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Shadow of Ullanor - Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

Segmentum Solar – Coreward Sectors

Worlds ablaze. A decimated empire. A galaxy of green.

If some extragalactic species – some xenos presence, blissfully unknown – had turned its attention to the realm of man, that was what they would have found. An Imperium hollow and without hope. A people scattered, screaming and fleeing for their lives. Planets trailing the smog of destruction through the void. A broken dominion.

The orks were everywhere. They were legion, and they terrorised their victims like monsters of myth. Their brutal technologies were the heralds of apocalyptic doom. Their sheer number was insurmountable. They were a green tide rising, swallowing hive worlds whole. Entire fleets plunged into the depths of their ramshackle barbarity, never to be seen again. The greatest armies of a millennium, uncounted regiments of the Astra Militarum, skitarii legions and Frateris Militia hordes, became nothing more than a bloody sludge through which ork billions stomped as they butchered their way across planets large and small.

High Admiral Thaddeon Trassq, flag officer of the Battlefleet Solar-Rimward, held a thousand battle cruisers and escorts on station in the Fantine Nebula, uncertain of his orders while the surrounding worlds of the Phadrian Cluster burned. Too late the High Admiral realised that his armada was hiding in the path of a different ork fleet entering the subsector. Led by vanguard space hulks that tumbled ahead of the fleet like the colossal chunks of a disintegrating comet, the orks smashed through the tight formation of the Imperial vessels. As battle cruisers and heavy frigates were pushed aside and overwhelmed, a trailing swarm of capsules, landers and assault boats descended upon their majestic wrecks.

In the Nazarex System, millions of agri-worlders perished with their crops as the sudden appearance of a monstrous ork attack moon threw the Praedial Worlds into gravitational chaos. Planets drifted out of their delicate orbits, some spinning towards their colossal sun while others were flung into the frozen darkness of the void.

Entire swathes of Imperial space were left derelict and lifeless in the wake of the destruction. Subsectors crowded with Imperial worlds became planetary mass graves. Smashed cities streamed with smoke, staining the heavens an acrid black. Corpses and body parts hung from vanes and cables, off baroque architecture and shattered statues – testament to the barbarity of the towering monsters storming through streets and structures.

The cardinal world of Koryban-Proctor and cemetery moons of Pulchra V, VI and VII were but shattered remnants, hollowed by the complete eradication of their priestly populations. The Hearth Worlds had been silenced, the boom of their industry and might no more. The colossal forges were now but mountains of scrap among the vapour forests, to be pillaged by the invader.

The creature they called the Beast was everywhere. His monstrous strength was in the brute swing of every primitive blade. His fury could be heard in the crash of rattletrap weaponry. His world-devouring madness could be seen in the fang-faced savagery of the hulking abominations that butchered in his name. The Imperium tottered before his alien wrath and the green inferno that swallowed planet after doomed planet.

Subsectors went dark like candles snuffed out in a cavern. Draznak. Phaal. Trega. Moebius. Solon. Quintarsus. Vulkhano. Battles blazed in the void about the sector Naval base of Gnostangrad and across the Chatasma Deeps. Mandeville points became the sites of horrific ship-to-ship collisions as desperate captains fought to make their jumps into the warp. Others attempted to do so without their Navigators, becoming forever lost in the empyreal storms beyond.

For other worlds the wait for Imperial assistance had simply been too long. Citizens and planetary governors had gone agonising months without word from their sector capital systems or even Terra itself. Urgent and repeated astropathic requests for assistance had been drowned out by announcements of alien invasion and catastrophic military failure in neighbouring systems and subsectors. Worlds without standing regiments of the Astra Militarum or stationed flotillas of Navy cruisers feared the worst in the face of obliteration. Many planets had lost their system ships and planetary militias to the authority and recalls of distant admirals and lord marshals.

Facing their doom in the swarms of space hulks and brute craft entering the system, miserable frater militias were disbanded and surface-to-orbit weaponry silenced. The baroque hives of Eidolon V rang with the screams of madness as the Beast’s unbearable psychic presence shattered minds. On final instructions from Ecclesiarch Mesring, sent shortly before his death, the shrine worlds of Fidessa Secundus and Pontefax XIII were urged to surrender themselves to the alien fury roaring its way across the void. Priests and pilgrims allowed the madness into their hearts, yielding their faith to the apocalyptic power of the Beast. By the time the orks arrived to decimate the towering statues and cathedra, all strata of Ecclesiarchal society on the shrine worlds had surrendered themselves to the Beast’s alien supremacy. On the industrial world of Trantis Di-Delta, the worker clans didn’t even need the intervention of a disgraced High Lord of Terra. They let the alien madness in unbidden and supplicated themselves before the arriving ork warlords, constructing from their communal visions a colossal representation of savage greenskin gods. The monstrous statues, plasma-welded together from assembly line materials, pleased the orks but they didn’t save the clansmen, who were swiftly butchered and sacrificed to the self-same gods.

So much death. Destruction untold. Worlds fell before the irresistible and unreasoning might of the Beast. Populations were slaughtered, Imperial citizens blasted apart, cleaved in two and torn limb from limb by hulking monstrosities. Planets that should have been notations in history books and the sites of grand last stands for colossal Imperial armies instead became only cemetery worlds of shallow graves. Armadas of ancient, cathedralesque battleships were turned into debris fields of scrap and frozen bodies drifting through the blackness. Great star forts and space stations were smashed aside before the might of the ork fleets, sent tumbling towards the surface of the planets about which they held station or into the blaze of system suns. In their wake the merciless creatures left dead worlds of ash, rotting bodies and smouldering scrap.

