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Echoes of the Long War – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

Immaterium – Phall transit, 544. M32

Combat lighting cut uneven diagonal strokes across the command deck of the Fists Exemplar battle-barge Dantalion. She creaked and groaned like a submersible descending into the deep, uncharted black. The real space cocoon of her Geller field rippled under the eddying pressures of the empyrean.

From null-shielded podia positioned around the principal deck to form an apotropaic symbol, cherubic serfs of the Chapter Librarius sang warp-soothing verses. The vaulted, cathedral-like space had been designed as much for its acoustics as for its strategic value, for indeed what were the choristers but another aspect of defence? Within hermetically walled-off command turrets, operations serfs worked efficiently under grainy pools of light. Shotgun-wielding Chapter armsmen, in grey carapace armour devoid of insignia, watched over their bodies. The chorus soothed their doubts and girded their souls. Reinforced by the confessional susurrus of muted conversation and the continual lifting up and setting down of hardline communication units, the song echoed down the mighty support pillars to the cogitation tiers below. Mindless though they were, even the servitors and the clicking, whirring, humming machine-spirits they tended had their contribution to make to the chorale.

The refraction field that blanketed the blast doors powered down, and the metre-thick, silver-rebarred adamantium parted with a pneumatic hiss. A dozen multilaser cradles and frag-launchers pivoted to cover the kill-zone that ramped upwards from the doors to the deck.

That was the sum of the reaction generated by First Captain Zerberyn’s arrival on deck. Fortunate then that he felt no need for the acclaim that Koorland and Thane received from the masses.

Zerberyn was humble, considered, austere: an Exemplar in his founder’s example.

Deactivating the priority summons, he stamped up the ramp with a whine of actuators and power servos, a pale-faced giant encased in armour of unpainted grey ceramite. He was pale, because he was the mortal child of a world whose light could kill. He was a giant, because his gene-fathers had seen the worth of making him so.

He ascended the deck at the same time as the blast doors resealed and the refraction field snapped back to full power. He felt the auto-turrets disengage their lock on him and return to sentry protocols.

‘Report, shipmaster.’

The crippled shipmaster stood stiffly in the middle of a ring of terminals in the vox-turret. His posture was no affectation. The augmetic brace that clad his entire right side in a metal skeleton and allowed him to stand did not also allow him to bend. He worked at attention, he ate at attention, he slept at attention. He glanced at the analogue chrono face mounted on the turret wall. It read 05:17. Still on Terran time.

‘I hadn’t expected you so soon.’

‘Your summons was flagged “priority” .’

As if to protest, Shipmaster Marcarian opened the corner of his mouth that still functioned, an eyelid flickering withlocked-in frustration, and stumped forty degrees about to face the vox-liaison. She was identically outfitted to the serfs she spoke for: glittering void suit, bulky headset, sidearm clamped under the rest of an armoured console chair. There was nothing to differentiate rank. Not on a Fists Exemplar ship.

The shipmaster worked saliva through his palsied mouth. ‘05:07, ship time, Vox logged receipt of an Adeptus Astartes distress beacon. Lexicography haven’t yet purified enough of the signal corruption to retrieve the message.’

‘The Navy abandons systems wholesale at the rumour of an attack moon in a neighbouring sector. Worlds burn, our own amongst them, the Throneworld itself is besieged, and hourly we receive a plea for deliverance. And you summon me for a distress beacon?’

‘I trust you weren’t called away from anything too pressing?’

Zerberyn looked down over the blinking lights of his gorget softseal.

Marcarian swallowed with difficulty. ‘Just curious.’

‘I was in the Locutory with Brother Columba. The sergeant and I were debating the meanings of Guilliman’s extended proverbs.’

The shipmaster produced a smile. ‘I’ve not yet had the chance to congratulate you on your promotion to captaincy of the First. The command crew held a vigil in your honour.’

‘I chose not to attend.’

‘Vardy brought amasec.’ Marcarian’s good eye wandered towards the spiralling waves on the vox-liaison’s screen. ‘We were able to provision a crate on Terra. The lord sergeant would be a worthy First Captain, but he’s a hard… task… master…’

Zerberyn’s eyes drilled parallel holes into the side of the shipmaster’s head. The man cleared his throat.

‘We have something,’ said the vox-liaison, crisply.

