The Unremembered Empire Part 2

The soldier raised his eyes to meet the Avenging Son's gaze. He had to tilt his head back a long way. *You saw something?'

*Yes, my lord, indeed so,' the man replied. *A great figure in black. Made of blackness, as it seemed. It stepped out of the shadows and was solid. It was wrapped in iron, my lord.'

*In iron?'

*In metal. It was armoured, even the face. Not a visor, a mask.'

*How big?' asked Euten.

*As big...' the soldier began. He paused. *As big as him, my lady.'

He gestured down the hallway. t.i.tus Prayto had just come into view, escorted by four Ultramarines battle-brothers.

As large as a s.p.a.ce Marine of the Legiones Astartes. A giant, then.

*Another sighting, my lord?' Prayto asked.

*Can you scan the area?' asked Guilliman.

*I have done so, but I will again,' Prayto replied. *There is no psychic trace here. The pa.s.sive monitors would have triggered long before I arrived.'

*But you hear the music, t.i.tus?'

*I do, my lord.'

Guilliman reached out his hand. Prayto, without hesitation, drew his boltgun and slapped it into his primarch's waiting palm. Guilliman checked its readiness quickly and turned towards the gallery door. The weapon was a little too small for his hand. It looked like a pistol.

*My lord,' Badorum began. *Should we not go in before you anda'

*As you were, commander,' said Prayto. He did not need to read his master's mind to be sure of the determination of his intent.

Guilliman entered the green twilight of the hydroponics gallery. Inside, it was warm and humid. The lights were on some night-cycle pattern. He could hear the gurgle of the water feeding the tanks, and the soft drip of the sluices. There was a pungent scent of gra.s.s and leaf mulch.

The phantom music was louder inside, and its echo more profound and inexplicable.

Prayto followed Guilliman. He had drawn his combat sword. Badorum followed him, his plasma gun braced at his shoulder in a sweeping aim.

*I don'ta' Badorum began.

The shadows parted in front of them and a figure loomed where no figure had been. It seemed to grow out of the darkness as if it had come on stage through some invisible curtain.

*In the name of Terra,' Guilliman breathed.

The figure was no apparition. It was real and solid. More particularly, he recognised it: the iron mask, the unmaintained Mark III plate, the insignia of the IV Legion Astartes. Guilliman knew too well the shuffling, crippled gait that spoke of chronic and unhealing illness. It was worse than when last he had observed it.

*Warsmith Dantioch,' he said.

*My honoured lord,' Barabas Dantioch of the Iron Warriors replied.

*How can you be here, Dantioch? No ships have arrived in weeks! How can you be here without us knowing of your arrival?'

Guilliman paused suddenly. Dantioch's greeting had been accompanied by a distinct echo.

*When last I heard,' said Guilliman, *you were half a segmentum away, in the Eastern Fringes, on Sotha.'

*Yes, my Lord Guilliman,' replied Dantioch, *and I still am.'

2.

Pharos

*And the decree was, "let light be"

And so it was, and it was good.'

a Proscribed *Creation Myth', proto-Catheric

teachings [pre-Unification]

Dantioch, warsmith of the Iron Warriors, stood in the cold chamber high on the summit of Mount Pharos, and held Guilliman's gaze.

It was extraordinary. There was no lag or delay. The image and sound of Ultramar's lord was an entirely realised presence. It was as though they were sharing the room, except that no echo accompanied Guilliman's voice, and no fume of breath came from his lips, suggesting that the room he actually occupied was smaller and warmer.

*Forgive me, my lord,' said Dantioch. He reached out an ironclad hand and pressed his fingertips against Guilliman's sternum. There was a slight resistance as Dantioch's fingers slipped into Guilliman's form, causing a slight, spreading ripple of light to shimmer his image for a moment.

Dantioch withdrew his hand.

*I'm sorry,' he said. *You seemed so real.'

*You are on Sotha?' Guilliman asked. *We are communicating at this distance?'

