Echoes of Eternity

Book : The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Genres: Colonization; Genetic Engineering; Space Exploration

Synopsis

Book 7 in the best-selling mini-series, The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra

The walls have fallen. The defenders’ unity is broken. The Inner Palace lies in ruins. The Warmaster’s horde advances through the fire and ash of Terra’s dying breaths, forcing the loyalists back to the Delphic Battlement, the very walls of the Sanctum Imperialis. Angron, Herald of Horus, has achieved immortality through annihilation – now he leads the armies of the damned in a wrathful tide, destroying all before them as the warp begins its poisonous corruption of Terra. For the Emperor’s beleaguered forces, the end has come. The Khan lies on the edge of death. Rogal Dorn is encircled, fighting his own war at Bhab Bastion. Guilliman will not reach Terra in time. Without his brothers, Sanguinius – the Angel of the Ninth Legion – waits on the final battlements, hoping to rally a desperate band of defenders and refugees for one last stand.

Release date: September 13, 2022

Publisher: Games Workshop

Print pages: 560

Sample

 

 

A red sun rises

Lotara

The war was over.

The Imperial Palace was dead. It had been a tectonic sprawl, breathless in scale; a marble scab the size of a continent that crusted over the Eurasian land mass, reaching from the dry eastern coast to the empty western sea. Now it was rubble. The regions that weren’t destroyed were infected. The sectors that weren’t abandoned were aflame.

All that sacred rock, gone to waste. The stone used in its construction wasn’t only Terran in origin. Luna had contributed, as had Mars, as had many of the moons spinning through space in their sedate ballet around the Sol System’s gas giants. Exo-system stone had been long-hauled back to Terra from rediscovered and conquered worlds, with populations that knew nothing of Old Earth outside of whispered myth now quarrying marble for the sake of a palace they would never see.

But Terra had given up the greatest portion of her bones for the project. She was already plundered from the Dark Age of Technology and scarred from the unknowable ruinations of the Age of Strife that followed – and she suffered again when Imperial ambition mined her crust hollow. The Emperor’s people tore a planet’s worth of precious stone from the ground, dragging it from the deep earth by the sweat of slaves and prisoners and servitors. Terra surrendered her bones, not that she had a choice in the matter, and they were hauled away beneath the gaze of adepts; payloads for code-goaded Imperial machines.

Polished. Refined. Processed. Rendered into art by architects. Rendered into reality by labourers. Rendered into battlements by soldiers.

And now gone, all of it. A continent razed. A hemisphere reduced to rubble.

A single tower will fall and its dust chokes a city block for hours. The death-smoke of two spires tumbling will blanket a region for days, turning the air to grey dust. But a witness in the sky drifting above the devastation of Terra now wouldn’t see a lone spire fall, or the death of a mere two towers. A palace of gods and demigods had been laid to waste. This witness would see the aftermath: dust, dust, dust – horizon to horizon.

An axiom from a more enlightened age stated, Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. That sentiment speaks not only of sacrifice, but vision. A future with foundations born in the deeds of the altruistic dead. Instead of such sacrifice, and bereft of vision, Terra now burned because of weapons in the shape of men.

Higher than life can climb unaided, above the thinnest reaches of the atmosphere, the Warmaster’s fleet lay anchored in orbit.

Space was no longer a void. Beyond Terra, what was once the cold vacuum of space had curdled with an infestation of unreality. Colours without names tendrilled around the armada, wreathing ships in clawed fog and dipping their misty protuberances into the planet’s exosphere.

The voidmist coalesced into figures and shapes a thousand times larger than ships themselves; the silhouetted promises of watching gods. Eyes the size of moons opened and closed in that seething mist. Teeth were bared, the length of continents. Great wings capable of eclipsing the sun spread and furled and rotted away and regrew. The orbiting ships absorbed this mist, their ironwork warping with its saturation. To open a vox-channel was to listen in on burning souls.

Elsewhere in the galaxy, the craftworld refugees of the aeldari race would recognise these sights of unreal wonder. The warp and reality interlocked, focused on a core of absolute suffering that their seers would find all too familiar. Centuries ago, this was how their species had given birth to their baneful god. This was how their empire had died.

