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  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

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  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  And lo, the grey-clad came from the outer night, and their jagged maw did swallow the stars, and their black gaze did mirror the void of oblivion. Their pale shadows fell upon the servants of the skulled-one with great fury from the darkness, unseen as the beast that lurks beneath the black waters, death for death, blood for blood… Thus were the sons of Sanguinius bought respite, and did turn back upon their pursuers, and so were the damned traitors of the false gods driven unto their ruin.

  – Canticle of Cassandra Lev, Vol. CVI, Chapter One, Paragraph 28.

  + + Adeptus Mechanicus Cargo Barge Arc Lux, holding station, Lysia System, Under-Sector 236-3 + + +

  + + Sensorium array entering monitoring cycle 6B + + +

  + + Empyrean variance detected, sector 9-2 theta + + +

  + + Scanning… + + +

  + + Results triangulating, standby… + + +

  + + In-system warp jump confirmed, sector 9-2 theta + + +

  + + Reading 13 [thirteen] returns. Running keel tag identification + + +

  + + Standby… + + +

  + + Results confirmed. 12 [twelve] escort-designate Imperial warships [highlight to review names and classes], 1 [one] capital ship + + +

  + + Capital ship identification confirmed. Adeptus Astartes battle-barge class, designate Nicor. Carcharodon Astra primary fleet asset + + +

  + + Threat level: extreme + + +

  + + Orders? + + +

  _________ Chapter I

  The depths of the Lost World were silent. Every step Khauri took felt as though he were summoning a thunderclap, his footfalls echoing on through the lightless depths long after he had come to a halt. He stood at the heart of a chamber of natural rock, its jagged floor uneven, the roof high above bristling with stalactites. The tunnel at his back was not the only entrance to the space of shattered rock – seven more branched off to his left and right, a web of passageways through the underworld. Each one ­represented a wrong choice. Every one held a phantom, a psychic spectre attuned specifically to Khauri’s memories. To engage one would be to risk losing oneself forever. Beneath the surface, the Lost World was a warren of caverns, caves and shafts, the planet’s integrity long ago splintered by forces far beyond mankind’s reckoning. To have come so far and delved so deep was rare, even for one of Khauri’s kind. Reaching this point had strained the focus and psychic warding of the young Lexicanium to breaking point.

  At least his journey had not been in vain. He felt a surge of satisfaction as his optics picked out the markings on the wall opposite. He quickly suppressed the feeling. Emotions were dangerous to one such as he. That was the first thing he had learned. Left unchecked, they made him a liability or, worse, turned him into prey for things that hunted in places far deeper and darker than the one in which he presently stood.

  He refocused, letting his helmet’s auto-senses piece together the image before him. It was a carving, roughly hewn into the very heart of the Lost World, a bestial likeness that took long seconds for his mind to properly comprehend. When he did, his breath caught and his grip on his adamantium stave tightened.

  ‘Now you truly understand,’ whispered a voice.

  Khauri spun, the grating of his armoured boots against the stone underfoot lo
ud in the dark space.

  ‘Master,’ he breathed, bowing his head hastily.

  Te Kahurangi, Chief Librarian of the Carcharodon Astra, mirrored the motion. Unlike Khauri, his helmet was mag-locked to his belt. A dry smile played over his gaunt, pale features, exposing rows of sharpened teeth.

  ‘You have done well to come this far, brother,’ the Chief Librarian said, stepping past him. Like Khauri, he was clad in ancient power armour that hummed and whirred as he moved. The traditional colours of the Chapter – greys and blacks – had given way to deep blue, though the battleplate was heavily inscribed with swirling white exile markings, honours that Khauri’s equipment did not yet bear. Te Kahurangi also carried a staff, though his was considerably heavier, clad in carved bone and tipped by a shard of green stone that began to glow as he raised it.

  How the Chief Librarian had succeeded in following him so closely without his knowledge – let alone entering the chamber unannounced – was something Khauri had learned not to ponder on too closely.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ Te Kahurangi asked, his voice a deathly whisper. The green glow from his staff picked out the bestial features Khauri had been straining to identify, and the Lexicanium found himself forced to suppress a shudder.

