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I am Slaughter – Extract

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One

Ardamantua, 544.M32

The Chromes were relatively easy to kill, but they came in ferocious numbers.

Eight walls of Imperial Fists boxed one of their primary family groups into a scrub-sided valley east of the blisternest, and reduced them to burned shells and spattered meat.

Smoke rose off the hill of dead. It was a yellowish air-stain composed of atomised organic particulates and the backwash of fyceline smoke. According to the magos biologis sent to assist the undertaking, sustained bolter and las-fire, together with the chronic impact trauma of blade and close-combat weapons, had effectively aerosolised about seven per cent of the enemy’s collective biomass. The yellow smoke, a cloud twenty kilometres wide and sixty long, drained down the valley like a dawn fog.

The magos biologis told Koorland this as if the fact had some practical application. Koorland, second captain of Daylight Wall Company, shrugged. It was a non-fact to him, like someone saying the shape of a pool of spilled blood resembled a map of Arcturus or Great-Uncle Janier’s profile. Koorland had been sent to Throne-forsaken Ardamantua to kill Chromes. He was used to killing things. He was good at it, like all his company brothers and like every brother of the shield-corps. He was also used to the fact that when things were killed in colossal numbers, it left a mess. Sometimes the mess was smoke, sometimes it was liquid, sometimes it was grease, sometimes it was embers. He didn’t need some Terra-spire expert telling him that he and his brothers had pounded the Chromes so hard and so explosively that they had vaporised part of them.

The magos biologis had a retinue of three hundred acolytes and servitors. They were hooded and diligent, and had decorated the hillside with portable detection equipment and analysis engines. Tubes sniffed the air (this, Koorland understood, was how the magos biologis had arrived at his seven per cent revelation). Picting and imaging devices recorded the anatomies of dead and living Chrome specimens alike. Dissections were underway.

‘The Chromes are not a high-factor hostile species,’ the magos told Koorland.

‘Really?’ Koorland replied through his visor speakers, obliged to listen to the report.

‘Not at all,’ the human said, shaking his head, apparently under the impression that Koorland’s obligation was in fact interest. ‘See for yourself,’ he said, gesturing to a half-flayed specimen spread-eagled on a dissection stand. ‘They are armoured, of course, around the head, neck and back, and their forelimbs are well formed into digital blades–’

‘Or “claws”,’ said Koorland.

‘Just so,’ the magos went on, ‘especially in sub-adult and adult males. They are not harmless, but they are not a naturally aggressive species.’

Koorland thought about that. The Chromes – so called because of the silvery metallic finish of their chitin armour – were xenosbreed, human-sized bugs with long forelimbs and impressive speed. He thought about the eighteen million of them that had swarmed the valley that afternoon, the sea of silver gleaming in the sunlight, the swish of their bladed limbs, the tek-tek-tek noise they made with their mouthparts, like broken cogitators. He thought of the three brothers he’d lost from his wall during the initial overwhelm, the four taken from Hemispheric Wall, the three from Anterior Six Gate Wall.

Go tell them not naturally aggressive.

The Chromes had numbers, vast numbers. The more they had killed, the more there were to kill. Sustained slaughter was the only operational tactic: keep killing them until they were all dead. The rate at which the Imperial Fists had been required to hit them, the duration, the frenzy – no damn wonder they aerosolised seven per cent of their biomass.

‘Chromes have been encountered on sixty-six other worlds in this sector alone,’ said the magos biologis. ‘Twenty-four of those encounters took place during compliance expeditions at the time of the Great Crusade, the rest since. Chromes have been encountered in large numbers, and have often defended themselves. They have never been known to behave with such proactive hostility before.’

The magos thought about this.

‘They remind me of rats,’ he said. ‘Rad-rats. I remember there was a terrible plague of them down in the basements and sub-basements under the archive block of the Biologis Sanctum at Numis. They were destroying valuable specimens and records, but they were not, individually, in any way harmful or dangerous. We sent in environmental purge teams with flame guns and toxin sprays. We began to exterminate them. They swarmed. Fear, I suppose. They came flooding out of the place and we lost three men and a dozen servitors in the deluge. Unstoppable. Like the sub-hive rats, the Chromes have never behaved this way before.’

‘And they won’t again,’ said Koorland, ‘because when we’re finished here they’ll all be dead.’