Thousands of crew members looked out at the toxic skies and down upon the world below, at their victory turning to ash. Terra was dying. The savants and scholars of Kelbor-Hal’s New Mechanicum could perceive the exact threads of annihilation, grasping the delicate balances of life and physics being thrown aside in the name of regicide, but the truth was evident to everyone. Anyone that looked out of a porthole or gazed from the wide windows of a command deck saw it plain.

You didn’t need to be an expert to see the war had killed Terra. You merely needed eyes.

Lotara Sarrin looked upon the blighted world from the bridge of the warship Conqueror. She sat slouched in her command throne, her deteriorated form at the very edge of terminal dehydration, and she stared at the world she’d helped destroy.

She had been proud, once. She’d been righteous in her rebellion, loyal to the Legion that treasured her, loyal to the crew she commanded and the soldiers whom she protected. She was a fleet-killer, a huntress of the stars, commanding one of the most powerful vessels ever conceived and created by human ingenuity. Her service record was decorated with avowals and commendations. Her uniform was marked with the Bloody Hand of the Twelfth, the highest honour a mortal could earn from her Legion.

She was still loyal. Even when insanity crept its way through her ship, she’d stayed loyal. Even when the World Eaters rampaged through the halls and chambers, butchering their own serfs and slaves. Even when she’d been forced to execute warriors whom she’d served alongside for years, who had lost their faith in the Warmaster’s way. Even when every drop of water in the crew’s supply tanks turned to flyblown blood. Even when her nights became sleepless epileptic seizures of flicker-flash horrors, as dead comrades cried out from the shadows of the ship they were doomed to haunt. Even when the degrading Conqueror began to phase in and out of reality, and entire districts of its lethal bulk turned rancid with the warp’s corrosion. Even when her skin began to scale with the rawness of her sins manifesting on her flesh.

Lotara Sarrin had sworn her loyalty to the very end, and now the end had come. She hadn’t expected it to look like this.

Reflected in her eyes was a globe of sickly grey, with its halo of violet madness. No visible land masses, no signs of life. She could see nothing beneath the layer of filthy murk. The Conqueror’s scanners, when they functioned at all, couldn’t cut through the dust. Terra didn’t look like Terra. It looked like Venus. It choked under a similar tainted sky.

Choppy reports analysed the clouded atmosphere. The marble dust in the air was enough to destroy any reliability with the vox, but it was nothing compared to the true damage. Toxic vapours were rife, churned up from a million surface detonations and the orbital barrages tormenting Terra’s carbonite-rich crust. The impacts and the world-tearing heat of cannon fire from the Warmaster’s armada had ripped craters in the Palace and carved chasms in the surrounding territories. Dying Titans contributed their swansongs, too – their heart-reactors going nova as they lay in the rubble-graves of their failed marches.

It all added up: fusing and igniting the gases that lay stable beneath the earth. Sulfa dyoxide, an element known to the sages of the Martian Mechanicum, was born from these blasted-open pores in Terra’s skin. The poison coiled its chemical tendrils through the filthy air, ruining it further, turning it acidic.

And there was more. The earth bled lava from suppurating ulcers. Pyroclastic flows of burning gas and volcanic tephra had gushed from the riven land, blanketing embattled regions with flash-melting smoke and sludge. The ash and dust clogging the air were conjoined now, layered yet inseparable, a curtain of pale grey denying sight and breath. Dust paste caked the lungs of millions of survivors. Those without rebreathers were at risk of asphyxiation just by remaining within the Palace, but there was nowhere left to run.

The destruction of the Imperial Palace also released chemicals used by the abandoned industries of Terra. Containment failures in several palatial manufactories haemorrhaged a processing substance marked as maethal eysocyanite. This gas clung to the ground with a predation that almost spoke of intelligence, flooding several remaining bastions at their lower levels, an unseeable tidal wave of chemical venom dissolving into the defenders’ eyes and throats. It blinded, burned, killed within hours. The Astartes could survive it, though it mutilated many of them. Hordes of human defenders and refugees were not so lucky.

