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The Last Wall – Extract

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The screams had merged into a single one. On the Avenue of Martyrs, below the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor, they surrounded Galatea Haas in an infinite variety. Every pilgrim, man or woman, child or adult, rich or poor, was an individual portrait of panic, a soul giving vent to the most profound terror. The entire rich palette of humanity howled around her; some of the shrieks were of pain, and of these some were caused by Haas as she wielded her shock maul, but in the end, all the fear and death blended together into the single collective scream.

‘Get back!’ Ottmar Kord was yelling, over and over, his voice hoarse with frustration and desperate hate. ‘Get back, get back, get back!’ Haas’ fellow Arbitrator was a few metres to her left, laying into the crowd with the same violence that she was. They were in the midst of a mob turned into a maelstrom. They brought their shock mauls down with such force that they had already killed more than a few pilgrims. The electrical discharge incapacitated nervous systems, but the physical blows cracked open skulls.

‘Get back, get back, get back!’

Get back to where? Haas leaned in to her shield, pushing back against the crush, but she wasn’t herding the crowd. There was no line to hold. The nine Arbitrators were scattered rocks in the foaming rush. Their proctor, in a compounding of bad luck, had been trampled in the first moments of the panic. It should not have happened. Morrow was indestructible. He was a wall. A simple mob could not have overcome him. But the multitude, caught in that scream, had been so strong that it had brought him down. The Arbitrators were not restoring order. They were lashing out at chaos.

‘Get back, get back, get back!’

Kord’s shout was meaningless. The words were just sounds, the raging punctuation of his blows. They were his scream. Haas was yelling, too. She roared at the pilgrims as she struck them down. She hurled her anger at their fear because, like Kord, if she did not, she would become part of the great scream. She understood the fear. They all did.

The universe had betrayed the people. On Holy Terra, where they believed themselves to be most protected by the Emperor’s embrace, they looked up and the sky had become the enemy.

The ork moon seemed to graze the spires of the Imperial Palace. It was a monster of rock and metal. The misshapen sphere was all the forms of threat. It was the eye of alien judgement, it was the visage of impossible yet imminent defeat, and it was the fist coming to smash all hope. It should not be. It could not be. And by existing, it threw everything else into doubt.

It was the end.

The waves of the gravity storm shook Terra. The ground rocked beneath Haas’ feet. It heaved. Facades crumbled. A hundred metres away, tenements on both sides of the Avenue pancaked, and they and their inhabitants vanished in a cloud of disintegrating rockcrete. The dust engulfed the street in a limbo, then was blown away by the gale winds that had sprung up in the wake of the moon’s arrival.

The people ran blind. They trampled those who fell to the heaving earth. They did not see Haas until she beat them down. Some did not register her presence even then. They were fleeing to nowhere, and the only sight they beheld was the star fortress, whether or not they were gazing at the sky.

Haas felt it too. She felt the weight of its being threatening to crush her spirit. If she faltered in her purpose, she was finished. She understood this at an animal level. There was, deep in the frenzy, little room for the rational. She roared again, rammed forward with the shield, and forced the pilgrims before her to fall back three full steps. A tall, corpulent man in finery, some minor aristocrat on his home world, trampled the man and woman in front of him and crashed against her. She smashed her shock maul against the side of his neck. Electricity coursed through his body. His limbs went rigid, vibrating, and he fell on his back.

Behind him, a tenement wall loomed. It was less than ten metres from her. In the middle of the Avenue the sides of the street had seemed an impossible distance away, but the eddies of the mob had pushed her closer to an anchor point after all. The possibility of directed action gave her some focus.

‘Kord!’ she called. ‘The wall!’

She pushed again, making for the tenement facade. She heard Kord calling out to the next Arbitrator, Baskaline, and so the word spread. Her comrades followed her lead. A line began to form again.

The pilgrims numbered in the hundreds of thousands. They could not be dispersed. But Haas grasped at the nebulous idea of breaking off a sliver of the mob, bringing it to heel, and creating a first island of order.