‘This is just one of a possible nineteen primary family groups,’ said the magos biologis. He paused. Koorland knew that the magos intended to address him by name, but, like so many humans, he found it difficult to differentiate between the giant, transhuman warriors in their yellow armour. He had to rely on rank pins, insignia and the unit markings on shoulderplates, and that information always took a moment to process.

The magos biologis nodded slightly, as if to apologise for the hesitation.

‘–Captain Koorland of the Second Daylight Wall–’

‘I’m second captain of the Daylight Wall Company,’ Koorland corrected.

‘Ah, of course.’

‘Forget about rank, just try to remember us by our wall-names.’

‘Your what?’

Koorland sighed. This man knew more than seemed healthy about xenosbreeds, but he knew nothing about the warriors built to guard against them.

‘Our wall-names,’ he said. ‘When we are inducted, we forget our given names, our pre-breed names. Our brothers bestow upon each of us a name that suits our bearing or character: a wall-name.’

The magos nodded, politely interested.

Koorland gestured to a Space Marine trudging past them.

‘That’s Firefight,’ he said. ‘That brother over there? He’s Dolorous. Him there? Killshot.’

‘I see,’ said the magos biologis. ‘These are earned names, names within the brotherhood.’

Koorland nodded. He knew that, at some point, he’d been told the magos biologis’ name. He hadn’t forgotten because it was complicated, he just hadn’t cared enough about the human to remember it.

‘What is your name, captain?’ the magos asked brightly. ‘Your wall-name?’

‘My name?’ Koorland replied. ‘I am Slaughter.’

Two

Ardamantua

In less than six solar hours, they were back in combat.

A filthy dusk had settled over the landscape. In the reddish haze of the sky, the low-anchored bulks of their barges hung like oblong, tusk-prowed moons. The Chapter Master had ordered over ninety per cent of the Fists’ strength out on this undertaking. It was a huge show of force. Too much, in Slaughter’s opinion. But it was political too. The Adeptus Astartes were very good at prosecuting and finishing wars. Whenever extended periods of peace broke out, especially in the exalted systems and holdings around the Terran Core, it became harder to justify the sheer might of a standing army like the Imperial Fists. It was good to get them out, to give them purpose, to chalk up a staggering victory that the core system populations could celebrate. The extermination of a xenosbreed threat like the Chromes was ample justification for such lethal institutions as the Imperial Fists.

Strategic surveys put the Chrome numbers at something in the order of eighty-eight billion, and migratory scans showed a pronounced in-curve diaspora towards the core worlds. Besides, Ardamantua, Throne-forsaken Ardamantua, was just six warp-weeks from Solar Approach.

Since the very earliest ages of the Imperium, the Imperial Fists had been the primary defenders of Terra. Other Chapters – Legions, as they had been known, until the Great Heresy and the instigation of the Codex – might crusade, explore or take war to the furthest corners of Imperial space. But the Imperial Fists were the primary guardians of Terra and the core. This was what they had always done. This was the duty their beloved Primarch-Progenitor had charged them with when he had left them.

It was their legacy.

Surface scans had shown another Chrome family group of significant size moving around the blisternest. Daylight Wall had led the way across the river, with two walls at their heels and another crossing further up. The river was broad but slow and heavy, no more than waist-deep, and muddy. The brackish water fumed with insects.

The Chromes started to resist when they saw the Imperial Fists wading out to the nest side. Some plunged into the water and attempted to attack. Shooting began, brothers firing from the soupy water, pushing the foe back, driving the Chromes up the claggy banks even as the xenos gathered in greater numbers to plunge in. The enemy became agitated. The slow tide was soon full of Chrome corpses, spinning end to end as they drifted downstream. The Imperial Fists advance seemed almost sullen; they came slowly, trudging through the stinking water, firing because they had to at targets too ridiculously easy to hit.

Slaughter roused his men. If they were going to engage, they were going to do it with dignity. They were coming up the bank, approaching the huge, septic shape of the blisternest rim.

‘Daylight Wall stands forever,’ he voxed. ‘No wall stands against it. Bring them down.’

The men of the company clashed their boltguns and their broadswords against their combat shields and chanted the refrain back. The advance began to accelerate.

A wall of men. A wall of supermen.

