Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

He drops more speed.

They’re coming up on Titans. Titans marching down the highway towards the port, single file.

They trudge. They are immense. Outrider gun-carts and skitarii speeders with flashing lights surrounding their feet, waving Ventanus wide.

They pass through their trooping shadows. Shadow, sunlight, shadow, sunlight. Each shadow is a darkness like the underworld. The Titans are caked in dust. They look weary, like ramshackle metal prisoners, giant convicts shuffling towards the stockade.

Or a gibbet.

The odd, hard sunlight catches their upper surfaces and cockpit ports. A gleam in the eye. A killer gaze. Ancient giants that have endured all wars, obediently marching towards the next one.

Ventanus finds himself looking up, looking back, gazing at them as they pass. Even he is impressed. Forty-seven Titans. He can hear the tectonic boom of their footsteps over the howl of the speeder’s engines.

The biggest are filling the highway. A supply convoy moving in the opposite direction has been forced to pull onto the shoulder and wait to let them pass. Marshals wave batons and lamps.

Selaton, urgent, has pulled wide. Now the shoulder is filled with stationary transports, so he pulls wider still, crossing the highway marker, the shoulder, the culvert and ditch, riding off the transit way onto the scrub beyond, building speed again, raising a foxtail of grey dust. He uprates the grav elements, lifts another fifty centimetres for terrain clearance, and opens the throttle again. They bank, accelerating. The speeder’s drive wails. They’re moving parallel to the highway.

Ventanus looks back.

He fancies one or two of the Titans turn their massive heads to watch; disdainful, grumpy. Who is that in the tiny speeder, racing past? Why are they so impatient?

Where are they going in such a damned hurry?

The Holophusikon. It turns out it is a triangle, like the icon.

A pyramid. Actually, a pyramid raised on three smaller pyramids, each one supporting a base corner of the largest. It is made of faced ashlar and cream stone. Ventanus notes that it is an impressive building, in terms of both scale and design.

It might even be beautiful. He’s not sure. He has no expertise in such determinations.

They can see it from ten kilometres away. The Erud Highway passes it, linking to the Holophusikon’s own feeder roadways, and the township of service buildings and garrisons. Numinus City resolves as a gleaming skyline on the horizon.

The Holophusikon is stately, immense, planted in the open space of the plains. Though there is an ample town of buildings around it, it still looks new, as though it has just been built and is waiting for a city to sprout around it.

Or it looks as if it has been sent into wilderness exile for punishment.

The rain has stopped, briefly. The wind is up. The light catches the monolith’s sunward faces, bright. The other aspects are deep brown shadows. Its perfect geometry is emphasised.

Approach roads are avenues hung with banners that jump and flap in the wind. Golden masts, gilt canopy poles, lamp stands. The banners bear the heraldry of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, of Terra, of the Imperium, of the XIII. Ventanus hasn’t seen so many banners in one place since he last looked at picts of the Triumph at Ullanor.

There are gardens in the ground too. They are very green. Irrigation has dragged water from the Boros River out into the arid plains to create an oasis. Pools shimmer. Hydration systems fill the air with spray. Miniature rainbows form. Palms nod.

‘Slow down,’ says Ventanus.

They ride up under the flapping banners, and through the cool darkness under a grand arch, and coast into an inner courtyard. There is a great flight of steps like the processional advance to a temple. More banners drape from the walls of the inner precinct. There are other vehicles in sight, and dots that are people dwarfed by the immensity of the enclosure. Motorised staircases with ceramite treads flow silently on either side of the main flight.

They dismount. The speeder wobbles like a small boat as their weight leaves it. Liveried footmen approach to take care of the vehicle.

Ventanus starts up the steps, his sergeant behind him. He unclasps and removes his helm, breathes unfiltered air, feels heat and light on his face.

‘The Holophusikon,’ says Selaton.

‘A universal museum,’ says Ventanus.

‘I understood that.’

Ventanus has little patience for, or interest in, such places. He is prepared to admit that this is a flaw in his character.

They arrive at the top of the towering flight. A standard human being, even an exceptionally fit one, would be slightly short of breath at the end of such a climb in the sunlight. If anything, their pace is faster by the time they reach the top.

A marble platform, a broad entrance. Beyond, a huge and airy stone space, lit by natural light through slots in the roof. Cool. The spacious echo of murmured voices.

Ventanus approaches through the broad entrance. It is rectangular, landscape in form. A vast slot. The lip of the doorway overhead is thirty metres wide.

There are a few other visitors, tiny clumps of figures in the vast interior space. Ventanus is struck by the scale of the space, by its hollow, empty sound. Around the edges of the great chamber there are alcoves, podiums, plinths, displays. The exhibits, he supposes. That’s where the visitors are. Why build such a vast space and then dot the few exhibits around the edges?

‘What is this supposed to be?’ asks Selaton.

‘I don’t pretend to understand curation,’ replies Ventanus.

More liveried footmen approach them.

‘How may we serve, sir?’ asks one.

‘Ventanus, Captain, 4th Company, First Chapter, XIII,’ Ventanus replies. ‘I am looking for–’

He has memorised the names.

‘–Seneschals Arbute, Darial and Eterwin. Or, in fact, any senior municipal servant whose portfolio encompasses the starport.’

‘They are all in the building,’ the footman replies. He is clearly being fed behind the eyes by some direct-to-retina datasystem. Ventanus can tell from the slightly glassy way his eyes de-focus to verify the names.

‘Could you fetch them?’ asks Ventanus.

‘They are in session all afternoon,’ replies the footman. ‘Is it urgent?’

Ventanus chooses his next word carefully. It’s not so much the word as the hesitation he places in front of it, the hesitation that says I am wearing battle plate, I am armed, and I am doing my very best to be polite.

‘Yes,’ he says.

The footmen hurry away.

The Ultramarines wait.

‘Sir, is that–?’ Selaton starts.

‘It is,’ Ventanus replies.

Ventanus walks towards the distant figure that they have recognised. The figure is kneeling in front of one of the exhibit plinths. Attendants wait for him at a respectful distance.

The kneeling figure sees Ventanus and gets up. The gears and motors of his armour hum. He is taller than Ventanus, broader, the bulk of his plate master-crafted and finished with expansive golden wings, lions, eagles. He is leaning on a broadsword that is fully the height of a standard human.

‘Lord champion,’ Ventanus says, saluting.

‘Captain Ventanus,’ the giant replies. He eschews a salute, hands off the mighty sword to a bearer, and clasps Ventanus’s steel-cased hand between his own.

Ventanus is flattered to be recognised by such an august person.

‘What are you here for?’ the giant asks. ‘I thought you were running the Erud muster.’

‘You are well-informed, tetrarch,’ says Ventanus.

‘Information is victory, my brother,’ the tetrarch says, and laughs.