The Unremembered Empire Part 8

In that first moment, in that first eye blink, time hung in the air, as weightless as a bar of sunlight. Guilliman's transhuman physiology accelerated from nothing to hyperfast response.

Practical. Read. Move. React. Read everything. No other thoughts. Practical.

He read the storm of bolter-rounds spitting from gun barrels. He read the white-hot muzzle flashes almost frozen mid-belch by the suspension of time as his heightened reactions propelled him to a new state of response. He read the ma.s.s-reactive sh.e.l.ls in the air, travelling, burning towards hima Guilliman was already moving, already turning. His right hand was grabbing the edge of a heavy sunderwood chart table, and pulling, overturning it.

Practical. Read everything. So many variables, but so few that will make a difference. Extreme close quarters. Outnumbered and outgunned. Not even the slightest margin for error.

Time seeped like resin. The top of the flipping table, heavy as a drawbridge gate and suddenly rising to meet Thiel like a bulldozer blade, took the first four rounds virtually point-blank. The ma.s.s-reactive sh.e.l.ls detonated, biting vast wounds out of the dense, aged hardwood, filling the air with splinters and burning fibres. One leg of the table came spinning away.

Guilliman was diving sideways behind the exploding tabletop, full-length in mid-air.

The table completed its overturn and crashed against Thiel and the Ultramarines beside him, forcing them to backstep. All of the other visitors were firing. Six bolt-rounds missed the diving primarch, annihilating a section of the high chamber wall and several portraits hanging upon it. Others. .h.i.t the spilled table and a chair beside it. Another clipped Guilliman's left shoulder guard and detonated. His plate protected him from the worst of it, but the heat of the nearest detonation scorched his left cheek and the nape of his neck, and shrapnel peppered the side of his face.

He hit the carpet, rolling, his tumble distorted by the glancing impact.

A weapon discharge alarm started screaming. Why so late? The shooting had begun hours before, days before... No, time was just trickling like syrup.

Concentrate! The odds are too bad, in such a confined s.p.a.ce. If the Residency's bodyguard reacts fast enougha The Ultramarines who had hung back by the door a of course one of them would cover the exit for such an ambush! a clamped a magnetic device onto the doorframe and twisted it. The public hatches slammed shut. They were locked in together. The primarch and ten would-be killers.

Aeonid Thiel's confederates open fire Traitors. Turncoats.

Why?

Guilliman was still rolling. Ma.s.s-reactives chewed holes in the carpet, chasing him, filling the air with flock fibres and shreds of matting and underfloor. Ma.s.s-reactives punched holes through the furniture he was rolling between, blowing out chair backs and arms. The air was full of cushion stuffing, blizzards of the stuff.

Why? Why Thiel?

Don't think about that. It's just a distraction, robbing focus from all that actually matters.

Practicals. Practicals. Read everything. Move. React.

A throne built for a primarch's stature, punctured twice through the seat back by bolt-rounds, began toppling onto the Lord of Ultramar.

I'm d.a.m.ned if I'll die on my kneesa Guilliman rolled onto his back, put his weight on his shoulders, met the falling throne with bent legs and kicked out.

The throne left the ground, its direction of movement violently reversed. The flying ma.s.s of it felled three of the traitors in its path.

I'll die on my feet if I have to die. Even the odds.

Time was still as slow as glue. He could see individual bolt-rounds in mid-air, leaving comet trails of fire behind them. He sprang into the face of the nearest killer. He seized the man's right wrist with his left hand and yanked his aim aside, so that the boltgun barked uselessly at the ceiling. Plaster dust showered like spilled sugar. Guilliman kept his grip tight, twisting the s.p.a.ce Marine around in front of him, turning him into a shield to meet the bolter-rounds crawling through the air towards him. Three rounds. .h.i.t the man in the lower back, rupturing his plating and blowing out his spine. Guilliman felt the impacts transmitted through the body in his grasp, saw the spinning shards of ceramite armour-plating, fragments of blood and flesh, splashing droplets of blood. He reached down with his oh-so-unarmoured right hand and grabbed the handle of the man's sheathed gladius.