Last and far from least, there was the radiation. By design or misfortune, subterranean stores of nameless Dark Age materials had been cracked open over the course of the war. Many of the gaseous elements sighing out of these ancient bunkers were barely understood and defied current naming convention, but their radiological effects were murderously familiar. They were death, one final horror from the past, the very last breath of a forgotten age.

Lotara had taken the last report she’d seen and given it to one of the few remaining Mechanicum sages still aboard the Conqueror. His augmetics were rusted, chafing at his ghoulish skin. Blood poisoning showed in lightning-bolt veins beneath his flesh. He had to tap out a reply on a speaking keypad because his vocoder had degenerated beyond repair. He’d never even set foot on the surface; the Conqueror had done this to him.

When he printed his reply to her, Lotara read it three times to be sure she understood just what the war was doing to Terra. And there it was, laid out in grinding totality. The absolute destruction of humanity’s birthworld. The war that had let the galaxy burn now covered every inch of Terra’s surface, darkening the heavens and gouging into the planet’s mineral flesh.

But it wasn’t the toxicity or the blindness that stuck with her, it was one of the tech-priest’s simple, blunt summations halfway through his analysis. He’d detailed how the sulfuryk elements from the world’s injuries had seeped into the air, scattering Sol’s incoming light within the human visual spectrum. With this explanation, a brief note gave simple context:

To those on the surface, the sun has gone red.

She couldn’t shake that image.

Now she looked at the oculus viewscreen where, from orbit, a pall of grey covered the entire world. They had come to take the Throneworld and had instead wrapped it in a funeral shroud.

‘Khârn,’ she spoke out loud for the first time in hours – or perhaps days – her voice a parched whisper. The closest crew paid her no mind at all. They were hunched at their own consoles, lost in their own pain.

‘Khârn?’ Lotara said again.

Khârn stood not far from her command throne. His visage was a riven mess of scars and battlefield staple-stitches. He didn’t say anything. He never said anything anymore.

Her stomach clenching was the only warning she got. Her insides heaved with enough force to drive her out of her throne and onto her knees, ears ringing with pressure, spit stringing between her open lips. She cried out at the sudden pain, at the poison running up her throat, and her yell turned into a hot flush of vomit slapping across the deck.

As she gasped for her breath back, she looked down at the half-digested spread of her last meal. A pool of thin bile, a few scraps of stomach lining, and three of someone’s fingers.

Disbelief overpowered her exhaustion for a few precious seconds. She recoiled from the puddle, pulling herself back into her throne. Just a trick of her sleepless mind. That was all. That was all.

Khârn approached the flagship’s captain, kneeling to rest at her level. He didn’t offer his aid as she hauled herself on shaking limbs back into her chair. He was unarmed, and Lotara couldn’t recall ever seeing him without his axe before. Blood trickled from her eyes as she stared into the patchwork ruin of his face. The thirsting husk of her body gave up yet more precious fluid in the form of those profane tears.

‘Khârn,’ she whispered. ‘What have we done?’

It was a question being asked across Terra and above it, by the men and women on both sides of the war.

Khârn had no answer.

 

A broken gladiator

Kargos

Somewhere in the dust, a gladiator hunted in the weakling light of a scarlet dawn. He staggered as much as walked, stumbled as much as he ran, any sense of grace he once possessed now a shredded memory. His motions were those of an infected beast, his mind aflame with urges that devoured reason. His crested helmet turned this way and that in animal, kinetic spurts. He moved as if rabid.

The enemy had broken and run. Minutes ago. Hours ago. Days ago. He couldn’t see them now, nor was he sure in which direction they’d fled. His armour joints snarled as he jerked his head at ­shadows in the ash, at sounds muffled to unreality. A chainaxe idled in his gauntleted fist. It wasn’t his axe, and he couldn’t ­recall where he’d found it. Sometimes the weapon’s teeth whirred, chewing dirty air. The blood that caked the axe’s fangs had dried to gritty paste.

The gladiator had a name, though in that moment he barely knew it. He also had an honoured, vital role within the ranks of his Legion, which was something else the pressure in his skull had leached away. The pain engine implanted against his brain was biting deep, a clicking parasite making a meal of his central nervous system.