Slaughter reached the bank. It was a steep, slick mire threaded with coarse vegetation. Glinting in the smoky light, Chromes bounded down onto the ridges, rising up into threat postures and challenging him. He came out of the water, oily green moisture trailing off his yellow armour. Frenzy was at his left hand, Heartshot was at his right.

The first of the Chromes came at him.

Slaughter’s broadsword was a two-handed power blade with a silver cross-hilt and a black pommel. It had fought at Terra, during the Siege, in the hands of a Fist called Emetris, who had fallen there. It was as broad as a standard human male’s thigh. He brought it up and it described an arc in the air as the first Chrome leapt. It split the xenos through its gleaming bio-armour and cut it in two. Ichor showered in all directions. A second sprang, and he smashed it aside, slashed open. A third met the blade, impaled itself, and thrashed wildly until he ripped the sword back out.

It was just the beginning. They started to rush. A dozen, two dozen, all at once. Slaughter liked sword-work. It was economical. It saved munitions for more significant moments. The broadsword was a finely balanced instrument in his huge hands. The two-handed grip could turn and shear each swing in a surprisingly subtle number of ways.

Slaughter began to slaughter.

He left a trail of dead behind him: ruptured silver husks weeping ichor into the matted, trampled vegetation. Each step was an impact as another two or three Chromes came at him and were met by the brute, full-stop force of his blade. Organic debris flew from each killstroke. Ichor and other xenos fluids squirted high into the air and dappled his armour like dew, like rain.

Frenzy tore through the stand of dry weeds to his left, swinging an axe that had been the proud possession of a series of Fists since before the Great Crusade. The curve of its bite had been notched by the skull of a green warboss during the Malla Vajjl compliance. Frenzy, a big-hearted generous man, possessed particularly acute hand-eye coordination. His movements were so fast and precise, they seemed almost random. He had earned his wall-name through his grace on the field, the constant motion, the changing grips, the reversals, the back-steps, the aggression. His axe moved from grip to grip like a baton or a staff whirled by some ceremonial parade-ground officer. It seemed to fly from his hand many times as he turned and changed position, but it never left him. Like Slaughter, he had eschewed his bolter for the clearance work.

Slaughter wished he could stop and admire the battle-craft of his friend and brother, but there was no opportunity. The enemy’s numbers were increasing.

To Slaughter’s right, tearing through the reed beds and the dried mucus walls of the blisternest edges, came Heartshot and Chokehold. Heartshot’s rotary cannon made a metallic din like a stamp-press forge at full production. Chokehold’s bolter exploded two or sometimes three charging Chromes with each shell.

Slaughter barked orders, kept the line firm. He didn’t want over-step. He didn’t want the Chromes to find a way in through any gap in their line. Heartshot and Chokehold moved ahead fast, cutting their path with firepower. He had to keep them leashed.

He called out wall-names – Cleaver, Arm’s Length, Coldeye, Lifetaker, Bleedout – and urged them in at the back, ordering them through the reed beds to fill and cover.

His head snapped around from a sideways blow. He smelled blood in his nose, blood that clotted instantly. A screamer alert sang in his helm and his visor display blinked up mottled damage patterns.

He recovered. This took less than a second. One of the big adults had raked his head with a forelimb claw. He’d taken his eye off the fight for a micro-moment to check the line.

His sword killed the thing for its insult and for the scratch it left in the yellow surface of his helm. But there was another at its heels, an even bigger adult. It was two-thirds his size. He hadn’t seen Chromes this big before. Its appearance was different too. It was not chrome or silvery. Its chitin and armour, and its claws, seemed resiny black and brown, as if made from a horny bark that was still growing.

It ripped his chestplate. Slaughter got his shield in the way, took off its limb mid-forearm, and then reversed his blade and killed it.

Two strokes for one kill. Inefficient.

The thing had been big. It had required the extra effort.

Another large, dark form appeared, and then two more. What were they? A sub-species? A larger, more aggressive form of the basic Chrome xenotype?

Slaughter’s helm was alive with vox-chatter reports from across the offensive, all describing the same new type: larger, darker, bigger, stronger, harder to kill.

Tactical re-evaluation. Slaughter started to issue advisories even as he met the next of the new kind. Two strokes to kill one, three to finish the next. More gouges down to bare metal on his armour.

