The twelve of them stood on the gallery overlooking the entrance hall and watched as Astartes entered. There had been thirteen of them last time, but Matthias, who Leman Russ had code-named Regis, had been the one called forward to be taken away by the red-armoured Astartes who arrived the month before. The Thousand Sons, they had been called. Teleute remembered Matthias questioning the Wolf Priests about the other Legions and their complexity, his dismay when they had refused him access to a library, claiming that there was no such store of written lore anywhere in the ancient fortress.
So naturally, the one who could have identified the legion or chapter (she wasn't entirely clear on the distinction) of the new arrivals was gone first, leaving them to guess. If she wasn't the one selected this time, Teleute swore she would question the Priests and force everyone else to memorise the basic colour schemes of the original Legions.
"Does anyone remember which legions use white?" she asked and then saw that while the leading Astartes were wearing white power armour, there was a cluster of four at the back wearing black. "Or black - are two Legions arriving at once?"
Dorias ducked behind her and crammed into a corner between her and a wall, ducking his head to avoid visibility. "I don't know," he muttered, "But whoever they are, I hope they call for me. Or Umi. Is she...?" He looked around furtively.
"Stay down," Teleute hissed as she saw the other girl scanning the group. Leman Russ, who claimed to be their brother (how that worked, Teleute had no idea: she'd spent most of the first week in his company caught between religious awe and dread that somehow she'd done something terrible and his legendary wrath would suddenly be directed at her) had designated Umi as Predator and it was an apt choice. All the feral girl seemed interested in was food, fighting and... well there was a reason Dorias tried to avoid her, although he didn't put up much resistance on the occasions when she did jump him.
"It could be that the ones in black are from a successor Chapter," suggested Prima. "And I think that the White Scars wear white armour." The taller woman sat on Teleute's other side.
Teleute leant forward in her seat, causing Dorias to cringe in case Umi was looking in their direction. "I don't think that these are White Scars. They have a sort of yellow bar in their heraldry don't they? This looks more like... a boar of some kind?"
Prima squinted. "Those aren't tusks," she said and both Teleute and Dorias heard a tremble in her voice. "That's a crescent moon."
"I... don't understand," Dorias muttered.
"The Luna Wolves. The chapter formed by loyalists from the Arch-Traitor's own legion," explained the woman. "Which means that whoever they pick must be..."
Teleute swallowed. "You mean..." She lowered her voice. "Horus?"
Her answer was a nod.
"Lupercal," the white-clad Commander called and all the breath left Teleute's lungs as she stared at him in denial.
She could easily imagine the thoughts running through everyone else's mind. Firstly: Thank Serenity he didn't call me. Secondly: Wait, Lupercal is Teleute.
Maybe he didn't call me.
Maybe... I misheard him...?
Please, Serenity?
She felt, rather than heard, Dorias moving carefully away from her. When she turned to look at him, there was horror in his eyes.
Looking the other way she couldn't even see Prima, although that was probably because Umi had shoved her way past the others and was now staring at her from a distance of about three inches. "Heeee~ey, does that mean you killed me?"
How in the name of the Emperor does one answer that?
Abesent any verbal response, Umi apparently filled in the blanks and grinned broadly, revealing gaps in her teeth (the Space Wolf's had been muttering about how to replace them without coming to any conclusions Teleute was aware of) and then headbutted her.
There followed Teleute Lupercal's first encounter with the Black Legion when the Mournival were required to forcibly restrain the two girls (because Teleute may have mistakenly let Umi inside her guard and get the first shot in, but she was damned if she was going to let that be the end of the matter).
Uther spat in Teleute's face when she tried to say goodbye.
The reactions of the others had varied widely. Umi had hugged her and then tried to start a fight. That had been reassuringly normal. If the legends surrounding Angron had grown over time, at least they had never claimed that he was petty. The Primarch that Horus had slain held no grudge.
Dorias had hidden from her. Prima had not. Miriam had been shy (as always) but when Teleute checked her pockets on leaving the other girl's room she had found two slim books tucked inside them - one written about Horus during the Great Crusade and a second about the battle in which he had died, penitent to the end.
Uther's reaction was by far the most adversarial. His faith in the God Emperor was deep and his tolerance for a rebel, even reincarnated, was all but non-existent.
"Understand this," he hissed. "I am reborn of a loyal Primarch and you are a traitor. Do us all a favour and die alongside the other scum of the Black Legion."
Teleute wiped his spittle from her cheek. "Two days ago it hadn't even occured to me that any of us might be traitors," she pointed out. "How do you know that you aren't one?"
He glared at her. "My faith in the God-Emperor is absolute."
