A Cold God, Chapter 41

The ship broke into realspace cleanly. In the hold, the clamps around the True Ice construct sang with stress that never turned into heat. I felt the vectors through every mounting ring and brace. The crew bled off residual warp shear and began the bleed-down protocol I had specified: staged, quiet, and without chatter.

“Approach beacon received,” one of their tech-adepts said over the internal circuit. “Flag is requesting identification of special cargo. Seal authority?”

“Authority remains sealed,” Lokir answered. His voice stayed level. The tech-adept hesitated a heartbeat, then obeyed.

I extended a portion of my will down into the avatar and woke it fully. The conduits took my presence without noise. The control sigils settled. Muscles that were not muscles waited for instruction. Between one moment and the next, I was a body, twenty feet tall, weighing more than tanks, and my thoughts had edges again.

“Lord,” Lokir said on the private channel. “Fleet reports the Lion’s flagship is ready to receive. He wants to meet you on his strategium.”

“Understood,” I said through the avatar. I kept the voice tight and small to hold back the frost and the storm. “Prep a shuttle with heavy cargo restraints.”

“Already done.”

They depressurized the hold. The outer doors opened onto a view that filled the frame of the world. The fleet hung against a backdrop of black and hard light. Dark Angels vessels formed lines around the flag like ribs and teeth, supported by Army transports and Mechanicum hulls with studded spines and hanger grids. There were ships here that were built to move regiments and others built to break continents. I measured warmsign within them from here and recorded it out of habit. Then I stopped. I did not need the data and I did not want to leave traces.

The shuttle they sent was a cargo box with thrusters and a docking claw that could hold a small titan. I stepped into it, felt the clamps bite, and braced. The pilot lit the engines. We crossed the emptiness on a clear path that no one challenged. Even my breath would have made frost ripple across the bulkheads if I had let it. I didn’t. I kept the cold close.

We came in under the command towers of the flagship and rotated into the bay. Runes and landing darts flashed in the air. The shuttle locked into its guide frame and sealed. The bay doors closed, pressure rose, and a double row of Legionaries in black-green armor advanced as one. Their armor bore the marks of recent work. Scored plates. Scuffs that had not been polished out yet. I watched the air frost around their plating and then clear as their heaters compensated. They held.

The Lion walked at their head.

He was not any taller than Horus, but he carried the space around him with a grip that didn’t loosen. His plate fit him as if he had been born in it, and his sword rested against his shoulder without drawing attention to itself. He looked at me without staring at my face or at my height. He looked as if he was looking through the reports he had already read and checking them against what stood in front of him.

“Arthas,” he said. The name came steady. No doubt. No irritation. “Welcome to my command. I am Lion El’Jonson.”

“Lion,” I answered. I kept the modulation tight. The first words were the danger point. If I eased too much power into the channels of the throat, the sound would have carried force it didn’t need. “Thank you for receiving me.”

He glanced once at the white frost that had webbed across the deck around my feet and then at the way the frost stopped as if a line had been drawn. I kept that line in place.

“Horus briefed me,” he said. “He did not understate the situation. Or your capabilities.”

“I came because he asked,” I said. “I was not sent.”

“I know.” He turned and gestured. “Walk with me.”

We moved across the bay. The Dark Angels did not move aside in a rush. They stepped aside in time. They looked up once, took in what they needed to, and then looked back down the line of their duties. I respected that.

The strategium was a long chamber with light coming from tables and planes of displayed data. The central display was a star and a handful of planets with density-coded shells. There were sigils that marked holding garrisons, interdiction buoys, and burn zones that had grown from single points into blotches. The blotches had the color reserved for “contested” and “lost.”

The Lion stopped at the main dais and mapped a field to my presence so I could stand without breaking anything. He didn’t ask me to sit. He knew I didn’t need to.

“Your constraints,” he said, without preamble.