Why would any force, any species, keep its largest and strongest warrior-forms in reserve? Why would they not send them out into open combat? They might have halted or driven back the Adeptus Astartes’ attack long before they had cut their way to the blisternest.

The tek-tek-tek noise the Chromes made with their mouthparts, that malfunctioning data-engine clatter, was changing. The bigger, darker warrior-forms made a lower, duller noise, a clack-clack-clack. Two brothers in the line had already fallen to their superior power and savagery.

‘Do we fall back?’ Frenzy voxed. ‘Slaughter, do we break and regroup? This is new. This is–’

‘Hold the line,’ Slaughter replied. ‘No regroup. No fall back. Hold the line. Daylight Wall stands forever. No wall stands against it. Bring them down.’

‘Understood.’

Frenzy’s unquestioning understood was instantly echoed by a hundred voxed voices.

Slaughter ducked a slashing brown claw the size of Frenzy’s axe-head. He was smiling.

He had made a realisation. He knew what this was.

They are us. They are Daylight Wall.

The blisternest was the Chromes’ Palace of Terra. They had kept their bravest and best and mightiest warriors in reserve to defend it, in case an enemy ever got through.

This was their last ditch. Their last stand. This was their final wall, their do or die.

The Imperial Fists were just hours away from completing their undertaking to Ardamantua and adding another proud tally to their glory roll.

This was the bloody endgame, and it would be a battle to relish.

‘Hold the line,’ Slaughter ordered. Then, as a practical afterthought, he added, ‘Use your bolters.’

Three

Terra – the Imperial Palace

The air was smoke.

In preparation for the midday Senatorum meeting, servitors had lit the burners in the upper galleries and the approach halls, and in the alcoves along the Walk of Heroes, whose great leaded windows, miraculously spared by the pounding overpressure of the Siege, had looked out onto the stately yards behind Eternity Gate for two dozen centuries.

The burners fumed with camphor and septrewood, rose-ash and parvum, the sacred incense of the Saviour Emperor, thought to smell exactly like the incorruptible sanctity of His Eternal Form.

Vangorich couldn’t attest to this. Given his office as a Grand Master, he might have requested, and even been granted, the chance to show observance at the foot of the Golden Throne. He had never bothered. The dead did not interest him, not even the divine dead. What interested him – obsessed him – were the mechanisms by which things became dead, and the opportunities those deaths afforded the living.

He had entered the Inner Palace that morning through West Watch, and then followed the hallway walks behind the High Gardens and Daylight Wall before pausing in the chapel ordinary behind the cloister wall to make a small devotion at the basin font.

Vangorich was not a pious man. He was a man of faith, but it was not a spiritual faith. He made his devotion because he knew – or at least could be fairly certain – that agents from a dozen or more ministries and factions were watching him at all hours of the day and night. It was easier to make sure he was seen to be doing what he was supposed to do, than it was to waste manpower eradicating those spies on a daily basis.

Let his rivals do the hard work. It was no great effort to act a part.

Drakan Vangorich had been doing it all his life.

So he did what was expected of him. As a Grand Master – albeit of an Officio that had once been powerful and was now regarded as an atavistic throwback to a more brutal age – he was expected to attend all meetings, formal and discretionary. He was supposed to show humility and dignity. He was supposed not to express any cruel or bloodthirsty appetites, the sort of appetites his rivals assumed that a Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum must harbour. He was supposed to show respect to the Creed.

All Senatorum members took a blessing or expressed some devotion before taking their seats at meetings, so that the will of the God-Emperor might guide their thoughts and wisdom. Some, like the odious Lansung, made a great show of doing so, in full dress uniform, usually in the chapel-vault of one of his battlefleet vessels in orbit. Mesring was the same, leading a train of gowned, gold-helmed savant-priests into the rotunda church below Hemispheric Wall. Pompous idiots!

Vangorich, dressed in simple, ascetic black, opted for a less showy effect. The chapel ordinary was used by Palace servants and householders for their daily observances. It was not a public place, just a very plain cell with frugal appointments. Vangorich was aware that using it made him look dutiful, restrained, and very humble. It made him look more admirably spiritual than the lords who made their observances for show. It spoke of simplicity and a lack of arrogance.

It made him look trustworthy and noble. It made him look good. He liked his rivals’ spies to see that. He knew it irked them beyond measure to hear that he had stopped for a few minutes in a private, unostentatious servants’ chapel to make a discreet act of faith. How it bothered them that he was so unimpeachably wholesome.

