Alpharius : Head of the Hydra Read online

  The Primarchs

  ALPHARIUS: HEAD OF THE HYDRA

  LION EL’JONSON: LORD OF THE FIRST

  KONRAD CURZE: THE NIGHT HAUNTER

  ANGRON: SLAVE OF NUCERIA

  CORAX: LORD OF SHADOWS

  VULKAN: LORD OF DRAKES

  JAGHATAI KHAN: WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS

  FERRUS MANUS: GORGON OF MEDUSA

  FULGRIM: THE PALATINE PHOENIX

  LORGAR: BEARER OF THE WORD

  PERTURABO: THE HAMMER OF OLYMPIA

  MAGNUS THE RED: MASTER OF PROSPERO

  LEMAN RUSS: THE GREAT WOLF

  ROBOUTE GUILLIMAN: LORD OF ULTRAMAR

  Also available

  KONRAD CURZE: A LESSON IN DARKNESS

  Ian St. Martin (audio drama)

  SONS OF THE EMPEROR

  Various authors

  SCIONS OF THE EMPEROR

  Various authors

  To see the full Black Library range, visit the Kobo Store.

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  Prologue

  Part One

  Discovery

  The Sigillite

  New Armies, Lost Brothers

  The First Test

  The Golden Deceit

  The Captain-General

  Part Two

  In the Shadows

  Secrets Within Secrets

  Terra’s Glory

  A Familiar Face

  Unforseen Consequences

  Part Three

  The Lord of The First

  Bar’savor

  Xenos Extremis

  One of Many

  Hydra Dominatus

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Luther: First of the Fallen’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  THE HORUS HERESY

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by his elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under his control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful champions.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?

  The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...

  PROLOGUE

  I am Alpharius.

  This is a lie.

  We wait, strung out dark and silent in the debris ring of rock and water ice that girdles the gas giant. We wait, our internal lights dimmed to minimum operational effectiveness, our sensors almost muted, our drives long since cooled so there isn’t even a glimmer of heat signature to pick out against the endless cold of space. We wait, clustered around the broken wreckage of defeated enemy vessels. But they did not drift here by accident. This is bait, and our trap is set. The enemy will come again, because they must. They are driven by their culture, by their nature, by their very DNA. I know this as well as any, and better than most. The question is in what strength they will come, and therefore whether we can defeat them as we did their kin.

  But this is not the question that matters to me, although none of those around me know that.

  ‘Contact, lord.’

  The officer’s words are unnecessary; I’d heard the chime of her console. Nonetheless, it is good that she’s alert, and the steadiness of her voice tells me she is resolute. This ship will need its crew functioning at maximum efficiency to have a hope of surviving what is to come.

  ‘Very well,’ I say, rising to my feet. ‘Let us see what they have sent us.’ I am significantly taller than anyone else present, which is just one of many reasons why they acknowledge my near-divinity. For all that humanity fancies itself an evolved, sophisticated species, it is still awed by size in a manner more suited to primeval apes.

  Sometimes, however, even those of us who are beyond humanity in every way – except perhaps in spirit – can be awed by it as well.

  The fleet that has dropped out of the warp is substantially larger than the one we destroyed. That was a mere expeditionary force: this is a force of conquest, which now expects resistance, and is here to crush it. And there leading it is ­easily the largest single ship that any of those arrayed around me have ever seen.

  ‘By all the stars,’ someone breathes. ‘Would you look at that…’

  The Vengeful Spirit.

  The pride of the Luna Wolves, those transhuman warriors whose ships lie wrecked around us. At least twenty kilometres long from the tip of its heavily armoured prow to its rear, where thrusters that are by themselves larger than any ship in my fleet burn furiously to propel its stentorian bulk through the void. The flagship of the one who calls himself Horus Lupercal, the greatest general and brightest star of Terra’s Great Crusade.

  This was my question, and it has been answered. He is here, and with such force arrayed around him that there is no statistical chance of my flotilla triumphing.

  But then, winning a space battle was never my plan. Never assume an enemy will allow you to beat them twice in the same manner.

  I reach for the communication relay as the Wolves close in on where we lie in wait, undoubtedly suspecting our presence but as yet, I believe, unable to detect us.

  ‘Fire up the drives,’ I command. ‘Prepare to engage.’

  There is no hesitation, no argument. Only those with the deepest, most unshakeable faith in my divinity could have any hope we might match this force, but they all know their role nonetheless. Their best hope comes from following my orders, and they trust I will guide them through.

  ‘Is my ship prepared?’ I ask. I know the answer, but allowing someone to give me an affirmative is a valuable morale boost in these early moments. Our drives and weapons systems coming online will trigger a blizzard of sensor hits in the Luna Wolves fleet. There is no going back now.

