Heralds of the Siege Read online

  BACKLIST

  Book 1 – HORUS RISING

  Book 2 – FALSE GODS

  Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES

  Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

  Book 5 – FULGRIM

  Book 6 – DESCENT OF ANGELS

  Book 7 – LEGION

  Book 8 – BATTLE FOR THE ABYSS

  Book 9 – MECHANICUM

  Book 10 – TALES OF HERESY

  Book 11 – FALLEN ANGELS

  Book 12 – A THOUSAND SONS

  Book 13 – NEMESIS

  Book 14 – THE FIRST HERETIC

  Book 15 – PROSPERO BURNS

  Book 16 – AGE OF DARKNESS

  Book 17 – THE OUTCAST DEAD

  Book 18 – DELIVERANCE LOST

  Book 19 – KNOW NO FEAR

  Book 20 – THE PRIMARCHS

  Book 21 – FEAR TO TREAD

  Book 22 – SHADOWS OF TREACHERY

  Book 23 – ANGEL EXTERMINATUS

  Book 24 – BETRAYER

  Book 25 – MARK OF CALTH

  Book 26 – VULKAN LIVES

  Book 27 – THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE

  Book 28 – SCARS

  Book 29 – VENGEFUL SPIRIT

  Book 30 – THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS

  Book 31 – LEGACIES OF BETRAYAL

  Book 32 – DEATHFIRE

  Book 33 – WAR WITHOUT END

  Book 34 – PHAROS

  Book 35 – EYE OF TERRA

  Book 36 – THE PATH OF HEAVEN

  Book 37 – THE SILENT WAR

  Book 38 – ANGELS OF CALIBAN

  Book 39 – PRAETORIAN OF DORN

  Book 40 – CORAX

  Book 41 – THE MASTER OF MANKIND

  Book 42 – GARRO

  Book 43 – SHATTERED LEGIONS

  Book 44 – THE CRIMSON KING

  Book 45 – TALLARN

  Book 46 – RUINSTORM

  Book 47 – OLD EARTH

  Book 48 – THE BURDEN OF LOYALTY

  Book 49 – WOLFSBANE

  Book 50 – BORN OF FLAME

  Book 51 – SLAVES TO DARKNESS

  More tales from the Horus Heresy...

  PROMETHEAN SUN

  AURELIAN

  BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM

  THE CRIMSON FIST

  PRINCE OF CROWS

  DEATH AND DEFIANCE

  TALLARN: EXECUTIONER

  SCORCHED EARTH

  BLADES OF THE TRAITOR

  THE PURGE

  THE HONOURED

  THE UNBURDENED

  BLADES OF THE TRAITOR

  TALLARN: IRONCLAD

  RAVENLORD

  THE SEVENTH SERPENT

  WOLF KING

  CYBERNETICA

  SONS OF THE FORGE

  WOLF KING

  Many of these titles are also available as abridged and unabridged audiobooks. Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com

  Audio Dramas

  THE DARK KING & THE LIGHTNING TOWER

  RAVEN’S FLIGHT

  GARRO: OATH OF MOMENT

  GARRO: LEGION OF ONE

  BUTCHER’S NAILS

  GREY ANGEL

  GARRO: BURDEN OF DUTY

  GARRO: SWORD OF TRUTH

  THE SIGILLITE

  HONOUR TO THE DEAD

  WOLF HUNT

  HUNTER’S MOON

  THIEF OF REVELATIONS

  TEMPLAR

  ECHOES OF RUIN

  MASTER OF THE FIRST

  THE LONG NIGHT

  IRON CORPSES

  RAPTOR

  Download the full range of Horus Heresy audio dramas from blacklibrary.com

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  Myriad

  The Grey Raven

  Valerius

  The Ember Wolves

  Blackshield

  Children of Sicarus

  Exocytosis

  The Painted Count

  The Last Son of Prospero

  The Soul, Severed

  Dark Compliance

  Duty Waits

  Magisterium

  Now Peals Midnight

  Dreams of Unity

  The Board is Set

  Afterword

  About the Authors

  An Extract from ‘Slaves to Darkness’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  THE HORUS HERESY

  It is a time of legend.

  The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.

  His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.

  Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.

  Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.

  Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.

  The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.

  The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended.

  The Age of Darkness has begun.

  MYRIAD

  Rob Sanders

  The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.

  Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty god-machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.

  Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.

  But those mass conveyors would not come.

  With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.

  Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.

  A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such god-machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.

  Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transpo
rt Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.

  It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.

  Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. While she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eyepatch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chainblade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.

  ‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.

  The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Lennox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.

  It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.

  In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.

  When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.

  ‘Ratchek,’ she called to her former moderatii and the Mole’s goggled operator. ‘Kill the main drive. Open outer doors.’

  The layered bulkheads sighed hydraulically, and slipped aside to reveal the shadowy interior of the scaffold complex.

  Lennox nodded. ‘Go.’

  The structure was swarming with afflicted constructs going about their duties, and before long Lennox and her rebels found themselves fighting up through the blind spots and gauntlets of the scaffold interior. Meanwhile, heavily armed security forces – drawn from their perimeter posts by the Mole’s emergence – were running across the assembly yards and converging upon the Titan.

  The compartments and ladderwells of the towering complex were filled with the cacophony of gunfire. The Omnissian Faithful had to make use of whatever untainted weaponry they could scavenge and could not afford god-pleasing uniformity. Laslocks blasted bolts across the darkness of the decks. Shells from stub-carbines tore up through catwalks. Arc rifles threw streams of lightning along gantries. Lennox anticipated the arrival of the rebels by tearing grenades from her bandolier and throwing them up through the ladderwells and into the levels above.

