Contents

Cover

Calgar's Fury – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

One

‘Primarion Optis, this is Arnaeus three, sweeping grid three-seven-two-five now, my augur is clear, all systems are in holy function. Throne be with us.’

‘Acknowledged Arnaeus three, we have you on long-range and are plotting now. Your patrol route has been inscribed in the Cogitator of Navigation.’

The augur controller Rann Gorekian, a human overseeing a long bank of murmuring servitors, yawned. It was a beautiful morning, and the sun was rising fat and red over Primarion Optis, the only large-scale urban area on all of beautiful Iax. Gorekian’s shift was almost over, and unlike the tireless servitors he oversaw, he was looking forward to his early morning meal, cold water on his face and some sleep. But for now, his duty kept him here, in the long, stone-built chamber that was as austere and echoing as a place of worship.

He bore the ultima sigil on the chest of his blue uniform, surrounded by the stylised wheat ears that made up the symbol of his world. Green garden of the sector, Iax was an agri planet, the granary of Ultramar. Nestled in the heart of that great, guarded realm, it was surrounded by minefields and gun-satellites and was as protected a world as could be found in this embattled galaxy. But still, the inter-system patrols went out every few weeks to police the space-lanes about Iax, a fleet of small ships kept in constant motion and watchfulness by the decree of Macragge.

Call sign Arnaeus three was a tiny craft, by Imperial standards. Based on the hull of a Faustus class interceptor, it was one of several squadrons maintained at Primarion Optis Space Port on Iax. Just over three hundred feet long, it had a crew of four: pilot, observation officer, flight engineer and gunnery mate, as well as several servitors. On this day the Arnaeus was close enough to its home planet to travel with a reduced crew. Its job was to observe, not to engage, and in any case, this far into the heart of Ultramar the system patrols had become over the years something of a pro forma exercise. Everyone knew that an Ultramarines strike cruiser was never more than a day or two away; on this occasion the massive, sacred bulk of the Rex Aeterna, commanded by Captain Caito Galenus himself with a full company of Adeptus Astartes aboard.

Gorekian walked up and down the monitoring dais which arced between the banked servitors and their screens. Incense hung blue in the air; the tech-priests had already conducted their ritual morning blessings, and the cogitators hummed serenely, the spirits within them in harmony.

High above him, the early light of Iax’s star poured through the armoured windows of the command chapel, yellow tinged with blue. He checked his chrono. Thirty minutes until relief. Another uneventful night in Ultramar.

It had been over sixty years since the tyranid invasion of the sector, and the terrible destruction of that titanic conflict had long since been repaired. To Gorekian, who was not yet thirty, tales of those years were something akin to legend. His father had known that time, and disliked speaking of it. Back then, Macragge itself had been all but overwhelmed, the Ultramarines beaten off their own home world, much of the surrounding systems devastated. But though there had been other wars since, they had taken place out on the fringes of the sector. Some were still ongoing; the orks were continually probing the borders of Ultramar, as were the eldar. But to a young man like Rann Gorekian, the possibility of a major threat making it all the way here, to the heart of the Ultramarines’ territory, was so remote as to be unthinkable.

Such are the limitations of men’s memories.

Gorekian yawned again, thinking of his wife in the hab out in the suburbs, the green fields that stretched beyond it. The plains of Iax were given over to grain crops, farmed on an immense scale by semi-automated combine-reticulates, irrigated, verdant, quiet. A man might spend his life on the planet and not see a single tree, just those endless plains of wheat and soy and millet; but the immense sky was always there to wonder at, and at night the stars blazed across it in trails and streamers of all colours, not hemmed out as they were on so many other worlds by the lights of hive cities and the miasma of man-made smogs.

Iax was clean, unpolluted – it had to be, for the foodstuffs it created fed half the subsector, even venerable Macragge itself. A man counted himself lucky to make his life there, when he could be toiling in some lightless mine or sweating his innards out in the manufactoria of a forge world. Iax was blessed, and the prowess of the Ultramarines saw to it that it remained so.

‘Primarion Optis, this is Arnaeus three, we have an anomalous reading in grid three-seven-two-six, coming up on augur now. Some kind of energy bloom. Could be the residual from a warp translation.’