And those were the fortunate ones. As the green tide crashed on through the segmentum, pockets of systems and worlds were left unmolested. Already swarming with sheltering merchant vessels and freighters, the planets in these areas were overrun by arriving refugees. Order had long since broken down on such worlds but their populations were unified by hope – hope that the greenskin blight of brawn and technological calamity might pass them by. But the orks – creatures of absolute, insatiable appetite – had no such intention.

For the astropaths of the Imperium, around whom planetary governors, Imperial commanders and the captains of isolated vessels gathered, the scale of the horror was painfully apparent. Everyone was desperate for information, news of successes and plans for a coordinated counter-offensive. What the psykers dared not report was that the Segmentum Solar was growing increasingly silent, as astropaths died with the worlds to which they were assigned. For thousands of light years about the Sol System, fleets reported decimation, Imperial armies their annihilation and planets their end. The astropaths could not find it in themselves to tell the terrified and hopeless that no help was coming. That the status conferred by rank, title or planetary tithes could do them no good, or that the remaining armadas were being held back for the strategic defence of Terra and its surrounding systems. Battleships and grand cruisers maintained formation. Colossal troop carriers held at the ready, laden with regiments of Astra Militarum who had no orders to take back doomed worlds, alongside great Ark Mechanicus vessels and mass conveyors laden with Titan god-machines, whose fury lay dormant in vast hangars.

Of organised resistance mounted across the void, the astropaths knew little. Unremembered heroes were too busy fighting and dying where they were to offer assurance to distant victims cowering under green-tinged skies. While common humanity – the Guardsmen, the priests, the hivers, adepts, farmers and servitors – died in their droves, survivors looked to the stars for deliverance. They prayed to the God-Emperor for help and the sons of His mighty sons for salvation. What had the galaxy fought for, a thousand years before, if not for the unity of the Adeptus Astartes? Surely, the Space Marine Chapters would gather as they had done in times past, their strength a shield to protect the weak and defend their Emperor. They did not, however. They could not.

The orks were everywhere. Their attack moons appeared above Adeptus Astartes home worlds. Space hulks smashed into recruitment worlds. Fleets of barbaric craft drifted unannounced into systems in which Space Marine Chapters already fought Traitors and the xenos menace of other invader species. Librarians of all Chapters received calls for assistance all at once. Space Marine companies and strike cruisers were despatched across the void, responding to ancient accords or to reports of unimaginable destruction and warnings from their own sentry stations and outposts. Like dry parchment the void blotched green with enemy intrusions, the appearance of attack moons and armadas. There were so many reports and enemy fronts that Space Marine Chapters, already spread thinly, were forced to prioritise their engagements. As the darkness flashed with void battles and annihilations, the green tide rose, swallowing planets, systems and subsectors. Adeptus Astartes companies, battle-barges and strike cruisers became cut off from the command structures of their own Chapters, and Chapters became cut off from one another.

Driven by some feral instinct and reports of changing xenos migration patterns, the Space Wolves started returning to Fenris in droves. With their home world in the path of a vast enemy armada, the Wolves found themselves in a bitter void battle within their own system against thousands of attack ships carrying millions of orks. Meanwhile, the Ultramarines, used to fighting off ork Waaaghs! at the borders of Ultramar, were swift to respond. As the gargantuan scale of the invasion and the appearance of ork fleets within their domain became apparent, the Ultramarines were recalled from across Ultima Segmentum. With them came companies from the Genesis Chapter, Novamarines and Inceptors, intent on purging Guilliman’s empire of the xenos threat. The Dark Angels, spread across scores of subsectors on various undertakings, struggled to reform and offer a counter-offensive, instead fighting for their lives and those of any civilian populations near where squads and strike cruisers found themselves.

To the galactic north, south, east and west, the Adeptus Astartes fought for survival in the wreckage of a decimated Imperium. While citizens screamed and greenskins roared, the Angels of Death defended dying worlds and struck at the heart of invasion armadas. Drowning in a sea of green death, Space Marines struggled on. Squads were slaughtered without ceremony. Companies were lost attempting to reach the Sol System. Entire Chapters tried to come to Terra’s aid, attempting to break out of ork blockades and rampaging cordons that cut off whole sectors. All failed.

Only the Imperial Fists had been swift and strategic enough to summon their successor Chapters in force to the core systems before the enemy had swarmed the inner segmentum. Only the Imperial Fists had been wise enough to seek the aid of the only living primarch and courageous enough to strike with him at the heart of the ork empire. Only… the last Imperial Fist was dead, slain by the monstrous ork that had made the Imperium his plaything and the galaxy his own. In that one horrific moment, everything changed. The last Imperial Fist had died and hope died with him. A Chapter of the First Founding had been exterminated: the Defenders of Terra were no more.

If the citizens of the Imperium, for all their suffering and screaming, could comprehend such a thing, they would have lost their minds. Every exhausted Guardsman would have laid down his lasgun. Every captain of every vessel would have walked from their command decks. Every Space Marine would have been forced to confront a truth buried deep: that they might have been engineered to be superior exemplars of their species, but in the evolutionary arms race with the greenskin plague, they had lost. For if one Chapter could be destroyed then they all could – and without the Adeptus Astartes, the Imperium was doomed.

For TC, Jonah and Elliot - you know why...

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover art by Víctor Manuel Leza Moreno.

The Beast Arises: Shadow of Ullanor © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. The Beast Arises: Shadow of Ullanor, 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.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-154-0

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