Contents

Cover

Duty Waits – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Duty Waits

Guy Haley

The Anterior Wall, Gate Anterior Six. Dorn’s fortress is new on Terra’s aged terms, but already the acids of the air and rain have eaten into it, pocking it rough as wave-worn rock. The erosion is getting worse. The processes the Emperor set in motion to clean the toxins from the air have halted. After a period of hopeful remission, Terra’s long illness has returned. Sacrificed to the exigencies of war, the regeneration of mankind’s home world has halted.

A column of warriors in yellow armour march upon the wall. The Imperial Fists are on patrol. There are five hundred of them, a company, with all their attendant officers. At their head is their captain, Maximus Thane.

Cold Himalazian winds cut across a wall-walk large enough for a squadron of tanks to ride down five abreast. In the upper reaches, where the Palace has smothered Earth’s highest peaks, it is snowing dirty flakes flecked with the smuts of industry. On the lower ramparts there is only rain. Once, these lands were dry, high plateaus, now they are a Palace larger than a city. Emissions from its lofty towers create their own storms. Atmospheric regulators spew steam into the sky. Artificial clouds rapidly become rain in the chill, thin air. None of it blesses the torrid earth. The rain runs into drains and thence into funnels that take it down into the spaces between the Palace’s cellars and the hidden bedrock. All the water is sucked back up by the Palace, to be used again and again.

Between the dark clouds, the sky is a sickly vanilla shade. It is a bruise gone past its worst lividity. Ordinarily the armour of the giants stamping along the wall is a rich gold, far cleaner than the ailing skies, a yellow as bright as Terra’s extinct wildflowers. The quality of the sun desaturates the hue of their armour until it is a leper’s pallor. When the clouds scud over the sun, it becomes a murky green.

The wind carries the rain in steeply. In eddies created by angles in the wall, it turns in soaking gyres. The water runs over the armour, gathering in corners, streaking eye lenses, pouring over their emblems of a black fist upon a white field. Both seem grey in the rain.

The Imperial Fists march relentlessly. Their armour is impervious to energy blast, explosion and the void. Mere weather is of no concern to the Legiones Astartes. They must move fast, for they have a lot of ground to cover.

The Anterior Wall is a loop, a rope of stone, rockcrete, plasteel and adamantium, tossed out to snare a great swathe of territory and steal it into the Palace’s embrace. It forms a bailey, though one built to the scale of titans rather than men. Behind the Anterior Wall, the Lion’s Gate let into the Eternity Wall. Whereas the Anterior Wall is only stupendous in scale, the Lion’s Gate defies human senses. There are mountains smaller than the gatehouse. Though two hundred miles from the Anterior Wall, it is clearly visible. Even through the rain, it is a squat, brooding shadow.

The Lion’s Gate is not these Space Marines’ concern. Others of their Legion man its guns and its parapets. Their duty is on the Anterior Wall, and true to the nature of their kind, they give it their complete attention – rain, dirt and all. No place in the Palace is safe. The enemy could come at any time. The enemy have already attacked. Since the Alpha Legion’s assault on Terra, the praetorians of the Emperor have been vigilant.

There are six gates that pierce the wall’s frontage. They are each eighty-nine miles apart. The wall itself is six hundred miles long, though if one were to draw a straight line between the two points where it joins the Eternity Wall, the distance would be only two hundred and forty-six miles.

The Space Marines doggedly tramp along. Their pace does not vary, but remains a jog that an unmodified human could not possibly match. They do it for hours, for mile after mile, thundering past the unblinking eyes of picters, through the spread nets of motion sensors, their patrol logged by every one. To their left the outer ward of the Palace spreads itself across the ground. The buildings there are strategically unimportant, else they would be within the Eternity Wall. Civilian abodes. Offices for non-hegemony organisations. Corporate interests, trade cartel headquarters, charitable foundations, places of education. All the usual trappings of human society. But most of the concerns sheltering in the Anterior loop have either been shut down or subordinated to the growing Imperial bureaucracy. There has never been a state of war like this in all of mankind’s history. Freedom is ever the first casualty of war, and it has been lost notably quickly this time.

Click here to buy Duty Waits.

A Black Library Publication

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.

Duty Waits © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Duty Waits, 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: 978-1-78572-845-7

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.