He salivated as he stared into the dust. In these moments – which were becoming ever more frequent – he was less a reasoning being and more a vessel brimming with notions of immediate instinct.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, the Butcher’s Nails sang, sending needle-prick electrical signals into the meat of his mind. This is pain, it promised him, and you will feel it until I allow you pleasure. And so, sharklike, he pressed on. To stand still was to feel the implant’s razor kisses deep in his skull, where he couldn’t scratch.

Things were changing. Had changed. With the pain engine remapping his mind, his chemical cognition was shattered. The adrenal violence that once brought ecstasy now brought a thin relief. Treasured, yes, but hardly the same thing. Before, the gladiator had chased a feeling of exaltation. Now, he pursued tantalising caresses of relief. They were never enough to become pleasure, never even close, but at least they came with a cessation of pain.

His armour was a scavenged panoply beneath the clinging layer of ash. For years he’d worn the white ceramite of the XII Legion’s crusading heraldry, and the mongrel suit he was sealed inside was formed from only half its original components. He couldn’t recall repainting his warplate, nor granting his serfs permission to paint it for him. Yet there it was, revealed in the patches where the dust briefly brushed away: arterial red instead of the familiar filthy white.

Yes, things were changing.

This didn’t trouble him. Perhaps it would have, had he given it true weight of thought, but in the rare moments he turned his mind in that direction, the Nails would gnaw hard enough to trigger muscle tremors. They promised him peace only if he ran, roared, killed, maimed, burned. So he did those things when he could, and grew drunk with pain when he couldn’t.

At one dimly remembered point in time, he’d tried breaking his skull open against a wall, rhythmically crashing his forehead against the broken marble in a bid to drain the vileness from his head. It had worked, until it hadn’t. Then the pain came back, twice as bitter. Punishment for his self-inflicted wounds. Judgement for attempted suicide.

The gladiator moved on. It soothed the Nails when he moved forward.

He wasn’t alone in the ashen wasteland. His brothers – and the things that pretended to be his brothers – made a loose pack around him. Together but apart, they moved through the gloom. Some of them were made of fire. Some of them were made of blood in the shape of monsters. Some of them were his lifelong brethren, and some of them just wore his kinsmen’s flesh.

Apothecary.

He heard the word as he ascended a scree of infected rubble. The sound of it was familiar even if the meaning wasn’t. Poisoned rocks slid beneath the weight of his boots. The wall had died to artillery fire, recently enough that it still smoked, and the gladiator hauled his way up the broken slope. The Nails sensed his resolve and could have been merciful, but they spiked again anyway. An animal grunt broke from his lips, unintentional and helplessly honest.

Apothecary. That word again. It lingered in his mangled thoughts, as if it wanted to mean something. Apothecary. Apothecary. The next time he heard it, it was shouted out loud: ‘Apothecary!’ It had the emphasis of a name. Or a curse.

The gladiator stopped in his ascent. He turned, gazing through the dust. Seeking the silhouettes of his brothers, and the stalking things that claimed to be his brothers. A cluster of them were at the bottom of the rubble slope. Their armour was no longer red. The ashy dust had restored his fellow World Eaters to their original filthy white heraldry.

‘Kargos!’ one of them shouted up at him.

Just like that, words had meaning once more. The Nails bit, as if mocking his return to cognition, but their mandibles were dull against the trickling spread of identity.

The gladiator – Kargos, he thought, I am Kargos – tried to vox down to them, but the vox-web was useless these days. He shouted back through his helm’s voice grille, the words amplified and raw.

‘Who calls?’

The answer wasn’t an answer at all, it was a demand. ‘Medic!’

Kargos descended, half-skidding down the rockcrete rubble. The cluster of silhouettes resolved into shapes, then became the figures of his brothers. His actual brothers. Not the things that professed brotherhood.

Twenty-nine of his kindred were down, their bodies dragged by the survivors sane enough to resist the song of the Nails. He looked over their broken remains lying in loose rows, already shrouded with grey-white dust. Bolt impacts and chainblade tears marked their armour, the ceramite rent open to reveal the destroyed meat inside.