“I can’t bring my Legion,” I said. “Not openly. The Emperor hasn’t ordered me to this front. Horus came in person and asked me to help. I agreed. What I can offer is this construct and what I can put through it. It’s enough to change the balance of one battle, or ten, if we do it with care.”

“Can you affect an entire world?” He asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I can draw heat out of air, ground, and water. I can lay a winter that does not break. I can deny atmospheric motion. I can lock the pressure gradient. I can stop biology and chemistry across the surface. I can also raise the dead as local force multipliers. I won’t touch your dead unless you ask. If you want me to use enemy dead or indigenous carcasses, I can do that without endangering your men.”

He held my gaze for a second longer and then looked back at the table. He put in a command and a world magnified. Green belts. Rivers. A render of weather patterns that had once been gentle and now had a jagged overlay like scarring. Outposts had black crosses through them. One sector had turned gray with heavy interference.

“This one,” he said. “Nilaqui Prime. Agricultural. Mixed native biosphere. The Rangdan slipped a seed force in and took it during our redeployment. They spread fast. I have people there. Army. Auxilia. Some of my sons. Not many. They’re in deep shelters and field bastions. They can hide from orbital scans but not forever. The Rangdan are pulling them apart when they find them. If you can kill the light, the heat, and the air without touching my bunkers, I can pull them out with minimum losses.”

“I can,” I said. “I need clean corridors above the emplacement grid. I need your people down. I need your ships back from low orbit. I’ll take the rest.”

He nodded and looked to his aides. “Signal all commands. Nilaqui Prime. Full tactical withdrawal to pre-designated shelters. No exceptions. No heroics. If they can’t make their primary, they hit the secondary and wait. If they can’t reach the secondary, they dig and broadcast a marker on the trespass band.”

A comm-officer frowned. “Sir, some of the Army commanders will want to contest the orbital. They won’t like, ah—”

“Tell them to shut it and get underground,” the Lion said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “We’re going to try something new. If they stand in the open, they die for nothing. If they listen, they live.”

“Understood.”

He turned back to me. “Tell me what you need from my ships.”

“Pull your pickets to a safe distance. High orbit, minimum. If you have anything in the atmosphere, get it out now. I’ll saturate from the pole that gives me the fastest coverage to your bunker grid. I’ll ping your shelters on the cold bands you give me. I’ll avoid them.”

He considered. “Comms?”

“I’ll establish comms when necessary,” I said. “Give me a frequency set your men aren’t using for anything else. I’ll stay on it until the job’s done.”

An operations captain stepped forward. He had broad shoulders and a scar that ran from hairline to ear. He didn’t hide the way he looked at me. He didn’t look for permission to speak. He spoke because he needed to.

“What about the forest,” he said. “That world feeds three other systems. If we freeze it like a block and then it cracks down to the bedrock, we lose more than a battle. We lose three winters for three worlds.”

“I cannot ensure the forest will survive,” I said. “My power does not discriminate. But rest assured that, when all this is done, the soil will recover and be fertile enough to feed a new generation of forestry.”

He exhaled. “All right then.”

The Lion glanced at him, then at me. “We’ll do it.”

We spent another ten minutes on codes, altitudes, parameters, and the rules of engagement. He didn’t waste words. I didn’t either. When it was done, he held my gaze again.

“I can feel what you are… somehow.” The Lion said. There was no threat in it. There was an assessment, and a quiet acceptance that came behind the assessment. “You came anyway.”

“Yes,” I said. “If I do this right, your men don’t die.”

He nodded once. “Then do it.”

I left the strategium and returned to the bay. The Lion didn’t escort me. He had work. His sons had work. I walked back to the shuttle to the sound of engines spooling up for order relay. The deck officer gave me a set of lane vectors to the drop point. I stepped into the cargo bay and let the restraints lock down.

“Your voice on the designated channel is clear,” the comm officer said over the link. “Lion to Arthas. You’re green.”

“Copy,” I said.

