Warhammer 40K: System Error, I Summoned the Arch-Traitor!

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The Emperor's Dream.

The moment that legendary warship reappeared in realspace, even the orbital station dispatchers above Macragge forgot to log their navigation records.

Her flawless hull caught a golden halo under the light of the star. The ancient weapon arrays lining her flanks faced the void in silence. She did not need to fire. Her mere presence was enough to make any enemy with ill intentions think twice.

People would naturally ask: how could a warship that should have slumbered in legend suddenly appear in orbit over Macragge?

The answer was ready-made: the might of the Emperor of Mankind.

On one hand, the explanation was simple enough. No one needed to wade through the mind-numbing complexity of Warp miracles. On the other hand, it was perfectly legitimate: the Emperor's Dream was the personal flagship that the Master of Mankind had granted to His friend Kaelen.

Who would dare question a friend of the Emperor?

The cogboys were the first to lose their minds.

Those Tech-Priest sages from Mars practically prostrated themselves before Kaelen, their red robes spreading across the floor, their mechadendrites trembling with barely contained excitement.

Their optical sensors flickered with near-fanatical light. Their voices stuttered and broke from sheer, irrepressible longing as they begged for the grace to board and tour the ship.

Even just one look. Even just one touch.

The Emperor's Dream carried so much technology lost across ten thousand years of war. Every inch of conduit, every armor plate, to the Adeptus Mechanicus, they were relics among relics.

Kaelen refused.

The reason was simple: he needed to use it.

During the coming Indomitus Crusade, the Emperor's Dream would serve as his flagship and as the joint operational base for the three Primarchs and all senior officers.

Guilliman formally transferred command of the First Expeditionary Fleet into the hands of Horus and the others, then withdrew to Macragge to devote himself fully to the mountains of administrative affairs piling up across the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar and the Imperium Sanctus.

Just as he himself put it: "I shall focus my energies on civil administration."

Kaelen couldn't even be bothered to mock that classic line.

But the arrangement was correct.

Konor, Guilliman's adoptive father, had once said this of his adopted son: he must restrain the passion in his heart, and when patience ran thin, an overwhelming need for control would take its place.

Like father, like son, right? You control-freak Emperor of Mankind.

Besides, no matter how brilliant a person might be, they could only truly pour themselves into one grand undertaking at a time.

The Indomitus Crusade looked like a great holy war on the surface. In reality, it was inextricably tied to governance, civilian welfare, logistics, and diplomacy.

Guilliman's greatest strength was exactly that kind of work: incorporating one reclaimed world after another into an efficiently functioning Imperial system. That was where his genius lived.

So let him handle all the civil administration. Leave the military command to the other brothers.

Each to his proper role. That was real efficiency.

On the very day the fleet was set to depart, Horus brought bad news.

"Bad news, my friend." The Warmaster's tone was a few shades deeper than usual.

Kaelen turned around, still holding the final supply manifest.

"What happened?"

"A main battlegroup of an expeditionary fleet has been completely annihilated." Horus's voice carried the particular weight that only veterans carry, and beneath it, a faint note of reproach.

Not directed at Kaelen. Directed at a fleet commander he had never met.

"An Emperor-class battleship. A Retribution-class battleship. A large number of Lunar-class cruisers. At least 4 escort squadrons. The entire battlegroup. Not one ship made it out."

He simply could not understand.

What kind of commander could lose a fight like this? A fully formed Imperial battlegroup, not driven back, not crippled, annihilated. Not even a single escort frigate had managed to jump into the Warp and flee. This had gone beyond tactical error into something else entirely.

Kaelen's brow furrowed.

That ship composition. He knew it too well.

"If I'm not wrong, He moved personally."

"Who?"

"The Plague Lord." Kaelen drew a slow breath and set the data-slate aside. "If I remember correctly, He took the field in person to save face. In a place the Emperor of Mankind wasn't watching, He crushed one of our fleets."

"What weapons did they use?" Horus was baffled.

In his career, he had faced no shortage of powerful enemies. The Rangdan were among them, that xenos race that nearly shattered the Imperium's advance was still one of the most tenacious opponents in his memory.

But even the Rangdan had never destroyed a fully formed Imperial fleet so quickly. So efficiently.

"It wasn't weapons." Kaelen shook his head. "It was time. The Warp's flow of time is deeply unstable — you know that better than I do — and the Plague Lord exploited it."

He paused, choosing his words carefully.

"He caused effects that would happen in the future to act upon the present. Let me put it plainly: this Imperial fleet was fated to rot eventually. Steel would rust, hulls would decay, crews would fester and die. What the Plague Lord did was advance that outcome, borrow it from the future and spend it now. Time-loan tactics."

"What desecration..."

Horus drew a sharp breath. That face, so long accustomed to battlefield carnage, wore an expression of genuine, undisguised disbelief.

Even for him, facing something that twisted causality and trampled the laws of time, a chill rose from somewhere deep in his soul.

"Did Father not notice? He..."

"I already told you the Plague Lord moved in a place the Emperor of Mankind wasn't watching." Kaelen shrugged, his tone carrying the flat calm of someone who had seen too many strange things to be shocked anymore.

"And on Yax, possessing Guilliman probably cost Him a great deal of strength. During the cooldown period, maybe He couldn't intervene in time."