Then he wrenched sideways with his left hand, flinging the dead man aside like a doll. The motion left the gladius drawn in Guilliman's bare right hand. Scaled to the primarch, the short sword seemed little more than a large combat knife. The flying corpse, showering blood, loose-limbed and whirling horizontally, hit two of the other killers in the faceplates and knocked them onto their backs.

Guilliman turned, shearing the blade of the stolen gladius through the extended forearm of the next nearest killer. The veteran's bolter fired once as it fell to the floor, still clamped in the severed fist. Guilliman put his foot in the man's belly and kicked him away, grabbing the hilt of his adversary's sheathed power sword with his left hand as he did so.

A captured blade drawn in each hand, he recoiled sharply, turning his face aside, as a ma.s.s-reactive sh.e.l.l burned past his cheek like an angry insect. Then he rotated, burying the edge of the power sword in the side of an Ultramarines head. The helmet parted, so did the skull. Guilliman saw grinning teeth in a skinned gumline, and a dislodged eyeball.

Three down, two of them dead.

But Guilliman was upright, and he was a big target. No matter that time had slowed to a glacial pace, he was not the only being in the room with transhuman reactions. His a.s.sailants were of the Legiones Astartes, and that made them the most potent warriors in the Imperium.

Guilliman took his first solid hit: a bolt-round to the shoulder. He felt his armour plate crack and compress, felt the sledgehammer slap of it, felt the searing pain of the fragments that had penetrated his body. A second hit, an instant later, lower back, and then a third, right hip. Dizzying pain. Impact. He was fighting for balance. There was blood in his mouth. He saw his own blood glinting as it ran down the scorched cobalt-blue surface of his leg armour.

Another bolter-round caught him in the left side, exploded, and threw him hard into the room's ma.s.sive desk, a piece hewn from the granite of the Hera's Crown mountains. He had to drop the gladius to steady himself. Ornaments, trophies and doc.u.ments scattered off the desk in all directions. Guilliman managed to roll his body against the edge of the desk so that the next round struck its surface rather than him. The polished stone fractured and crazed like gla.s.s. Roaring, Guilliman pushed away from the desk, side-stepped another hurtling round, and swung the power sword at the shooter. He felt the collision impact shiver along the blade. The man left the ground, head back, arms rising, as if he had run throat-first into a tripwire. A small dish of blue metal flew off sideways. The power blade had sheared through the cranium of the warrior's helm, carving off a slice of it. Blood drizzled from the perfectly circular hole in the helm's ceramite, the concentric rings of scalp and bone, and then the exposed brain tissue beneath that. He landed hard.

Guilliman wanted to reach for the man's bolter, but another round took him in the chest and blew him back against the desk. They were coming at him. All those he had knocked down but not finished were on their feet again. He groped for the fallen gladius on the desk, missed it, and found a marble bust of Konor's father instead. He hurled that.

It struck one of the killers in the faceplate hard enough to turn his head and smash a visor lens. Guilliman's rummaging hand located the gladius. He hurled that too, like a throwing knife. It impaled the neck of the a.s.sa.s.sin he had just dazed with the marble bust. The man lurched several drunken steps sideways and collapsed, blood gouting from under his chin.

Guilliman was. .h.i.t again, left hip. The pain was so fierce he wondered if his pelvis had fractured. Two more shots went past his head to the left, missing him by less than a hand's breadth.

Gasping with pain, the Avenging Son threw himself backwards over the desk in an evasive roll, trying to get its granite bulk between him and the relentless bolters. Stone chips and fragments whizzed out from every fiery impact. The front and top of the desk quickly began to resemble the cratered surface of a moon. One of the attackers leapt on the desk to fire over the side at the sheltering primarch. Guilliman came up to meet him, and put the power sword through both of the a.s.sa.s.sin's knees with a double-handed stroke that felled the man like a sapling. One leg remained standing on the desk's top, supported by its heavy armour casing.

Guilliman could feel blood leaking inside his buckled, perforated armour. He could feel blood running from the torn tissue of his face and neck. He could hear the palace guard hammering at the high chamber door.

The guard could not open the doors, public or private. If they had no override, then the a.s.sa.s.sins had brought a system jammer with them. Pre-meditated. Clever. Ingenious, in fact.

Not the actions of bitter, disaffected veterans, nor the behaviour of warp-damaged maniacs.