Kargos turned his gaze to the survivors, the World Eaters still standing. Others stalked past them in the dust, climbing the rubble slope, seeking prey at the behest of the pain engines biting into their brains. Even those with enough self-control to deal with the Legion’s dead were tormented by violent tics and twitches. This funeral service, as blunt and careless as any XII Legion ritual, took a supreme measure of focus for those able to perform it.

‘What are you waiting for?’ one of them grunted. Kargos couldn’t make out the warrior’s identity with the dust coating his warplate. ‘Harvest them,’ the warrior ordered.

Kargos looked down at his own armour, at his empty belt and bandolier. When, exactly, had he lost the tools of his trade? The metal vials of stimulant serums and combat narcotics were gone. His narthecium was a broken ruin, a bolt-hit husk of missing instruments. Its scanner display was cracked and black, no longer connected to his armour’s power supply. Even the keypad on his vambrace was worthless, showing lost keys like a desperate smile with missing teeth.

No matter. He didn’t need the specialised instruments to harvest, he could use his knife. The work would be messier, riskier for the removed organs, but he’d done it before. All it took was care and haste, so the ashy air wouldn’t contaminate the fleshy nodes as they were pulled free.

He crouched by the first body and drew his knife. In human hands, it would be something to go to war with. In Kargos’ grip, it was a chipped and tarnished machete.

‘Who was this?’ he asked his brothers. They didn’t answer; Kargos sensed them shuffling in the dust, struggling to remain with the dead rather than move on in search of more prey. They probably didn’t know who’d died either; squads were scattered, the vox was down, and the dust was a great equaliser on that score, turning them all into ghosts of themselves. Who was who hardly mattered now.

Kargos reached for the containment cells mag-locked to his belt. They were reinforced, internally cooled ceramite cylinders marked with Nagrakali runes. He carried dozens of them, each one a capsule for the progenoids of a fallen Legion brother. With their gene-seed harvested, the slain would live on in the creation of their replacement warriors. Over the months of the war, he’d harvested the progenoids from the throats and chests of many of his kindred.

Except his fingers brushed against naked ceramite plating. He didn’t carry dozens of them. He carried three. And the three that remained were punctured and empty.

A chill ran through him, severe enough to cool even the sting of the Nails in the back of his head. So many had already died unharvested over the course of the war. How many had he harvested only to lose their genetic legacy in the fitful nothingness between bouts of clarity? He could die for this. In better, saner times, his Legion had executed Apothecaries for failure of this magnitude. They still might.

Kargos felt the eyes of his brethren upon him. He knew their weapons were still in their hands.

‘I can’t,’ he confessed to them. ‘I can’t do it.’

They still said nothing, and Kargos felt the weight of their wordless judgement. He rose to his feet for sentencing. Gladiators always faced fate with courage. Only cowards died on their knees.

But there was no one there. The other World Eaters were gone. Swallowed by the dust, if they’d ever been there at all. He looked down; the bodies were gone, too. He stood alone in the dust. Utterly alone.

Alone, that is, but for a sudden pinch along his spinal nerves. The Nails bit, offering up a motivating pulse of pain, promising more if he remained still. Kargos turned, staggering, stumbling, no longer really Kargos at all. Just the gladiator again.

Time passed strangely in the ash. At some point in Kargos’ staggering journey, shapes resolved around him. A few became many, and many became more than enough. He knew some were his Legion brothers and some were not, and he could tell the difference by those that could see where they were going. He and his brothers were blind, but the things that pretended to be his brothers and sisters could see well enough to hunt. These blood-letting creatures hunted ahead of the horde; the Emperor’s silent scream sapped their strength, but they saw flares of life in the choking dust, and they drew the Warmaster’s forces with them. Making their way towards the Sanctum Imperialis, where the last organised defenders gathered at the final fortress.

It was a tide. Hundreds of thousands of warriors and soldiers and daemonic entities merging into a wave of god-soaked intent. Rank meant little now among the mortal castes of this horde; military cohesion had almost broken down into myth. They staggered and stumbled and some even ran, warriors from every one of the Warmaster’s Legions, a seething host of abused minds and diseased souls. Some exulted in their ­shackles of divine slavery, others falsely believed themselves free. It made no difference. A slave was still a slave even if he crowned himself king.

