Calth is an embodiment of the reward that centuries of warfare have been leading to.
For this reason, Calth must not fall. For its status as part of the dominion of Ultramar, it must not fall. For its shipbuilding capacity and its forge world, it must not fall.
Intelligence has been received from Horus. A theoretical has been identified. It must be a great deal more than a theoretical, Thiel believes, for mustering and conjunction to have been taken this far, unless the new Warmaster is anxious to prove his authority. To mobilise the XIII, the largest of all the Legions, in an essentially singular war effort, that takes balls. To tell Roboute Guilliman, the primarch with the least to prove, how to do his duty, that takes balls of adamantium. To suggest that Guilliman might need help…
Horus is a great man. Thiel is not ashamed to admit that. Thiel has seen him, served with him, admired him. His selection as Warmaster makes reasonable sense. It was only going to be one of three or perhaps four, no matter how other primarchs might deceive themselves. To be the Emperor’s avatar, his proxy? Only Horus, Guilliman, Sanguinius, perhaps Dorn. Any other claims for viability were delusional. Even narrowed down to four, Dorn was too draconian and Sanguinius too ethereal. It was only ever going to be Horus or Guilliman. Horus always had the passion and the charisma. Guilliman was more clinical, considered. Perhaps that tipped it. So did, perhaps, the fact that Guilliman already had responsibilities. An empire, half-built. Ultramar. Administration. Populations. A culture. Guilliman had already evolved beyond the status of warlord, where Horus was still a killer of worlds and a subjugator of adversaries.
Maybe Warmaster Horus is aware of this disparity, that even in his triumphant election, he has been outstripped by a brother who does not even want for the honour of Warmaster any more. Perhaps that is why Horus needs to exercise his authority and give orders to the XIII. Perhaps that is why he is conjoining them with the XVII, a Legion they have never been comfortable with.
Or perhaps the new Warmaster is rather more creative than that, and sees this as a chance for Lorgar’s rabble to borrow a little gloss from Guilliman’s glory by association and example.
Aeonid Thiel, Ultramarine, has said these thoughts out loud.
They are not the reason he is marked for discipline and censure.
They are loading munitions crates at the docks on the south shore of the Boros River. Numinus City faces them across the wide grey water.
The work is hard, but the men, Imperial Army, every one, are laughing. After the loading, a meal break, a last drink, then lifters to orbit.
The crates are scuffed metal, like small coffins, full of local-pattern lasrifles, the Illuminator VI, a refined variant pressed out at Veridia Forge. The men hope to be using them within a fortnight.
The wind blows in along the estuary, bringing scents of the sea and the coastal dredgers. The men are all from the Numinus 61st, regular infantry. Some are veterans of the Great Crusade, others are new recruits inducted for the emergency.
Sergeant Hellock keeps the spirits up.
‘Will it be greenskins? Will it be the greenskins?’ the rookies keep asking. They have heard about greenskins. He assures them it will not.
‘It’s an exercise in cooperation,’ Hellock says. ‘It’s an operational show of force. This is Ultramar flexing its muscles. This is the Warmaster flexing his muscles.’
Hellock is lying to them. He lights a lho-stick, and smokes it under the shade of a tail boom, the collar of his dark blue field tunic pulled open to let the sweat on his collarbones dry. Hellock is on good terms with his captain, and Hellock’s captain confides in him. Hellock’s captain has a friend in the Ultramarines 9th Company, part of the encouraged fraternisation. His captain’s transhuman friend says that the threat is not theoretical. He calls it a ‘likely excursion of the Ghaslakh xenohold’, which is a shit-stupid way of describing it. Bastard greens. Bastard orks. Bastard bastards, gathering at the sector edge, working up the courage to come and ransack Calth. Not frigging theoretical at all.
That’s why you take the whole bastard XIII and the whole bastard XVII and all the Army units you can scare up, and you throw them at the Ghaslakh bastard xeno-bastard-hold, thank you so very much. You drive a bastard system-killing compliance force through their precious xenohold, and put them down dead before they put you down, and you kill their barbarian empire at the same time. Just kill it. Dead, gone, bye-bye, clap the dust off your hands, no more threat, theoretical or bastard otherwise.
You take a compliance force the scale of which hasn’t been seen since Ullanor or the early days of the Great Crusade, two full Legions of the Emperor’s finest, and you piledrive it through the septic green heart and rancid green brain and green frigging spinal cord of the Ghaslakh xenohold, and you end them.
This is how Sergeant Hellock sees it.
Sergeant Hellock’s forename is Bowe. None of the men in his command know this, and only one or two who survive will learn it later when they read his name on the casualty lists.
Bowe Hellock will be dead in two days’ time.
It will not be an ork that kills him.
Sergeant Hellock has gone for a smoke. The men slow the pace. Their arms are aching.
Bale Rane is the youngest of them. He is absolutely raw, a week out of accelerated muster. There’s been a vague promise he’ll get an hour to say goodbye to his bride of six weeks before he lifts that evening. He cannot bear the idea of not seeing her. He is beginning to suspect it was an empty promise.
Neve’s on the other side of the river, waiting for him on a public wharf; waiting for him to wave from the ferry rail. He can barely stand the idea that she will be disappointed. She will wait there all night, in the hope that he’s only late. It will get dark. The refinery burn-pipes will glitter yellow reflections off the black river. She will be cold.
The thought of this hurts his heart.
‘Pull your collar up,’ Krank tells him, clipping his ear. Krank is an older man, a veteran.
‘Work in the sun,’ he scolds, ‘it’ll burn you, boy. Cap on, collar up, even if you sweat. You don’t want skinburn. Trust me. Worse than a broken heart.’
The ‘mark’ of Calth means two things. First, it refers, as per XIII Legion combat record protocol, to the elapsed time count (in Terran hours [sidereal]) of the combat. All Ultramarines operations and actions of this period may be archivally accessed for study, and their elapsed time count mark used as a navigation guide. An instructor might refer a novitiate to ‘Orax mark: 12.16.10’, meaning the tenth second of the sixteenth minute of the twelfth hour of the Orax Compliance record. Usually, this count begins at either the issuing of the operation order, or the actual operational start, but at Calth it is timed from the moment Guilliman ordered return of fire. Everything before that, he says, wasn’t a battle: it was merely treachery.
Secondly, the ‘mark’ of Calth refers to the solar radiation burns suffered by many of the combatants, principally the human (specifically non-transhuman) troops.
The last of these veterans to die, many years later, still refuse graft repair and wear the mark proudly.
3
Remus Ventanus, Captain of the 4th, has command of the Erud Province muster. It’s supposed to be an honour, but it doesn’t feel like it.