*Who are you?' Guilliman demanded of anyone and no one. His voice sounded small, enclosed by gun smoke, cinched by pain.

More bolt-rounds came his way in answer, flaring out of the fyceline smoke that clogged the air. Guilliman threw himself flat. Bolts kissed the ruined desk and struck the high windows behind him, creating cobweb patterns of cracks in the strengthened gla.s.s. Part of the window drapes collapsed. A picture fell off the wall and its frame shattered. A bookcase toppled over, spilling its contents in an avalanche of paper and leather bindings.

How many had he finished? Five, and one other with a hand severed. Was it five? How many of them would it take to finish him?

He glanced around.

The man he had cut off the desk was sprawled beside him on his back, still twitching. Blood had already stopped jetting from the stumps of his thighs, but the carpet around him was dark and soaking. He was reaching up weakly, aiming his boltgun at Guilliman.

Guilliman rolled and impaled the a.s.sa.s.sin to the floor with the power sword. The man went into juddering spasms and died.

Guilliman wrenched the boltgun out of his dead grip. Like the one Prayto had lent him the night Dantioch manifested, it was like a pistol to him. It only fitted his un-gauntleted hand. That hand was dripping with blood.

He heard the remaining a.s.sa.s.sins exchanging guttural, coded words as they fanned around the devastated desk through the smoke to finish him. He didn't understand what they were saying. It wasn't an Ultramarines battle cant.

It didn't matter that he didn't understand.

Practical. Read everything. React.

Their exchange told him plenty. It placed them. Sound and relative angle. He knew, without having to see, that two were coming around the desk to his left, and one to his right.

He went to the left. He came around the desk firing. One kill, solid, a head shot, a red fog. A second, two through the chest.

Something ran into him from behind. His mouth opened wide, a silent howl, as he felt the sharp, cold bite of a gladius blade punching through his back-plate armour and running in under his ribs. It stayed there. It was wedged. Guilliman wheeled and smashed his gauntleted left fist into the face of the swordsman.

The Ultramarine was somersaulted backwards by the force of the blow. He hit the windows face first, upside down. Despite the cobweb cracks, the gla.s.s did not break. The man dropped in a heap on the floor beneath them.

Guilliman turned to track the remaining killers. The d.a.m.ned gladius was still stuck through him. Hea At least two sh.e.l.ls struck his left shoulder armour behind his ear and detonated. He felt as though his head had snapped off to the right with the shockwave. He felt heat and ferocious pain. He tasted blood and fyceline, his ears ringing, his vision gone.

He fell. He couldn't get up. He was half propped against the desk or an overturned chair.

He couldn't see. He fired blind. It was pointless. He fired again.

He felt a blade against his throat.

*Death to the false Emperor,' said the voice Guilliman had thought belonged to Aeonid Thiel.

*Let me die knowing what you are,' Guilliman whispered.

A laugh.

*Your killer.'

*What else? What else are you?'

*I am Alpharius,' said Thiel.

Then the hateful rumours from Isstvan, of treacherous masquerade and false colours, were true. The Alpha Legion would employ any means. The deception through which this execution had been accomplished, the impeccable covert approach, it made sense. Guilliman had never had any martial respect for the elusive, cowardly tactics of the youngest Legion, but this had been superlative.

*One thing you should learn from this moment, servant of the Alpha Legion,' Guilliman said. *When you have to murder a primarch, and you get one at your mercy, do not waste the moment answering his questions when he still has a bolter in his hand.'

Guilliman fired. *Thiel' was thrown away from him by the force of the point-blank shot. The a.s.sa.s.sin's blade left a deep scratch across Guilliman's exposed throat. Blood welled.

He rose to his feet, unsteady. His clouded vision began to return. He saw the last a.s.sa.s.sin, the one whose hand he had chopped off, crawling across the high chamber floor, struggling to find a boltgun.

*Enough,' Guilliman said, and shot him through the back of the head. Then he dropped to his knees and realised how tired he was.

At some point after that, the Invictus guard finally cut through the main doors.

7.

Greeted By

Death

*There is an art to dying, but it is a dying art.'

a Corvus Corax, Primarch of the XIX Legion *Does he yet live?' asked Valentus Dolor.

There was no response. They had all come in haste, rushing to the Residency, and had entered the medicae hall to find the ashen chamberlain outside a sealed, guarded apothecarion chamber.