‘Go ahead,’ Marcarian breathed. ‘Please.’

‘It’s definitely Last Wall.’

It would have taken one even more attuned to Space Marine physiology than the two mortal crew members to note the tightening muscles of Zerberyn’s neck. The Last Wall was an abhorrence to him. The mere conception of it would have been affront enough to Guilliman’s legacy, and that it was his own primarch that had done so sickened him. It had been Oriax Dantalion himself, the visionary who would later found the Fists Exemplar, who had persuaded Dorn of the wisdom in Guilliman’s solution. And now the Fists Exemplar had discovered that the primarch was not persuaded after all.

Zerberyn had argued the case with Thane at Phall, as he knew Dantalion himself would have done had he still lived, and had done so again on Terra. Another might have viewed his subsequent elevation in spite of all that had gone before as evidence of Thane’s magnanimity, but Zerberyn knew him better. It was an insult. The First had already been culled of its finest to reform Koorland’s shield corps. He was captain of the First, but the First was a company of new recruits and stubborn ideologues like Columba, who would rather lay down their arms and let destruction find them than don the black fist of Dorn once more.

‘What does it say?’

‘I wouldn’t advise listening to it. There’s a verbal component but it’s been heavily corrupted by the transition to the empyreal phase. But I do have coordinates.’

‘Is it Phall? I told Thane that Koorland was premature to depart while the Soul Drinkers and the bulk of the Black Templars were still to be contacted.’

The vox-liaison shook her head. ‘No. The latest navigation estimate puts us at least several weeks from the rendezvous coordinates. It’s not Terra either.’ She pivoted her chair and called up a screed of data to her terminal. Gloved fingers dancing over the keys, she transformed it into what Zerberyn recognised as a four-dimensional coordinate plot. ‘It’s close by, originating from an orphan star in the Sycrax Cluster. A red giant called Vandis.’

‘Is Thane or anyone else receiving this beacon?’

The officer sucked in her teeth, frustrated as much with herself as with the difficulties imposed on her by warp physics. ‘I don’t know.’

Zerberyn looked up to where the main viewscreen hung suspended from a plasteel gantry, reassuringly blank save for a purity seal on a fuzzy grey background. It was blustery with static, interpretive in its not-quite-random swirls of the buffeting energies of the warp.

With superhuman speed of thought, he collated the available variables, assembling them into a plan of action that he then challenged with every conceivable scenario. He took the additional half-second required to satisfy himself that any ship in the Fists Exemplar fleet in possession of the same information would reach an identical conclusion.

He had no love for his distant gene-brothers, but like it or not they were the Last Wall. The Imperium stood only while they held firm, and as the Arch-Heretic himself had annihilated the last great ork empire at its root, so too would Zerberyn burn the Beast from the very ground on which he lived.

This, he promised to himself.

‘Contact the Alcazar Remembered or any other ship you can raise, and transmit a data-burst containing the beacon coordinates and our course of action.’

‘Which is?’ said Marcarian.

‘Prepare for immediate real space translation onto the origin of that beacon. All stations to battle readiness. All weapons systems and shield arrays to be engaged the second we emerge.’

The shipmaster nodded stiffly and began to relay orders to the relevant stations, which in turn disseminated them through the ship down their hardlines. The murmur of voices became a clamour.

‘To run blind into a battle is folly,’ Marcarian murmured, for Zerberyn’s ear alone.

‘I know well the lessons of the Codex Astartes, shipmaster.’

Marcarian bowed his head. ‘Let me at least recommend that Excelsior be sent in ahead. She’s Rubicante-class, designed to operate through the worst distortions of the Flux. Her vox-array should be more than powerful enough to reach us, even here.’

Zerberyn duly considered the shipmaster’s counter-proposal. Coordinating the actions of a fleet the size of the Fists Exemplar’s through the immaterium would be fraught at best. Who could say what was listening? Or worse, what truly answered. He could not even say with certainty where Excelsior or the Alcazar Remembered were, or that they had not already emerged into the materium at Phall.

It was possible that Dantalion would return to Phall in a month’s time and find that Excelsior and the rest of the fleet had never left.

Zerberyn’s thumb rolled over his bolt pistol’s holster lock. It was Umbra-pattern, lacking the refinement of post-Heresy models, the various augmentations and integrations that had come with subsequent improvements in power armour design, but it was good at what it was made for and always would be. Purity through utility: that was how one proofed oneself against the unknowables of the galaxy.

