Sons of the Hydra

by Rob Sanders

  Pallidax had lost two companies of honoured warriors on what had already been a penance crusade through the Tempest Hippocrene. Another had been decimated defending recruitment worlds from the predatory expansions of another greenskin Overfiend.

  Star forts stationed on the borders of the Maelstrom and fleet patrols had been mercilessly hit by pirates, renegades and Red Corsairs operating out of the warp storm, as the Tyrant of Badab turned his attentions rimward. As the Marines Mordant lost company after company, requests for assistance from brother successors had gone unheeded. The Nova Legion, Vindicators and Crimson Consuls were all sons of Guilliman who shared some of the responsibility for guarding the rimward frontiers of the Maelstrom – as the doomed Maelstrom Wardens had done with the coreward sectors before the Badab War. The Nova Legion didn’t reply at all. The Vindicators were found to be in the throes of their own calamity. In answer to a surprise astropathic distress signal from the Crimson Consuls, Pallidax sent a demi-company and some of his finest remaining captains to help them fight off the Alpha Legion at Carcharias. They never returned.

  All the while, the Marines Mordant had lost two further companies on the Kontradorn Drift from fighting a splinter fleet of Hive Fleet Leviathan – a gruelling engagement that had nearly cost the Chapter their only remaining battle-barge, the venerable Assiduous.

  ‘Bas-Silica, this is Assiduous, please respond,’ Ventor called.

  At first there were no words: only static. Pallidax’s mouth went to work on reports and orders that the command deck could not hear, before his battle-weary features formed a furious scowl in recognition of the communication difficulties. When sound did cut through the static it revealed to Sol Ventor gunfire and the thunder of nearby explosions.

  ‘Captain,’ Brother Orthrius said, moving between the glow of runebanks. Techmarine Arkadii’s efforts were paying off. ‘We’re getting reports of armoured renegades on the planet surface. Traitor Guard and terror attacks throughout Salina City. The cloud rising from the soda lakes is probably an engineered chemical reaction. It is drifting through the city. Sources on the ground are claiming thousands dead.’

  Ventor and his champion locked grim gazes.

  ‘Continue,’ the captain said.

  ‘People are fleeing the city,’ Orthrius said. ‘The Chapter Master opened the Bas-Silica’s gates to admit them…’

  ‘Which is what the renegades were waiting for,’ Sol Ventor said.

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘The attackers are within the perimeter defences?’

  ‘And are laying siege to what is left of the veteran First Company,’ Orthrius told him. ‘Eyewitness accounts tell of a myriad of xenos mercenaries supporting the assault. Our brothers are struggling to both mount a defence against such different enemies and defend the refugees from the city.’

  ‘And who is responsible for this?’ the captain demanded. ‘Or do these craven renegades hide their markings as they do their intentions? The Tyrant’s Corsairs? Lord Bythoss and his Apocalypse Watch? Word Bearers out of Ghalmek?’

  ‘For once, they do not hide their markings,’ Chapter Master Pallidax said, his words and hololithic representations crackling to clarity. ‘It is the Alpha Legion.’ Boltfire and detonations continued to carry across the transmission. The name of the dread Legion echoed nastily about the command deck. For a moment, the transmission was lost.

  ‘Chapter Master?’

  ‘Captain, can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ Ventor said. ‘We’re receiving you.’

  ‘Good,’ Pallidax said, ‘because I want no confusion about my next order. The enemy are in. Alien mercenaries. Renegade Guardsmen. Warp-tainted altereds. Traitors clad in bilious blue and green. The scum of the galaxy, all under the foetid banner of the hydra. The Alpha Legion have us. They are led by the one they call the Angelbane. The self-same monster no doubt responsible for the silence of our brother successors. He talks to us now, through our own fortress vox casters. He offers us a living hell – a place in his ranks, in exchange for our surrender. The game is over and the sons of Guilliman are played out. There is one piece on the board he has missed, however. A sacrifice waiting to be made. You know of what I speak.’

  ‘Chapter Master,’ Ventor said, his voice cracked with fury and pain. ‘The Assiduous has been–’

  ‘The Assiduous, aye,’ Pallidax said, not seeming to hear the captain. ‘What we have taken for misfortune and tragedy has a name. The Angelbane. This fiend and his Alpha Legion filth cannot be allowed to escape the Bas-Silica. You know what I am asking you to do, old friend?’

  ‘I do,’ Ventor answered gravely.

  ‘This is the last you shall hear from Pallidax of Vitrea Mundi,’ the Chapter Master said. ‘The final lament of the Marines Mordant. Let our name echo through the ages as warriors of the Emperor’s Space Marines, terrible and true. Loyal sons of Guilliman and avengers of our brothers’ blood. Let our dirge be the thunder of the Assiduous’ bombardment cannon and our tomb these hallowed halls. I am giving the order to lower the Bas-Silica’s void shields… now. Captain, do your duty.’

  With that, the hololithic representation warped and died. A terrible silence descended upon the command deck. One by one, Chapter serfs, crew and Marines Mordant looked to their captain.

  ‘My lord,’ Brother Orthrius said. ‘We cannot do this.’

  ‘And yet we must,’ Ventor said, his face a pale blank.

  ‘What? Become the final weapon wielded by the Alpha Legion against our brothers?’

