The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

She leaned closer to Kaeria and Diocletian, spindly and inhuman, so frail for one who commanded such authority. ‘Mars must be retaken.’

Malcador’s staff thudded upon the floor. ‘Mars will be reconquered when we have the resources to do so.’

Diocletian and Kaeria remained silent throughout the exchange. They shared a glance, hardly blind to the tension. Malcador’s gesture was a plain request for them to leave.

‘This meeting is concluded,’ said the Regent of Terra. ‘You have our gratitude, Sister, Custodian.’

Before any of the hierarchs could argue otherwise, Diocletian and Kaeria strode from the room. There was a great deal yet to do before they could return to the Dungeon.

Four Anomalies / Bodies in the mist / End of Empires

1

Alpha-Rho-25 didn’t consider himself burdened by any particular degree of sentiment. Even so, there was a pang of loss as he came across the dead servitors. Whoever had constructed them had done so over many weeks, with painstaking care and expertise, to serve in the Omnissiah’s name. And now they were reduced to… this.

Such a waste.

As one of the Mechanicum Protectors assigned to the Unifiers, his role was simple. He was to stalk through the webway, overseeing the Mechanicum’s restoration work and shoring up their defences in the outward tunnels – that region known by the vanguard as Magnus’ Folly. It fell to him and those like him to defend the outskirts of the Impossible City and guard the Unifiers working in the tunnels leading deeper into the web. Now it fell to him to watch over the retreat.

A decision that had been too long in coming, by the Protector’s analytic perceptions. Casualties had risen starkly in recent months. Too few defenders stretched too thin through far too many tunnels. Falling back to the defensible bastion offered by the Impossible City was the logical course of action.

Alpha-Rho-25 had taken part in one thousand, six hundred and eighty-three individual skirmishes since being brought into the Imperial Dungeon five years before. His recordings of individual foes destroyed were accessible to the archpriests who coded his orders, but he didn’t like to review them himself or tally the totals. That kind of behaviour seemed close to self-satisfaction – what a full-blood human might call smugness – and therein lay danger. To be satisfied with oneself was to consider oneself perfect, to abandon all hope of refinement and improvement. A tragic delusion indeed. Perfection did not exist outside the Omnissiah Himself.

No, one must always evolve. To consider the stasis of satisfaction was nothing more than a vaguely amusing heresy.

Nor did Alpha-Rho-25 find himself burdened with the weight of superstition. These creatures he had fought now for five years were hardly ‘daemons’ in the terms referred to in human mythology. They were entities of incorporeal origin, breaching the barrier between the unmapped tides of the aether and the material universe. Aliens, then. A xenos breed from the warp. It was quantifiably true.

If pressed to be truthful on the matter, he found the relentlessly warlike entities no more or less disgusting and unnatural than the perfidious eldar, in whose ruins the Imperial Vanguard had made their fortress. All alien breeds suffered from the unholy imperfections of their forms. That was the beginning and end of the matter.

Still…

Still.

These ‘daemons’ were violent beyond any other species Alpha-Rho-25 had encountered. And they took a great deal of effort to extinguish. The fact they bled was no guarantee they would die. Many of them refused to even bleed at all. That was quite galling.

He hunted alone in the dayless and nightless flow of time that shrouded the Impossible City. His hunting grounds on this operation were far from the Godspire, a full forty kilometres away, where the eldar ruins grew ever more decayed. Contact had been lost with the boundary servitors guarding one of the many thousands of capillary tunnels leading deeper into the webway, which was by no means unusual.

However, questions remained. These boundary servitors had been guarding a far-flung passageway with significant defence batteries and gun emplacements. It shouldn’t have fallen at all, let alone so swiftly and with so little warning. Subsequent contact had been lost with the reinforcement servitors, their handler and then again with the three squads of Thallax war machines sent forwards from the tunnel’s second barricade to ascertain the gravity of the situation. All of this was less than typical.

And so, while the rest of the Imperial vanguard withdrew and abandoned the outward tunnels, Alpha-Rho-25 went hunting back through them.

He loped onwards, lens-eye scanning, panning. The sloping walls of this tunnel were glossy white, something that seemed a cousin to clean marble and polished enamel, yet was entirely unrelated to either.