"The Primarch called you 'Herald' didn't he?"
Uther nodded. "The herald of Serenity's return."
She shrugged. "Before they found their Primarch, one Legion bore the name 'Imperial Heralds'."
"...which Legion?" he asked, reluctantly, even his disgust yielding to the driving curiousity about which Primarch's soul was also his own."
Teleute turned away. "The Seventeenth," she told him and closed the door before he recalled which Legion bore that number.
Behind her, while Uther screamed denial - that she was lying, that he hated her - of the implication that he was father to the Word Bearers, Teleute wondered uneasily how she had known that tidbit of history.
Teleute's body was no longer entirely familiar to her.
It was her soul that the Lunar Wolves found valuable. Her body was merely human and this was not, to them, sufficient. Leman Russ had already had biologists from the crimson-clad Adeptus Mechanicum treat her pre-emptively with anti-agathics calculated to slow her aging. To the ancient stronghold world of Cthonia, Master Cuchlain had called blue robed emissaries of the Filia Mercurium who had been studying this matter for some eons.
When Teleute came out of the vat they had placed her in, she crushed the first hand offered to raise her to her feet. She felt terrible about that of course but was even more appalled when she found that the hand had been augmetic. For the weeks it took to learn to regulate herself, only space marines of the Lunar Wolves entered her presence, and that in full battle plate.
According to mirrors she looked much as she had before the process: slim, dark of hair and pale of skin. But she could feel things moving inside her, organs akin in a distant fashion to those implanted in the Space Marines. The cost of them had been incalculable: the ancient secrets used to create the Primarchs and their legions had never been intended for women. Nor were the costs merely fiscal: Fabius Bile himself had sought the lore and thousands upon thousands of the Filia had died screaming under his torments rather than reveal the secrets to Fulgrim's Fleshcrafter. (No one told Teleute of the thousands of volunteers who'd perished in almost equal torment as experimental subjects during the lengthy development process).
Once she had learned a measure of self-control, the backbone of the Chapter and the Legion took her in hand. Sergeants of the Lunar Wolves and Black Legion, as well as three successor Chapters that could also claim Horus as progenitor, put her through a rigorous training regieme calculated to make Teleute ready to fight alongside the Space Marines with boltgun, chainsword and a myriad other weapons. Now, with any error likely to be painful, she truly mastered her new physique and into the nights officers and chaplains moulded her mind, preparing her not only for battle but for leadership in battle.
It was almost a shock when a Captain of the Black Legion summoned her to the docks where a strike cruiser was waiting. It was time for her to see war.
The battlefield was a strange one.
Thousands of years before the Imperium men had come to the system of Troy. Using vast mirrors they had harnessed the light of a sun and applied it to the nickel-iron asteroids that might at one time have been parts of long dead planets. Applied correctly, the result was bubbles of stone, and a wealth of minerals.
[i]Most[/i] of the asteroids was nickel and iron, both of which were somewhat valuable in the quantities available. Some was other metals far more useful. The Emperor alone could guess how much of the Dark Age of Technology had been built with the metals from Troy.
All of that had been long ago. The mirrors were long gone and the miners who remained could not say what had happened. Conquered by the Great Crusade, they had paid their tithe in minerals scratched from the inside of their hollow homes and otherwise dabbled in piracy when they thought they could get away with it.
That was not the reason that the Black Legion had been sent there.
The reason was that the miners had stopped pirating, which had made the Administratium happy, and started hurling their homes off into the darkness of interstellar space upon fusion torches. Since those giant globes then ceased to send tithes to the Imperium, or to hand their pskyers to the Black Ships, neither the Administratium not the Inquisition was happy with this idea.
Storming aboard the remaining globes was the sort of job that required Space Marines, at least to force beachhead. And since it was the sort of head-on assault that would kill even Space Marines, the first wave of the attack would be carried out by the Black Legion and the second by World Eaters who would have the unspoken orders to use their bolters of the Black Legion balked.
Not that they would, of course. They were under the eyes of their reborn Primarch and more importantly, the Black Legion never had. But some wounds are just too deep.
Teleute would fight with the rear rank of the Black Legion. This was not the usual position for an inexperienced member of the Legion - usually their deployments were well forward so that those who had joined only in search of a place to die would find it quickly, those who desired to continue their service would have opportunity to show their worth and those undecided between the two extremes would be forced to choose.
It had been made clear to Telute that while she was fighting alongside the Black Legion, she was doing so as commander of the XVI Legion and thus her life was not to be given away. Her warplate was therefore the bone-white with black trim of the original Luna Wolves and although outwardly it resembled Mk 8 Power Armour she had learned that the artifice of its construction rendered it almost as durable as the mighty tactical dreadnought armour used by veteran Astartes. And then there was the Iron Halo.
