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Ruinstorm – Extract

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One

The Redemption Leap

My sin is the greatest, the Angel thought. And so my need is the greatest. Father, hear my cry. Bring me to you.

His great wings folded, one hand resting on the pommel of the Blade Encarmine, the Angel stood as a towering, meditative statue on the central command dais of the Red Tear’s bridge. By his word, a fleet went to war. The power of a Legion flowed from him, and his decisions, his acts, had brought the sin to all his sons. His must be the power now to wash away that sin.

From the dais’ forwards, elevated position, Sanguinius had a panoramic view through the battleship’s windows. He watched the warp-torn agony of the void for a few final seconds as the shutters began to close. The view of the Ruinstorm narrowed, and the tension of the crew increased. The humans had survived the madness that had fallen upon the fleet on the jump to Signus Prime, though they bore the psychic scars, memories like shards of glass digging at their courage. But they looked at him and drew strength, and performed their duties. A navigation officer began counting down. Her voice was steady, committed. One after another, officers called from their stations, announcing the readiness of the vessel.

A tremor ran through the decking as if the machine-spirit of the battleship were bracing itself. The Red Tear had fallen on Signus Prime. Like so many of us, the Angel thought. It had risen again. The years at Macragge had been time enough to repair the venerable ship. It was battle-worthy once more, but its scars ran as deep as those of the crew, as profound as the spiritual wounds inflicted on the Legion. Much had been lost. The lines of the battleship ran true. Its halls and bays were intact. Its weapons systems were fully operational. But the statues, the art and the manuscripts that had been burned were gone forever. The Red Tear had been the proud embodiment of the culture of Baal. Each destroyed artefact was a vanished piece of Blood Angels history. Sculptures, tapestries and tableaux still lined the corridors. Those that could be restored had been. Sanguinius had given orders that the others stay in their places. They were memorials now. And they were reminders that the IX Legion fought on, no matter its wounds, no matter the flaws that threatened to shatter its fundamental nobility.

The shutters closed. The Ruinstorm vanished from Sanguinius’ view. It remained before his mind’s eye. The rage of madness tore at the materium. It hid the stars. It was a howling promise of destruction, an endlessly twisting slashing at reality. Yet this bloody pyre of existence was just a foretaste of what waited in the warp itself. The warp that Sanguinius knew held worse than just the breakdown of sanity. There were deeper forces there, powers with sentience and will.

He had fought them. He and his Legion had fought them, and they had triumphed. If it was time to fight them again, then he and his sons were ready.

Yet he felt the wounds. He felt them in his crew, in his ship, in his Legion, in his soul.

Seated on the Red Tear’s command throne, Carminus called out. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘the jumps of the First and Thirteenth Legions are confirmed.’

‘Thank you,’ Sanguinius said to the captain of the Third Company. He had made Carminus temporary fleet master during the exodus from the Signus System. There had been time to find a mortal officer suitable for the command, but the Angel had decided Carminus should lead the fleet again. Even if all went well, the journey through the warp was going to be a long one. After what had happened at Signus Prime, Sanguinius needed a genhanced human at the post, someone with a stronger resistance to the attacks of madness.

At the Angel’s side, Raldoron said, ‘May we meet our brothers again at journey’s end.’

‘We will,’ Sanguinius told him. The First Captain had been in favour of the combined forces of the three fleets striking out together. Even if the primarchs had been of the same mind, their approaches to the journey were too different. We each have our hopes, our convictions, and our sins, he thought. Guilliman’s fleet was attacking the warp in a systematic manner, seeking to batter the storm into submission with the brute force of reason. As for the Lion…

Sanguinius did not know his strategy. He did not know how the Lion would travel through the warp. But in their last meeting together in the Fortress of Hera, where Roboute had looked determined, the Lion had appeared confident. He fully expected to reach Terra.

Sanguinius envied his brother’s confidence at the same time that he distrusted it. Certainty had brought catastrophe to the Imperium. Sanguinius had been certain of Horus. And what was Curze, if not certain of the truth in whose name he had slaughtered?

The Blood Angels had been lost in the Ruinstorm when they tried to reach Terra after Signus. There was no reason to believe the passage would be any easier now. Sanguinius knew to hold fast to the certainty of uncertainty. All there was to take the Legion through the storm was urgency.