Dantioch nodded.

*I am in a chamber known as Primary Location Alpha, near the top of the Pharos structure. We test-started the system three weeks ago, local, and the system has been running for two weeks. Since then I have been attempting to establish communication.'

Guilliman shook his head, marvelling.

*We saw your light for the first time tonight,' he said.

*Roughly when alignment was properly established,' Dantioch noted, *which in turn allowed this conversation to take place.'

*You are like a star. A new star.'

*I would appreciate any data you can process back to us via this link,' Dantioch said. *To understand in more detail how we are received will allow us to fine-tune the connection.'

*This is technology of a level we can scarcely dream of, warsmith,' said Guilliman.

*We did not dream of it,' replied Dantioch. *It was dreamed of by beings who came and went long before us. Yet you suspected its worth, imagined its potential, and trusted me to unlock its secrets. This vision, both literal and metaphorical, is due to you, my lord.'

Sotha was a far-flung world close to the edge of the galaxy's Eastern Fringe. It lay farther out than Graia or Thandros, almost at the limits of both the fiefdom of the Five Hundred Worlds and the span of all Imperial territory.

Not far beyond it, in warpcraft terms, lay the rim of the Ultima Segmentum and the edge of the human galaxy. Past that vast thinning-out of stars and systems lay nothing but the black, heatless void of the intergalactic gulf.

Sotha was a jewel of a world, one of the few Terra-comparable ecosystems discovered so far out in the galactic east. It possessed living oceans and densely forested, mountainous landma.s.ses. There were lower-level animal-forms, avians and insects. Curiously, there were no higher forms, nor any obvious trace of attempted xenos visitation or colonisation. Guilliman and the expedition fleets of Ultramar had always considered the world a particular curiosity: if there was one geo-type almost guaranteed to have been settled during the outward expansion of the Great Age of Technology, it was the rare and precious Terra-comparable planets. For Sotha to have been overlooked or missed by the Great Expansionists seemed unlikely, but there was no evidence that any human presence had reached Sotha, not even a colony that had been established and then died out.

Then the surveyors learned the truth about Mount Pharos, the tallest of all the peaks in the planet's majestic mountain ranges.

Plans for full colonisation were put on hold. A small agri-colony was approved instead, to be based on Sotha in support of a survey mission of archaeologists and xenoculturists a.s.signed to Mount Pharos.

A dedicated company of Ultramarines, the 199th, was a.s.signed to Sotha as permanent protection, and the world was given the cla.s.sification *restricted'.

All that had happened one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier.

Dantioch had been out on the promontory at sunset when the Ultramarines of the protection company came to tell him that signs of contact were finally becoming apparent.

It was about time. The ancient systems of the Pharos, vast quantum-pulse engines of almost inscrutable function, had been running for two weeks. Dantioch had begun to fear that he and the men he worked with had entirely misconceived the purpose and use of the artefacts.

It was late afternoon, the particular moment when the light above the forests and distant sea outside began to skew away, filling the apertures of the summit behind the promontory with a phantom luminescence.

It was the best time to appreciate the sheer magnificence of the structure.

*There is a sign at last?' he asked.

One of the Ultramarines, a sergeant called Arkus, nodded. He was accompanied by two young men of the company's Scout section. The Ultramarines 199th had made the best of their residency on Sotha by taking pride in their specialist duty. They had adopted the name Aegida, or *shield', Company while operating from the Legion orbital. They had also taken up a symbol as their company icon. Both the Scouts wore it on their pauldrons.

*There are signs, sir,' said Arkus. *Noises in the... the acoustic chambers.'

*At last,' Dantioch said. He limped across the rocky promontory to follow them inside the mountain, every step an effort for his ma.s.sive, iron-framed physique. He no longer cared to disguise the attenuated gasps of pain that movement forced out of him. He had been genetically fabricated to withstand superhuman tolerances, and by the d.a.m.ned Emperor, he was withstanding them.

