His determination is this: he is in his casket, and his casket is being moved for transit. Something, perhaps some clumsy or inexpert handling of his casket, has woken him.
His implant clock tells him it is eighteen weeks since that routine wake-up on Macragge. Locator systems, reading noospheric tags, tell him that his casket is under transfer in the orbital yards at Calth. The staging post. The place of conjunction. He has roused too early. They’re not at the war front yet.
He wonders why he has woken. Was it clumsy handling? A loader jarring his casket? Justarius and Kloton and Photornis are nearby, in their own caskets, and they are still in hiber-stasis.
Was he physically disturbed? Or was it some scrapcode abnormality causing his cogitation systems to fibrillate?
Telemechrus doesn’t know. He is new to this. There are no techpriests nearby. He wants Justarius to wake so he can ask him.
Is this normal? What do these traces of scrapcode mean? He feels trapped. He feels anxiety. Fear will follow.
He is aware of the hibersystems trying to pull him back into unconsciousness where he belongs. They are trying to spare him the pain and the anger. There is no need to wake. You woke too early. You don’t need to be awake.
The techpriests are wrong.
It’s not the pain a Dreadnought is afraid of.
It’s the silence. It’s the oblivion. It’s the sleep.
It’s the inability to escape from yourself.
Guilliman looks at Gage and nods.
Gage speaks to the lithocast operators and they activate the system.
Guilliman steps onto the hololithic plate as it starts to come to life. The tiered stations of the flagship’s bridge rise up around the vast plate like the stalls of an amphitheatre.
Light blooms around him.
Figures resolve, there but not there at all. Light has been captured, folded and twisted to give the illusion of reality. Guilliman knows that, somewhere, millions of kilometres away, other deck systems are fabricating images of him out of light. He is appearing as a hololithic presence on the lithocast decks of other stages, for the benefit of the august commanders whose ghosts are manifesting to him here.
One in particular.
‘My worthy brother!’ Lorgar exclaims. He steps forward to greet Guilliman.
The simulation is remarkable. Though luminous, there is true density and solidity to his flesh and his armour. There is no lag to his audio, no desynchronisation between mouth and voice. Remarkable.
‘I did not expect to meet you like this,’ Lorgar says. His grey eyes are bright. ‘In person, so I could embrace you. This seems premature. I was informed of your request. I have had no time to dress in ceremonial attire–’
‘Brother,’ says Guilliman. ‘You see that I greet you in regular battle plate too. There will be time for personal greeting and full dress ceremony when you arrive. You are just a few hours out now?’
‘Decelerating fast,’ Lorgar replies. He looks at someone not caught inside the hololithic field of his bridge. ‘The shipmaster says five hours.’
‘We will meet together then, you and your commanders. Me and mine.’ Guilliman looks at the warlords whose images have appeared around Lorgar’s. They all appear to be connecting from different ships. He’d forgotten the imposing bulk of Argel Tal. The lipless sneer of Foedral Fell. The predatory curiosity of Hol Beloth. The hunched gloom of Kor Phaeron. The lightless smile of Erebus.
‘Some of you are already here,’ Guilliman notes.
‘I am, sir,’ says Erebus.
‘We will meet shortly, then,’ says Guilliman.
Erebus inclines his head, more an accepting bow of the head than a nod.
‘My vessel is entering orbit,’ says Kor Phaeron.
‘Welcome to Calth,’ says Guilliman.
The light phantoms salute him.
‘I’ve asked for this brief communication,’ Guilliman says, ‘to discuss a small technical matter. I do not wish it to mar our formal conjunction, nor do I wish it to create problems for your fleet during approach and dispersal.’
‘A problem?’ asks Kor Phaeron.
There’s a stiffness to them suddenly. Guilliman feels it, even though they are only present as handfuls of light. When they first appeared, he realises, they seemed like a pack of dogs, padding into the firelight, teeth bared in smiles that were also snarls, gleefully inquisitive. Now they seem like wild animals that he should never have brought so close to the hearth.
The Word Bearers have been fighting brutal, heathen wars of compliance in the ragged skirts of the Imperium. They’ve been fighting them dutifully and ferociously for decades, since that fateful day on Monarchia that changed the relationship between XIII and XVII forever. There is something coarsely barbaric about them. They have none of the praetorian nobility of Guilliman’s men. They don’t even evince the passionate devotion of their misguided days. They look sullen, world-weary, as though they have seen everything it is possible to see and are tired of it. They look hardened. They look as though all compassion and compunction have been drained out of them. They look like they would kill without provocation.
‘A problem, lord?’ Argel Tal repeats.
‘A machine code problem,’ Guilliman replies. ‘The Mechanicum has advised me. There is a malicious scrapcode problem in the Calth datasphere. We’re working to eradicate it. I wanted you to be aware of it, and to take steps accordingly.’
‘That could have been summarised in a databurst, sir,’ remarks Foedral Fell.
‘A connected matter,’ Guilliman says carefully, ‘is that the source of the scrapcode remains unidentified. There is a strong possibility that it is a data artefact that has been inadvertently brought in from outside the Calth system.’
‘From outside?’ asks Lorgar.
‘From elsewhere,’ Guilliman states.
There’s a look in Lorgar’s eyes that Guilliman hopes never to see again. It’s hurt and it’s anger, but it’s also injured pride.
Lorgar raises his hand and draws it across his neck in a cut-throat gesture. It takes Guilliman a moment to realise that it’s not a provocation, a curt insult.
The hololithic images of his officers and commanders freeze. Only Lorgar’s remains live. He takes a step towards Guilliman.
‘I have suspended their transmissions so we may speak plainly,’ he says. ‘Plainly and clearly. After all that has passed between us and our Legions, after all that has been toxic these last years, after all the effort to engineer this campaign as a reconciliation… Your first act is to accuse us of tainting you with scrapcode? Of… what? Of being so careless in our data hygiene we have infected your precious datasystem with some outworld codepox?’
‘Brother–’ Guilliman begins.
Lorgar gestures to the frozen light ghosts around them.
‘How much humiliation do you intend to heap upon these men? They want only to please you. To earn the respect of the great Roboute Guilliman, a respect they have been lacking these last decades. It matters what you think of them.’
‘Lorgar–’
‘They’ve come to prove themselves! To show they are worthy to fight alongside the majestic Ultramarines! The warrior-kings of Ultramar! This conjunction, this campaign, it’s a point of the highest honour! It matters to them. It matters very much! They have waited years for this honour to be restored!’
‘I meant no insult.’
‘Really not?’ Lorgar laughs.
‘None at all. Brother Lorgar Aurelian, why else would I have communicated informally? If I’d saved this matter to sully our ceremonial greeting, then you might have considered it an insult. A private word, between trusted commanders. That’s all this is. You know scrapcode can develop anywhere, and adhere to the most carefully maintained systems. This could be us, this could be you, it could be an error from our datastacks, it could be some xenos code that‘s been stuck to your systems like a barnacle since you left the outworlds. There’s no blame. We just need to acknowledge the problem and work together to cleanse it.’