Urgency, and the need for redemption.

There had been no ceremony to mark the departure of the fleets from Macragge. There had been no formal taking of leave by the Triumvirate. The Emperor, the Lord Warden and the Lord Protector had left, each taking two-thirds of their fleets. Those who remained would guard Ultramar under the regency of Valentus Dolor. Imperium Secundus no longer existed, except as a fiction Sanguinius despised as much as he understood its necessity. Some form of continuity had to be maintained to preserve what order had been restored to the Five Hundred Worlds. Until Terra was found again, until the Emperor was proven to be alive, the Angel’s official status could not change. For the billions of Ultramar, he was the Emperor Sanguinius. His sin could not be erased by edict. It could only be forgiven by his father.

My sin is the greatest.

The Angel was the usurper. He had sat upon a false throne and been called Emperor. Not even Horus had managed to go so far.

Father, hear my cry.

Urgency drove all three fleets. Urgency to reach Terra and confound Horus. The traitors had done their work well, convincing three Legions that there was no Terra to aid. The Ruinstorm was not just a barrier, it was a veil concealing the truth and had led to the lie of the Imperium Secundus. The lie was over now, but the barrier remained. To purge the sin of usurpation and save Terra, the task was clear.

Break through the Ruinstorm.

‘The fleet is ready, lord,’ Carminus said. ‘We jump at your command.’

Father, bring me to you.

Sanguinius sent his need towards hidden Terra. He could not call it hope, the thing that would travel with his fleet through the warp, this convulsion in his soul that the galaxy felt too small to contain. He could not expect it would guide them to his father. But he reached out as if it would. In the exodus from Signus, anger and military priorities had been the driving needs. They were still present, but the desperate reach for redemption was even more powerful. If Sanguinius stretched out his arm, surely he should be able to grasp the path to Terra.

The need was that strong.

But there was no certainty, and he would not fall to the illusion.

He turned to Mkani Kano. The Librarian stood at Raldoron’s right hand. ‘Your men are at their posts?’ he asked. Sanguinius had ordered a Librarian be stationed in the Navigation chambers of every vessel in the fleet. They were to do what they could to protect the fragile humans from the forces that would come for them in the immaterium. There was no more certainty they would succeed than there was of reaching Terra.

‘They stand ready,’ said Kano.

Sanguinius turned his back on the shutters. He faced his sons and the human crew. Below the dais was a squad of Raldoron’s Sanguinary Guard. With them was the Angel’s herald. This was his sacrificial son, the legionary whose identity Sanguinius had necessarily hidden from himself, who had become the Angel’s voice in the Imperium Secundus. It was he who had been the figure most of the supplicants to the throne had seen, and not Sanguinius. The Angel now saw this son’s sacrifice as all the greater for having been part of an immoral folly. His presence on the bridge, close to Sanguinius, was in recognition of his service, and as a visible reminder of the need for atonement. The sacrifices his sons had made weighed heavily on his mind. On Signus Prime, Meros had taken his place to become the Red Angel, giving up all nobility and humanity to become the worst of the Blood Angels’ savagery. The herald lived, and remained human, but the price he paid was a high one. His helm kept his face hidden, and would until the legionary’s death. Sanguinius was no longer Emperor. There was no need for the role of herald any longer. Yet the legionary’s identity remained subsumed by his duty.

What you have created, you must not destroy.

The instinct was imperative. The herald had a significance that Sanguinius could not see yet. The role was needed. There was something in it he had created that was pure, that was the best of what the Blood Angels could be.

‘Let us strike forth to Terra,’ Sanguinius pronounced, and the power of his voice made the walls of the bridge thrum. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said to Carminus, ‘signal the fleet. We jump.’

‘So ordered, lord,’ Carminus replied.

Father, hear my cry.

Reality, bleeding and savaged by the Ruinstorm, tore wide open. The Blood Angels plunged into the vortex of the warp consumed by rage. A klaxon sounded as the Red Tear’s Geller field shrieked with strain.

Then reality collapsed. Only Sanguinius felt it from within his perceptions. He saw the shutters ripple and bulge. They flowed like liquid. The shapes of his legionaries smeared into nothing. Then the command deck vanished from his sight.