That was barely a plan. The fact that it existed felt like a victory.

Kord, Baskaline and the others battered their way closer. They locked shields with her. One unforgiving step at a time, they pushed towards the tenement. The scream filled Haas’ ears. She roared still. She could barely hear herself. She could feel her rage, though, in the tearing of her throat. Hard smash of the shield, swing of the maul, a step, and then again, and again. The facade drew nearer.

Sudden, overturning movement to her left, seen in the corner of her eye. She turned her head. The crowd had upended a vendor’s food wagon. Its cooking stove burst, spraying flaming promethium over the pilgrims.

The great scream took on some new notes of pain. The fire spread quickly.

They couldn’t hear the scream in the Great Chamber.

There was an official reason given for why the High Lords were meeting in the Chamber’s vastness for the first time in years. The hour was a grave one, and called for a return to the most sacred tradition. That was a simple truth. It also had nothing to do with the decision to hold a session here. Vangorich knew of other reasons, some whispered, some not uttered at all. The Clanium Library was still filled with the trappings of Admiral Lansung’s vainglory. The Cerebrium, that favoured nest of power plays, was now terrifying. From the top of the Widdershins Tower, the ork moon loomed closer. Even with the casements closed, the presence in the sky pressed upon the room. The Cerebrium was too exposed.

Terror and politics. The Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum wondered if there was any real difference between the two. The petty wars of the High Lords and their clawing for pre-eminence were the product of fear of each other at least as much as they were of personal greed. Even today, with terror more acute than any of these worthies had ever known in their lives, calculation and manoeuvring did not stop. The orks were on the doorstep of Terra but until they were in the Imperial Palace itself, and perhaps even then, their threat would remain distant. The other Lords were here now. The threats they presented to each other were clear and urgent. The need to neutralise the fraternal enemy never ceased.

And this is why we’re here, Vangorich thought. Its walls reinforced during the reconstruction after the Siege, the Great Chamber was the most secure location in which to hold a session, and the most insulated from the world outside. The terrible moon had come, and the ground had quaked, but these walls stood firm. The scream did not reach through them. The High Lords could concentrate on their agendas. They could reduce the threat of the orks and the collapsing order to abstractions – ones that could be discussed and made into factors in personal narratives, not confronted in all their terrible reality.

The Lords took their seats on the central dais. Around them, the tiers of the Great Chamber rose in echoing emptiness. It had been decades since they had been filled. Vangorich could still remember days when the full Senatorum had sat. Hundreds of thousands of people, debates rippling out from the dais and breaking into multiplicities of contention. The process had been messy, often sluggish and frustrating, and it was astonishing that it had worked at all. But it had worked, and worked well. The memories of that living governance sat in accusing silence on the benches, hovered beneath the distant ceiling and its fresco of the Great Crusade, and gathered in the stern eyes of the massive statue of Rogal Dorn.

‘You are setting a precedent, Lord Commander,’ Vangorich said to Udin Macht Udo after Tobris Ekharth, the Master of the Administratum, had called the session to order. ‘Notice will be taken that we are meeting here. Other voices will demand to be heard.’ He took some pleasure in reminding the High Lords that the scream would find them here in the end. They could not hide from events. If the Great Chamber was used, it would fill.

Udo wasn’t thrown. ‘Quite so, Grand Master. That is as it should be, in this time of crisis. They will be heard, in due course.’

Vangorich nodded, expression neutral. Udo couldn’t be thinking of spreading blame for failure, could he? The Lord Commander did understand that failure meant destruction for everyone, didn’t he? Vangorich’s fear of what was about to befall Terra, already acute, grew worse at the thought that the High Lords were not as afraid as they should be.

‘Admiral,’ Udo said to Lansung, ‘what are your recommendations?’

