Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

The primarch.

Thiel breathes out slowly. It is safe to estimate that he is in about as much trouble as it’s possible to be in.

In which case…

He takes down the longsword. It has extraordinary balance. He sweeps it twice, then turns towards the nearest practice cage.

He halts. He turns back.

Might as well be damned for the whole as a part.

He takes down a Rathian sabre, half the length of the longsword, almost the same weight. A blade in each hand, he walks to the cage.

‘Rehearsal, single sparring mode. Dual wielding, extremity level eight. Commit.’

The cage hums into life, the armature system rises around him, clattering as it begins to turn.

Thiel hunkers down. He raises the two, priceless blades…

Their lift is delayed. Something about a storm out over Caren Province. The sky in the east goes mauve, like a blood bruise.

Sergeant Hellock tells them to bed down and wait for the call. Their lift is delayed, but not in any way that will allow Trooper Bale Rane to leave the site and go see his girl.

‘Standing orders apply, no exceptions,’ says the sergeant. Then he softens slightly. ‘Sorry, Rane. I know what you were hoping.’

Bale Rane sits down and leans his back against a loader pallet. He’s beginning to think that he will spend the rest of his life looking at Sergeant Hellock’s face and never see Neve’s again.

The truth could hardly be more contrary.

‘Is that singing?’ asks Krank. He gets up.

‘That’s singing,’ he says.

Rane can hear it. Two hundred metres away, on the other side of some perimeter fencing, is a compound occupied by Army forces that have arrived with the XVII. A ragged mob, they look. Just the sort of fringe-world vagabonds you’d expect to come scurrying along on the heels of the zealot Word Bearers. They had received a great deal of critical commentary from Sergeant Hellock as they disembarked, criticism that included uniform code, formation, equipment maintenance and parade discipline.

‘Oh, that’s just embarrassing,’ Hellock says, lighting a lho-stick as he watches them dismount from the troop landers. ‘They look like bastard vagrants. Like shit-stupid hunters from some arse-end world.’

The soldiers from off-world indeed do not look promising. They are ragged. There is a wildness to them, as though they have been deprived of something vital for too long. Their skin is pale and their frames are thin. They look like plants that have been starved of light in a cave. They look like heathens.

‘That’s just what we need,’ says Hellock. ‘Heathen auxiliary units.’

They are singing, chanting. It is not a comfortable or attractive sound. It’s atonal. It’s actually quite unpleasant to listen to.

‘That’s going to have to stop,’ the sergeant says. He grinds the butt of a lho-stick under his heel.

He crosses the yard to have a word with the commander of the other unit. The chanting bothers him.

Raindrops come out of the dry air like bolter rounds. They explode like black glass against the hood of the speeder that Selaton is gunning down Erud Highway.

Everything’s dust: dust-dry land, dusty-caked metal, a fog raised by lifters and engines and traffic. The flat landscape is pale, harshly lit. The sky has gone oddly dark, opaque. From the passenger seat of the armoured speeder, Ventanus can see the distant line of the hills, swathed in green.

There’s a rainstorm swimming up from the south. Vox says it’s already a mire down in Caren.

It’ll be a mire here too, before very long, Ventanus thinks. The light is so weird. The sky so black, the ground so light. The raindrops look like glass beads, like tears. They explode all over him, all over his armour, all over the speeder, wet black streaking the film of white dust all surfaces have acquired during the day.

The raindrops hit the dusty ground, the highway, the scabby verge, making millions of little black entry wounds, little black craters, little puffs of white. Far away, little silver threads of lightning glitter in the low cloud, like seams of bright ore exposed in coal.

Selaton drives like an idiot. The speeder is a hefty two-man machine with forward gunmounts, its cobalt-blue armour flaked with dust and bruised with the dents and scrapes of use. The cockpit is open. Grav plates keep the ground at bay, and the drive-plant is over-powered to help it slide all that armour around.

It’s a light recon vehicle that’s mean enough to fight its way out of bother. Ventanus requisitioned it for the day as staff transport.

Now Selaton’s driving it like an idiot.

He’s affecting just about maximum horizontal velocity, pluming a white tail of dust out behind them along the flat, straight roadway. The rain is trying to wet the dust back down, but it’s too thick. A nav-track display to the left of the driver blinks a route overlay. The display is armoured and grilled against wear and tear. The speeder is a working machine with bare metal along most seams.

The twitching cursor on the illuminated display is supposed to be them. The etched line is the highway. At the foot of the screen is a blob, that’s Erud station. At the top, a triangular icon.

Red hazard hatching appears on the etched line ahead of the cursor.

‘Slower,’ says Ventanus over the helmet link.

‘Too fast?’ Selaton replies, eager glee in his voice.

Ventanus doesn’t even look down. He taps the screen of the nav-track.

Selaton glances, sees it, eases off the throttle immediately. They’re coming up on the tail of a muster convoy. Even as they bleed off speed, they hit the dust wake of the moving column.

Selaton steers out, crosses the centre of the highway, starts to overtake. Trundling troop transports, cargo-20s, towed artillery, tank transporters, laden. Each hulking vehicle zips by and falls behind, each one glimpsed for a second as they pass it in the odd light, in the air that is both dry with dust and wet with rain. Troop truck, gone. Troop truck, gone. Troop truck, gone. Troop truck, gone. A garland of cheers and hoots from a transport load of Army troopers, waving them past.

Self-propelled guns now, zipping past, barrels up to sniff the sky. Ten, twenty, thirty units. The damn column is forty kilometres long. Shadowswords. Minotaurs. New Infernus-pattern armour and regimental troop carriers.

Ventanus watches beads of rain, black with soot, crawling and quivering over the hood of the speeder.

He’s had to leave Sydance in charge at Erud, with reliable sergeants like Archo, Ankrion and Barkha to back him up. There’s something to sort out with the Numinus seneschals. Local politics. Ventanus hates local politics, but this has come from the primarch’s staff directly. Port affairs. Handling rates. Diplomacy.

Ventanus knows what to do with a boltgun.

This is another unnuanced exercise in teaching them the other crafts their lives will one day require. Courtesy. Effective management. Authority. Basically, anything that doesn’t involve a boltgun. It has Guilliman’s handprints all over it.

It’s the sort of issue that Ventanus would prefer to resolve with a quick vox order, but he’s been told to handle it in person. So, a forty-minute wasted trip to the port where the seneschals he needs to see aren’t, now an hour up the Erud Highway instead to… where was it?

The Holophusikon. Holophusikon.

Ventanus isn’t stupid. He knows what the word means. He just doesn’t know what it is.

A triangular icon on the navigation display.

Selaton makes a sound. It’s a murmur of something. Surprise. He’s impressed by something.