Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

‘Who the hell is firing?’ Guilliman asks. ‘What the hell are they shooting at?’

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He strides to the main detection console and pushes the bewildered staffers out of his way. They are so transfixed by the scene beyond the open shutters, they stumble aside like sleepwalkers.

‘Any auspex? Any at all?’ Guilliman asks.

One of the detection officers remembers where he is.

‘The pulse,’ he says. He coughs. ‘The electromagnetic pulse, my lord. It has rendered us insensible for a moment. Automatic restoration programs will–’

‘Take time,’ Guilliman finishes.

‘We could…’ the man stammers. ‘That is, I could authorise a restart of the detection array. But it might blow the links.’

‘And we’d lose everything and need a month in the yards to have the array refitted?’

‘Yes, my primarch,’ the man says.

‘Do it anyway,’ says Guilliman.

The man hesitates.

‘For your own good, hurry,’ Gage whispers to him. The officer jumps to work.

‘If this is a fight and you blow the array, we’re no use for anything,’ Gage says quietly.

‘We’re no use for anything already,’ Guilliman responds. He is staring at the view, absorbing every detail he can. He’s already mentally logged the names of several ships that have been crippled or destroyed.

‘The ship fire,’ he ponders. ‘It’s coming from… from the southern dayside. Close in, too. That’s not coming in from interplanetary space. That’s in amongst the anchorage.’

Gage says nothing. He’s not quite sure how the primarch is determining this from an eyes-only view of distance, space, burning gas, energy flares and backscattered light.

‘I think so,’ says Zedoff, who is more used to the view from a bridge window. ‘I think you’re correct, sir.’

‘Someone could be trigger happy,’ Guilliman says. ‘Firing because they think it’s an attack.’

‘It may be an attack,’ Gage says.

Guilliman nods. He’s still staring at the scene.

His calm is almost terrifying. Gage is transhuman: both bred and trained to know no fear. The acceleration of his own hearts and adrenal levels are simply a response to the situation, a readiness to act faster and more efficiently.

But Guilliman is at another level entirely. He is watching a critical disaster unfold on one of his most beloved planets: the miserable loss of a vital shipyard facility, the collateral damage, the destruction of ships, a portion of the fleet crippled, surface locations caught in the debris rain…

Even if it’s an accident, it’s a dire turn of events. And on this day of days, when so much prestige and statecraft was to be achieved.

It’s not an accident. Gage knows in his gut it’s not. And he knows the primarch knows it too.

But the primarch is considering things as though he’s contemplating the next move in a game of regicide.

‘Hurry with that auspex!’ Gage yells.

‘Put the vox on speaker,’ Guilliman tells the shipmaster.

‘It’s a jumble, sir–’

‘On speaker.’

A cacophony screeches across the massive bridge. Static, pulse-noise, code squeals, voices. There’s overlap, interrupt, distortion, bad signal. It’s as if the whole universe is screaming at them. The only voices Gage can hear with any clarity are the ones screaming for help, for answers, for permission to leave orbit or open fire.

Gage watches Guilliman listening.

‘They’re not speaking,’ Guilliman says.

‘What, sir?’ asks Gage.

Guilliman is listening intently. He’s teasing out every piece of detail from the uproar.

‘They’re not speaking,’ he repeats.

‘Who are not speaking?’ Gage asks.

‘The Word Bearers. The traffic, it’s all us.’

‘How do you know?’

Guilliman shrugs lightly, still listening. He’s recognising ship names, voices, keel numbers, transmission codes. Would that the Mechanicum could design a bioengine half as efficient as Guilliman’s mind.

‘We’re the ones requesting help, requesting clarification,’ he says. ‘We’re the ones asking for instructions, for permission to fire back. We’re the ones dying.’

He looks at Gage.

‘The Word Bearers are shooting at us,’ he says.

‘No. No, they simply would not–’

Guilliman silences him.

‘Whatever this is, whatever has happened, they think it’s an attack, and they think we’re part of it. Everything they believe about us has just appeared to come true, Marius, and they’re shooting at us.’

He turns to Zedoff.

‘Forget the auspex. Activate the lithocast and show me Lorgar. Nothing has greater priority.’

The first object hits. It’s a piece of debris. Oll Persson doesn’t know what it is exactly. He scarcely cares. A lump of ship. A piece of orbital.

It’s the size of a habitat; it comes down out of the burning sky at a forty-five degree angle. It’s blazing superhot like a meteor. It punches home like a rocket strike.

It hits the scrub land on the far side of the estuary. The impact shock throws them all over onto the ground. The swartgrass in the field around them is shredded up like chaff. Heat and air smack them, tumbling Oll and the workers, and then dust, and a storm of particulate debris. Then it rains. The rain is scalding hot. It’s river water from the estuary thrown up to steam and back by the hit.

A second later, another few million gallons of river hit them. The impact has thumped the river out of its bed, and driven a two-metre-high tidal bore up across Oll Persson’s land.

‘Get up!’ Oll yells to his paid-by-the-day workers. ‘Get up and run!’

The wave swallows him, sweeping him under.

He hits a fence post, grabs on, choking, dragged around by the ferocious surge, and then back as the water recedes in a sucking rush.

More objects are hitting. Two more big pieces strike on the far shore, like missiles. Vast plumes of fire spit into the sky. Smaller pieces of debris are hitting all around, like shells, like shots from light field guns. They blow holes in the ground like grenade blasts: shell bursts of mud and water and matted vegetation. Whizz and whistle, crump, ground-shake, backspatter of mud. It’s as if he’s back on Chrysophar, on that last tour from hell. He feels the old fear return, and prays to his god. His lungs are full of water. He’s covered in mud, black mud, that good, black alluvial soil.

The thunder is like the guns of Krasentine Ridge. A boom like sheets flapping in the wind. The shudder inside your ribs as the pressure hits you, quivering your diaphragm.

Dear god, dear god, let me live, let me live, I am your servant…

Not shells. Not shells from field guns in flak-sacked redoubts. Not shells. No stink of fycelene. But just as bad.

It’s raining on them now, raining burning debris. Pelting. Each hit is like a bomb.

‘Find cover!’ Oll yells.

Stupid. How stupid. Where is cover going to be in this? The sky is falling in.

Some of his workers are already dead. He sees a man clutching the squirting stump of an arm, writhing in the black mire, screaming. He sees parts of a woman he quite liked protruding from the steaming lip of an impact crater. He sees one boy dead, crushed, and another dragging himself along, his legs blown off.

Like Krasentine, just like Krasentine. The ridge. He came to Calth to leave that life behind, and it’s found him again.

Something burning like a falling star hits one of the fusion plants at Neride, and the ground leaps.

This time the tidal wave is four metres high and feels like a rockcrete wall.

Seneschal Arbute comes to. She looks at Ventanus as if he has attacked her. There’s a graze on the side of her face and she’s clutching her torso with both arms. Broken ribs.