The question was respectful in its phrasing and its tone. It did not have to sound like an attack in order to be one. The session was being held far from Lansung’s trappings of authority in the Clanium Library. Udo wasn’t soliciting his advice. He was exposing the Lord High Admiral’s weakness, distancing himself from a former ally before he could be damaged by the other man’s fall.

‘Our options are limited,’ Lansung answered. His normally florid face was grey. His generous flesh hung on his frame as if it were pulling him to the ground. He had been brought low at the moment of his triumph. The bluster and calculation had drained from him. Whatever Vangorich thought of him as a politician, he knew Lansung was a brilliant military tactician. Alone among the High Lords, he had fought the orks. He had a true understanding of what had come upon them, and he spoke with a despair born of realism. ‘I’ve ordered the immediate return to Terra of the coreward fleet. But the orks are here now. We have the Autocephalax Eternal and its escort, along with those ships that had remained on local patrol and were not destroyed by the gravity storm. A squadron’s worth. Not much more.’

‘You destroyed one ork moon,’ Juskina Tull said. The Speaker for the Chartist Captains had preserved all the glamour of her raiment in the flight from the Praetorian Way. When she had stood with the others to welcome Lansung as a triumphant hero, the beauty of her dress seemed an acknowledgement of the importance of the occasion. Now it gave her an air of command. ‘You know how to do it now, don’t you?’ Her tone was sharp. Vangorich heard in her question the expectation, perhaps even the hope, that Lansung would respond in the negative.

He did not disappoint her. ‘The fortress we fought was a fraction of the size,’ he said. ‘If this one’s orbit were as close to Terra as that of the one over Ardamantua, the tectonic upheavals would have been devastating. Meanwhile, our resources are nothing compared to what we had at Port Sanctus. If we launch an attack, the orks will swat us from the void. The least bad choice is a defensive posture. We can hope to hold the orks at bay until our main force arrives.’

We can hope. Vangorich noted the phrasing. An invitation to engage in wishful thinking, and nothing more.

‘But the orks could be here within hours,’ Mesring said. The Ecclesiarch of the Adeptus Ministorum, Lansung’s other ally, now deserted him. ‘How long do you expect us to hold?’

‘If you know of a way to accelerate warp travel, I’m eager to hear it,’ Lansung shot back.

‘If the orks have the temerity to land, they will be repulsed,’ Abel Verreault said. The Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum was the junior member of the High Lords. Since succeeding Lord Heth, he had been sidelined, his forces given no role to play in the campaign run by Lansung. His pronouncement was met by a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. Everyone on the dais wanted him to be correct. But the orks had destroyed the Imperial Fists in ground combat.

‘There is little that can be done while anarchy reigns beyond these walls,’ Udo declared. He looked at Vernor Zeck, Grand Provost Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites. They all did. Vangorich sensed an unspoken, barely conscious consensus to shift the spotlight onto Zeck. It was plausible to view the panic as the first urgency. If it was not already worldwide, it would be within twenty-four hours. There was a real risk of a total collapse of order doing the work of the orks for them.

Even so, Vangorich seethed at the naked abdication of responsibility he was witnessing. If action depended on Zeck restoring order, then the other High Lords were absolved of the need to make any critical decisions of their own until the forces of the Adeptus Arbites had quelled the panic.

‘No other action is proposed?’ he asked.

‘There is none to take, beyond the preparation of orbital defences,’ Udo said, giving Lansung a significant glance. No one contradicted him.

Zeck did not respond. He hadn’t moved since taking his seat. His augmetics were so extensive that he was barely more human than Fabricator General Kubik. Neither had reacted to anything the others had said, remaining statues throughout the session. The Lord of the Mechanicus was an insect-like collection of metallic angles, sensors and tubes. The Provost Marshal was a squat hulk, a machinic and organic embodiment of the necessary violence of the law. He turned his attention from the stream of reports fed to his bionic ear with visible reluctance.

‘The situation is fluid,’ he said.

‘It can’t remain so,’ said Mesring. ‘Disorder is heresy.’