The truth was, he probably thought more about how he looked at all times, and what his image said about him, than the likes of Mesring and Lansung. Their activities were conducted publicly, to win popular support; Vangorich’s were conducted simply for the benefit of the ever-circling spies. He performed for his rivals, playing the part he wanted them to see.

How would they see him now, coming to the meeting? As a man of medium height and medium build, dressed in black, with black hair oiled back like a clerk’s across his narrow skull. His skin was pale from the constant twilight of life in the Palace, and he had precious little in the way of distinguishing features, except for his dark, wide-set eyes and the duelling scar that canyoned the left part of his mouth and chin.

Vangorich never spoke of the duel, except to say that it had happened when he was a youth, before he took office, and he regretted it in as much as the matter should not have been resolved face-to-face with rapiers, but rather with him placed behind his adversary, dagger in hand, and his adversary unaware of his presence.

Drakan Vangorich liked to kill things. He liked to kill things as efficiently as possible, with the least possible effort, and he only ever killed things if there was a reason: a good reason, a persuasive reason. Death was the pure solution to life’s greatest and most confounding problems.

This was what so many of the offices and agencies seemed not to understand about the ancient Officio Assassinorum. It was not an archaic killing machine, lurking to spread disorder and mayhem at the whim of some mercurial Grand Master, poisoning here and stabbing there. It was not a thirsty sword hung in a rack, aching to shed blood.

It was a necessary and purifying fire. It was the last resort, the end of arguments. It was hope and it was salvation. It was the noblest and truest of all the Offices of Terra.

The Emperor had understood this, which was why He had instigated the office and allowed it to function during His lifetime. He had understood the necessity for ultimate sanction. He had, after all, permitted the VI Legion of the Adeptus Astartes to exist simply to function in that role as it applied to primarchs and other Legions. Grand Master Vangorich’s office existed to perform that function at a court level.

That was why the other lords were afraid of him. They all presumed he might stab them in the spine. They always forgot that he was their instrument. They got to vote on who he killed. They should spend more time worrying about each other.

‘Good day, Daylight,’ he said as he stepped out of the chapel ordinary to continue his walk to the Great Chamber.

The Imperial Fist, his armour polished and perfect, turned slowly and offered Vangorich a shallow tip of the head.

‘Good day, Grand Master,’ the Space Marine replied, his voice welling up as a volcanic rumble through helm-speakers. He towered over the human lord, ornamental spear in his left fist, litany-inscribed shield in his right. Vangorich felt sorry for the wall-brothers of the VII. They were reputed to be the very finest of all, the most excellent and capable of their Chapter. Yet, because of ritual and ceremony and honour, they were fated to remain here for their entire service lives; the best of the best, one for each of the Palace walls that the Fists had protected, wasting their immense potential, serving out their time in the one place in the galaxy that war would never visit again.

They didn’t even have names. They simply wore the names of the walls they patrolled, every day and night, in perfectly polished armour.

‘I’m probably late for the meeting,’ Vangorich remarked.

‘You have six minutes and thirteen seconds remaining, sir,’ replied the Space Marine. ‘However, I suggest you take Gilded Walk to the traverse behind Anterior Six Gate.’

‘Because they’re not meeting in the Great Chamber?’

The Space Marine nodded.

‘They are not, sir.’

‘They keep doing that,’ said Vangorich, peeved. ‘I think it is unseemly. The Great Chamber was good enough for our ancestors. It was built as our parliament.’

‘Times change, sir,’ said the warrior Daylight.

Vangorich paused and looked up at the grim and unfathomable visor. Light glowed like coals behind the optic lenses.

‘Do they?’ he asked. ‘Do you wish for that, Daylight? Do you wish for the chance to kill?’

‘With every fibre of my soul, and every second of my life, sir,’ the Imperial Fist replied. ‘But this is the duty I have been given and I will perform it with my entire heart and will.’

Vangorich felt he ought to say something, but he could not think of anything adequate, so he nodded, turned, and walked away down the gloomy hallway.