  Ajax Abominata, even in the final stages of its dread assembly, was what she had come to expect from a corrupted god-machine, swarming with twisted artisans prattling scrapcode and insanity.

  The rebels moved up at speed and with merciless gunfire delivered at point-blank range. The corrupted army of constructs tending the monstrous Titan were ill-equipped to repel such a direct attack. The assembly yard’s security forces and shock troops hadn’t entertained the possibility of an assault on Temple-Tarantyne coming up through the installation’s foundations. While they babbled and ran towards the towering scaffold, Lennox and her rebels hauled themselves up through the structure. Heavy servitors and cyborg corruptions shrieked as they were blasted aside. Chainblades opened up the traitor constructs in fountains of blood and oil before sending them flailing off the scaffold’s edge.

  The rapid advance was not met without resistance. About them the very metal of the Titan’s outer hull and the surrounding scaffolding warped with daemonic presence. Infernal eyes opened in the walls. Hatches opened explosively to vomit acidic ichor or shoot grasping tentacles at the rebels. Deck openings became fang-lined mouths that cut insurgents in half. The fighting got close and tangled on a platform crowded with strapped-down stores and cargo nets. They were rushed by servitors with black filth bubbling from their mouth-grilles and a fell light behind their eyes. Lennox ordered her expendable ferals with their limb-fused weaponry into the fray, supported by engineered hulks who tore the traitor servitors limb from corrupted limb.

  Higher up, the rebels became caught in a furious exchange of fire as a twisted member of the Titan crew took charge on the scaffold deck, joined by sentries running up the mobile gantries. The stairwell turned into a horrific kill-zone. Lennox didn’t have time or bodies to spare in pushing on through and so cut up through the mesh flooring with her chainblade. Sending a small group up through the hole with Galahax Zarco, she watched the enginseer swing his power axe about him. With heavy footfalls he took apart possessed servitors and buried the crackling weapon in the Titan crewmember with a sickening thud. With the gauntlet broken, Lennox ordered the rebels onwards and upwards.

  The compartments about the Titan’s command deck had been locked off by the time the rebels reached it. Engineering constructs gargled corruption at them through the metal.

  ‘We don’t have time for this,’ Lennox said to Omnek-70 and Zarco. Levelling his arquebus at the doors, Omnek-70 punched round after transuranic round through the bulkhead and into the cavity compartment beyond. As the sound of the tainted constructs died away, the enginseer buried the crackling cog of his axe in one of the round-punctured doors and heaved it aside. Lennox slipped through, her plasma caliver hugged in at her chest.

  The compartment stank of corruption and was wreathed in a lead-coloured smoke. There were warped bodies on the floor with gaping holes through their polluted workings where Omnek-70 had shot them through. A tech-adept came at the princeps, wielding a heavy multi-tool like a club. Leaning into the kick of the caliver, she blasted the thing into oblivion, before turning to face another filth-spewing construct, burning it from existence.

  ‘Open it up,’ Lennox said to Galahax Zarco as they strode through the compartment and climbed up onto the outer shell of the Titan’s head. From there they could see many other Titans in the gloom of the colossal assembly yard. They were all in different stages of completion, some surrounded by warped scaffolding. Lennox
looked down at the corrupted hull of Ajax Abominata beneath her boots. The princeps could feel the suffering of the afflicted machine-spirit within.

  ‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 called from the scaffold exterior, his optics whirring through different filters. He pointed out across the assembly yard. ‘The Ventorum is powering up.’

  Lennox grunted. The Warlord Titan Belladon Ventorum was one of the many god-machines waiting in the assembly yard precincts for transportation off-world – and it had stood there a long time, judging by its relatively uncorrupted appearance. While most of its weaponry was too powerful to use without damaging the precious Ajax Abominata, its mighty gatling blaster was capable of turning the scaffolding upon which they stood into a blur of shredded scrap.

  ‘Enginseer, work fast,’ she called.

  ‘As fast as I can,’ Zarco replied. While a simple hatch, even a reinforced one, shouldn’t have been a problem for a priest of Mars, the corrupted metal sickeningly retracted from Zarco’s tools.

  As he finally forced the grotesque thing open, Omnek-70 pointed his arquebus down into the musty darkness of the bridge space. There was no crew on the command deck and Lennox didn’t have time for the intricacies of sabotaging such a complex machine. All she knew was that the most sophisticated piece of equipment on a Titan was the manifold interface and mind-impulse technologies that would link the crew to the machine. Zarco stood aside to let Lennox get past him to the hatch.

  ‘Pass them along,’ the princeps ordered, as her rebel followers formed a line.

  One by one they passed along the demolition packs they had carried with them. Zarco primed the timers before handing the devices over to Lennox, who dropped them down through the hatch.

  ‘Go!’ she called, moving the Omnissian Faithful off the Titan’s afflicted hull and back into the scaffold complex.

  A mobile gantry completed its ponderous swing into position, connecting with the scaffolding, and Lennox’s constructs began exchanging heavy fire with enemy forces running the length of the groaning platform. A tech-thrall exploded in gore and workings as the beam of some tainted weapon hit him. Servo-automata were blasted to shreds and gun-servitors received glowing auto-rounds to the head.

  ‘Get back!’ Lennox ordered, unleashing a storm of plasma up the ladderwell.