We cut free and burned for the planet.

Nilaqui Prime filled the shuttle’s forward pane as a turning sweep of cloud and ocean. It was young by Imperial standards. It wore a heavy belt of forest on its largest continent and its air held more water than most. Its storm cells worked in predictable cycles. The Rangdan had pushed those cycles into odd shapes with their landing work and their incursions. I read the distortions as we came down and filed them in a span of thought I didn’t need to keep.

“Altitude profile received,” the pilot said. “We’ll reach your designated point in two minutes.”

“Open the bay,” I said.

Wind clawed into the shuttle. I stepped to the edge. The world opened below me. I dropped.

Air slammed across the armor of the construct. The symbols at my joints flared and held. Speed rose, fell, and settled where I wanted it based on drag and angle. I rode the fall and watched for any Imperial warm marks still moving. There were a few. Vehicles burning for deep cover. Transports that had lifted late. A flight of fighters that cut a lazy arc to make the enemy think they were still present and then dove for hard tunnels. They were all moving out of my path. Good.

Clouds closed over me. Moisture condensed on the construct’s surface and then stopped. I denied the condensation and kept the skin clean. I needed the instrument to breathe in signal, not water.

The designated channel came alive. “Lion to Arthas. All forces report in bastions or en route to secondaries. You clear?”

“Clear,” I said.

I began.

I took the heat out of the troposphere over the northern pole first. It was the fastest way to push the front. The air changed its behavior when I pulled energy out. It slowed. It sank. The pressure lines redrew themselves. I drew a circle and dragged it across the hemisphere like a net, tightening it to the lines of their bunker map. Above me, clouds took on weight and thickness that had not been in the forecast. Ahead of me, the ocean calmed as the winds stopped pushing it. I reached into the water and made its surface skin turn to ice one layer at a time.

My power was slow, but unrelenting, much like the end of all things that I embodied. It was calm and patient and uncaring, and no matter how much you ran from it it would always catch up. 

The Rangdan noticed. I felt their movement when I extended my attention through the avatar’s senses into the storm that was now mine. They were here in numbers. Their shapes wandered across common geometries with wrong angles and joints that a living skeleton would not pick. The closer I brought the cold, the more they jerked and scuttled. Patterns in them reconfigured to resist. Some of them could scrape at the air and call light. Some of them vomited heat in cones that ran red in my perception. None of it mattered.

They recoiled when my storm touched them. Their movement went from purposeful to irregular. They tried to phase and found my winter sitting across every vector. It wasn’t just the air. It was the ground and the space between. The nearest ones slowed and then stopped. The further ones trudged and left lines that ended nowhere. Some of them dug. Ice filled the holes before they could finish a thought.

A squadron of their vessels came up from under the clouds to get clear. The hulls on those ships were wrong in ways that were the same across their kind and different in every instance. They threw unknown radiation into the upper air. The radiation hit cold that did not absorb it and the leakage collapsed back onto them. They lost surface systems one by one. The ice on their flanks grew in sheets and then in depth. Their drives sputtered, flashed, and went dark. One tried to spin. The ice broke off its tail, wrapped itself around the main body, and then re-formed over the drive bells. It dropped out of the cloud like an overdense stone. It hit a frozen river and vanished into the new surface.

Snow built depth. Ice sank roots. Branches on trees froze and held. Leaves became plates. The canopy lost movement. The first Rangdan massed for a push near one of the lowland cities. Their shapes ran in a wave along the streets. The wave hit a wall of cold and turned into a scattering of parts. They struggled on the ice like animals. I dropped the temperature three degrees there and watched them slow to a crawl. I stopped sending snow for a minute and let my dead stand.

