Dark Imperium: Plague War by Guy Haley

Author:Guy Haley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Published: 2018-09-03T07:34:53+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Mustering at Parmenio

There were grand arrivals and there was awe. There were speeches, orders and announcements. Tyros, bowed by war, ecstatic at salvation, reeled with the arrival of the primarch. Two miracles in a single day is more than most human hearts can endure.

Once the attempts at pomp were done and the ragged finery of Tyros put away, evening rushed its cool cloth over Parmenio’s fevered skin. Then Guilliman found time to speak with his chief officers: the newly minted Primaris Tetrarch Felix of Vespator, and Captain Sicarius of the Victrix Guard, hero of the Ultramarines. Present also were Maldovar Colquan of the Adeptus Custodes, and Sister-Commander Bellas of the Sisters of Silence. There were others who could have been there. Many others. Generals of the Astra Militarum, senior princeps of the Collegia Titanica, magos domini of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and myriad high officers of multiple Imperial Adepta. Most had had their turn at the council called within Tyros’ walls; those that had not could wait. Guilliman needed level heads. Moreover, he needed minds whose sensibilities were uncoloured by religion. Of those upon the wall only Bellas was devout, but the primarch trusted her to leave her beliefs to one side.

There were too few believers he could call into his confidence.

For his platform Guilliman chose the flat roof of a bastion tower looking out over the narrow channel between Tyros island and the Hecatone coast that formed the city port. The land on both sides had been shorn of natural shape, forced into geometric patterns of squares and rectangles that months of battle could not erase. But the buildings on the altered coastlines were rubble and twists of metal dropped half in and half out of the water.

Damage like that was costly to put right. Months would come and go before the docks might be rebuilt.

Before then Guilliman had another purpose for them. Hecatone’s spaceport was deep in enemy territory. The docklands of Tyros, with their large, flat spaces made for the storage of shipping containers, provided a viable alternative.

Work commenced to make Tyros docks ready for the muster. Sea port was remade into spaceport.

Guilliman’s reclamation crews worked around the clock, clearing the far side of the channel. The land was divided into neat quadrants by winking beacon poles. Cleansing teams and chanting priests walked back and forth over these areas, venting steam and prayer into the warm summer night. They wended their way in and out of sight, disappearing behind bomb-shattered warehouses, reemerging from crumpled containers, not straying outside the beacons of delineation until the whole of each box was done.

The quadrants declared pure were set upon by building-sized construction vehicles, beneath whose dozer blades the land screeched with the protests of metal and the grumbling of ferrocrete rubble being shunted aside. The giant dozers moved slowly, pushing up the detritus of war into embankments around the mustering point. In the quadrants nearest the shore, the rockcrete was planed down entirely, outlines of lost buildings the sole reminders of what had been a thriving port.

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