Blows hammered his frame and stabbed his mind. His eyes were filled with a colossal figure in sin-black armour. Crimson eyes blazed. Fratricidal hate battered the breath of life from his body. Horus was the shape. Horus was killing him. The Angel’s death fell on him with a piercing immediacy. Blood soaked his sides and poured through rents in his armour. His hearts lurched under the agony of the terminal vision. The future grasped Sanguinius, a future where his hearts no longer beat, where the pain and fire of a lost, final battle dropped him into the endless dark.

Here was certainty.

Here was the end of all doubt.

Sanguinius had thought he had come to terms with the inevitability of his death. If it was the price of saving his father, he would be the willing sacrifice. Yet now, as the attack sought to buckle him under its fury, as the maw of the dark gaped wide to swallow him, he did not feel the acceptance of the good death. He answered the rage with his own. It was rage at betrayal, at treachery and at crime that surpassed all understanding. Destruction took him, and he howled at the night, howled with a hate greater than he had ever known, yet was his completely, as much a part of his identity as the light he embraced. As the pain dragged him down, his howl filled the dark, becoming one with it. The howl grew, echoing, redoubling, shattering time and reason and hope.

Death was his destiny. So too, was the howl.

Father.

My cry.

Sanguinius fought back. He hurled his will against the wall of night and pain. Horus was not here. Horus was not looming in triumph over him. The reality of his death was not now. The future had not come. Not yet. Not yet.

The Angel clenched his fists. His body responded to his will, and he took hold once more of his present self. He denied the pain of his ending. He pushed through it, rising as if from the depths of a molten ocean. He spread his wings in defiance and in the assertion of victory. The vision broke up. It did not vanish at once; it fragmented, its shards stabbing him to the last. Jagged patterns of black and blood and silver flashed and shimmered. They burned his vision, then fell like scales as he forced his way back to the real. The bridge reappeared, first as an uncertain transmission, then gathering substance, and at last the vision faded.

Sanguinius exhaled. He had been in the grip of his death for the space of a single breath. Across the bridge, mortals and Space Marines struggled with psychic injuries. The warp storm was so furious that strands found minute weaknesses in the Geller field and forced their way through them. Servitors flailed at their stations, their limbs jerking chaotically, energy sparking out of the points of fusion between their flesh and machinic components. Officers clutched their heads. Some were screaming. Some were on their knees, jaws clattering hard enough to splinter teeth.

But the damage was less than it might have been. The crew was strong. It had been tempered by Signus. Every man and woman on the bridge had survived the insanity that had taken so many of their comrades. They had been braced for the jump. In the midst of the siege of insanity, the command deck continued to function. After a few moments, someone shut down the klaxons. Medicae personnel pulled the incapacitated and the raving from the bridge.

Raldoron looked shaken, but was standing firm. Kano was doubled over, a hissing snarl of pain and anger escaping from his clenched teeth. A nimbus of unlight flared at the edges of his psychic hood. Sanguinius placed a hand on the Librarian’s shoulder. Kano felt his presence. He straightened. The dark glow dissipated, and his eyes cleared. He looked at Sanguinius with deep anguish. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I saw…’

‘You saw what has not come to pass. It does not matter.’ For now, he added to himself. ‘What matters is how the present moment tasks us.’

Kano nodded, strain visible on his face. He was holding off the immaterium’s attack, but it had not ceased.

Sanguinius turned back to Carminus. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said, ‘what is the status of the fleet?’

‘All vessels accounted for, but communications are breaking down,’ said Carminus.

‘Are there reports from the Navigators?’

‘No, though there have been no casualties among them.’

The best we can hope for, then. With Terra invisible, there was no clear course to take through the warp, but if the coherence of the fleet was holding, the Navigators were managing, for the moment, to cleave to the course he had set them. The grand flotilla had direction. He could only hope it also had a destination.

The Angel moved to the command dais’ hololith plate. ‘I will speak to the fleet,’ he said. While communications still functioned, he would impart what strength he could to his sons.

Carminus pulled a lever on the console next to the throne, and the plate crackled to life. The hololith caster in every bay and hall of every vessel projected his image to the Blood Angels and to their mortal crews.

‘The transmission quality is erratic,’ said Varra Neverrus. The vox-officer barely looked up as she worked the controls at her station. ‘I don’t know how long it can be sustained.’