Zeck turned his head to stare at the Ecclesiarch.

‘Perhaps you’d like to address the crowds outside?’ When Mesring didn’t answer, Zeck rose. His awareness had been beyond the Great Chamber, calculating the vectors of perhaps the greatest exercise in crowd control in human history. Now he was realising that the situation had given him the whip hand. The other High Lords had, for the moment, surrendered their agency.

Opportunity, Vangorich thought. You can’t resist its scent, can you?

Verreault began, ‘The Astra Militarum–’

‘Is not a police force,’ Zeck cut him off.

The Lord Commander Militant reddened. He was not much younger than Heth had been, but he had come through his battlefields with little visible scarring. He was short, and his wiry physique appeared slight in his uniform. He was fighting the perception that he was a toy soldier. Zeck’s correction did not help.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ Zeck said to the rest of the Twelve, ‘I have work to do.’ He strode away from the dais.

‘How will you pacify the entire planet?’ Ekharth called after him.

Zeck gave no sign he had heard.

Vangorich eyed the fuming Verreault, and felt the weight of his own helplessness. He’d spent months fighting to get the High Lords to act in time to staunch a lethal threat to the Imperium, and he had failed. The Officio Assassinorum had no forces to offer against an invasion of Terra. Was there anything left for him to try in the defence of the Imperium? He could watch the deliberations. He could evaluate the efforts to fight the orks. He could, perhaps, just perhaps, head off more disastrous decisions.

Like you’ve been doing so well, he thought. How are you any better than these other fools?

For the moment, he had no answer for himself.

The fire raced to the tenement blocks. Walls impregnated by centuries of oil smoke and rotted by poverty ignited. Haas hesitated in her advance. Within seconds, her target became a wall of flame. Another variation joined the chorus of the great scream. The inhabitants shrieked, and were incinerated. The burn became a firestorm. It spread to the left and right along the Avenue of Martyrs. It leapt along the vaulting arches overhead and travelled on the backs of pilgrims, turning them into running torches. Soon, both sides of the Avenue were ablaze.

The Arbitrators stopped. Haas’ plan disintegrated. The people tried to retreat from the flames, but the flames were everywhere, their crackle growing to a snapping roar, a wind with jaws. The pilgrims shrank from the heat and bunched towards the centre of the Avenue. They became a solid barrier of flesh. The crush was such that even those rendered unconscious by the shock mauls were held upright by the bodies around them.

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ said Kord.

‘Make a circle!’ Haas called.

The Arbitrators moved into a tight formation. Their linked lockshields became a perimeter wall, a shelter against crowd and fire.

‘We’re too close,’ Baskaline said.

It didn’t matter that he was right, that the centre of the Avenue would be better.

‘Can you move?’ Haas asked him.

‘No.’

‘Then this is where we stand.’

The tenements disappeared in an explosive combustion. Haas sweated beneath her riot armour. The shields blocked the direct intensity of the flame, but the fire shone through the viewports of the lockshields with daylight brilliance. The thunder-roar of the fire was joined by the cracks of failing masonry and the crashing of collapsing wood. ‘Here it comes!’ Haas warned.

The near facade came down with avalanche fury. Portions of the building fell in on themselves. Other sections of the wall smashed onto the Avenue of Martyrs, crushing the pilgrims, making them into burned offerings. Haas and the other Arbitrators crouched, angling their shields into a protective roof. Blazing wreckage crashed against the ceramite. Haas crouched lower, absorbing the shock of the blows with her arms and legs. A heavy, burning hand tried to drive the Arbitrators into the pavement. They pushed back, shoving the rubble aside.

The roar of the fire had lessened. Through her viewport, Haas saw that the worst of the conflagration had been smothered by the collapse. Hundreds of pilgrims had been crushed. She had no idea how many thousands had died in the buildings themselves.

