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Calgar's Siege – Extract

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One

The black dream that was the unending warble of the war drums went on and on, as fierce and insistent as the beating of an ork heart. It stilled the jungle noises, and thrummed up into the star-spattered sky. The ork host danced and cavorted and bayed at the moons above the many fires of the encampment, thousands of enormous primates baring their fangs and grappling and killing and lacerating one another’s flesh in an outpouring of sheer bestial energy.

The prisoners were turning on the spits, their screaming long done. Brug sat on his throne-stone and rested his knuckles on the ground, his knees as high as his ears, his head like some savagely sculpted mountain rock that an avalanche has smashed into jagged relief. His eyes gleamed red. Watchful, full of angry malice and an intelligence that none of his tribe could match.

His time had come. He could feel it humming in his blood.

Around him the three warbosses of the host stood glowering, impatient, full of the aimless rage of the ork, and yet cowed into silence by their lord’s mere presence. These were creatures out of a primeval nightmare, brought into being for one purpose only, as single-minded as a wildfire. It took an enormous will to bend such beasts to a single purpose, to bring them together and make them cooperate.

Brug had that will. He brought such fear into his fellow orks that they were willing to obey rather than rebel. They were incapable of affection or loyalty, but they knew respect. As long as Brug could kill the strongest of them, as long as his plans worked, and there was fighting and loot and blood to be had, then they would follow him, as the stones roll in the grip of the flood.

‘We gots to have more than this,’ Brug said, the words spat out from between mismatched fangs. ‘We needs more than this. Our big-ships is ready and full and round our heads right now.’ He looked up, the massive skull turning on a neck as thick as a bull’s.

‘This world is eaten through. There ain’t nothing left here for us but bones and rock. We needs to go and find a new place, and other tribes to mangle. Otherways, these boys will turn on one another, and we’ll piss away all that was done here. All that I done here.’ He looked at the three warbosses, hulking shadows with red-lit eyes.

A deep ‘Huuurgh’ of assent came out of them.

‘Let ’em have fun for a little more, but anyone starts a big fight, you take their heads and remind ’em that they belong to me.’

He paused, the red glare of his gaze turning slowly to catch the warbosses one by one. They looked away. To meet his eyes was to challenge, and they were not ready for that. Brug had slain all challengers to his rule, and there had been many. There was no longer an ork left on the planet that could come close to matching him for guile or for sheer brute strength, and they knew it.

As did he. Something like humour flashed across his face, a savage sneer.

‘You all belongs to me. I gives the orders, and you obeys. That way, we is mighty. If it wasn’t for Brug yous would all be little warchiefs still, running in the jungle and raiding farms by night. Now we have us a whole world in our fists. I did that, Brug Greenstorm. I brought the clans together. I set yous at the cities, and was first over the walls of the big capital, the high place of the pink flesh. Don’t you never forget it.’

The fires blazed, the night was bright with them. On the horizon behind Brug there was a mighty red glow: a burning Imperial city. It was still being sacked by the orks. Brug had brought out his bodyguard and his warbosses from within the broken walls after they had run riot for three days, leaving the rest of the army to eat and loot and pick over the survivors for slaves.

He was always most comfortable out here, in the jungle. He hated the stone and plascrete cities of the pink flesh with a vengeance. Even their manufactoria he wrecked and despoiled and destroyed, rather than keep running. He wanted nothing from the enemies of the orks but sport and spoils. And a name. He wanted that most of all. Brug Greenstorm, he would be remembered as. He would write that name across whole worlds in the blood of their inhabitants.

‘You is to start after the middle of the night, and get the clans all gathered up together. Come sunrise, we’ll call us down the shuttle-ships and start to load up the boys for the big wagons, up in the Great Dark. There is a skinful of other worlds out there just waiting for us, ripe as red meat.’

‘Where is they?’ one of the other orks ventured.

