The Beast Arises

‘Most of all, know that it is the Emperor’s blood that flows through your veins and He will not let you fail. Eidolica is His. It is Imperial sand and dirt. It isn’t much, but it belongs to humanity and as such it is not the Fists Exemplars’ to give away. I know you will do your best. I know you will make your Chapter and your Emperor proud. Give all you have in His name, as He has given for you. Bring all your genetic gifts, your talents and abilities, to bear. Live through your plate. Be one with your weapons. Fulfil, my battle-brothers, the purpose for which you were ultimately created.’

In one fluid movement, Thane slammed a sickle mag home into the breech of his own Umbra-pattern boltgun. The Umbra was a venerable pattern, thought of as uncouth and archaic after the necessities of the Heresy. Despite lacking the finesse and refinements of other patterns, Thane found the Umbra to be a reliable and reassuringly bombastic bolter. A Chapter workhorse of a weapon.

‘This is Maximus Thane, captain of the Second Company, Fists Exemplar Chapter. The order is given…’

Thane leaned into the boltgun and picked out the first of the unfortunate green beasts to die: a pale monstrosity, brutally etched with scars and jangling with rings, tribal trinkets and piercings.

‘Fire.’

SIX

Terra — the Imperial Palace

On the Feast Day of Deliverance, it was traditional for the Senatorum Imperialis to restrict its meetings to the Imperium’s most urgent business. The Imperial Palace was lifted by evensong; blessed incense was burned by the brazier and both Adeptus Custodes and Astartes attendants were required to adopt ceremonial attire. The cavernous halls and corridors of the Palace were decked with reverential tapestries and flocks of winged cherubim read from endless scrolls the lists of fallen notables and petitionaries. Prayers and benedictions were offered and armies of planetary ambassadors admitted in rotating attendances to witness ritual silences, followed by volley shots and a salute issued by honour guards of decorated Lucifer Blacks.

Beyond the urgent business of their own mighty bureaucracies, the High Lords of Terra were occasionally called to order during the solemnities and celebrations. The Samarkan hive plague had necessitated such measures, as had the mutiny at Zyracuse. Since the Ardamantuan Atrocity, the tedium of unscheduled council meetings had become a common distraction for the Senatorum Imperialis.

Today’s urgent business regarded the loss of the shrine worlds of the Jeronimus Fyodora cluster and that glittering jewel of piety, the cardinal world of Fleur-de-Fides. Most days there were reports of some kind of distant disaster. It had become almost commonplace. Such news — if reported publically — would have thrown Terra’s billions into a state of panic and mobilised thousands of interest groups and influentials.

It was agreed that this was not in the best interests of the Imperium. Instead the horror of such catastrophes was restricted to the staid and stuffy assemblages of the High Lords: informal meetings of the Twelve in which the great and good of Terra put such tragedies in context.

‘A great tragedy… indeed.’

‘I believe my confessor attended the college-cathedra at Fleur-de-Fides.’

‘A beautiful world: a real loss to the Imperium.’

‘Cardinal Creutzfeldt will be looking for another seat, I suppose.’

‘Isn’t Gilbersia part of the Fyodora Cluster? No, wait. I’m thinking of the Outer Trinities.’

‘Dreadful business…’

Loss of life, calculated by the billion, put unnecessary strain on the mind of the common Imperial citizen. The destruction of worlds, sometimes a score at a time, stoked patriotic notions of galacticism — and the suspicion that humanity was losing its grip of its precious empire among the stars.

The twelve men and women gathered in the Anesidoran Chapel did not deal in such sentimentalities. They were perpetually lost in a blizzard of decisions, quantifications and bureaucracy in which the considerations of bounty and starvation, war and peace, life and death, were measured by planet, by subsector and segmentum. In a galactic game with an unimaginable number of pieces in play, it wasn’t difficult for even the greatest minds and keenest ambitions of the Senatorum to become desensitised to the importance of individual details. Indeed, over time, even the most experienced of players tended to become blind to the board for the profusion of pieces. Within a parliament of such minds, even minor problems become exacerbated. In the kingdom of the deaf, dumb and blind, problems with small beginnings — small, at least, on a galactic scale — had a way of gathering irresistible momentum.