At the threshold of one of the vast apertures which opened like a giant eye socket in the mountainside, Dantioch turned back to look at the evening sky. Beyond the high cloud, he could detect the malicious disturbance of the Ruinstorm. It was easier to see at night, usually, but even in daylight hours the traumatic warp-spasms and ripples shimmering through s.p.a.ce were visible.

The trigger point for the Ruinstorm had been the attack on Calth twenty-eight months earlier. Its hideous effects had rapidly spread right across the segmentum, and had engulfed the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

No one knew how far the storm effects went. Some said they had possessed the entire galaxy. What was certainly true was that they had rendered the Five Hundred Worlds unnavigable except for the most high-risk enterprises. Trade and communication had collapsed. Ultramar, as a single and admirable area of governance, was ruined. Furthermore, all interstellar transit between the Eastern Fringe and the core segmenta, and beloved Terra, was impossible. The galaxy was, in effect, cut in two.

Lord Barabas Dantioch, warsmith of the IV Legion Iron Warriors, was technically a traitor. He was a traitor to the Throne and Terra, because his Legion had crossed the line and sided with the renegade Warmaster, Horus. Simultaneously, he was a traitor to his own Legion, because he had forsworn the Iron Warriors and decided to stand with the loyalists. He stood alone, besieged by the conflicting loyalties of the new, riven Imperium.

Being besieged suited all Iron Warriors, of course, no matter their inclination. No Legion matched them for their artistry in fortification, except perhaps for the VII Legion, the Imperial Fists. The comparative technical excellences of the IV and the VII would be put to the ultimate test, Dantioch was sure, before the Civil War ended. In fact, given that the morality of the Imperium had already been turned upside down by Horus's revolt, it would seem a waste of the opportunity if the ancient rivalry was not tested by war.

For his excellence in siegecraft, and his staunch loyalty to the Emperor, Barabas Dantioch had been recruited by the Lords of Ultramar to help them construct and defend the greatest contingency plan a and perhaps the second greatest heresy a the Imperium had ever known.

Dantioch had accepted the challenge. He had supposed he would be employed in fortifying the physical defences of Macragge and other key worlds of Ultramar. That was his forte.

Then the Avenging Son had revealed to him the long-sequestered mysteries of Sotha, and Dantioch had realised that the survival of a pocket empire like Ultramar lay less in fortifying its physical defences and far, far more in strengthening its function and operation.

He agreed absolutely with Roboute Guilliman. Sotha offered a way in which they might overcome the Ruinstorm rather than batten down against its wrath.

Dantioch had spent the last nine months working to that end, unlocking Sotha's mysteries and activating the planet's deep-time secrets.

The day's ebbing light shone into the aperture and the great coiled chamber. The interior s.p.a.ces of the Pharos, each one of them cut from the mountain's living rock by processes that no one had been able to explain, reminded Dantioch of the inner s.p.a.ces of a great conch sh.e.l.l. They were polished, smooth, and curved. There were no straight lines or hard edges. Vast, organically curved chambers led one into another, sometimes connected by smaller, flask-chambers or rounded coils of hallway that felt like tubes or blood vessels. Everything was a polished, gleaming black: a surface treatment of the exposed rock that was durable and resistant to scratching or cutting. It was like a black mirror, yet it gave back very little reflection a just the merest shadow a and held very little light, except for when, at the end of each day, the sunset flooded through the mountain-top apertures, and a curious golden light dripped and drained down through the Pharos chambers, deep into the mountain, like liquid fire running off the polished black walls.

The early surveyors had found the Pharos, men working in the fleets sent out by Guilliman to expand the realm of Macragge, and reconnect with ancient fief-holdings that had been part of the realm before the Age of Strife. This had always been Konor's dream. Konor had ruled Ultramar from Macragge, but his Ultramar was but a shadow, a fraction of the culture that Ultramar had been before the Long Night. Konor had been determined to rebuild the mythical Five Hundred Worlds, and, after his death, Guilliman had set out to achieve his father's ambition. It was while he was rebuilding the Five Hundred Worlds, and making them the greatest empire in the galactic east, that the crusading fleets of Terra had reached Macragge, and Guilliman had finally met his blood father, and learned of his true inheritance.