He made his decision.

Guilliman’s writings spoke often of the importance of recognising the least worst option and seizing it.

‘Take us in.’

Vandis System – Mandeville point

Zerberyn felt a squeeze on his brain as though something were trying to get in. He heard whispers, and ignored them. He saw things – things he could not ignore so easily. He saw Dantalion.

Zerberyn was a relative neophyte, a recruit of the Chapter’s Eidolican era. He had never seen Oriax Dantalion, but he knew with the conviction of his genetics that it was him. Zerberyn did not speak, nor was he spoken to, but just watched as Sigismund, Alexis Polux, Demetrius Katafalque, and then Rogal Dorn himself turned their backs on the first Exemplar one by one. Zerberyn felt anger, but he was helpless to express it to these titanic figures. Without appearing to transition, Dantalion’s armour had ceased to be gold, but it had not become the unvarnished grey of Zerberyn’s own.

It was gunmetal and bronze.

Translation was complete, but this part was the worst. Those few seconds after the warp drives had powered down and the Geller field had collapsed, but the empyreal sheath remained raw and unhealed, thin enough to touch the other side with one’s mind, and for the waking nightmares that dwelled there to, if only for a few seconds, touch back.

The vision faded as the materium resealed, and Zerberyn dwelled on its lies no further.

Klaxons screamed proximity alerts and a dozen different types of weapons lock. Alert runes cycled amber and red. Their warnings went unheeded for a few critical seconds more, the unimproved brain chemistries of Dantalion’s mortal crew requiring that extra time to recover from the ordeal of translation.

Zerberyn killed an automated low-shield sounder with a gauntlet-mash that deactivated several other warning icons and cracked the terminal.

‘Steady as she goes,’ Marcarian drooled, straight as a cane, stiffened by his augmetic brace and implant while those around were still slumped with harrowed expressions in their chairs. ‘Cycle plasma coils. Navigational shields to full power. Void shield generators to cover all quadrants. Weapon grids online. Full spectrum sweep and re-initialise main viewer. Someone find me the source of that distress beacon.’

A dulled chorus of ‘Aye, sirs’ answered him. A string of light impacts trembled through the massive vessel’s hull as the main viewscreen wiped its purity seal and shivered online. It was a default forward shot: the gothic grey armour of Dantalion’s prow. A squadron of supercharged ork fighter-bombers streaked across it, trailed by a line of explosions.

‘Shields,’ said Zerberyn.

‘Void banks to charge in three… two… one.’

A resonant harmonic thrummed over the systems’ noise and the cherub-serfs’ chorus. The fighter-bomber to the rear of the orks’ chaotic formation was swallowed up by a ball of fire as Dantalion’s port-forward void shield manifested within its fuselage and ripped the craft to pieces. A wave of static washed across the viewscreen. Zerberyn focused. His occulobe organ was designed for low-light conditions and hyperfine details, and it autonomically filtered the visual noise.

The murderous red glow of the stellar giant, Vandis, flooded the shot and robbed the void of stars. In their place, he saw explosions, propellant burns and a glittering shoal of red-lit predators. It was a void fight, and a major one. He counted at least two hundred ork cruisers, possibly more. Pre-translation inertia carried them towards the battle at several hundred kilometres per second.

‘Ship contacts!’ came the shout from the strategium, a second behind. The liaison serf there held an internal vox-horn to his ear.

‘Ours?’ said Marcarian.

‘Too many!’

A flare lit the viewer, something massive-yield thumping the forward shield hard enough to shake the deck plates of the command bridge.

‘Try to raise the rest of the fleet,’ ordered Marcarian. ‘If they haven’t joined us then we don’t stand a chance.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘They will be here,’ said Zerberyn. ‘If even one ship received our transmission then they would have signalled also and the probability of a third vessel receiving would be doubled, and so on, exponentially. We are in the only place that any brother in receipt of those coordinates could be.’

‘We should at least be prepared to withdraw. Permission to re-actuate warp drives and lock-down for an emergency translation.’

‘Granted. Caution is always the wisest course when others fail to present themselves.’

‘Very good, lord captain.’ Marcarian stumped off to distribute orders.