  ‘A monster,’ he said after a moment.

  Te Kahurangi’s smile widened slightly, the light gleaming from his wicked teeth.

  ‘It is us,’ he said, lifting his other hand as though to caress the carving. His gauntlet stopped an inch from its surface, hesitated, then withdrew. ‘It is the truth about who we are, Khauri. You understand the crest we bear on our pauldrons?’

  ‘The great carcharodon,’ Khauri said, glancing at the white, finned predator coiled on the right shoulder of the Chief Librarian.

  ‘You have seen them during your induction, have you not? Swum with them, meditated upon their nature. They are mighty predators indeed, and our Chapter’s doctrines and philosophies do well to reflect them. And yet, it could be said that the great carcharodon is but a mask we all wear.’

  ‘This is known to all void brothers?’ Khauri asked slowly, his eyes dragged back to the nightmarish creature that had been hacked into the Lost World’s bedrock millennia before.

  ‘It is,’ Te Kahurangi confirmed. ‘We do not hide our origins, Khauri, not from our own. We do not hide who we are. We do not hide this.’

  Khauri pondered the beast a moment longer before speaking again.

  ‘It is a creature from ancient Terran myth, is it not?’

  Te Kahurangi turned abruptly, the light of his staff falling away from the carving and leaving it in darkness. His features, made even more ghoulish by the contrasting illumination, were suddenly grave.

  ‘No more words, my apprentice. Your trial is complete. We must make haste, back to the surface. The machine-men have made planetfall, and the Grey Tithe is about to begin.’

  It was growing dark on the surface, the weak sunlight hidden by a rising dust cloud that threatened to shroud the length of the Tithe Valley. The bleak, desolate rift in the dead planet’s crust echoed with the ticking of radium carbines, the whir of cybernetics and the metallic thump of thirty sets of bionic limbs as Magos Primary Otte Benedikt’s skitarii vanguard came to attention.

  Not his skitarii, Otte corrected himself as he passed between their twin ranks, red robes flapping in the bitter wind that knifed down the valley. They were Magos Domina Kraph’s. The combat-augmented tech-priestess had made it abundantly clear to the primary that, just as she would leave the discourse to him, so he must leave security to her and her rad-troopers. A younger, more flesh-prone member of the Adeptus Mechanicus might have probed her reputation for weakness, thinking her own calculations unstable or her functions not fully settled, but Otte knew better than to waste processing time on such pettiness. He had served alongside Kraph enough to be certain that her security precautions would be faultless to within point one of a per cent.

  The truth was, if the beings Otte was about to meet decided to engage in hostilities, the skitarii present would not be enough to significantly increase the likelihood of his survival. Without doubt the combat assets escorting the Adeptus Mechanicus exploration vessels in stasis anchorage above would be enough to cripple the warships with which they shared orbit, perhaps even destroy them. Otte, however, knew that the likelihood of him still being even partly functional by that point was statistically negligible. Those they were about to meet rarely took survivors.

  He could see them now, their bulky outlines a few hundred yards ahead, his green optic clusters stripping away the grey, wind-whipped dust that shrouded them. It bit and chafed at the few remaining organic scraps of his body, and befouled the mechanical purity of his metallic form with a million insidious grains. It would take weeks of lubricant salves and auto-benedictions to purge himself of this filthy backwater world.

  He deleted such secondary concerns from his consciousness, the brief spike of anger that accompanied them vanishing as he ran an override on all background considerations. Focus. He could not afford a miscalculation, not now. Behind him Explorator Deitrich and his bibliovore logis, Severus, were barely resisting the urge to overtake the magos primary. Deitrich had worked hard to mask his excitement during their long warp transit, but the explorator’s reserve was coming undone now that he was drawing close to so much prized archeotech. It was easier for Otte to suppress his own desires to claim the blessed relics for Mars. Deitrich, after all, wasn’t the one who had to negotiate with their current owners.