Four

Terra – the Imperial Palace

The Great Chamber had been the seat of power on Terra since the Palace had been established. It was a formidable stadium, a veritable colosseum, with a central dais and seats for the High Lords, and then vast tiers of seats for the more minor officials and lords, lesser functionaries, petitioners and so forth. At full capacity, it could hold half a million people. It had been damaged during the Siege, but it had been restored and repaired in a sympathetic fashion. A huge statue of Rogal Dorn had been erected at the east end, commemorating his superhuman efforts of defence in general, and his extraordinary running battle in the hallways just outside that very place.

It had not been Dorn’s choice. Guilliman had ordered the statue raised.

‘My brother watched over the Palace during our darkest hour,’ he had said. ‘He should watch over the council evermore.’

Of late, in the last few decades, the Senatorum Imperialis had taken to meeting in other places. The Great Chamber was too big for anything except full meetings, many claimed: too noisy, too formal. Favour was placed on more closed sessions, in smaller chambers, for intimacy and immediacy. The Clanium Library was often used, almost as a private cabinet. Sometimes, the High Lords convened in the Anesidoran Chapel.

Most preferred was the Cerebrium, a comparatively small, wood-panelled room near the top of the Widdershins Tower. It was said that the Emperor had favoured the rooms of the tower for meditation and mindfulness, and the Cerebrium in particular. ‘It makes us feel closer to His thoughts to convene here,’ Udo had once exclaimed, defending the regular use of the room.

Vangorich knew perfectly well why they did it.

The Cerebrium had a large, figured wooden table at its centre, and the table was big enough to take twelve chairs.

Only the twelve members of the High Senatorum could sit in session together. Secondary officials, like Vangorich, were obliged to lurk in the shadows, or take seats along the wall.

It was power play. It was infantile.

The Cerebrium was a fine room, well-appointed and quite atmospheric. Opening the casement shutters afforded the room an extraordinary view across the Palace roofscape and down over the ring-gates and the armoured flanks of the world. Vangorich had often thought it would make an excellent private study or office.

However, it was hardly a place to run the Imperium from. It was too small, too insubstantial, too amateurish. It was a back-room, fit only for private thoughts and back-room deals. It was not a place of government.

Vangorich entered, his attendance solemnly noted by the servitor of record. The High Lords were taking their seats. He nodded a greeting with Lord Militant Heth, his only true ally among the High Twelve, and then found a place in the flip-down wooden pews under the east windows, where other lesser lords and functionaries were seating themselves. They greeted him as if he was one of them.

He was not.

Less than a century before, one of the permanent seats among the High Twelve had belonged to the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum. The office was one of the ‘Old Twelve’ that had sat in governance of the Imperium since the Senatorum’s inception.

Times, as Brother Daylight had said, were changing. Some offices, and none more than the Office of Assassins, were now seen as obsolete at best, or archaic and primitive at worst. They had been edged out of the inner twelve, and either dispensed with altogether, or relegated to the lesser seats outside the High Circle. Other, newer, stations had advanced in their place.

This was ignominious. Vangorich accepted that some of the Imperium’s newer institutions absolutely deserved a seat at the table. Both the agents of the Inquisition and the ecclesiarchs of the Ministorum required representation among the High Lords since the Heresy War. They were fundamental parts of the modern Imperium. Vangorich would not argue that. What he would argue was that the council should have been expanded to admit them rather than culled to find them places.

He watched them take their seats at the table, talking together, some laughing. Wienand, the Inquisitorial Representative, was the only one not talking to anybody. She was quiet and reserved and surprisingly young, with sharp cheekbones and very short, steel-grey hair. Technically, she was his replacement. Technically, the Inquisitorial Representative had taken the permanent seat that had traditionally belonged to the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum.

Vangorich held no grudge. He quite liked Wienand, and he’d admired her predecessor. He believed in the near-autonomous function of the Inquisition, because it reflected, in spirit, the same safety-catch mechanism as the Assassinorum. He often met with Wienand and others of her kind, in private of course, to discuss operational techniques, methodology of detection and research, jurisdiction, and also to share inter-agency intelligence. He found that the inquisitors were often astonished at the level of intelligence his office was able to gather, and they often turned to him, clandestinely, for favours.

It was all part of the give and take.

Heth was the Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum, an old, maimed veteran. Though the Guard was the largest military body in the Imperium, Heth felt it to be very much the junior third service to the Adeptus Astartes and the Navy. It was probably why he sought out unlikely allies with voting rights, such as Vangorich.