Though blunted by the Nails’ pain, Kargos sensed the shifting air. The veil between worlds was so very thin now. Neverborn clawed their way into reality with mere wisps of thought. A single drop of blood on the broken earth spawned horrors.

The Emperor was weakening.

Imagine such a thing.

The Neverborn hissed it. Angron roared it. Horus promised it. Soon the time would come to drag down the walls of the final fortress.

Something pierced the bloodstained cloud of Kargos’ thoughts. His name again. Someone nearby was saying his name. They’d been saying it for some time.

It was Inzar. Inzar of the XVII, wearing grit-abraded warplate and with his weapons chained to his armour as a symbol of his time with the XII. The parchments still adhering to Inzar’s armour were scored and faded, reduced to ragged strips. He gripped Kargos’ shoulder guard, preventing him from moving on with the horde.

‘I thought it was you, brother.’ Even all these years later, Inzar’s voice was a low and familiar purr through his helmet’s vocaliser. Somehow it cut through the wind. ‘How fine it is to see you, so close to our triumph.’

Kargos wasn’t sure what to say – nothing about any of this felt like triumph – so he said nothing. Inzar’s touch remained on the World Eater’s shoulder. A guiding hand.

‘Come with me, Kargos. You have lost your way. I will help you.’

Kargos stared, mute, through eyes that throbbed with their own pulse. It took him three tries to speak, and he only managed three words.

‘Are you real?’

Inzar grunted at that, a sound that might have been a laugh. ‘Come with me, my friend.’

‘No.’ Kargos licked his cracking lips and tasted blood. ‘Answer me. Are you real?’

There was no laughter that time. Just a nod, a gesture of understanding.

‘I am real.’

Kargos hesitated for a few more seconds – the Neverborn had lied to him before – then followed.

A council was convened in the wasteland, formed around a gather­ing of officers and attendants still in possession of their senses. The shadows of tanks rumbled at the gathering’s edges. Warriors of every Legion stood in loose packs, as often associating by new-found allegiances over their paternal bloodlines. Kargos was one of them. He stayed at Inzar’s side out of exhausted familiarity, watching, through aching eyes, the first signs of order from disorder that he’d seen in what felt like forever.

Questions were asked in vicious murmurs and answered in the same tone. Establishing a firm hierarchy was impossible without the vox, and without knowing what regiments were where; what Titan Legios had managed to haul themselves up and through the wreckage of the Ultimate Wall; what Astartes forces had assembled in the fallen districts of the Inner Palace. But it was something. Waves were forming in the tide, part of the natural rhythm of the horde: gatherings of might just like this one, warbands massing for the final assault.

The names of First Captains were spoken, and their absences marked. Ahriman. Typhon. Abaddon. Embattled elsewhere or already dead? None could say.

And what of Rogal Dorn, the Emperor’s Praetorian? What of Jaghatai Khan and the Angel of Blood? Were they cowering within the Sanctum Imperialis waiting for the last battle, or were they trapped elsewhere in the war-torn districts of the Inner Palace, besieged in their bastions and unable to break out? The Khan, it was said, had died of his tainted wounds at the Lion’s Gate space port days ago. The Praetorian, with the Palace in ashes, his genius expended and his plans in ruins, was said to be hiding behind the walls of Bhab Bastion and readying his final scheme to escape Terra. That left only the Angel free, and the depleted remnants of the three Legions he commanded.

Kargos’ exhaustion thinned out as the Nails blessedly stopped biting so deep. The voices of those speaking soothed the pain engine in his skull, as if their plans were a prayer. The war was won. The defenders were broken. The Emperor’s shield was reduced to a sliver of its invisible power, and Neverborn ran amok through the wasted districts of the Inner Palace.

What, then, came next? Magnus would break the Emperor’s will, and with it, the psychic shield. Angron, in his fury, would find and butcher the Angel of Blood, then march upon the Sanctum Imperialis. Horus himself was soon to make planetfall. They would tear down the Eternity Gate and burn the Sanctum Imperialis to the ground. They had the numbers. The defenders did not.

So let it be spoken, so let it be done. Terra would soon be theirs.