With a roar, Brug sprang up, leaping off his throne-stone. He came down like a green flailing tree on the ork who had spoken, and swept one great arm across the creature’s face. His claws ripped out an eye, tore the meat from the bone, and sent the powerful warboss flying backwards, a thousand pounds of flesh and bone toppling into the grass.

‘No one asks Brug questions. You obey me, see? Or I will eat you, maggot.’

He stood over the fallen warboss. The other two backed away, clashing their teeth and opening their hands in submission. The injured ork on the ground spat out blood.

‘Yes, chief.’

‘Next time, I chews on your tongue, Krobag, and serves you up as snotling meat.’

‘I hear you, boss.’ The injured ork cowered, but was unable to dim the furious hatred that blazed out of its remaining eye.

‘I is the high boss of this here army. I will make us a Waaagh! the likes of which none of the pink-flesh scum of this here sector of the Dark has ever known. I will find yous foes to kill and stomp which is worthy of the fight. Do yous hear me, you filth?’

‘We hears,’ they all said, snarling on the words.

‘We is the ork. We is the fear in the Great Dark, the red light in the night. They will hear our drums out there in them stars, and they will know we is coming for them.’

Brug opened his massive arms wide. ‘And we will chew it all up, kill it all, taste every gobbet. Nothing is stronger than us. There ain’t nothing can make us stop.’

He gurgled out a laugh that was part speech, part meaningless, hungry bellow.

‘We was made for this, boys. And ain’t it sweet.’

Two

Lord Lucius Fennick looked down upon Zalathras from a balcony off to one side of the grand chamber he liked to call his map room.

A teeming sea of low-rise buildings rolled out halfway to the horizon, tawny under the sun, and from it reared up the looming spikes of two hive-spires, both still under construction. Jagged mountains erected not by nature, but by the hand of man. The smoke haze hung blue in the still, humid air about them.

Zalathras. How many millions toiled in those high spires, or down in that tawny sea? More than at the last census, by far. Now that the space port was finished, they came almost daily – in creaking shuttles from Iax and Espandor, and in dribbles even from the agri worlds – Quintarn, Tarentus, Masali – places long tamed and civilised.

To this world – green, steaming Zalidar, this barely polished gem of a planet on the Eastern Fringe, beyond Ultramar, almost beyond the bounds of the Imperium itself. A place that had been nothing more than a wilderness a generation before, but was now on the brink of full Imperial compliance.

Most of the backbone of the workforce was from the Zalidari System itself – they came because they were restless, or discontented, or they sought a wider horizon, a new challenge. Well, they got it here.

Others were indentured workers brought in by the thousand to fulfil labour quotas – the grist that was ground in the mill of the burgeoning Zalidari industries.

Four million inhabitants at the last census, ten years ago. There must be double that now in Zalathras alone, Fennick thought, savouring the number in his mind.

We are on the brink of great things on Zalidar. One day we might even rival Iax for production. If only we can keep up the pace!

The building crews worked in shifts round the clock. His people needed housing; the shanty towns that they had once hacked out of the jungle were a mere memory. Now, Zalathras was a city, a true city with high walls and paved streets and thrumming manufactoria. At long last, the labour disputes were ended; brought to a close by the iron fist of the Zalidari militia, which now patrolled orderly districts of true citizens. One day soon, it would be the Adeptus Arbites who did so, and the militia would give way to the Imperial Guard.

We are so close, Fennick thought. If Ultramar’s resources were not stretched so thin, we would have been brought into compliance by now.

So dense was the population that the walls could barely encompass it. So they had begun to build upwards more and more, rather than let the city sprawl beyond the defences. The hive-spires grew day by day, so that the tallest of them lost their lofty heads in cloud when the rains came. The Imperium was rising up here in all its glory.