  ‘Yes, Lord Alpharius,’ Commander Semastra says, saluting. Now she hesitates, just for a moment. ‘Lord… Is this truly the only way?’

  I smile, to put her at her ease. ‘Cut off the head, and the body will fail. So it goes with all enemies.’

  ‘But not with us,’ she says, pride visibly swelling within her. She salutes again. ‘Hydra Dominatus!’

  ‘Hydra Dominatus,’ I reply, returning her salute, and move past her to head for the hangar.

  It doesn’t take me long. The ships of my fleet are tiny compared to those of the Imperium of Man: mainly one- and two-person fighters, with a smattering of gunboats. My flagship
is barely the size of an Imperial escort craft. We triumphed before thanks to the overconfidence of our enemies, and the fact their commander was – and I say this with no arrogance, merely accuracy – no match for my tactical acumen. That is no surprise. He was merely a trans­human warrior, one amongst many hundreds of thousands. I am something far greater, and far rarer.

  My flagship’s powerful drives bring with it acceleration that cannot be properly compensated for, even by the dampeners. We strike fast, and hit as hard as our small size allows, evading the cumbersome, if deadly, ordnance of our enemies. One on one, our fighter craft are a match for theirs, and clear the way for our bombers: mere transports for explosives, which are themselves unguided by anything except the kinetic force we give them. They would be hideously inaccurate at long range, but that is why we get close. The lack of guidance mechanisms means every part of the bomb is given over to destructive power. We maximise what we can, to make up for our shortcomings.

  It won’t be enough against Horus.

  I strap myself into my personal fighter and power up the drives. Despite its status, it has no markings of rank for an enemy to target. I will be one of many, the last of my flagship’s ten to launch.

  I deactivate the mag-lock holding me in place on the hangar deck, and I roar out into the void.

  Stars pinwheel across my vision as I haul my fighter’s nose around to bring it onto an attack vector, and aim straight for the Vengeful Spirit. I have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in protracted dogfights with the enemy, and I do not deign to acknowledge the first sparks of fire flashing in my direction from their hastily launched fighter screen. Horus is already showing himself as more tactically aware than his lieutenant whom I defeated; but then, I would have expected nothing less.

  I trigger my guns and blow the two nearest of the enemy out of the sky, then throw my drives to maximum and slip through the hole I’ve just made in their defensive line. My companions engage, trying to punch a larger gap for the looming shapes of our bombers to exploit. We will make them bleed, that is for sure, but that is not how success will come today.

  I soar on, avoiding the blasts of gun emplacements thanks to my reflexes, against which no mortal enemy could hope to triumph. The Vengeful Spirit swells larger in my viewport, a monstrous leviathan of void-borne destruction, riven with deep scars which nonetheless have failed to breach its armour plate. It is capable of weathering the most terrifying damage and still coming through with the ability to crush its enemies, a charac­teristic and tendency it shares with the elite troops it bears.

  What a primitive understanding of war.

  I dive, inverting my craft so that from my perspective I now seem to be pulling up towards the enemy flagship – and what is void combat if not defined by our own perspectives? The commander who forgets that is a slave to their own limitations. The Vengeful Spirit cannot shoot me down. I would be surprised if Horus hasn’t noticed me, but my craft poses no threat, and in any case I have angled my approach so any fire on me risks missing, and striking another of their cruisers beyond.

  I am through their shields now, calibrated as they are to repel the monstrously powerful weapons of capital ships like their own. I pull out of my dive, skimming over the scarred and pitted surface of the Vengeful Spirit, still inverted, searching for my target.

  There.

  A sensor tower, up ahead. The perfect decoy. I aim my fighter for it, lock the course, and hit the ejection mechanism.

  I am blasted free of my craft, and only just manage to activate the mag-clamps on my armour to catch my momentum on the hull of the Vengeful Spirit instead of ricocheting off. A mortal could not have managed this manoeuvre; it is doubtful they’d have even survived it.

  I unclip my safety harness, and the seat that boosted me here begins to drift away. Ahead of me, my fighter crashes into the sensor tower and obliterates it in a silent flower of shimmering metal debris. A suicide run, where a single pilot sacrificed their life to hurt and blind the enemy. A worthy death, although a futile one: a craft the size of the Vengeful Spirit has many sensor towers, and built-in redundancy.

  No one, not even Horus, will notice the lone figure in scaled armour crawling across the hull of the Imperium’s mighty warship. Even if they did, there is no way I could have the security codes which would allow me to open an access hatch and gain entry to the interior.

  I enter the code, and the hatch releases. Within seconds I am inside. Now all that stands between me and Horus Lupercal is a warship’s-worth of Imperial Navy personnel, and the elite troops of the Legiones Astartes.

