The Gates of Terra Read online

  A steady staccato drummed through his body as the harness failed to fully dampen the recoil from the massive gun. No mortal could have used the macro-cannons; their bones would be reduced to splinters, their innards rendered to soup in a single salvo.

  Arcadese endured it, revelled in the cathartic satisfaction of seeing a tear open up in the cruiser’s aft. Drooling men and fuel, it slowed and fought for retaliatory firing solutions. Three more macro-cannons stitched lines of super-heavy shells into its flanks, burst open entire decks, collapsed towers and ripped open full sections of armour plating as the voids capitulated utterly.

  ‘Bring it down!’

  Arcadese was bellowing now, venting his frustration at the certainty that this was but a forestalling of all their deaths.

  A rippling chain reaction broke the cruiser into several pieces, now little more than flotsam awash on a dark and uncaring ocean, a tomb of flash-frozen heretics cast to oblivion.

  Tracking that sea of utter black, Arcadese found and locked on to another ship. A snap-fired salvo collapsed a few shields, broke up some comms towers before a heavy grip on his shoulder pulled him away from the myopic universe to which he was a willing prisoner.

  ‘Our ground forces are failing, my lord.’

  Lieutenant was still alive. Bloody-faced with a jagged line of crimson across his cheek that was bleeding onto his neck and riming the edge of his gorget, but alive.

  ‘I can take the gun, sir,’ he added.

  Arcadese nodded, yanked up the firing harness to let Lieutenant in, and went to the command console.

  ‘How?’

  Where only moments ago the battle was bogged down in a time-eating stalemate, now the traitors had regrouped, their forces inexplicably replenished. They were losing again. More than that, something else moved amongst the warring throngs. Red-fleshed with eyes black like darkest flint, a baleful aura exuding off their brawny bodies in a visceral steam, Arcadese had no words to describe these… monsters.

  Entire phalanxes of men, those who had lost their Legionary captains, fled in the face of the horrors. Bolter fire swept them up, tore them apart like threshed wheat. Those loyal warriors still fighting were hard-pressed to last much longer before a full-scale rout saw the end to their resistance.

  Arcadese engaged the comm-bead in his ear.

  ‘How many men do we have as garrison?’

  Lieutenant answered perfunctorily.

  ‘Fifty Legiones Astartes and a hundred times that in Army auxiliaries. They await you in the lower deep, before the gate.’

  ‘I did not ask if…’ Arcadese let it go. Lieutenant wasn’t listening any more. His final words to Arcadese haunted him as he walked to the lifter plate that would convey him to the lower deep and the last defenders of the fortress.

  ‘It has been an honour to serve with you, my lord.’

  The reply sounded hollow, even untruthful. ‘And you, Lieutenant.’

  Shrouded in shadows, dust motes spiralling earthwards with the recoil from the macro-cannons, the lower deep was a vast and echoing space. In its centre, standing to attention in a pool of lambent light, was a square of over five thousand men.

  Ultramarines officers stood head and shoulders above the Army soldiers, bolters locked across their chests. When the lifter plate touched down Arcadese realised he was wearing his full panoply of war, including cloak and laurel. He perceived the warriors he was about to command to their deaths through the red retinal lenses of a battle-helm. Clasped to his left thigh was an ornate scabbard; on the right, holstered and fully loaded, was a bolt pistol. The command circlet was gone. A servitor-armourer that hadn’t been with him when the lifter plate descended was by his side now and bowed humbly.

  ‘Serf, my blade,’ he said, holding out his hand for the servitor-armourer to place his sword in it.

  The hilt felt strong, it lent strength to Arcadese’s arm as he touched it.

  ‘I know my purpose now,’ he muttered to the creature, which backed away as Arcadese stepped off the lifter plate and into the fortress’s lowest level. He didn’t question, for nothing he could have asked or had an answer to would matter in the moments to follow.

  Instead, he merely asked, ‘Are you ready to make your sacrifice with me and die in the name of Terra?’

  ‘For Throne and Emperor!’ over five thousand voices replied in shouted unison.

  Arcadese nodded and found steel in the eyes of every one of these warriors.

  ‘Open the last gate,’ he ordered, and the gates ground open noisily, letting in the light and the blood and the death…

  Time… slipped. It had happened before, but this was the first occasion when Arcadese could remember it happening and notice it.

  Five thousand had become five hundred, surrounded in the middle of the battlefield by a baying throng of beasts shaped like men and men shaping to become beasts.

  Daemons all…

  Such a curious, archaic word. Yet it felt apt.

  In seconds, five hundred became fifty, so only Arcadese and his Legionary brothers remained.

  Wasn’t I supposed to be one of the last?