I raised them cleanly. There was no heat. There was no rot. The dead on this world were not my dead, not born to me, but their bodies were scaffolds. I made them move. They came out of the drifts and the buildings and the shallow pits where the Rangdan had left them. Some were human. Some were not. I didn’t give them anything they didn’t need. I gave them only a will to tear the enemy apart. They fell on the Rangdan and pulled them down. The wordless struggle ran across the frozen streets with a kind of order that didn’t come from thought. The Rangdan broke. They ran nowhere. They stopped.

I kept going.

The winter spread from the north and met the lines that bled out from the south. The equatorial belt narrowed and then vanished. In the ocean, I dropped sheets down into the upper water and let them thicken until the water below slowed and the currents lost strength. Fish died. Plants froze and sank. I mapped the offshore bunkers and left holes above them where the water would not press down enough to crush. The ice bridged over, and the holes stayed holes.

Above me, their ships tried again. They tried to burn a hole through my sky. Their beams met cold that I had organized into lattices. The beams hit those lattices and failed to transit. Energy went nowhere. The ships slowed under their own lost thrust and began to pick up ice again. I adjusted the surface textures against them and watched their control start to vibrate, then die. One of them tried something I had not seen. It pulled a fold in the air. The fold met the boundary I had set and stopped. The ship kinked under its own force. The nose crumpled. It fell.

This was a slaughter. It needed to be. The alternative was to push men into trenches and fortifications until the numbers ran out. All along the ground, in their camps and their moving formations, things stopped. Torsos slowed. Limbs slowed. Joints stuck. Hulks that were half machines and half biology tipped over and stayed down. Where they thrashed, I locked them to the ice. Where they screamed, I took the air away.

On the third hour, the taproots of the forest gave a long groan as the water in them froze and turned to ice. The trees broke apart into gnarled and frozen sculptures. 

At the end of the fourth hour, the last free water on the surface was in the shadow of a ridge that had always been dry. I took it too. A flock of native birds that had slept in a cave there huddled together and stopped. I marked their bodies. I would not raise them. I didn’t need them. I kept the cave’s roof from collapsing and left it alone.

I expanded the winter up into the lower stratosphere so that storms would not curl back in and push heat down. I took heat out of the ground to a depth that would keep the permafrost from bleeding warmth back for days. I wrapped the mountain ranges with colder air to keep wind from climbing and rolling. I went back through every bunker and checked it from the outside. Two had microfractures at one corner. I ran a skim of True Ice across them, paper thin, and fused the wrong lines. The pressure inside didn’t change. The men inside didn’t know I had touched their walls. That was good. I didn’t need thanks and they didn’t need to have a god shape walk through their heads while they sat in the dark.

I made a pass from the pole to the equator and back. I confirmed that the Rangdan ships that had made for orbit had failed to clear my layer. I confirmed that the ground under their landing sites had frozen to bedrock. I confirmed that every inland sea had set. When I was sure, I exhaled a breath I had not needed and let the network of attention ease. The winter I had laid would hold without me for a while now, like a machine with a flywheel.

“Now,” I said. “You can roll your recovery crews.”

“All commands,” the Lion said, not to me. “Begin Phase Two. Roll to pre-planned sites. Arthas, I’m sending you a sweep plan.”

“Received,” I said.

His plan was made with a careful hand. It took advantage of the cold and of the way the terrain had become simpler when all softness had gone out of it. His routes avoided lowlying places where cold pooled and would pool even now. He didn’t risk ice bridges over anything that looked like void under the surface. He kept his men keyed to watch for hairline cracks and no more than that. He had done this before, in another winter somewhere.

I followed his plan with adjustments. We cleared a shelter full of Army troopers who had been down to their last two days of rations. They opened their doors to a world that was white and still and didn’t make sense. They cheered over the vox until one of their officers told them to breathe through their cloth and keep moving. We cleared a field bastion where thirty Auxilia had held a perimeter around a hospital tent for too long. The wounded inside had stiffened but they were not dead. I watched them load into transports and pull out along a path that ran flat and clear and didn’t give under the weight.

