastelands of what had once been ornamental pasturelands where wild horses had roamed freely and rare flora, virtually extinct in Ultramar, had again bloomed in glorious bursts of kaleidoscopic colour.

The assembled captains glared at him, resentful at sending their brothers to die following orders that broke the cohesion of the Ultramarines defence lines. Arcs and lines of blue snaked across the map at random, each one an isolated bastion of Ultramarines, Defence Auxilia and requisitioned Imperial Army units.

‘What are your orders, Captain Ventanus?’ demanded Captain Honoria.

Remus stared at the map, feeding the current situation through the filters of the primarch’s work. Orders presented themselves to him, but they made no sense. He checked his conclusions again, knowing they were correct, but checking them anyway.

‘Order the Twenty-fifth and the Seventh to realign their frontage,’ ordered Ventanus. ‘The Seventeenth is to halt and hold position.’

‘But the Fifth,’ protested Urath. ‘They’ll be cut off without the Seventeenth covering their flank.’

‘Do it,’ said Remus.

‘You will condemn those warriors to die needlessly,’ said Honoria, gripping the side of the plotter tightly. ‘I cannot stand by and watch you lose this world and our Legion’s best and bravest with such insanity.’

‘Are you questioning my orders?’ asked Ventanus.

‘You’re damn right I am,’ snapped Honoria, before remembering himself. The captain of the 23rd took a deep breath. ‘I know what you did on Calth, Remus. Damn it, we all respect you for that, and I know you have the primarch’s ear. He has his eye on you for great things, I know that, but this is madness. Surely you must see that?’

‘Question my orders and you question the primarch,’ said Remus softly. ‘Is that really a stance you wish to take, Honoria?’

‘I question nothing, Remus,’ said Honoria guardedly. He swept his hand out to encompass the disastrous tactical situation on the projection of Prandium. ‘But how can those manoeuvres halt the World Eaters? The Red Angel’s butchers are gutting Prandium, and you are helping them to do it.’

Remus held his tongue. For all that he agreed with Honoria’s sentiments, he had to trust that the primarch knew what he was doing. To try and understand the workings of a mind crafted by the genetic mastery of the Emperor was as close to unattainable as it was possible to be. The leaps of imagination, intuition and logic the primarch of the Ultramarines could make were unreachable to anyone save another primarch. And even then, Remus doubted any of Roboute Guilliman’s brothers could match his grand strategic vision.

Yet what he had devised and passed down to them would only work if every cog in the machine was turning in the same direction. Honoria, for all his courage and honour, was twisting the machine’s workings. And that couldn’t be allowed. Not now.

‘You are relieved of command, Honoria,’ said Remus. ‘Remove yourself from this post and have your lieutenant step up.’

‘Ventanus, wait–’ began Evexian.

‘You wish to align with Honoria?’ said Remus.

‘No, Captain Ventanus,’ said Evexian with a curt bow. ‘But even you must admit that your orders appear somewhat… contradictory. You know this, I can see it in your eyes.’