This is civilisation, Fennick thought. This is how worlds are made. One day, we will be a pillar of Ultramar, and if the Emperor wills it, I will make a pilgrimage to Macragge itself, and I will look upon great Guilliman in his shrine, and see the wound that bleeds eternally through the shimmer of the holy stasis field that sustains him. I will look upon the face of a primarch. That, I have promised myself.

‘Throne be praised,’ a voice said behind him. ‘The Kalgatt Spire looks near finished. I have not seen the view from this high in an age. Zalathras looms above the Tagus like a titan rising from the sea. Standing this high, it almost seems we have tamed this damned world.’

‘If only that were so, Boros,’ Fennick said. He turned and smiled. He was a long, lean man with the grace and poise of someone much younger than his fifty years. His black beard was oiled to a point, and his eyes were as grey as a sea from a colder world.

‘You know as well as anyone that over most of the planet, the Tagus still holds sway. Our logging teams have cleared a quarter of one continent, no more. There are places near the poles where man has not yet set foot – not even that damned mountebank, Morcault – and mountains yet unclimbed in the hinterland of Zalathras itself.’

‘All in good time, my lord,’ the man called Boros said gruffly. He was a brown man, brown of hair, brown of skin, heavily tanned and stocky as an owl. The scars on his face were all the more livid for his colouring, white lines that striped his cheek from eye to chin. He wore a leather battle-harness, old-fashioned armour crafted to protect against blade and claw, but for all that there was a laspistol holstered at his hip, and a colonel’s stars on his shoulders.

‘Soon we must think more on the outlying towns, it’s true,’ he said. ‘The roads are still all but impassable in the rainy season. They must be paved, all the way out to the coast. And the Dromion Bridge is insufficient for the traffic that now crosses it.’

Fennick waved a hand. ‘You tell me nothing that I and the Council do not know, Boros. We were discussing it all morning. But eventually I made Vanaheim and Rosquin see sense. We must increase the supply of building material substantially, especially now that we have the two hives under construction.’

‘Then the plascrete manufactoria are to be enlarged at last?’

‘We voted on it this afternoon. Timber has served us well hitherto and Throne knows there is no shortage of it on this world, but if things are to endure in this climate, then we must build in more durable material. I have commissioned an expedition to the foothills of the Zalidari Range. We must open more quarries and blaze a trail through there for the big loaders. The Ballansyr works are almost exhausted. Even Vanaheim had to admit that.’

Boros grunted, slapping a hand on the butt of his pistol. ‘Good. His reluctance to admit his limitations has curbed all sorts of projects. And his near monopoly of construction–’

Fennick held up a hand wearily. ‘I know, Boros. But there was a time when his company was the only place I could go to for any large enterprise. The walls, for instance.’

Boros frowned. ‘I am glad of our walls, my lord, but there are young officers even among my own command who deem them something of a luxury for a city as desperate for good stone as this one.’

‘Strange words from my guard commander, Boros.’

Boros shrugged. ‘The walls may have meant something once, but the beasts of the jungle have been thrown back many miles. It is the outlying farms that face them now, not this metropolis. The defences of Zalathras were ruinously expensive to build – they tied up our resources for the better part of twelve years. I wonder sometimes if our energies might not have been better spent elsewhere. Decent roads, for instance.’

‘There are always enemies to be defended against, not all of which are on this world, Boros.’

‘You do not have to tell me that,’ Boros said, touching the scars that marred his brown face. ‘But a third hive-spire, my lord? Is it really necessary? Perhaps we should save the resources and let the people throw up more towns outside the walls. After all, the planet is large enough for us all without cooping up millions within them.’

‘Here, they can be more easily controlled, Boros – that is the brutal truth of it,’ Fennick said, and his cold eyes flashed. ‘The manufactoria are all concentrated here, in Zalathras. Employment is here, order is here. The day will soon come when Zalathras shall be called upon to make its own contribution to the war effort of the Imperium – in materiel, in men… When that day comes, I do not intend that we shall be found wanting.’