We found a Dark Angels sergeant and seven of his squad in a pit with a burned-out skimmer. They had refused to move because the sergeant had taken a hit in the stomach and wouldn’t be moved. They had dug and fought and dug again. The sergeant sat with his back to the pit wall and his hands on his faceplate. He didn’t look up when the rescue team came. He didn’t stand. He said nothing. Two of his men lifted him and carried him into the crawler. He stared at nothing. He wasn’t shocked. He was empty. The cold couldn’t touch him and I couldn’t either. I didn’t try.

There were still Rangdan shapes here and there. Most were frozen in place in positions that made no sense now that motion had left them. A few still twitched. The dead I had raised saw them first and went to them. I held the dead back when the rescue crews came near. I would not have my men walk past my corpses without warning. That wasn’t the Lion’s way and it wasn’t mine.

As the hours went on, the Lion spoke to me from his tower.

“You’re keeping the ceiling at what?”

“Negative sixty in the upper bands, rising to negative twenty at ground level where your crews are working. Your men will be fine if they stay inside their suits. If I made it any colder, I’d be the only thing left in this world still capable of communicating.”

“How long can you hold the field?”

“As long as I want,” I said. 

He was quiet for a moment. “I can move half a dozen regiments through a winter corridor if you keep the air still and the light low.”

“You can move all of them,” I said. “Just don’t let them act like the sun is out. Compression burns lungs at a walk in this cold. If they get out and start shouting, I will let them, but then they will die.”

“They won’t,” he said. 

A junior officer cut in. “My lord, Third Battalion secured the eastern silo line. No contacts. We are moving to evacuate the workers from Silo Eight.”

“Make it standard,” the Lion said. “Arthas, I want an estimate on the mortality rate on the Rangdan.”

“Ninety-nine percent on the surface,” I said. “Anything in deep holes will be slower to die but the air they breathe will fail. Their machines will stop. Their weapons are failing. Your men can run lines for controlled breaches and burn whatever is left when the thaw starts.”

“Good.”

By the tenth hour, I had turned the entire planet into a locked system with small, controlled leaks. There were no storms and there were no waves. We walked the crews through their routes. We updated the maps when we saw a new sinkhole or when a bridge flexed more than it had to. We recorded the positions of every Imperial shelter and every human mark we found. The snow continued to fall in slow sheets that I thickened where I needed to hide people and thinned where I needed to let machines run.

A Navy commander came on our shared channel. He sounded tired and relieved. “The sky is clear, Lord. I mean there’s no sky, it’s all just snow clouds, but it’s clear. We can see for ten thousand kilometers. The enemy isn’t moving. I don’t know what I’m looking at, to be honest.”

“Keep moving,” the Lion said. “Get your units into overwatch.”

“Understood.”

I pulled my attention back from the far edges and looked at the work we had done. The winter was clean. There were no bulges or eddies where I didn’t want them. The only heat came from shelters and crawlers and a handful of unknown spots that I expected were alien burrows too deep for now. I marked them to be burned later.

“Lion,” I said. “I’ll hold the world for you. You can move your people at your pace. Don’t hurry. Haste kills in this environment.”

“I know,” he said. Then he hesitated and added, almost as if the words cost him a fraction of pride, “You did it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You saved me divisions,” he said. The flat line in his voice cracked, not into weakness, but into something that was rare for him. “I cannot afford to waste my sons or the men who fight beside them. I do that only when I have to. This… I’ll take this. I’ll take a clean, frozen blade over a tide of blood.”

“Arthas,” he said after a moment. “When this thaw ends, I’ll have to explain this to the War Council. Some of them will be happy that it worked. Most of them will ask how it was done. I assume you wish your presence to be kept a secret?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I will do my best,” he said.

“You can claim to have unleashed a powerful weapon that was gifted to you by the Emperor,” I said again.

“I suppose I could.”

