Now Peals Midnight by John French

Author:John French
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Published: 2017-11-14T07:00:27+00:00

Two Hours to Midnight

‘Strength and truth shall be its future, but for now it will serve us as a place of slaughter. And this will be a slaughter…. That is the price of that future.’

His own voice followed Rogal Dorn as he walked beneath the Dome of Unity. The voices of others wound through his thoughts, on and on, shouting from the silence. He thought of all the steps he had taken in his life, all the decisions made, and all those that now seemed to have a different meaning to what he had thought at the time.

‘It will never end, don’t you see that? Hate only breeds hate and the Imperium cannot be built upon such bloody foundations.’

‘You are not my son. And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.’

‘The Imperium will not survive if it does not die, brother…’

‘Ash running through our fingers…’

‘I am not your son…’

‘Lord praetorian.’ His personal vox cut through the voices of ghosts.

‘Speak, mistress,’ he said, subvocalising into his armour’s vox so that neither Archamus, Andromeda or the other huscarls would hear.

‘Word has come,’ said Armina Fel. ‘As instructed, it has not been broadcast to the astropaths across the system. Do you wish the signal sent?’

‘When will the first lights appear?’ he asked.

‘Two hours,’ she said.

Two hours…

‘Thank you, mistress,’ he said and cut the link.

He turned to Archamus. The sight of a young warrior’s face bearing that name pulled another voice from the edge of night.

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘That others will die for my weakness. That I will fail.’

‘Prepare a signal to all Legion formations,’ he said.

Above the Palace the Arcus orbital plate drifted on the edge of the atmosphere. Captain Demetrius Katafalque watched night slide across the face of the viewport. Pinpricks of light dotted the spreading dark, clustering in the shapes of the great city drifts, space ports and hive clusters. He knew every detail of that view at night, in day, and reimagined in the endless strategic holo-displays that filled the hours he was not on the wing with the rest of his assault company. The hours that remained were given to waiting.

In the distance he heard the hiss of a hatch release, but did not turn.

On the other side of the plate he could have looked out and seen the reaches of space. Long ago, the first ancients to touch the void beyond the sky would have had only the stars to greet them. Now the night side of Terra glittered with the lights of warships. System monitors; converted trade tugs; mass conveyors carrying Terra’s void-borne reserve forces; war-barques whose keels had been set in a time before Unity and empire was a dream; missile pinnaces so young that their weapons had never spoken in anger: all arranged in constellations that crowded the blackness as the light of Terra spidered the darkening ground.

‘Captain,’ said the voice of Getterax, from behind him. He turned, surprised. The master of signal assigned to the Arcus orbital plate rarely left the command cluster at its core.

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