‘Perhaps not…’ Heka’tan was looking past the frightened crowd to the door. The broken masonry had fallen against it. The column had been heavy enough to put a wide crack in the door’s surface.
Some of the trapped civilians were even now pulling at it.
‘Stand aside,’ Arcadese bellowed, ‘in the name of the Legiones Astartes!’
The frightened throng parted for the two warriors who reached the door and each taking a side of the fissure, which was deep enough to get their fingers in, pulled. The stone door came away in chunks now that its structural integrity had been compromised. The crack widened.
Bullied to the front by his entourage, Vorkellen was right behind the Legionaries.
‘Get us out,’ he pleaded in a small voice, clinging to Heka’tan’s arm. ‘I too have been deceived.’
The Salamander looked down at him like he was the intestinal remains of an enemy he’d just gutted. ‘Where is your ship?’ he demanded, before the majority of the auditorium floor collapsed into a fiery chasm. Most of the senators went with it. Only those clustered next to the exit were spared death by fire.
‘Close, at the end of the gangway just outside,’ said the iterator. All of his suave self-assurance was evaporating before the prospect of his imminent demise.
Debris was falling from the ceiling, killing Bastionites by the score.
The gap in the door was wide enough for the Legionaries to squeeze out, which meant it was also large enough for the humans too. There were precious few left, just the clave-nobles and a handful of senators and marshals, and the iterator with his cronies of course.
Arcadese was first out and began waving the others on. Heka’tan was last through just as an almighty conflagration swept across the sundered auditorium. Smudged silhouettes in the smoke cloud screamed for rescue but the Salamander closed his senses to them.
‘They’re good as dead,’ he said as he met the hard gaze of the Ultramarine. It wasn’t an easy choice to make.
II
THEN THEY WERE running, even as Cullis was collapsing around them. Portions of the city were giving way under the chain of incendiaries planted by the Iron Warrior. Out in the slums, great cracks were opening up in the ground, pulling in vast tracts of sump-ash. Distant landmen drove their hauler-trucks in crazy arcs to avoid the growing fissures. On the horizon behind them, the super-rigs and megaliths of other Bastion cities burned.
Out on the landing platform the air hazed. Ash and flesh-smoke baked on the hot breeze. Girders and gantries groaned in protest as they buckled and fell in the expanding conflagration below.
They were fleeing across the exit strip that led to the deck where Vorkellen’s ship was still anchored when a fuel hopper burst and sent a plume of fire and force into the air.
Several of the civilians were thrown off the narrow companionway and plummeted screaming.
Leading, Arcadese turned to see another group crushed by a collapsed comms tower. They died without uttering a sound.
Heka’tan was missing. Just a few more metres to the ship and he’d lost the Salamander. Vorkellen, too, was nowhere to be seen. Smoke and fire dirtied the view.
The Ultramarine waved the few survivors on. ‘Into the ship.’ He seized one of the iterator’s cronies by the arm as he hurried past. The scrivener had a cut to his forehead and looked dazed. ‘Wait for us,’ Arcadese told him. After the scrivener had nodded feebly, the Ultramarine let him go and went back into the smoke cloud.
‘Heka’tan!’ The pall was thick, getting thicker. Arcadese wished he still had his battle-helm; the task of finding his battle-brother was made more difficult without it.
Below the belt of charcoal-grey, the Ultramarine saw four grasping fingers. They were black, like onyx.
Arcadese cried, ‘Hold on!’ and rushed to the ragged lip of the companionway. He thrust his hand down but Heka’tan slipped and fell another half-metre. Gripping a twisted metal rebar, he looked up at the Ultramarine. There was blood on his face and one of his eyes was swollen shut.
‘Save him.’ He had to shout above the roar of the flames boiling below.
Arcadese’s gaze flitted to Vorkellen, who was also stranded and clinging on desperately. The iterator peered down intermittently, white-faced and clammy.
The Ultramarine shook his head and reached harder, farther. ‘You first. Reach up.’
‘Protect the weak,’ Heka’tan told him. ‘No matter who that is.’
In no mood to debate, Arcadese growled, ‘Reach up. Now!’
Still holding on with one hand, Heka’tan swung up the other and stretched. Their fingertips could almost touch.
‘A little more…’
‘It’s too far. Get out while you can.’
Arcadese shook his head. ‘We are so close…’ he said. His face was wrenched with effort. He leaned and found purchase on Heka’tan’s fingers…
…just as the Salamander’s hand began to tremble. As the nerve tremor took hold it shook Arcadese’s grip free. Heka’tan was flailing now. The explosions, the smoke and fire – he was reliving Isstvan all over again.
‘Steady yourself… I can’t…’ Arcadese snatched at Heka’tan’s shaking hand, but was unable to get a grip. ‘Steady yourself, brother.’
Their eyes met, the reflection of the destruction trapped in the Salamander’s locked there forever.
‘Let me go,’ he said, lowering his quivering hand. His voice was calm, his mind decided.
Arcadese raged, gesturing frantically. ‘I can lift you. What are you doing?’
‘Going to join my brothers.’ He let go.
Bellowing denial and utterly powerless, the Ultramarine watched Heka’tan plummet for a few metres until he was swallowed by the explosions. Arcadese thumped the companionway, splitting the rockcrete. Nearby, Vorkellen was screaming.
‘Don’t let me die, please don’t let me die…’
Bereft of all pity, of any feeling, his organic flesh as inured as his augmetic implants, Arcadese grabbed the iterator’s wrist and dragged him up.
Just a few seconds later, a column of fire erupted skywards from where Vorkellen had been swinging. The human staggered to his feet. He was weeping uncontrollably. Arcadese picked him up and threw him over his shoulder.
Then he ran as the world of Bastion submitted to its death throes behind him.
III
FROM THE SHUTTLE hold, Arcadese looked down upon the ruination of a world. Cooking off in the wake of the incendiaries, Bastion’s thermo-nuclear stockpiles were tearing the planet apart.
Long chains of fire stitched the world’s surface like its seams had been unpicked and were slowly being burned apart. Continents cracked and mountains sank. The oceans boiled to gas and the cities were consumed. Billions would look to the artificial nuclear sunrise, their retinas seared away in seconds, the skin of their bodies flaking like parchment only to become as ash on the wind. And even that was ephemeral, torn apart and scattered to oblivion by the blast wave that followed.
A small armada of ships had managed to achieve orbit; others had been swallowed up in the chaos, failing to achieve loft and put enough distance between themselves and the rapidly unfolding cataclysm.
They were headed for the Imperial starship at anchor on the edge of the system. Arcadese had already voxed a warning to its captain but no attack had come from any vessel affiliated with the Warmaster. The work here was done. The Iron Warrior had achieved his mission. Whatever the purpose of the schematics Heka’tan had described, it would not be discovered until it was too late. The message was sent. Horus wanted the galaxy to know, he had used Bastion as an example.
Ally with the Imperium and die.
Neutral planets would go down on bended knee for the Warmaster now, the threat of reprisals too real and absolute for them to ignore.
Heka’tan had believed in the possibility of a peaceful solution. Despite everything, he dared to hope that the Traitors would adhere to the rules of engagement.