He cut the channel without ceremony. I kept the winter in place and walked through the most dangerous points again. I found a cave with bodies in it that had been hung on hooks and drained. The Rangdan had made a pantry, nothing more. I cut the hooks. I laid the bodies on the ground and covered them with ice. They would not rot. I found a field of machines that had been disassembled and stacked in patterns that meant nothing to me. The patterns had ceased to hold tension. The stacks had fallen without my hand. I left them as they were.

By night-cycle, the planet had already forgotten daylight. There was no dawn and no dusk. There was just shadow and gray and the colors of paint and armor and eyes. My dead stood along the roads and in the fields and at the corners of the old cities. They didn’t move unless I told them to. They scared some of the men and comforted others. It didn’t matter. They were tools. I would dismiss them when I didn’t need them. I kept them simple. No thought. No memory. The dead should sleep.

I stood on the ice with my feet planted in a river that was a river in name only now. The wind did not blow. The sky had no cloud left that I did not control. The line of the horizon was clear and straight. In the distance, a convoy of crawlers moved in single file with exact spacing. They looked small. I could have tipped one with a finger. I didn’t.

The Rangdan no longer moved. The few pockets below ground that still showed heat would die in their own gas inside a day. I sent a warning to the nearest patrols to stay out of them until I said otherwise. They thanked me. One of the drivers sounded like he had not slept in two days. I told him to switch. He swore and then apologized and then switched.

Time stretched and then folded in on itself as the work became maintenance. The Lion’s men cleared bastions, ferried the wounded, collected the bodies they could reach, and killed what pockets of the enemy still twitched. The Army crews moved like insects across the white, tiny next to their machines, but I tracked each of them because each was a point of heat in my field. Each was a life I could keep alive by moving a line one degree this way or that. I did it.

On the twentieth hour of the operation, the Lion came down himself. He stood on the ramp of a heavy crawler with two of his captains and stared at the edge of a city that was nothing but clean lines and snow. He looked smaller here in the open, but only because the space around him didn’t belong to ships anymore. He lifted his head and looked at me. He had no reason to stare. He did anyway, once.

I walked to him, careful, each step set to not send a ripple into the crust.

He spoke without the vox.

“This is good work,” he said. His breath made a small cloud that twisted and then fell. He didn’t shiver. He was a Primarch. Cold or heat did not make him less.

He gestured at the frozen world. “You did this in hours. I’ve seen worlds burned in less time. Those worlds were lost. This one isn’t. We can use it. We can feed off it and through it. We didn’t have to grind ourselves down to get it.”

He smiled, small. It didn’t reach his eyes because his eyes were busy.

“You’ve made my life easier,” he said. “I don’t get to say that often. Thank you, brother.”

He turned, looked at the convoy that waited for his word, and then back at me.

“You said you couldn’t bring your Legion,” he said. “Can you keep coming yourself?”

“Yes,” I said. “For now.”

“For now will do,” he said. “We have more worlds and I have realized that your powers will be the key to attaining the ultimate victory over these monsters.”

He stepped back up into the crawler and sealed the door. The hatch locked. His convoy moved out.

I stood in the cold I had made and felt the last Rangdan vessel go dead far over my head and fall. It started as a slow drop and then became a fall. It hit far away. The impact ran through the ice and into the bedrock. I let the shock dissipate and did not let it crack anything I wanted.

On the vox, the Lion’s voice rose in the clear.

“All commands,” he said. “Nilaqui Prime is secure. No one dies in the cold without my say so. Phase Three. Start moving supplies. Get the wounded to orbit. Get the civilians out of the deep shelters and into the heating domes. Everyone else stays on mission until we’re done. And remember this day.”

There was no cheer. This wasn’t a day for shouting. It was a day for taking a breath and not falling apart. It was a day for counting the names that had not been added to the list of dead and for writing down the numbers of rations and fuel and bandages. It was a day for quiet.

I kept the winter in place and watched for movement. There was none. All was quiet. All was still.