  Those owners were only twelve in number, and they waited impassively as Otte and his skitarii approached. The magos primary completed his scans as he closed the last few dozen yards, logging every detail as a matter of potential importance. Six of the figures, the ones on the flanks, were clad in Tactical Dreadnought armour, their off-white slabs of plasteel, ceramite and adamantium caked with the valley’s pervasive dust. Otte’s internal processor registered a degree of awe at the presence of such blessed battle suits, even as his analysis moved on to the other six.

  They made for a less uniform gathering. All were Space Marines, two in the grey power armour that predominated in this particular Chapter, two in the blue battleplate that Otte’s data files informed him belonged to sanctioned Adeptus Astartes psykers. The fifth wore red ceramite, and bore upon his breastplate the wondrous Machina Opus of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Approval at the presence of the Techmarine barely registered before Otte took in the final figure.

  He stood apart from his brethren, alone, a dozen paces behind them. Even by the standards of the Adeptus Astartes the figure was a giant, standing a head above the rest. He too was clad in Tactical Dreadnought armour, and for a moment Otte’s analytics glitched, informing him he was looking at a graven statue. A slight shift in the giant’s stance removed that possibility – dust cascaded from the cliff-like plates of his immense suit and his huge, wickedly barbed gauntlets. Every inch of the warrior was clad and armed with the most hallowed and rare pieces of wargear Otte had ever set his optics upon. It made the Space Marines standing in the giant’s shadow seem like children.

  He was not supposed to be here. In three centuries overseeing exchanges such as these, Otte had never once encountered him. Binaric discord filled his thought-algorithms for almost two whole seconds before he regained cognitive control. He misstepped, the slight change in motion enough for Kraph to thought-cant him.

 

  he replied, filing away the shame he felt at his moment of weakness for later analysis.

  Otte halted half a dozen paces from the nearest Space Marine. The rest of the Adeptus Mechanicus expedition came to a perfectly synchronised stop behind him. For a moment, there was nothing, nothing but the hissing of the wind in the sand and the flapping of crimson robes.

  The wind died. The dust settled with it, and suddenly what lay beyond the Space Marines b
ecame visible. A great shard of black rock jutted from the head of the valley, framing the Adeptus Astartes. A crevasse was open in its flank, a jagged, lightning-bolt split in the stone that led to a darkness so complete Otte’s bionics could not penetrate it.

  ‘H-hail and well met, children of the void,’ the magos said, his external vox-units stuttering slightly as they came online and issued the pre-recorded greeting. ‘I am Magos Primary Otte Benedikt, of Exploration Fleet 2-8-17 Arc Lux. I thank you on behalf of the Omnissiah for this audience. May it serve us both.’

  He made the sign of the cog over his breast, silver digits clicking as they interlocked. For a moment, none of the Space Marines spoke. Then one of the grey-armoured warriors took a pace forwards, towering over Otte’s bent frame.

  ‘Hail and well met, servant of the Machine-God. I am Akamu, Harvester Prime and captain. I bid you welcome to the Lost World on behalf of my void brethren. We are here seeking the beneficence of the Grey Tithe.’

  ‘All will be as the Omnissiah wills,’ Otte said, giving the ritual response. Both spoke in High Gothic. ‘I call upon you, Harvester Prime Akamu, to deliver a hallowed oath that you will protect me and my binaric congregation for as long as we remain upon this world, and that no harm will befall us while under your stewardship.’

  ‘I make this oath gladly and freely,’ Akamu responded, the words scraping through his helmet’s vox-grille like a blade over a whetstone. ‘With my void brethren and great Rangu as my witness.’

  Otte bowed his cowled head, the motion mirrored by the Space Marine. The magos deactivated his vox recording, ritual observed, and switched to mem-generated audio-cant.

  ‘Brother Hitaki, it does my processes good to witness you once again.’ The red-armoured Techmarine Otte had addressed nodded his head, but said nothing. Otte spoke to Captain Akamu again.

  ‘You have a crop for us, Harvester Prime?’

  ‘We do, magos. The Outer Dark has rendered up a great deal in the past decade. We believe it will more than match your needs.’