  Aside from the Crusader Host, the rest of Guilliman’s Legion was last reported to be on Calth. The incongruity of his unknown company brothers, the faces without names, the warriors bereft of diversity or personality, only just struck Arcadese in those final moments.

  The stench of burning flesh assaulted his nostrils even through the grille of his battle-helm as the power sword slid from a traitor’s chest; a second blow cut head from neck. A third blocked the thrust of another assailant. Churning teeth met super-heated adamantium in a collision of sundered metal. A point-blank bolt pistol salvo took out part of the berserker’s face. He fell and behind him loomed a creature wrenched from hell.

  It flickered incorporeally, flitting between realities, preternaturally fast. It was rage, distilled and fashioned into bestial flesh. It was horned, and bayed with a resonant cry of promised damnation.

  High above the battlefield, a shadow grew over the force dome that surrounded the fortress-asteroid in hermetic void-shielding. Slow-moving, it slid with a predator’s ease across the canvas of space, eclipsing entire nebulae.

  The beast before Arcadese was emboldened by the vast ship’s presence and the suppressed despair of the Ultramarine who looked upon it and recognised the manner of his death.

  As the first of the Vengeful Spirit’s gun batteries opened up, birthing miniature suns against the atmospheric blister cocooning the fortress-asteroid, Arcadese still dared to believe they could resist. Power sword met stinking hell-glaive, releasing a shower of black sparks into the air as Arcadese parried the beast. He missed a second blow and felt agonising heat seize his body.

  Laughing, the beast looked down and bade its enemy do the same.

  Sulphurous breath washed over Arcadese in a burning fog as the daemon’s mirth increased. Jutting from the Ultramarine’s chest, a half-metre deep, was the hell-glaive.

  Light was dying in Arcadese’s eyes, the ring of cobalt he had forged around him from those fifty battle-brothers all but broken, just as another light was born overhead.

  Opening up its awesome prow weapons, the Vengeful Spirit needed only to speak one final time before the force shield around the fortress-asteroid was overwhelmed.

  Nucleonic fire rushed from heaven to meet him, bathing his world in pellucid white as Arcadese closed his eyes…

  …only to awake again, drowning in darkness.

  Blood tasted metallic in his mouth and he couldn’t move. After a few seconds, Arcadese realised it was because he was strapped down.

  Awareness was slow to come. His head itched, as if an insect swarm had run amok inside his skull, and his body was raw and tenderised. Judging by the solid walls, which only now resolved as he adjusted to the dark, he was being held in some kind of cell. On his
back, as if in repose, it was difficult to discern much more. Instinct suggested he was not alone, and he called out.

  ‘Where I am?’

  Peripherally, he was aware of a presence behind him, but it was foggy, as if somehow veiled.

  The presence behind him didn’t answer. Instead, an elliptical portal of light appeared, just visible if he peered down his face. Two figures, barely more than silhouettes, stood within its confines.

  ‘Who are you? What is the purpose of my incarceration?’ He’d been taken. Somehow he’d survived the nucleonic fire and become a prisoner of the enemy.

  One of the observers was massive. Twice again as tall as Arcadese, he cast an immense shadow, black on black. Encased in hulking power armour, he emanated strength.

  Horus…

  Arcadese could not suppress a scowl or the snarl in his voice.

  ‘Slay me now, hell-kite, and save your time.’

  It was the other figure – much slighter, much smaller and clad in long robes – that answered.

  ‘You are safe here, Brother Arcadese,’ he said, his tone cultured and stately.

  ‘Then release me.’

  The armoured giant left the elliptical portal, disappeared somewhere into the background where Arcadese could not see him.

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘I am a Legionary Captain of the Ultramarines, and if I am not a prisoner of war aboard this vessel you will let me go.’

  ‘You are not on a ship, Ultramarine.’

  ‘Then where–’

  ‘That is not important. The important thing is that you are on the verge of passing the trial and returning to active duty.’

  Arcadese’s face contorted into an incredulous expression.

  ‘I have already done so, commanding a fortress as part of the Ardent Reef. I was just…’

  His thoughts were clouding, hard to grasp and hold onto.

  ‘Are you? Is that where you’ve been all this time?’ asked the robed figure.

  Incredulity became anger.

  ‘What is going on?’ He pulled at the restraints keeping him in a supine position. ‘And why I am strapped down? I died.’

  ‘Only in your mind, and the restraints are for your own protection.’

  ‘But how could you…?’ And like a lantern had been set ablaze inside his head, an ugly truth was revealed. ‘I am not alone in here. There is a psyker with me, one of us.’

  ‘One of us?’ The figure seemed not to acknowledge the disgust in Arcadese’s voice.