  I ready the long, double-bladed weapon my followers have taken to calling the Pale Spear. This should not take long.

  No one on this ship, Horus included, has any idea what is coming.

  PART ONE

  LAST AND FIRST

  DISCOVERY

  I do not remember my beginning.

  Even for a being as unusual and remarkable as I, there was a time before reason. Or perhaps there was not. Perhaps I knew where and what I was from the moment my form was created, but these memories were stolen from me by the forces that snatched me from the place intended to keep me safe in my infancy. All that is left to me, even now, are impressions, more than anything else: gleaming, white sterility; a glowing presence that outshone all others and left a sense of loss whenever it departed; and then noise, a jumble of colours which even I lack the vocabulary to describe, and a tapping and scratching, as of talons seeking me, that still sometimes haunts my dreams even in these last days of the 30th millennium.

  My first definite, clear memory is of sitting in dust under a cloud-wracked night sky, assailed by a biting wind. I was not sure where I was, or how I had come to be there, but I knew my name. It had been whispered to me at some point, of that I was certain, and so I repeated it to myself for the first time.

  ‘I am Alpharius.’

  Some people say names have power. Mine does not. I felt no sense of rightness or surety sweeping through my body when I spoke. My name is a tool, nothing more: an identifier, a starting baseline, to be used when convenient and discarded when not.

  Then again, my name has come to have power, has it not? But that is power lent to it both by my own actions, and how it has been used as a tool by others. Taken alone, it is merely syllables. As with all such concepts, the significance they have is merely that which we confer upon them.

  I knew nothing of this, however, as I sat in my first moments of lucid thought. I knew the wind lashing me was many degrees below the freezing point of water, and I could taste the artificial contaminants on it; and when I looked up, I could – even in the darkness – make out the faint colour signatures of the chemicals laced into the clouds above me. I could see mountains off to my right, high and stark, their peaks lost in cloud, but I also knew the plateau on which I sat was already at a high elevation. I could taste the thinness of the air. I did not know how I knew those things, against what criteria I was measuring them, or how that knowledge came to be with me. I simply knew them to be true.

  What was also undeniably true was that I could see lights approaching from the north.

  I understood that as soon as I saw them, although again, I cannot truly explain how. I realised the lights were to the north of me, and the mountains were to the south. I also became aware, for the first time in my life, of the concept of threat. I didn’t know the purpose behind the lights, but I knew there was the possibility that those controlling them might be hostile, and so I took stock of my situation.

  I was sitting next to a piece of ruined metal, which appeared to have been torn apart by violent forces. Some few lights were still blinking on arcane devices within, but the thing itself was clearly damaged beyond repair. Indeed, I could tell it was far from whole, that approximately half the material required to form its original shape was missing. The ground was chewed up around me, as though this thing had
fallen from a height.

  So, it fell from the sky, bearing me with it, and landed with force. Either the fall, or the impact, or both, attracted attention. Those who were approaching could be intending to assist, or to plunder.

  I was small, and young. I recognised the thing next to me as the remnants of what had surrounded me, in the dim, swirling memories that were all I had of my life before that point. I had presumably been within it for a reason, and the fact I was there, out in the open with it ruined beside me, suggested I was not yet intended to be outside it. I could be vulnerable.

  I rose to my feet, and my body obeyed me as I wished it to. I scanned my surroundings for anything I could use as a weapon, but my options were limited. There were no sizeable stones in the dirt, and the ruined metal had not sheared or splintered into ­serviceable lengths. I caught sight of a marking as I looked it over: two sets of crossed lines, an ‘XX’. This meant nothing to me at the time, so I dismissed the detail.

  The lights were closing on me now, and I could hear, above the wind, the mechanical roar of an engine. More than one, in fact. It was time for me to leave this place. I could watch from nearby, and reveal myself if I determined that these arrivals were not hostile.

  I scrambled out of the rut carved through the ground by my arrival, keeping low, and made for the nearest slight rise in the ground. I crested it on my belly and turned at the top, my skin pressed against the dust, and looked back at where my consciousness had begun.

  Two vehicles rumbled up: large, heavy and tracked, of similar but not identical designs, with paintwork that was faded in some places and damaged in others. I recognised the work of wind-driven dust and sand, and of rust, and also of ballistic weapons.

  Doors opened, and light flooded out into the darkness. Nine figures dismounted: bipedal, and shaped roughly like myself, but I knew at once they were no kin of mine. Their movements were slow and clumsy, and they were swaddled in protective clothes against the chill and, perhaps, other environmental dangers. Each of them wore goggles, and masks that were presumably intended to aid their breathing. I took an experimental breath of my own, focusing on it consciously for the first time, but although I could taste bitterness on the air, it posed me no problems.