The Beast Arises

‘Go to them then, brother,’ said Koorland, turning to meet the glowing red lenses of Eternity’s helm. ‘Let them see that they are safe, that it is an Imperial Fist that walks amongst them.’ He glanced to Haas. The woman was almost shaking, worse than when she had been rescued from the orks’ captivity. ‘Let them all see.’

Three

Terra — the Imperial Palace

The Great Chamber had been the institutional heart of Terra for as long as Terra had been the heart of an Imperium of Man. At capacity, it could hold half a million citizens. It was a coliseum, a public arena of awesome scale, built to the grand demands of Unitarian dreams. The restoration work enacted in the aftermath of the Great Heresy had been largely sympathetic, cosmetic re-imaginings of the occasional mural where a pict of the original could not be found or showed an inconvenient contradiction to the Creed notwithstanding.

Vast tiers of empty seating surrounded a central dais. Twelve large chairs were spaced evenly across its centre line, backed by the heraldic banners of the twelve great pillars of Imperial government. A speaker’s podium, raised by the spread wings of a golden aquila, glittered under the triangulated beams of focused lighting. The dais rotated almost imperceptibly, and a more potent metaphor for the pace of decision-making by said great pillars of Imperial government Vangorich could not imagine.

The last vestige of representative and accountable governance stood at the far east end of the chamber: a statue of the great Rogal Dorn, raised in commemoration by his brother, the first Lord Guilliman. The primarch watched the council of the day with an expression of infamous severity.

Drakan Vangorich was not a man given to idle dreams, but the thought of what a living, breathing primarch would make of the small men trying to fill their superhuman boots gave him a little pleasure.

‘Order, please,’ said Tobris Ekharth, Master of the Administratum, reading tiredly from the data-slate in his hands. His voice mumbled back to him on a time-delayed echo from the vox-casters set up around the vast auditorium. Small-arms fire in the distance — but not all that distant — broke up the carefully calibrated augmitter system with pernicious static. ‘I’m sure that the situation is under control… I…’

He blinked myopically at a second data-slate on the lectern in front of him, then bent to listen to some aide unseen behind the beam-bright podium lights and visibly pulled himself together.

‘I’ve been made aware that the situation is well in hand. If you could all now please access your agenda packets, cryptex key kappa-tribus-septum-septum-omega, and once we’re all here we can begin.’

Scattered around the swathes of empty seating, lesser lords and meme-serfs approved by the Administratum’s increasingly stringent vetting lists peeled the security tape off their packets and tapped in the cryptex key.

Vangorich did as everyone else did. As a man of medium height and medium build, dressed in black with oiled-back black hair like any aide or staffer present, he was adept at discouraging notice. His skin shared the pale tone of the trillions who lived their lives on lightless Terra, his few features of note being his dark, wide-set eyes and a tiny scar that bridged the lower part of his face between jaw and chin.

He had, of course, memorised the contents of an unredacted version of the package, and his agents had furnished him with the cryptex key to the final document as soon as it had been disseminated amongst the High Twelve.

It had been a hundred years since a Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum had been seated amongst that number, but one grew accustomed to certain privileges of access, particularly if one possessed the means to retain them. Indeed, Vangorich considered it the patriotic duty of his office to keep his finger, as the saying went, on the Senatorum’s pulse.

Scanning the ninety-seven-page abstract, he flagged up the most glaring omissions from the original agenda. It was always an amusing mental exercise to attempt to deduce who was responsible for removing what.

A complaint from the Admiralty on the costs imposed on them by the transfer of the blockade from the Last Wall to the Navy? Fabricator General Kubik. Too easy. The Fabricator General would accept any cost to get his mechadendrites on the orks’ technologies, particularly if it could be loaded onto another.

A demand for civilian evacuation of the cathedral world Madrilline? Lansung. Why discuss what you no longer had the ships in range to deliver?

A motion to restrict Chapter Master Koorland’s ‘disruptive’ access to Naval facilities, and, reading between the lines, the Lucifer Blacks? It had the patrician fingers of the Paternoval Envoy all over it. Smiling archly, he skimmed ahead. The only downside was that Helad Gibran no longer owed him a favour. He held the page and frowned in thought. Here was an interesting omission.