‘The surrounding system is quiet now,’ Boros said stubbornly. ‘That is to say–’ He hesitated, and then looked down. ‘This is Ultramar, my lord, or near as damn it. The Adeptus Astartes guard this sector of the Fringe, not some Imperial militia.’ He smiled crookedly, and tapped his hand upon his own armoured chest. ‘Though there is something to be said for an honest militia.’

‘Ultramar,’ Fennick said in a low voice. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. But we are on the far fringes of that great realm, Boros, an outlying world which I am sure barely registers on the consciousness of the high lord who sits on Macragge.’

He looked down at the teeming city below, and the man-made hills that rose up from it, wreathed in the smoke of combustion and construction. Half a century before, it had been virgin jungle. Now it was this raw, seething metropolis. It never failed to amaze him, what men could do to a planet, given time and the will to succeed.

‘What I would give, Boros, to bring Zalidar to Macragge’s attention. To remind them that we exist. To see them here, even.’

‘The Ultramarines?’ Boros, too, lowered his voice, in something close to reverence. ‘Be careful what you wish for, Lucius. Not for nothing are they known as the Angels of Death.’

‘They are the guardians of mankind,’ Fennick said crisply.

‘When they retook Thrax they did not hesitate to issue the Exterminatus,’ Boros said stubbornly. ‘To erase the Chaos taint they scorched the planet down to the stone.’

‘I know,’ Fennick said quietly. ‘I was there too, my friend.’

But Boros was not done. ‘They are pitiless, the Adeptus Astartes. Let them watch over us by all means, but the day we see their kind set foot on our world there will be sorrow to follow. That is the way of things.’

‘We are building a whole new world for them here,’ Fennick persisted. ‘I would that they saw it for themselves, just once.’

‘I doubt they even know we exist.’

‘Oh, they know, Boros. We send shuttleloads of Zalidari goods to Macragge every few months, as is our duty as an Imperial world. We cannot compete with the long-established planets, like Quintarn or Tarentus, or beautiful Iax – but we make our contribution, all the same. Eight thousand tons of iron ore went out only last week, and tomorrow a grain shuttle will follow them. I trust that some of our foodstuffs have even ended up on the table of Marneus Calgar himself.’

‘Perhaps,’ Boros snorted. ‘But when I break my bread, I do not find myself marvelling about where it came from. I would be surprised if the Lord of Macragge, Throne be with him, is any different.’

Irritated, Fennick turned away from the high balcony overlooking the city. ‘What is this report you have to make, colonel?’ he demanded, sharp now, his eyes cold.

Boros stiffened. ‘I meant no disrespect, my lord.’

They looked at one another. Finally, Fennick laughed.

‘We have known each other long enough, you damn fool, that we can speak our minds freely – when we are alone together at least. Forgive my tone, Boros. Arguing in council is apt to sharpen a man’s tongue.

‘You and I remember when Zalathras was a mudbound settlement surrounded by a wood stockade, and beyond it the jungle shrieked and teemed with fear. What is it now, thirty years?’ He turned and smiled. ‘Long enough to wear away some of the formalities at least.’

Boros stumped towards him. With his right hand he snapped and unsnapped the strap that held his pistol holstered to his thigh. The tall-ceilinged chamber in which they stood made the gesture click out loud. Brutal Imperial architecture, grand but functional. Its design and dimensions were echoed on ten thousand other worlds across the galaxy, the imprimatur of the Imperium of Man. It seemed designed for giants – perhaps it once had been.

‘I remember when we both wore sergeant’s stripes, and were proud to wear them,’ Boros said.

‘I do not forget, Boros. I could never forget that,’ Fennick replied. The two stared at each other again, and then at nothing, the memories in the eyes of them both.

Finally Boros coughed, and grinned sheepishly.

‘I am about to complicate your day, my lord, and for nothing perhaps.’

‘Go on then. My day can fit one more complication in, I’m sure.’