Gorekian rubbed his eyes and touched the vox mic that hung from one ear.

‘I hear you, Arnaeus three. Do you wish to investigate? You are beyond our augur and your sweep is almost over.’ And so is my shift, Gorekian thought irritably.

A few seconds delay. Arnaeus three was moving farther out from the planet, the lengthening distance delaying signal transmission somewhat. Gorekian picked up the ship’s ident beacon on the data readout of the servitor tasked with monitoring the void space over Iax and frowned. Almost out of patrol range.

He knew Arnaeus three’s pilot – young Jesh Warius, a fire-eater if ever there was one. The fellow was a voidsman of some repute among his comrades in the Iax squadrons, one of those who loved nothing more than to pilot his craft out there in the darkness, intent on one day joining the Imperial Navy proper, to course the true depths of the void. But he was trustworthy.

‘Affirmative, Primarion Optis, we are heading to intercept, should be within good interrogative range within fifteen minutes.’

‘I see nothing out there,’ Gorekian said, walking up and down the dais and scanning each slate and screen below him. Nothing was logged as inbound in that grid – if some vessel had translated out of the warp, then it was not on any schedule here, which was unusual for a system as well regulated as Iax.

The servitors muttered in binharic and their barely human limbs moved across their keyboards like musicians playing some enormously intricate instrument. Whatever it was that had piqued Warius’ interest was too far out to show up here.

The Arnaeus’ ident beacon glowed yellow, surrounded by darkness – no other Imperial ships were anywhere near. Gorekian’s stomach rumbled. Silently he cursed Warius and his curiosity. Like as not it would be nothing, some spatial anomaly which would go into the log and be forgotten along with the fistful of others that cropped up every few months. The void was full of phenomena that had not been investigated or explained; they were merely catalogued. Scientific curiosity was for the Adeptus Mechanicus, not a planetary patrol crew.

Minutes clicked by. Gorekian’s relief would soon be here. He could hand over Warius and his curiosity to Lieutenant Haldane, or he could adhere to the letter of the regulation tomes and remain.

Gorekian sighed. He knew what he would do. The training had ingrained it in him.

‘Primarion Optis, Arnaeus three here – you are not going to believe what I’m picking up!’ Warius’ voice had lost the bored competence he usually affected. ‘Throne – I’ve never seen anything like this before!’

‘Maintain proper voice procedure,’ Gorekian warned, though he felt a shrill spike of adrenaline at the outright fear in the pilot’s tone. ‘Arnaeus three, relay your findings to me at once.’

There was a squawk of static, and then silence.

‘Arnaeus three, do you read? Acknowledge my last message and relay your augur readings to my cogitators for analysis.’

‘It’s drawing us in– we’re out of–’ The transmission cut off on Warius’ last shout.

Nothing more. Gorekian strode up and down, his weariness forgotten. The servitors muttered binharic around him like a congregation mumbling its prayers. He stared up at the tall, cool walls of the chapel.

‘Throne,’ he growled under his breath at last. He touched his vox and called up the servitors direct.

‘Sigma binary one, extend planetary augur to full reach, bearing towards grid three-seven-two-six. Binary two, re-establish vox with Arnaeus patrol.’ He hesitated, and bared his teeth a second. ‘Sigma three, ready emergency vox call for Rex Aeterna strike cruiser, Captain Galenus commanding.’ His heart began to thump in his chest. ‘But hold off on that until I give the word.’ It was written in the Regulation tomes that all unusual vox occurrences be routed out to the nearest Ultramarines strike cruiser for further analysis, but he did not want to go down that route yet. One did not disturb the Ultramarines with trivialities.

Gorekian began to sweat. The servitors went about their business with the calm imperturbability of their kind, the readiness lights on their decks glowing amber as they undertook their newly assigned tasks in addition to their continual monitoring of the space port systems.

The command centre doors slid open and Lieutenant Haldane walked in, an older, crumpled man who looked as though he had just got out of bed. But he was a veteran of his kind, and took in the situation on the boards at a glance. Making the sign of the aquila to the little Imperial Shrine, which glimmered with a votive light, he placed his vox headset behind one ear and raised an eyebrow at his fellow officer, but Gorekian held up a hand. ‘I have this, Borr.’

