James Swallow - The Flight of the Eisenstein

'You did not/ Garro replied. 'Your insight is… challenging, that is all.' He thought for a moment. 'As to your question, I do not know the answer. If there were no wars, what use would weapons be?' He pointed to Carya's pistol, and then himself. 'Perhaps we would make a new war, or turn upon each other.'

'As Horus did?'

A chill washed through Garro's soul. 'Perhaps.' The thought lay heavy upon him, and he turned, forcing it away.

Garro found Sendek and Hakur scrutinising an aus-pex unit. With the aid of Vought, Sendek had been able to connect the device to some of the Eisenstein's external sensory mechanisms. 'Captain! A reading…'

Garro dismissed Carya's words from his mind and snapped back to battle focus. 'Report.'

'Energy build-up/ said Hakur. 'For a second I thought it might have been a deep scan of the hull, but then it changed.'

A complex wave-form writhed across the auspex screen.

'A scan?' He glanced at Sendek. 'Could we be detected in here, through this much iron and steel?'

'It is possible/ replied the Astartes. A vessel with enough power behind her sensors could burn through any amount of shielding.'

A ship, or something like a star fort/ added Hakur.

Cold realisation seized Garro's chest and he snatched the auspex from Sendek's grip. The pattern; he knew what it was. 'To arms!' he bellowed, his voice echoing around the chamber. 'To arms! They're com­ing in!'

The auspex forgotten, Hakur and Sendek brought up their weapons and panned them around the com­partment. At Garro's words, the crew surged with panic. He saw Carya snap out commands and the men brought their guns to the ready.

'Sir, what is it?' Sendek asked.

'There!' Garro pointed into the centre of the cham­ber, to an open area just inside the doors where Hakur had arranged a staggered barricade. A low humming, like electric motors deep beneath the earth, was issuing from the air, and static prickled at the battle-captain's skin.

Embers of emerald radiance danced and flickered across the deck, for one moment recalling the strange warp-things that had come to the ship in the depths of the empyrean; but this was something different. This time, Garro knew exactly what to expect. 'No man opens fire until I give the word!' he shouted.

And then they came. With a thundering roar of splitting air molecules, a searing flash of jade light­ning exploded across the middle of the armoury chamber floor, the backwash of colour throwing stark, hard-edged shadows over the walls and ceiling. Garro raised his hand to shield his eyes from the bril­liance before it could dazzle him into temporary blindness. Then the light and noise were gone with a flat crack of displaced atmosphere, and the teleporta-tion cycle was complete.

Where there had been bare deck and scatterings of discarded equipment, now there was a cohort of

stocky, armoured figures in a perfect combat wheel deployment. A ring of eight Astartes, resplendent in battle gear that shimmered in the light of the biol-umes, stood with their bolters ranged at their shoulders, with none of the chamber unguarded.

One of them spoke with a voice clear and hard, in the manner of a man used to being obeyed instantly. 'Who is in command here?'

Garro stepped forward, his weapon at his hip and his finger upon the trigger. 'I am.'

He saw the speaker now, his head bare. He picked out a hard face, a humourless aspect, and behind him… What was that behind him?

'You will stand down and identify yourself!'

In spite of the tension inside him, something in Garro rebelled at the superior tone and he sneered in reply. 'No,' he spat, 'this is my vessel, and you have boarded it without my authority!' Abruptly, all the strain and anger that he had kept locked away inside him over the past few days roared back to the fore, and he poured every last drop of it into his retort. 'You will stand down, you will identify yourself, and you will answer to me}'

In the silence that followed, he caught a murmur and as one, the muzzle of every bolter the boarding party held dropped downward to point at the deck­ing. The warrior who had addressed Garro bowed and stepped aside to allow another figure – the shape he had glimpsed at the centre of the group – to step for­ward.

Garro's throat tightened as a towering shape in yellow-gold armour came into the light. Even in the feeble glow of the lanterns, the raw presence of the new arrival lit the room. A severe and uncompromising gaze surveyed the chamber from a

grim face framed by a snow-white shock of hair, a face that seemed as hard and unyielding as the mammoth plates of golden-hued brass that made the man a walking statue; but no, not a man.

'Primarch.' He heard the whisper fall from Hakur's mouth.

Any other words died forming in Garro's throat. He found he could not draw his sight away from the war­lord's armour. Like Garro's, the warrior wore a cuirass detailed with eagles spread over his shoulders and across his chest. Upon his shoulder pauldron was a disc of white gold and layered to that, cut together from sections of blue-black sapphire, was the symbol of a mailed gauntlet clenched in defiant threat. Finally the diamond-hard eyes found Garro and held him.

'Pardon our intrusion, kinsman,' said the demi-god, his words strong and firm but not raised in censure. 'I am Rogal Dorn, Master of the VII Legiones Astartes, Emperor's son and Primarch of the Imperial Fists.'

He found his voice again. 'Garro, lord. I am Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro of the Death Guard, commanding the starship Eisenstein!

Dorn nodded gently. 'I request permission to come aboard, captain. Perhaps I maybe of some assistance.'

PART THREE

UNBROKEN

FOURTEEN

Dorn's Fury Divinity To Terra

The men at the gunnery stations stood in salute as they carried out the orders of the primarch. Heads bowed, they made the sign of the aquila across their chests before the commander of the cannonade island on the prow of the fortress placed his hand on die firing lever. The officer paused for a moment and then pulled the massive trigger.

Four high-yield ship-to-ship torpedoes flashed from their firing tubes, thruster rockets igniting to carry them the short distance from the fortress to the frigate. Each one was tipped with a compact but very powerful atomic warhead. One would have been enough to do the job, but after the catalogue of hor­rors that had walked the decks of the Eisenstein, the overkill was deemed necessary. The ship's duty was concluded, and only in death did duty end.

The Phalanx watched the last few seconds of the starship's life unfold. The massive construct, the

nomadic home of the Imperial Fists Legion, was more planetoid than it was space vessel. It stood at silent sentinel over the ending of its smaller Sister.

The torpedoes impacted at the bow, the stern and at equidistant points along the frigate's beaten and rav­aged hull. The detonations had been programmed flawlessly, all four rippling into one seamless, silent flare of radiation and light. The glow illuminated the surrounding vessels of the Astartes fleet, and cast bright columns of white through the windows of Rogal Dorn's sanctorum atop the highest of the Pha­lanx's towers.

Garro turned his face away from the flash and in doing so felt an odd pang of regret, almost as if he had done the steadfast vessel a disservice in not watching her last moments of obligation to the Imperium. Dorn, some distance away at the largest of the windows, did not move. The nuclear light washed over the primarch and not for one moment did he flinch from it. As the flare died away, the master of the Imperial Fists gave a shallow nod.

'It's done, then.' Behind him, Garro heard Iacton Qruze's remark. 'If any taint of that warp witchery remained, it is ashes now.' The old warrior seemed to stand a little taller now that his power armour had been repainted in the old colours of the Luna Wolf lively. Dorn had raised an eyebrow at the change, but said nothing.