He didn't press further into the topic. The annihilation of an Imperial battlegroup was heartbreaking, yes. But the Imperial war machine was already turning again under Guilliman's direction. With the Master of Ultramar holding the fort, plus the STC templates for the Gloriana-class battleships, the Imperial shipyards would soon be running at full output. New fleets would roll out in short order to fill the gap.

Heartbreaking. But not a moment for despair.

Kaelen led Horus deeper into the Emperor's Dream.

The ship was eerily quiet. There was almost no one aboard: Kaelen's remaining 9 Castellan Battle-Automata, and the 3 Adeptus Custodes guards Guilliman had assigned to him. No one else.

Full automation had its advantages.

The bridge needed no hundred officers on watch. The engine room needed no swarms of servitors shuffling through it. The entire colossal warship operated like a living thing, running in silence, as if waiting at every moment for its master's word.

The two of them walked the broad internal corridors until they passed beneath the dome and into the circular observation gallery.

Kaelen noticed Horus's footsteps slow.

The Warmaster stopped. His gaze dropped through the transparent deck beneath his feet and settled on the empty dining hall below.

There was nothing there. Tables and chairs stood in neat rows. Tableware caught the light and gleamed faintly.

But Horus was seeing something else.

Kaelen stopped beside him and asked, quietly.

"That was the beginning of the end of your loneliness, wasn't it? My Wolf God."

Horus gave a small nod.

He didn't answer right away. His gaze remained on the empty tables below, as though through the veil of ten thousand years, he could make out another person standing there.

"When Father brought Russ home, he was waiting for me here." Horus's voice had gone very soft, like he was afraid of disturbing something that had long since disappeared. "I stood right here, in this exact spot, watching my brother come back..."

He could almost still see it.

Leman Russ, that golden-haired barbarian from Fenris, and his rough-edged tribesmen gathered around that table, tearing into great hunks of meat, draining great bowls of ale. Their raucous laughter nearly shook the crystal chandeliers loose from the dome.

And himself, standing at his father's side, his heart full of jealousy and unease.

The emotions of youth were like a dull blade. They couldn't cut through anything. They just made you lie awake at night.

Those words still echoed in his ears.

You should exterminate Fenris, Father. How savage they are. They are primitives.

He is a barbarian, Father. I do not accept him as my brother.

Horus smiled.

The smile held the warmth of memory, and also mockery. Mockery of his younger self. Fond recollection of the Great Crusade, and embarrassment at what a terrible first impression he'd formed of his brother Russ.

Russ was never a barbarian.

Perhaps the Lion was.

The thought made the corner of his mouth lift a little further. Then he shook his head.

The Lion was a steady, dependable knight now. The Great Lion was no longer the silent hunter who had walked out of the forests of Caliban. Neither of them were barbarians. The old prejudice was nothing more than the narrow sight of youth.

"In your eyes, my friend." Horus turned to look at Kaelen. "What kind of man is my brother Russ?"

Kaelen thought for a moment, then gave a precise answer.

"Big-hearted. Outwardly warm, inwardly guarded — but someone who takes family seriously. Genuinely loyal." He paused and raised an eyebrow. "Second only to Vulkan, Lord of Drakes."

Horus didn't argue.

Kaelen went on.

"After you fell, he boarded the Vengeful Spirit to assassinate you. And when you recovered some of your sanity, Leman Russ — the Emperor's cold executioner — actually softened for you. That tells you how deep his feelings ran."

The smile left Horus's face.

In its place came something more complicated: anger and grief, wound together.

"He should not have softened." His voice was low and raw. "He should have killed me. Not let me go on and on with everything I did."

"No." Kaelen's tone was steady, almost flat. "That was the best move he could have made. Because it was precisely his hesitation that laid the groundwork for the Emperor of Mankind to land the killing blow."

The damage from Russ's Spear of Russ had left a decisive crack, one that the Emperor exploited when the final duel came. The cunning old man conjured the image of the one person Horus loved most, Loken, his son. He used the last shred of love left in the Warmaster's heart to strike the killing blow.

It had also, incidentally, spawned a classic joke: what do you do when Horus starts drooling? Doctor Wolf, where are you? Come save him.

"Speaking of which." Kaelen pivoted, his tone lighter. "Do you remember Corvus Corax, Lord of the Raven Guard, Wolf God?"

"My youngest brother, the last to be found. What about him?" The name pulled Horus back from the weight of those memories.

"Back when you were still the uncorrupted Imperial Warmaster, during a joint operation, you pressured Corax into sending the Nineteenth Legion on a meat-grinder assignment. The Raven Lord refused. Perturabo stood on the side and sneered. Only Russ spoke up for him."

Kaelen kept his pace easy and unhurried.

"After your rebellion, the Raven Lord led his surviving sons in guerrilla warfare. The Lion pressured him again, naturally. Still Russ who defended him."

He tilted his head, and the look in his eyes carried an unsparing amusement.

"The Imperial Warmaster and the Second Warmaster were both real pieces of work, I have to say. Piling on a poor Raven Lord like that?"

"Ahem."

Horus cleared his throat. His voice carried a distinctly unnatural awkwardness.

"That... I'll explain when I have more time."

When his friend brought up this particular piece of dark history, the Warmaster's expression couldn't quite settle. It moved back and forth between guilt and embarrassment, and found no comfortable ground between them.

➤ Next: The Expedition Continues: Armageddon and the Maelstrom

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