The protection afforded by the suit was remarkable, but given that between her and the enemy were not only the first rank of the Black Legion but also the second rank, made up of hoary veterans that formed the backbone of the Legion, it seemed almost superfluous.
It was a surprise therefore that no sooner had she exited her boarding torpedo than she was shot at.
The stubber slugs exploded in fiery death as they struck the protective field of the Iron Halo and Teleute automatically raised her bolt pistol, dispatching the gunner as her bodyguards eradicated the infiltrator squad that had somehow eluded the first attack groups.
One look at the tactical displays demonstrated to Teleute the validity of the first principle that she'd learned from studying Miriam's gifts: in war, the plan was the first casualty. The outer shells of the globes were over a hundred kloms thick and penetrated only by a maze of interlinking passages and mineshafts. Maps provided for the operation bore little to no relationship with reality.
"Move forward," she ordered tersely, ignoring the shattered remains of the men she'd killed, now almost obscured by the flood of information across her eye-displays. "We will have to penetrate to the core. We can't expect to kill a snake by gnawing on its tail."
It took almost a week to fight through the outer layer of the globe and that was good progress. Three of the other four assaults had managed to create bridgeheads for Imperial Guard regiments to take over, which had just lead to bogging down of the Guardsmen with brutal losses despite support from World Eaters. The fifth attack had failed outright, the Black Legion laying down their lives to cover the retreat of the support elements.
Teleute had consolidated the Black Legion into this attack and was using the Guardsmen to secure their rear areas. It hadn't stopped casualties but it at least kept them to a manageable level and as a result the Imperial forces now controlled a secure route from an improvised dock to a minehead two hundred kloms away on the inside. Now all they had to do was work out where on the four and a half million square kloms of the inner surface the rebel leaders could be found.
No one had questioned Teleute leading the assault out of the mineshafts although she had appeased any desire to recommend caution by letting the company's two dreadnoughts and squad of terminators take point. There had been seven casualties among that echelon, which had been almost half their losses in the operation. Approximately two thousand rebel soldiers had been killed – the tenuous atmosphere inside the globe was entirely the result of millenia of pollution so the breach of a space suit would have been fatal even if the pressure hadn't been barely greater than that of space outside the globe.
Inside one of the resealed domes that housed the minehead, Teleute was being assisted in repairs to her armour by two techmarines – the assistance being their doing the work while she watched, learned and occasionally held tools for them. Being out of her armour felt strange after six days and she had already made a mental note to bring a bodyglove or robe for this contingency in the future.
She was examining her helmet when Hundred Leader Belisarius entered the chamber. "What do you make of this?" she asked, holding it so he could see the small 'M' that the techmarines had engraved above the brow without asking her. "I'm not sure it's a good idea."
"Was it your idea?" the towering Astartes asked bluntly. Teleute had grown accustomed to being surrounded by near-giants at all times but had to admit to herself that she had been almost embarassingly glad to learn that the XVI Legion had female serfs so that she at least had other women to talk to at times.
"Oh this is their fault." She pointed at the two unrepentant Techmarines.
Belisarius nodded in understanding. "Then it is a good thing, Thousand Leader Teleute." And he saluted. The Black Legion did [i]not[/i] salute their officers.
"Stop that, it's a sniper check," she told him automatically.
"My apologies, Thousand Leader." He didn't sound particularly abashed. "You have guests."
The next person through the hatch was a World Eater officer. Such was the shrouding effect of the battle plate that it wasn't until the white helmet came off that Teleute recognised Umi. The other young woman – young, they must each be past forty now! - had her hair in tight braids flat against her skull and secured at the nape of her neck. "He~ey!" She hugged Teleute which was a nervous moment since she had lightning claws (inactive thankfully) jutting from one of her gauntlets. Enhancements or not, those claws could have torn the unarmoured woman apart with ease. "Help me?"
"Certainly," Teleute agreed quickly. "Ah... what with?"
"My marines!" Umi leant closer and half-whispered into her ear: "So stupid."
Umi was calling someone stupid? Umi? Teleute winced. "Why don't you tell me a little more about this." She relaxed slightly only to tense up as she saw the helmet of the next World Eater to enter was battered as if by some hardened club. One that apparently had an aquila stamped on it just like the reinforced butt of the bolt pistol that sat at Umi's hip.
She could practically feel the glare she received from the World Eater, whose black armour proclaimed him to be a Chaplain.