*Mamzel, is he alive?' Dolor pressed.

Euten looked up at him. She had been lost in thought. Her frail face was more pale and translucent than ever, drawn more by pain than age. She had been a beautiful woman in her youth, a noted beauty. Now her beauty was her strength, and an intense inner core of belief in, and devotion to, Roboute Guilliman.

The day's events had shaken that.

*Yes,' she replied. *My Lord Valentus, he lives. He has been most sorely hurt, and it is only chance that spared his life. One lucky shota'

*I think not chance,' said Phratus Auguston. *I rather think the martial prowess of our beloved lord saw him through this infamy. His practicala'

*Yes,' said Euten sharply. *Yes, why not? Let us believe he is an invulnerable G.o.d who can do no wrong. Let us believe that death cannot overtake him, or that there are no limits to his energy and capacity. Let us put our trust in him blindly and expect him to deliver us single-handedly from all thisa'

*My lady,' said Auguston, *I meant no disrespect.'

*Did you not?' she asked. *Really?'

She eyed Phratus Auguston with barely disguised contempt. In the absence of Marius Gage, who had vanished during the battle for Calth in pursuit of the renegade Kor Phaeron, Auguston had been elected to the post of Master of the First Chapter, and thus First Master of the Ultramarines. He was a bullish, aggressive man, and one of the finest field commanders in the XIII. Euten had not favoured his appointment, though she enjoyed no official influence in such Legion matters. She had advised Guilliman to prefer Verus Caspean, current Master of the Second. Auguston was too focused and aggressive, in her opinion, to suit the broader needs of the role. Caspean was wiser, more compa.s.sionate, more nuanced. She urged that Auguston should be kept where he would be most effective a in line command, in the field.

Guilliman had not taken her advice.

Euten took a step towards the ma.s.sive First Master and tapped the chased gold engraving of his breastplate with the tip of her staff.

*Understand respect, First Master,' she said. *Is this respectful?'

She tapped again. *No, it is not. No, it does not accord with respect. I do not know my place. I am but a chamberlain of the court, and you are the Lord of Lords in Macragge's Legion. But I am listened to because I am not sparing in my wisdom. Each to his own, Auguston, each to his strength. If you would show our beloved primarch respect, then first do so by accepting his limits. Your vapid praise sounds like false flattery. He is more than human, but he is only more than human. The Invictus guard counted eighty-five spent bolter-rounds or impact holes in that chamber. If any one had struck his unarmoured head, any one, he would be dead and this conversation would be very different.'

*Ladya' Auguston rumbled.

*Where was the error, today, sir?' she asked, tapping again. *Was it the bodyguards, for failing to antic.i.p.ate? Was it the Residency guards, for not scanning the visitors properly? Wait, was it Badorum and his men, for failing to police the precinct? It must have been, for they are but human and therefore flawed, unlike the transhumans of the Legion! Or perhaps it was t.i.tus Prayto, or others of his office, perhaps even our Lord Librarius Ptolemy, for failing to foresee the event? Or perhaps it was our avenging Lord Guilliman, for being too tired and burdened with duties, for slipping a moment and allowing someone a quick pa.s.s through Residency security because he wanted the relief of a conversation with an old friend? Guilliman ordered the would-be killers through, Master Auguston. He ordered them through, and no one thought to question that authority. Do you know what that means? It means he made a mistake. Let us all help him not to make another.'

Dolor glanced sideways at t.i.tus Prayto, but Prayto had already read the instruction before it had been voiced. He stepped forward.

*No one here disputes your words, mamzel,' he said, taking Euten gently by the arm. *Let me fetch you water and sit with you. You've had a long and stressful day.'

Euten glared at Auguston a moment longer, then sagged and nodded. She allowed Prayto to lead her from the waiting chamber.

*I have no idea what he sees in her and her counsel,' growled Auguston as the hatch closed. There were thirteen senior Ultramarines in the chamber, the anteroom of the Residency's medicae hall, all of them at least of the rank company commander or Chapter Master. Some laughed. Verus Caspean did not. Neither did the most senior of them, Tetrarch Dolor.

*I am glad you are not of the Librarius, Auguston,' Dolor said.

*How so, my lord?' Auguston replied.