She could move forward now. There was shelter in the smoking ruin, the chance to regroup and return to the fray. She clambered over some low heaps of rubble. The others followed, their armour protecting them from the guttering fires. The smoke choked the entire street and Haas coughed, wishing for a rebreather.

The suffocating air further smothered the flames of the panic. Many of the surviving pilgrims, bunched tightly in the street, were falling to their knees, retching. More powerful yet than the smoke was despair. It drained the urgency of terror from the crowd. It stole hope away and left the people motionless before their fate. On the other side of the street, the fire still towered from the tenement blocks. The collapse began there too.

Destruction marched up and down the Avenue of Martyrs, but in its wake, it left a kind of order.

Kord sounded like he was going to leave a lung on the pavement.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he said.

‘And go where?’ Baskaline sounded no better.

Haas’ vision swam. It was all she could do to remain upright. Baskaline was right, though. Any route they took would be back towards the fire. The space around the Arbitrators was fairly open. If they waited, the worst of the smoke would dissipate before too long.

‘Our duty is not complete,’ she reminded the others. Calm had been restored, for the moment. It fell to them to maintain it until they were ordered elsewhere.

Time passed. The air cleared enough that each breath Haas took felt like swallowing hot sand instead of burning coal. Kord looked up. There was nothing to see through the smoke. Even so, he stared as if he could see the object of his hatred.

‘We need to bring the fight to the greenskins,’ he said.

‘We will,’ Haas reassured him.

‘I don’t just mean the Navy and the Guard. I mean all of us.’

‘Our oaths are different. We’re called to serve here.’

‘What good will that do? This could be our last stand. If we don’t stop the orks, there will be no law to keep on Terra.’

‘If the orks make landfall,’ Haas countered, ‘we’ll be needed as never before.’

Kord had another coughing fit. ‘Things have changed,’ he said when he could speak again. ‘Everything has changed.’

Haas shook her head and started forward to stand guard in the midst of the pilgrims, an unbending sign that the Emperor’s law still prevailed. She would not swerve from her oath of office until death took her. It was her anchor, because Kord was right. Everything had changed.

And everything was ending.

The galaxy shook. From Segmentum Solar to Ultima, from Tempestus to Obscurus, the Beast unleashed its forces against the Imperium. Star fortresses appeared simultaneously in system after system. A predatory monster with uncountable millions of heads descended on the worlds of humanity. The fleets and armies of exultant savagery struck and struck and struck. The Imperium bled from a thousand wounds.

The worlds of Ultramar were spared the tectonic events of a star fortress extruding into near orbit. That was the only mercy. The first to be attacked were the agri worlds Tarentus and Quintarn. The skies over their cities turned black with ork drop-ships. Enemy cruisers devastated their orbital defences. Three companies of Ultramarines responded within hours, and they set the void on fire as a battle-barge and strike cruisers engaged the ork vessels.

Far to the galactic west, in the Segmentum Tempestus, the forge world Lankast convulsed. The geologic tides unleashed by the ork moon above it tore open vast chasms that traced jagged paths hundreds of kilometres long. Lava flows spread over the land. Entire hive cities were wiped away, hundreds of millions of lives vanishing into waves of molten rock. And in the more stable regions, on the high continental plateaus, surrounded by new seas of fire, Iron Father Bassan Terak shouted the hatred of the Red Talons. They met the ork siege of the colossal manufactoria with a rage that had its own volcanic force. Third Company’s Predator tanks hit the ork ranks with the relentlessness of a mechanised, moving wall. The orks countered from orbit. Heedless of their own casualties, they hurled rocky masses to the surface. Meteor strikes pummelled the manufactoria and iron chimneys a hundred metres tall collapsed. The eruption of the furnaces was a solar flare. The Red Talons advanced still. They had no choice. There was nothing behind them now but flame.

But it was Klostra, a planetoid not much larger than the star fortress that closed in on it, that suffered the most important attack. The inhabitants of its colonies prepared for the invasion they knew they could not stop, the invasion whose blow would resonate as far as Terra.

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