Sanguinius nodded. He thought he could feel the dissolution of his image as it reached through the warp, the claws of the immaterium tearing apart the transmissions, fracturing the self he was sending to his sons.

He had spoken to the fleet before the jump to Signus. That had been the Blood Angels’ last moment of true hope, and the last moment of delusion. They had been through the fire of ultimate treachery and of destroying revelation. There was no hope to speak of now. No promise of a cure. He would speak instead of strength and faith.

‘My sons,’ he said. ‘Legionaries of the Ninth, our war for Terra has already begun. The storm is our enemy as surely as Horus is. We know the nature of our foes much better than before. We know the truth of the danger they present. We are attacked on fronts far beyond the physical. We have seen how they might destroy us. But they have failed, and we are the stronger for it. Your armour is more than ceramite. You know what is in your blood. You know what you are capable of.’ He chose his words deliberately. Every Blood Angel would hear the two meanings of that sentence. He needed them to. The flaw he had cursed them with had almost destroyed them. ‘You know what you must guard against. Make that defence a sword. Its blade is the forged adamantium of our noble selves. Let us burn our way to Terra with the flames of our loyalty to the Emperor.’

He stopped speaking. He knew the hololith transmission had broken down before Neverrus told him it had.

Furious waves of unreality slammed against the hull of the Red Tear. The hololith plate screamed.

The edges of the Angel’s vision cracked. Filaments of darkness coiled. The endlessly repeated moment of his death stabbed inwards to his consciousness.

Sanguinius strode to the edge of the command dais. The hull groaned. The empyrean’s convulsions were roars and whispers that battered the ears and slid into the veins.

‘We fly on righteous wings,’ he thundered, defying the storm. ‘We cannot be stopped.’

The warp seemed to answer him. A massive surge struck the fleet. Even shielded by the Geller field, the auspex readings fell into shrieking madness. Pict screens shuddered, and their images suddenly looked too much like flesh. Vox-casters squawked and rasped with incoming transmissions, as broken and static-disrupted as they were urgent.

‘The Encarnadine has a Geller field breach,’ Neverrus said. ‘Incursions on the Scarlet Liberty, Sable and Requiem Axona.’

Sanguinius pressed his lips together. An instinct, deep and ancient, insisted that the apparent response of the warp to his challenge was no illusion. The fleet was not just battered by the vortices the traitors had summoned into being. This attack was directed.

Directed at him.

I do not accept this, he thought. The implications were too grotesque. He was deluding himself with sinful pride. It was the same hubris that had convinced him the Imperium’s salvation depended on his taking the throne. Would he now decide the empyrean itself was attacking him?

No.

And yet. And yet.

The Red Tear shuddered. The huge battleship was tossed by the fury of the warp.

The death vision pressed harder, a bare membrane of consciousness holding it back. Beyond the vision, there was something else. A hint of shadow, the weight of a huge displacement wave, the thing that pushed the vision upon him, that used the storm against the fleet.

You are watched. You are targeted.

Again, he tried to shake the delusions off. His mind must be clear. There were threats enough that were real without him clouding his decision-making with hubristic anguish. Whether or not he, personally, was the subject of the attack, something was coming. The threads of unreality were already reaching into the ship. A serious breach was imminent.

Sanguinius drew the Blade Encarmine from its sheath. Raldoron, in his office of equerry, approached and handed him the Spear of Telesto. Behind him, the doors of the bridge opened and Azkaellon led his Sanguinary Guard out to surround the command dais. At the sight of the gathering might of the Blood Angels, the human crew drew courage. The moans quieted. The officers worked their stations, holding the course of the Red Tear as true as they could in a realm where truth drew the blood of reason.

Claws scratched at the hull. They scraped along it, as if it were a thin wall of tin. The shutters bulged again, and yet again, with the rhythm of strange lungs.

The breach came in the bridge’s vault. It snaked in sharp angles down the height of the wall. It vibrated with the hum of a million flies. It began to peel back, metal framework and marble cladding turning flesh-red, flesh-supple, flesh-weak. The buzzing of the flies filled the command deck. The taste of the sound was foul on Sanguinius’ tongue. He felt the crawl of legs and the flutter of wings.

A bell tolled, and with the chanting of a thousand festering tongues, the tear split wide.

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For my mother, Eleanor Anne Annandale (1935–2016). In loving memory.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2017.
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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