The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Whatever the truth, whether out of date or recorded incorrectly to begin with, his map was unreliable.

None of these musings solved Echo-Echo-71’s conundrum. Retreating and reconsidering the route would mean deviation from the Archimandrite’s plan. Advancing along the unmodified route would mean venturing into this anomaly through which there was no evidence of survival, let alone drawing nearer to his goal.

All the while, thrummed through his senses, a pressurised compulsion, demanding he obey.

‘Forward,’ he commanded in a spurt of code. ‘For Mars and the Omnissiah.’

As relatively valorous as a skitarii elite could ever be, Echo-Echo-71 led his warriors into the mist. He was immediately and completely disassembled beyond even the atomic level, wiped from existence as he plunged from an eroded section of the webway into the raw matter of the warp. What passed for his spirit, a machine-thinned whisper of consciousness, ignited in the Sea of Souls and lasted a statistically insignificant amount of time longer than his body.

With no way of knowing their alpha had been obliviated by immersion into the naked daemonic aether that raged behind the material universe, every one of his warriors dutifully marched forwards and shared his fate.

6

The words rang out, augmitting to dozens of warbands, most of whom were dead by the time they would have received the message, or trapped in capillary tunnels and fighting for their lives against hordes of the warp-wrought.

In that respect, at least, they did indeed protect the convoy. Their lives were sold to slow the enemy, even if only by the chance of misfortune.

7

The Archimandrite processed the spillage of inloading data with a sense of dawning horror. She coded back to her surviving warbands, requesting updated positional information and sending them rerouting cogitations that would allow them to link up with others to form a more cohesive fighting force.

First she attempted to band the surviving regiments together in order to break through. Within seconds of her primary calculations failing, she was settling for demanding they fall back, flee, do whatever they could to escape. Even then she received precious few canted replies. Most of them were already dead.

She – She? – stared at the datastreams within her own mind, gripped by a traitor’s icy guilt. She had led thousands upon thousands of Mechanicum souls into annihilation. She had failed to hold the Aresian Path despite betraying the Omnissiah’s own praetorians to do so.

Mistakes have been made, she thought with a cognition-failing, creeping unreality.

The fate of the Imperials was nothing in light of her own careless treason; there would be no forgiveness for this. The Fabricator General would pull her organics from her body for this sin, and crush them in his hands before her failing vision.

The depleted core of Hieronyma surfaced through the mess of the Archimandrite’s ambitions. She heard footsteps in the chamber, which was patently impossible given the seals in place at the containment door, and streamdumped herself from the noosphere in order to turn and face the intruder.

The first thing she saw through the unresolved failures of her target locks was that the door remained sealed. The second thing she saw was a human male, his features hazy, his shadow too long across the floor.

She deployed an army’s worth of weapons from her shoulders, her wrists, her forearms, even her chest cavity. Weapons based on Arkhan Land’s forbidden lore, many of which still lacked Imperial names.

‘Hieronyma,’said the approaching figure. His speech was awkward, as if he had only recently mastered not just Gothic but any language at all. He moved his mouth out of time with the syllables he spoke. ‘I sensed you. You have known such bloodshed…’

His face twisted in something that began by resembling a smile, but was really just a rending of flesh. The thing inside him tore itself free, reaching for her.

All of her treasured, unnamed weapons fired, far too late to make any difference.

8

Kaeria’s captives sang as the machines began their work. In none of the circumstances and possibilities that she had considered would the doomed prisoners sing.

She couldn’t hear them, couldn’t even be certain they were singing at all. She was only alerted to this unforeseen behaviour by one of the tech-adepts retracting his secondary arms into his robe and turning his sun-starved face to the coffins above. Hundreds of them were bound to the wall, chained in place.

‘They are singing,’ he said in faint wonder.