Chapter 200 - Assassins of the Iron Hands
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Horus had always prided himself on his negotiation skills.
In his view, no matter how stubborn a person was, even his brother Rogal Dorn — they would eventually find common ground within his rhythm.
He had come into this meeting with a clear goal: extract what he could about Iron Father Kardan from this Iron Hands squad, gauge the current state of the Chapter, and build leverage for tomorrow's formal negotiations.
Not that the Wolf King had any desire to command these warriors from a position of lofty superiority.
He simply wanted to reach some degree of reconciliation with the sons of Ferrus Manus in a public setting.
And if reconciliation proved impossible, then at least easing the tension between both sides was worth something.
But as the meeting wore on, something started to feel wrong.
Captain Tarek was too composed.
Not the composure of diplomatic restraint. Something else. He had never actually entered the conversation. His answers were flawless, his bearing neither servile nor overbearing, but every word sounded like a man reading from a pre-prepared script, not a flesh-and-blood warrior in genuine exchange with his primarch.
Horus had sat across from countless people in countless negotiations. Some outwardly respectful, inwardly resistant. Some outwardly hard, inwardly wavering.
Tarek was neither.
It was like speaking to a man behind glass.
These people were planning something.
The thought crystallized in an instant.
Horus decided to test it.
"I offer my most sincere apologies for the vile acts committed against your Legion Master, my brother Ferrus Manus, during my fallen era." The Wolf King's voice was low and earnest. "I do not ask for your forgiveness. But I, Lupercal, will spend whatever remains of my life atoning for the sins I have committed."
As he spoke, he turned his full perception on Tarek's vital signs.
Even through a power helmet, a primarch's senses could cut through ceramite. The faintest twitch of a facial muscle. The slightest shift in breathing rhythm. The bio-electric currents that betrayed emotion before the mind even knew it was feeling.
When Ferrus's name left his lips, Tarek's breathing didn't change.
Not at all.
No anger. No grief.
As though Horus had mentioned not his decapitated Gene-Sire, but a complete stranger.
They are fakes.
The Wolf King's heart dropped to freezing point.
Even the most iron-willed Astartes would react to hearing their primarch's name invoked in shame. Some spike of fury, however suppressed. However fleeting.
And Ferrus's head still bore Horus's own teeth marks.
No true Iron Hands warrior could sit through that apology in perfect silence.
These warriors — what exactly are they?
Horus kept talking. His expression gave nothing away. But quietly, smoothly, he shifted his weight back in his seat, moving his center of gravity just enough to give himself a fraction more reaction time if they moved.
"My lord." Captain Tarek spoke at last. "We will not forgive you."
"But since you say you will do your utmost to atone for the sins you have committed."
He paused.
"In that case."
In the next instant, Tarek drew his bolter, leveled it at Horus's face, and pulled the trigger.
Behind him, every Iron Hands warrior opened fire at once. A dense torrent of bolter rounds poured out like iron rain.
Two of them hurled grenades. The canisters traced short arcs through the air, hit the floor, and didn't explode. Instead they released a ring of warped, rippling distortion. Stasis grenades. Horus's speed was dragged down immediately, every movement like pushing through thick glue.
The plasma guns on two more warriors fired simultaneously. High-temperature plasma beams punched straight into the shield generator on his Terminator plate. The energy shield shrieked and overloaded, collapsing into a scatter of blue sparks.
Horus raised his arm and returned fire with the under-slung twin bolters, driving bursts into the assassins while he kept moving, kept shifting, trying to stay ahead of the fire that seemed to track him like a plague.
He reached for the comm.
Static. Nothing but static. The network had been cut before they ever walked in.
The meeting room was too small. Too cramped for a primarch to maneuver properly, and the floor was littered with stasis grenades pumping out their distortion fields in overlapping rings. His movements were locked down, every dodge half a beat slower than it should have been.
"Enough!"
The roar detonated through the room.
Horus stopped holding back. A massive surge of psychic power tore free from within him.
He used it rarely. That didn't mean he couldn't.
A semi-transparent psychic barrier erupted outward, catching the entire hail of bolter rounds in mid-air, freezing them in a suspended cloud of screaming metal.
Then he drove the power into his limbs. Muscle fibers swelled under psychic catalysis, speed and strength climbing in tandem, doubling, tripling.
He tore through the stasis field like it was paper.
His hands found two assassins. He wrenched.
Ceramite and flesh came apart together. Blood painted the conference table.
He hadn't wanted this.
Even as he moved, his mind had been running through the alternatives. Could this be a misunderstanding? Could Iron Father Kardan's personal grudge against the primarchs have pushed these warriors into something rash, some act of private fury that spiraled beyond their orders?
Killing warriors of a First Founding Chapter would crater his diplomatic position. Worst case, it could light the fuse on open armed conflict inside the Imperium.
He feared no enemy. But he would not be the spark that set humanity burning again from within.
Now he was certain.
Even an Astartes driven by bone-deep hatred for him would not hear Ferrus's name and feel nothing. That blankness wasn't discipline. It wasn't restraint.
These people were assassins in Iron Hands skin.
A third fell at his hands.
The survivors adapted fast. The two warriors flanking Tarek poured suppressive fire back on him and threw two more stasis grenades at his feet. At the same time, a third man reached to his waist and drew a small object, small enough to fit in one palm, carved with strange runes. A twisted Warp sigil covered its surface, writhing as though it were alive.
Three things hit the floor at once.
The stasis grenades' temporal fields and the anti-psychic fluctuation bleeding from the rune device wrapped around each other and merged. The resulting trap was precise. It was built for one thing.
A gene-primarch.
Horus froze.
The psychic barrier around him let out a piercing shriek, then burst apart like a popped bubble and was gone.
Body locked. Power suppressed.
Damn it.
His pupils contracted.
Captain Tarek drew his dagger.
The blade ran with a strange purple light. A sickly-sweet, nauseating smell coiled around its edge. The moment Horus saw it, his memory was ripped back 10,000 years in an instant, back to Davin, back to the knife that had started everything — the Athame, the blade his corrupted mortal friend and governor had driven into him.
This was the same.
Tarek leaped. The dagger's purple arc cut through the dim light of the meeting room, angled straight at Horus's throat.
Was this truly how tragedy repeated itself?
Tarek's figure filled his vision. The blade's edge grew larger with every fraction of a second.
Closer.
Closer.
➤ Next: Diplomatic Fallout
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