‘Find me that distress beacon, shipmaster.’

‘Come and look at this, lord captain.’

Marcarian was standing by the chart desk that dominated the strategium turret. The base unit was an illuminated table, above which a wavering hololithic grid chart was displayed. A golden aquila dead-centre represented Dantalion. She was surrounded by a cloud of unidentified blips, trailing back towards the bloated, crimson wire-frame that represented the Vandis star. The intervening grids filled fast with ship markers, like a spreading infection reviewed on rapid playback. The banks of time-lapse and repeater screens that surrounded the desk were walled with static.

‘Disregard the orks for now,’ Marcarian commanded the strategium liaison. ‘Authorise removal of the necessary coding wafers and route the spared cogitation capacity to parse Last Wall identifiers.’

‘Do you not want targets?’ asked Zerberyn.

‘Scanning for Last Wall signals will identify both the source of the distress beacon, and our own fleet if they are here. That should be our first priority.’

Zerberyn offered his silence by way of agreement. Before a void fight with a Death Guard flotilla had wasted his right side and earned him his command, Marcarian had been Augur Master aboard the Grey Ranger. He knew his system.

‘I’d also recommend mobilising the First. The orks have shown themselves to favour long-range teleport actions.’

It was then that Zerberyn realised that at some point during the translation cycle he had drawn his pistol.

‘We are ready for them.’

All Adeptus Astartes fleets employed the same classes of ship, but the modular design allowed for variations on the basic STC. Fists Exemplar warships differed from those of their cousins in many ways, but principal among these was the manifold layers of dedicated psychic shielding they employed. They were built for void-war, purposed to patrol the storm-wracked region of wilderness space afflicted by the Rubicante Flux. In addition to the cherub-serfs that filled every inhabited section with song, choristers from the Chapter Librarius psychically conducted the chorus from chambers specifically designed for their warp-soothing acoustics. Every one of Dantalion’s millions of consoles was worked with monomolecular silver wires. Her ballast chambers were filled with the scent of candlewood and samphyr, silvic oil and rose cedar. Even the very halls of the ship were arranged into the schematised form of potent protective runes and a good portion of her orbit-to-ground firepower had been retrofitted with psychic null generators.

She had been designed to fight the enemies of Man and triumph in regions of space where other ships could not enter, and only deep-survey barges of the Inquisition sailed with greater protection against warp-borne assault.

‘But again, granted. Have them deploy at your discretion.’

‘Bright skies…’ someone exclaimed.

Zerberyn followed the staring faces to the main viewscreen. Someone amongst the veteran crew zoomed the screen’s visual feed and placed a bracket around a patched-up old colossus. Almost three times the mass of Dantalion, it looked like an Imperial Navy battleship. It was heavily damaged and, so it appeared, either partially or carelessly rebuilt. Its aft section was almost completely crumpled, and had been fitted with a monstrous engine housing almost as large as the rest of the ship that filled the void behind it with cones of chemical fire. Construction scaffolds spread from the hull like a beetle’s wings. Fires burned on several decks.

‘Oberon-class,’ Marcarian confirmed. ‘Or she was.’

The big vessel yawed into the lower quadrant of the main viewer, drifting across the plane of the solar system with a trail of gnat-like ork fighters in pursuit. ‘Approaching on an intercept vector.’

Whatever their current naval supremacy, the orks would always make use of what they found. Zerberyn could almost respect them for that.

‘No serial codes, no auto-transmissions, no response to hails.’ Marcarian limped through the strategium desks, looking over shoulders at the read-outs. ‘I’d say it’s an ork ship.’

‘Of course it is an ork ship. That much is clear.’

‘Still no sign of Last Wall transponders on our scans, lord captain,’ said Marcarian, stiffly. ‘All hands ready for emergency translation at your order.’

Zerberyn brought the barrel of his pistol to his gorget ring and tapped it as he thought, watching the zipping ork fighters wind about the nearing battleship like surgical thread through a wound.

‘Lord captain, I think that–’

‘I commend you your unfettered thought, it improves us all,’ Zerberyn spat, quoting from the Oriax Variorum. The ship slid into full view, Dantalion gunning for it amidships. Zerberyn aimed his bolt pistol at the viewer.

‘Kill that ship.’

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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 Víctor Manuel Leza.

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