‘There are rumours – barely more than that – coming from the border moons of the Chrisos System. A few outposts have fallen out of vox, and there is a claim that some addled enginseer picked up a strange signature on augur while on a sanctioned-trader bound out of Chrisannon.’

‘What kind of signature?’ Fennick asked. He was leaning over the long table that ran down the middle of the room. There, acid-etched into the hide of a jungle centaur, were the plans of his Zalathras –the city that currently existed, and the one that was still gestating. Upon the scaly hide of the map, roads yet unbuilt arced out towards satellite cities which at present were nothing more than stockaded hamlets. And all around the edge of the map, the deep jungle known on this world as the Tagus: unconquerable, perilous, source of both fear and wealth.

‘Something big,’ Boros said, still clicking his gunstrap. ‘It is probably nothing.’

‘The farther eastern outposts of the system were always at the limits of the vox’s capabilities. You know that, Boros,’ Fennick said irritably. ‘Messages are relayed from station to station, they get lost, or misunderstood…’ He stared at his guard commander’s restless fingers and Boros lifted his hand from his holster.

‘Is it the augur report?’

Boros nodded. ‘It bothers me. The enginseer said it was a passing pulse, no more, but it was big enough to be a large vessel, or a lot of smaller ones. He might even have thought it to be a stray asteroid cluster, except that it seemed to alter speed and course. It was far out, but on course for the heart of the system. And, my lord, our enquiries show that no other Imperial ships were in the area at the time. That area of space is deserted, or at least it should be.’

‘Perhaps it was an asteroid cluster after all then… How far away?’

‘At normal cruising speed, many weeks, perhaps as long as two months from Zalidar.’

‘Perhaps we should wait awhile before jumping to conclusions,’ Fennick said dryly.

Boros bowed slightly. ‘I thought it best to draw it to your attention, just in case.’

Fennick’s eyes were ranging over the map on the tabletop. He seemed utterly absorbed by the representation of his city as it was, and as it could be.

‘Quite right,’ he muttered. ‘Was there anything else, Boros?’

‘No, my lord.’ The leather-armoured soldier hesitated. ‘But – well – I would like your authorisation for a long-range patrol of the system to be set up. I will need one frigate, no more, and the Hesiod is available. I checked.’

Fennick arched one black eyebrow. ‘You should perhaps be consulting Rear Admiral Glenck on a fleet matter, Boros.’

‘I did. He refused.’

Fennick straightened and looked Boros in the eye. ‘So you decided to step out of channels, eh? And play on our friendship.’

‘Yes,’ Boros said, thrusting out his jaw.

‘You think it is that important?’

‘I think, my lord, that the universe is a dangerous place, and as you have said yourself, not all enemies are of this world.’

‘But this is Ultramar, near as damn it.’

‘And the Ultramarines have many claims on their time.’

‘You have never liked Glenck, have you, Boros?’

Boros flushed slightly. Again, the outthrust jaw. Fennick had seen that expression on his friend’s face many times over the years.

‘He is a functionary, relegated to what he sees as a backwater, his career all but over. He may have been an effective officer once, but those days are past.’

Fennick smiled. ‘Harsh words. I wish I could disagree with them.’ He turned back to the map. ‘Very well, Boros. I trust your judgement. Your instincts have saved my hide more than once, Throne knows. You shall have your patrol, and let us hope it is all for nothing. I will issue an executive order. It will do the Hesiod’s crew good to see something of the outer system at any rate.’

‘Thank you, my lord.’ Boros bowed, and turned to leave, but Fennick held up a hand.

‘One thing, Boros. You know you are making an enemy of Glenck by doing this, don’t you?’

Boros shrugged. ‘He is not much of an enemy. We have faced down far worse, you and I.’

Then he left by the great double doors at the end of the chamber, his footsteps echoing off stone and plascrete as he went.

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For my brothers, Sean and James

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.
Internal illustrations by Dave Gallagher, Paul Dainton,
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