Lansung was certainly ignoring him. Lansung, broad, red of face and booming of voice, was the Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Navy. His corpulent form was encased in a uniform of oceanic blue threaded with silver braid. He took a while to be seated, engaging Tobris Ekharth, the Master of the Administratum, in some convoluted piece of scandal-mongering while Vernor Zeck looked on with patient indulgence. Zeck, the giant among them, was the Grand Provost Marshal of the Adeptus Arbitrators. He was one of the two most heavily augmented humans among the High Twelve. He was not particularly amused or even diverted by Lansung’s outrageous gossip, but he was forcing himself to at least feign a show of interest. Vangorich was aware that Zeck’s mind was a billion light years away, processing the layers of administrative and forensic data, the ceaseless work of keeping Terra’s gargantuan hives ordered and policed. The look of wry amusement on his leonine face was a simulation for Lansung’s benefit.

Similarly, Lansung wasn’t at all interested in speaking to Ekharth, other than to cultivate the loyalties between Navy and Administratum. He was telling a story at Ekharth so he could get Zeck’s attention, and be seen to be the close and genuine confidant of the Provost Marshal.

Maybe I should draw up a map, thought Vangorich. A map or chart, some kind of visual aid, a diagram of the basic interpersonal relations of the High Twelve. It could be colour-coded to reveal areas of contempt, deceit, insincerity, political expediency and outright rancour. Yes, I might do that and present it to the Senatorum one day under ‘any other business’, he thought.

At the other end of the table, Kubik, the Fabricator General of the Adeptus Mechanicus, was conducting a dialogue with Mesring, the Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum, and Helad Gibran, the Paternoval Envoy of the Navigators. Kubik was, of course, the other extensively augmented person present, but his alterations had been elective and had begun at an early age, rather than being the result of repair and injury like Zeck’s. Vangorich watched Kubik’s actions and movements with great interest. He had only limited experience of killing servants of the Mechanicus, and it was a skill he felt he ought to develop given the vast political and materiel power of Mars. He thought, instinctively, they would be hard to kill. The Navigators, equally inhuman, at least seemed physically frail and vulnerable.

Vangorich had already prepared methodologies on some of the other ‘sub-species’ at the table. The haunted, spectral servants of the Astronomican, represented in the High Twelve by Volquan Sark, the Master of the Astronomican, were still human enough for conventional processes. The telepaths… Ah, the telepaths were a different order of things. Abdulias Anwar, the Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, was typical of their malevolent and discomforting kind. To deal with telepaths, with the Imperium’s most powerful sanctioned telepaths… Well, that was why Vangorich had brokered such close ties with Wienand and her ilk.

Juskina Tull, the Speaker for the Chartist Captains, was the eleventh of the High Twelve. A magnificent woman in an almost theatrically ostentatious gown, she occupied a role that many thought was the most trivial of all the seats. On the other hand, the Merchant Fleets represented nearly ninety per cent of the Imperium’s interstellar capability. In times of crisis, the Speaker wielded power greater than the Lord High Admiral.

A bell sounded. The delegates moved to their places, even the most exalted of them. Cherub servitors and vox-recorder drones buzzed around the Cerebrium as though it were an aviary.

Lord Guilliman entered the crowded, panelled chamber and took his seat. He bowed his head to his eleven senior fellows. He was the Lord Commander of the Imperium, the commander-in-chief of all Imperial military assets. His head was shaved, and the huge old scar traversing his scalp and neck was very visible. Though beyond any single discipline or arm of the Imperial war machine, he wore a braided uniform that was, in style at least, an echo of the grand admiral’s uniform he had worn during his illustrious pre-Senatorum career.

His name was Udin Macht Udo. He was not the first human to hold the chair of the Senatorum Imperialis, but like all his predecessors, human and transhuman alike, he used the formal, honorary title of his office, the name of the first Lord Commander: Guilliman of Macragge.

Udo glanced around the chamber. His eyes, the left one glazed and milky under the lip of the long scar, fixed upon Ekharth, the Master of the Administratum.

‘Bring us to order, sir,’ Lord Guilliman said.

Ekharth nodded, activated the cogitator-recorder that was crouching on the table in front of him, and began to type on the quivering spindle keys that unfurled from it like the wings of a giant moth.

‘High Lords, we are now in session,’ Ekharth began.

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First published in Great Britain in 2015
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