Behind them, the door to the telegraph office slammed open and Oren Yacio came out, moving woodenly, his face drained of colour. He still had the complex set of headphones in his hands, the ones he wore while he worked at the telegraphic console. A loose wire trailed after him, dangling from an implant in the back of his neck.
No one spoke as Yacio took the steps down to the road, blank-faced and sweaty. The only sound was the rattle and twang of the cables over their heads as the touch of the distant storm-winds brushed over them.
Finally, the telegraphist spoke, raising his voice to be heard. ‘On this day, news from… News reaches the colony…’ He was trying to keep a professional tone to his words, but he failed. Yacio swallowed and began again, eschewing his normal air of formality. ‘A fragmentary broadcast has come across the wires. It was piecemeal and it took me many hours to reassemble it. Sporadic reports from Oh-Nine, One-Five and the capital.’
‘The drop-pods,’ asked a woman. ‘Is it the Sons of Horus?’
A torrent of other questions erupted after her, and Yacio waved his hands and let out a screech. ‘ Quiet! Quiet! Listen to me!’ He shivered despite the warmth of the night air. ‘It is my duty to tell you all that his honour Esquire Lian Toshack, Imperial Governor-Select of the Virger-Mos colony, took his own life this day in his chambers. There… There is confusion about how next to proceed.’
A ripple of reaction crossed through the small crowd. Prael said nothing, his sweaty fingers kneading the frame of the laslock. Toshack had killed himself rather than face the invasion. How many others would do the same, too terrified of the Warmaster to even bear the thought of facing his Legions?
‘There’s more,’ Yacio went on, shaken by the portent of his news. ‘Other townships are passing on unconfirmed reports of… of sightings.’ He licked his lips. ‘Massive figures in dark armour have been seen advancing from town to town. Those settlements that sent such reports have all gone off the wire shortly afterwards.’
‘Space Marines,’ breathed Ames. ‘Throne and blood, they’re really here.’ He nodded to himself with the bleak solemnity of a man standing before the executioner’s block. ‘I knew it.’
‘No!’ Prael snapped. ‘No, we don’t know!’ He grabbed Yacio’s arm. ‘You said “unconfirmed”. That means this could be some kind of mistake, or–’
‘Open your eyes!’ screamed the woman. ‘We are invaded, you idiot!’ Her words were like a match to kindling, and everyone on the street was shouting and wailing.
Panic hit Prael like a wave, and he felt the mood of the townsfolk crumbling. He knew that if he didn’t act now, the whole settlement would fall apart. With a grunt of effort, he hauled himself up onto the hood of a parked trailer and waved the laslock in the air, filling his lungs to shout.
‘Listen to me!’ he bellowed, drawing their attention. ‘I have lived my life in this township, just like all of you! And the blight can take Horus Lupercal for all I care!’ He shook the rifle, finding a new reservoir of will inside himself. ‘I will die before I allow that traitor bastard and his turncoat whoresons to take my home from me! I’d rather burn than surrender!’
His blunt, forceful oratory got him a ragged chorus of cheers from those in the crowd who felt the same, but there was still a sizeable number who looked on, sneering at his words.
And just then, from his higher vantage point, Prael saw something coming. Lights, bobbing as they moved, and the sound of an engine behind them. Something dark and large caught in the nimbus of the storm, coming down the mainway from the edge of town.
‘It’s them!’ screamed a voice. ‘They’re already here!’
The crowd scattered, some of them stumbling over one another in wild haste, others fleeing to find anything that approximated cover.
The motions of his hands were automatic; Prael found the laslock coming up to his shoulder, his eye peering down the iron sights. The training and the days of vermin-shooting with a slug-thrower snapped back to him. The old laser rifle warmed up and went live. His finger was on the knurled trigger-plate.
The dark shapes were closing in, riding on a plume of windborne dust. Prael wondered what was out there, behind those lights. An armoured tank, a cross-terrain vehicle? Perhaps lines of Legiones Astartes walking single file? He’d heard they did that to hide their numbers.
‘Prael!’ Ames was shouting at him, trying to pull him off the trailer. ‘Get down from there, you worthless idiot! You’ll be the death of us all! Put down the bloody gun before they see you!’
In all his life, Dallon Prael had wanted to be something. To be more than just a solarman, to have his existence matter. No, more than that. He wanted to be a hero.
His finger tightened on the trigger-plate. He wouldbe a hero. Even if he had to die to do it. He would teach these invaders a lesson.
The laslock released a pulse of brilliant red light with a shriek of split air, and the shot hit the mark Prael had made for it.
He let out a breath and felt suddenly dizzy. He waited for the reprisal. And waited.
The wind and dust went on and brushed past him with a crackle of grit, and Prael stumbled down, advancing towards his aim point. Acrid smoke curled in the air and he smelled burned flesh.
He stopped, and found himself looking at Silas Cincade’s corpse, lying where the body had been blown out of the saddle of an idling rover trike. A good quarter of the mechanic’s face was a blackened ruin of meat, where the las-bolt had hit just above his right eye.
Prael started shaking, the rifle falling from his nerveless fingers.
IN THE END, it fell to Yacio to approximate something approaching organisation. While Prael went to pieces, weeping like a child, the telegraphist called on the townsfolk to find whatever they could to barricade the roads in and out of Town Forty-Four. They obeyed, mostly out of the need to feel like they were doing something that mattered instead of just waiting to die.
Cincade’s body was taken, and somebody got the laslock away from Prael. The mechanic had ridden to Oh-One in search of information, and now they would never know what he had to tell them; most of the town had already assumed Silas to be dead anyway, fearful that the wandering invaders out there in the fields would have killed him before he ever reached the capital beyond the horizon.
Yacio warned them that the Legiones Astartes wouldcome here. It was inevitable. The Skyhook was here, and that made it a tactical location. They had to protect it – either from an invading army come to plant its flag or for a brigade of defenders come to protect them from a heartless dictator. The space elevator was all they had that might be able to keep them alive.
What troubled Oren Yacio the most was the question of what he would do when he finally learned who had arrived on Virger-Mos II. The forces of the Emperor, or the Legions of Horus?
Did it actually matter?
+++Broadcast Minus Two Weeks [Solar]+++
THE TITLE OF the book was Insignum Astartes: The Uniforms and Regalia of the Space Marines, and it was a real tome in the traditional sense of the word. Not a pict-book to be read by a data-slate, but a physical object made of plaspaper, like the ones his mother had always favoured.
Leon took great care with it, as the binding was old and the pages uneven where the glue holding them in place had yellowed and gone to powder.
He looked over age-dulled images of armoured warriors, captured by picters or rendered in artwork as they strode battlefields like mythic storm-lords. He knew the representations intimately, every shade and line and colour. He knew every word in the book by heart. The careworn pages showed details of Legion sigils, banners and insignia, basic facts on the nature of the Legiones Astartes and their battle doctrines. The book smelled of age and solemnity. At his feet, hand-drawn sketches that were full of painstaking detail, rendered on scraps of butcher’s paper, lay in an untidy pile beneath his bed.