  ‘A Librarian,’ he stated flatly, consternation edging his tone. ‘Trawling through my memories, implanting scenarios… How else could you have muddied my thoughts, forced images into my psyche and made them seem real? What of the Nikaean edict, what of the Emperor’s will?’ he demanded.

  ‘Things have changed. Necessity forces us into compromise and hard choices. We have to be sure. I hope you can understand that.’

  Arcadese was finding it hard to master his anger and indignation. ‘Sure of what?’

  ‘Of your ability to make sacrifices, function under pressure and do all that is necessary to achieve your mission even if that meant losing the battle and your life. You have been absent from the frontline for many years. Even on Bastion you were merely a bodyguard.’

  Bastion… Heka’tan died there. The Salamander’s face as he fell into the fire still haunts me.

  The robed figured continued. ‘The training had to be harsh in order to test you sufficiently.’

  ‘Is that why I’m bleeding,’ Arcadese asked, ‘and strapped into this chair?’

  ‘The “scenarios” provoked by the Librarius are potent, they have to be to seem real. A side effect is that they can, and often do, manifest physical symptoms sympathetic to the mental ones experienced. There is nothing here that does not serve the greater goals of the Imperium.’

  ‘Then why are you hiding in shadows?’

  ‘Darkness aids the process. Besides, it wouldn’t matter if I weren’t.’

  ‘And the attack?’

  ‘Has not yet begun, but the Warmaster’s fleet could emerge from the warp at any moment. We must be ready, so there was no time for endless training. Utilising the Librarius provided expedient answers.’

  The scowl on Arcadese’s face suggested he did not agree, but he found he couldn’t maintain his anger. Unconsciousness was crawling at the edge of his vision again, as a sensation of weightlessness took hold.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said the robed figure with genuine regret.

  ‘For what?’ Arcadese answered groggily.

  ‘For what I have to do next.’

  Arcadese passed out on the chair, eyes flickering as he returned to unreality.

  The robed figure nodded to the Librarian standing behind the slumbering Ultramarine. The psyker had his hand poised over Arcadese’s head. A nimbus of crackling psi-energy played about the psychic hood he wore.

  ‘Thank you, Brother Umojen.’

  ‘Lord Sigillite.’

  As he retreated back into the observation chamber, Malcador met the steely gaze of the armour-clad giant.

  ‘His mind will be cleansed?’ asked the warrior.

  Heavy gears sounded through the metal and the lozenge-shaped mag-lift began to ascend the rail on a plate of anti-gravitic power. Slowly, it rose higher and the cell began to shrink revealing a second cell alongside it, and then a third, fourth…

  ‘I shall see to it personally,’ answered the Sigillite. ‘You should be smiling, lord praetorian. Arcadese will make a perfect commander upon the Ardent Reef.’

  A hololithic image dominated much of the chamber that the giant warrior now approached and regarded. In grainy resolution, it described the slowly rotating orb of Terra and the thousands of defence asteroids which now surrounded it.

  ‘Even so,’ the warrior rumbled, ‘it will still not be enough.’

  Malcador sighed, ‘No, it will not. In every projected scenario, Horus breaks the Reef apart.’ He paused before asking, ‘Are you willing to approve Captain Arcadese?’

  The warrior exhaled a long and rueful breath. ‘Run it again,’ he said, turning from the hololith. ‘Run them all again.’

  The mag-lift was still climbing. Hundreds of chambers were revealed, their subjects under psychic trance, each presided over by a Librarian from diverse Legions sent back to Terra by Captain Garro and his cohorts.

  Malcador could feel the minds of each and every one, hear the distant psi-echo of battle in their thoughts. He had dreamed of the assault on Terra many times. And in every somnambulant vision it had never ended well.

  ‘As you command, Lord Dorn.’

  Arcadese awoke to find blood trickling down the side of his face. He was injured, a head wound, but couldn’t recall any battle where he’d received it. A fortress surrounded him on all sides, and the rumble of cannon emplacements in the walls brought him out of unconsciousness.

  Pushing to his feet, he saw a battle-brother he didn’t know.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ he said, recognising the Ultramarine’s rank markings, ‘report.’

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nick Kyme is the author the Tome of Fire trilogy featuring the Salamanders. He has also written for the Space Marine Battles and Time of Legends series with the novels The Fall of Damnos and The Great Betrayal. In addition, he has penned a host of short stories and several novellas, including ‘Feat of Iron’ which was a New York Times Bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection The Primarchs. He lives and works in Nottingham.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Originally published in the French Games Day Chapbook 2012. This version published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

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  ISBN 978-0-85787-940-0

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