‘Warius again, eh?’ Haldane said, scanning the call-logs.

‘It’s probably nothing.’ But Gorekian could not forget the fear in Arnaeus three’s last transmission.

‘He has travelled far out,’ Haldane grunted. ‘He has exceeded the parameters of his orders.’

‘Warius lives to fly that ship, Borr, you know that. There’s not a better pilot in the squadron.’

Haldane scratched his unshaven chin, grimacing. ‘He is insubordinate, but I admit what you say is true.’

They stood listening, waiting. Gorekian found himself staring at the ident beacon of Warius’ ship on the control slate. It was not moving, but at least it was still there.

Haldane cleared his throat. ‘Lieutenant Gorekian, I intend to clear Arnaeus two for lift-off, just in case. Do you concur?’

‘Affirmative.’ If something had happened aboard Warius’ ship there might be survivors in need of rescuing. In any case, vox had been down for too long. The void around Iax was as close to tamed as space became, swept clear of debris, asteroids and anything which might impede the coming and going of the grain convoys.

They waited. Gorekian felt the vibration from the launch pads through the soles of his boots as Arnaeus two warmed up her engines below the command tower.

‘Primarion Optis, Arnaeus two ready for take-off.’

Haldane and Gorekian shared a look and the younger man nodded.

‘Arnaeus two,’ Haldane rumbled, ‘you are cleared for take-off. Make for geosynchronous orbit and await further orders.’

‘Acknowledged.’

A dull roar outside, and a brightening of the morning as the Faustus took off, streaking up into the blue above.

The mechanical grate of a servitor spoke up over the noise. ‘Vox transmission incoming, grid three-seven-two-six, non-Imperial frequency… Transmission ends.’

‘Play it back,’ Gorekian snapped.

They heard a garbled flash of static, nothing more. Haldane swore under his breath. ‘Non-Imperial? Binary two, do we have any ships showing in that grid?’

‘Affirmative,’ the servitor intoned. ‘Call sign Arnaeus three is in that grid.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Negative.’

‘Try and sweep from here.’

‘Negative. That location is beyond planetary augur range.’

‘Play back the transmission, and clean it up,’ Gorekian said.

It came again, still soaked in static, but now there was definitely a voice there, words drowned out by interference. Something about the transmission set the hairs rising on Gorekian’s neck.

‘That’s no vox shadow,’ Haldane said, bending over the shoulder of a servitor to look at the screen. ‘It’s an old frequency – I’ve never seen it used before.’

‘Analyse,’ Gorekian said harshly.

The servitor answered with implacable calm. ‘Transmission is non-mechanical, non-xenoid. Transmission is human.’

‘Throne,’ Haldane swore. ‘Put it on a loop and see if you can reconstruct it.’

The two men went to one knee, the better to look down into the servitor well and watch the creature at work, though the servitor’s digits moved too fast to follow.

‘I have partial reconstruction,’ the servitor said.

The two straightened. ‘Let’s hear it,’ Gorekian said.

The transmission came over the chapel speakers again. This time as they listened, Gorekian and Haldane looked at one another and the same bleak astonishment was in both their faces. It was not a language they knew, but it was human speech – speech from a voice that set their skin crawling. A short, truncated phrase, repeated over and over again, until it seemed like a chant to fill the air, loathsome and alien, and yet hauntingly familiar.

‘Insanista in tenebris,’ the voice said, garbled and static-haunted but recognisable now.

Insanista in tenebris.

Gorekian’s eyes were wide. He tried to shake off the sense of clammy terror the words engendered.

‘Shut it off,’ he croaked. ‘Turn the damn thing off.’

The command centre went quiet again but for the binharic murmuring of the servitors and the hum of the boards.

‘Sigma three,’ he said at last, ‘patch me through to the Rex Aeterna. Get me Captain Galenus of the Ultramarines.’

Click here to buy Calgar's Fury.

For Liam Arbuthnot.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2017.
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jaime Martinez.

Calgar’s Fury © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Calgar’s Fury, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-646-0

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.