That the Pharos was an immense structure of xenos origin had been obvious. That was why Sotha had been restricted and placed under guard while it was thoroughly investigated. Guilliman, so forward thinking in other ways, had a natural mistrust of technologies not built by man, especially those that could not be easily reverse-engineered. The Pharos of Sotha was potentially many things, with many possible functions, and Guilliman was cautious of them all. The survey mission was established on the planet, a planet that otherwise would have been rapidly colonised, and a community of settlers founded to support the scientists.

This amused Dantioch. The settlers were simple agricultural workers charged with food production and livestock management. They lived simple, pastoral lives on the lower slopes of the mountain. Forest growth on the slopes was rapid and vital. It had taken several years to clear the entrance apertures just to gain access. Every summer, the farm workers came up from the arable fields in the valley below, bringing their scythes and harvesting hooks, and worked to clear away the year's gra.s.s and brush growth where it had begun to choke and invade the gleaming black halls again.

This simple, rural tradition, dating back over a hundred years, had given rise to the protection company's choice of icon.

The people of the farming community did not hold the Pharos in any particular awe. It was simply part of their world. They often used its obsidian apertures as caves to shelter them and their herds from storms. They had also, long ago, discovered the extraordinary acoustic qualities of the linked chambers and halls, and had taken to playing their pipes and horns and psalteries in the deep caves, creating music of unparalleled beauty and mystery.

From the first moment that he arrived to inspect the Pharos, Dantioch had understood that the interlinking chambers had not been intended as occupation s.p.a.ces, at least not for any creatures of humanoid dimensions. There were often places of near impossible access between chambers: deep, polished drops; smooth sheer curves; untenable slopes. There were no stairs, no measured walkways. In one particular instance, a vast tri-lobed chamber, shaped almost like a stomach, plunged away into a polished tube seven hundred metres deep, which opened in the ceiling of another vast, semi-spherical hall a hundred metres high.

A long, slow process of construction had been undertaken over the years, establishing self-levelling, pre-fabricated walkways of STC design to provide platforms, ladders, stairs and bridges that would allow humans to traverse and explore the almost endless interior of the Pharos.

Dantioch and his Ultramarines escort descended on just such a walkway. The Imperial equipment, solid and steady, locked into place over the rolling, polished curves of the Pharos's chambers, seemed crude by comparison: treated, unpainted metal, cold-pressed from a standard template, stamped with the Imperial aquila, echoing to their footsteps with leaden clatters. When they walked upon the polished black, they made only the softest tapping sounds. The walkways, stairs and platforms were also dwarfed by the gloomy chambers they threaded through, and seemed frail by comparison to the sheened black curves and cliffs.

Arkus and his Scouts patiently led the crippled warsmith to the abyssal plain of Primary Location Alpha. Twice on the journey they pa.s.sed farmworkers eating supper and playing their instruments. Oberdeii, one of the Scouts, and the youngest of the entire company, shooed them away. The Pharos had been officially out of bounds ever since Dantioch had brought the quantum-pulse engines, deep in the mountain's core, online. They could all hear, or at least feel, the infrasonic throb of the vast and ancient devices.

Dantioch had stood in Primary Location Alpha, and nodded to his escort to withdraw. He had been fairly confident that he understood the function of the Pharos even from the data he had studied before his arrival on Sotha. Guilliman had deduced it too. Primary Location Alpha was, he was sure, the centre of the entire mechanism. Dantioch found himself referring to it in his notes as the *tuning stage' or the *sounding board'. It was a vast cave of polished black, with a domed ceiling and an almost flat floor.