  ‘We have no choice,’ the captain told him, his voice low and heavy with responsibility.

  ‘We can choose not to fire upon our own brothers,’ Orthrius called, his desperation echoing about the cavernous bridge.

  ‘You heard your Chapter Master,’ Ventor said. ‘We were fighting side by side against the enemies of the Imperium before you were even born. Tarro Pallidax is not given to hyperbole. When he announces that this is the end of his Chapter, he damn well means it. I have an order from my Chapter Master – as protocol dictates, I intend to follow it.’

  Ventor looked around the command deck. At the ornate helms of his honour guard hanging in shame. At Brother Arkadii and Master Zamander’s sombre acceptance. At serfs staring in disbelief at the horror unfolding on their consoles. At Earpsichor and the shipmaster waiting grimly by.

  ‘Orthrius,’ the captain said finally. ‘If we do not do this, this Angelbane – once he has taken the fortress-monastery – will turn its defence lasers upon the Assiduous. You know in her present condition she cannot withstand such an attack. Call it the dying wish of an honoured Chapter Master or self-preservation, this must be done. Status?’

  ‘The fortress-monastery’s void shields are collapsing,’ Master Zamander confirmed from a runebank.

  ‘Then please be so good as to inform the section ordinators and dorsal gun crews of our target and intention,’ the captain told Zamander. ‘I want magma-bomb warheads primed and the bombardment cannon trained upon the fortress-monastery. Full spread, if you please. No consideration is to be given to Chapter forces at the impact site or collateral citizenry in the adjacent city. Make sure they understand. Repeat the order twice. I want the target and the enemy within completely obliterated.’

  ‘As you command,’ Master Zamander said, turning back towards the runebank.

  It all happened so fast that Sol Ventor, already numb at the news from Vitrea Mundi, couldn’t make himself act. The command deck, the runebank unit and Master Zamander suddenly disappeared. The polished metal floor glowed red and then white, bubbling about the Techmarine’s boots as he backed away. The console station melted before him and a screaming Zamander – already aflame and sinking as if into a mire of molten metal – dropped down through the deck. The runebank and melting floor followed him, leaving behind a dark crater that revealed the deck below.

  Ventor felt the whoosh of heat on his face as another sub-atomic detonation turned the deck nearby into a fiery pit.
He felt Brother Orthrius push him back before the champion ran forward to help members of the honour guard. Marines Mordant were aflame and roasting within their plate. The company’s standard turned to ash, while its bearer fell down through the white-hot inferno with two of his veteran brothers. Orthrius managed to pull the final surviving member of the honour guard out of the superheated blast.

  The Alpha Legion were not just on the planet surface. They were not contained, as Orthrius had suggested, in the launch bay. They were here – intent on taking the battle-barge’s command deck. Sol Ventor shook the stunned realisation from his addled mind and found his way to action.

  ‘Suppression fire!’ he roared across the bridge at the surviving Marines Mordant. With a wave of his gauntlet he directed deck serfs from their runebanks and consoles. ‘We are under attack. Follow your protocols. Lock down the bridge.’

  As the remaining member of the honour guard blasted his boltgun back into the darkness of the pit, Techmarine Arkadii did likewise with his pistol into the crater that had swallowed the Master of the Forge. Bridge serfs, up from their stations, snatched laspistols from their robed belts and joined them. Orthrius tore his power blades from their scabbards and brought them to sizzling life, assuming position in front of his captain. Shrugging back his silvered cloak, Ventor went to draw his own bolt pistol but found it to be missing.

  Turning furiously, he found Shipmaster Darrius standing behind him. The senior serf held the weight of the ornate weapon in both hands, leaning into the pistol. As the master’s scarred face creased with imperious incredulity, the bolt pistol fired. Brother Orthrius was thrown forward by the force of the bolt round’s impact, his helm blown open at the back. Brains and skull blasted forth through his ornate faceplate, while the champion’s short power blades clattered to the deck.

  The shipmaster thrust the bolt pistol at Ventor, forcing the Marines Mordant captain back. Behind Darrius, he could see the dead bodies of the serf elevator sentries and the astropath Earpsichor, their slit throats leaking lifeblood all over the deck. Ventor tensed in his plate, the hydraulics and servos straining. With a single power-armoured strike he could break the serf shipmaster’s spine. Darrius stared at the master of the fleet with dark eyes, holding the bolt pistol on Ventor’s furious figure.

  ‘I believe you’re fast, captain,’ Darrius told him, ‘with your genetically enhanced reflexes, your training and plate. But do you really think you’re faster than a bolt round?’

  Snarling, Ventor turned to the Marines Mordant and serfs firing down into the holes in the command deck. As bolt weapons ran dry, the Space Marines held up their gauntlets, indicating that the light show the deck serfs were visiting upon the darkness below should also come to an end. After several seconds, a grenade vaulted up out of the darkness. Spinning in the air, the melta bomb reached up into the bridge.

  ‘Fire in the–’ Arkadii managed before the melta bomb detonated. As it did, another grenade was tossed up out of the second hole. Exploding at shoulder height, each grenade blossomed into a blinding, sub-atomic blast that could be felt by Ventor on the other side of the bridge. The captain watched with horror as the melta bomb blasts wiped the deck serfs and the last of his Space Marines from existence. Bridge bondsmen disappeared in a stream of ash and screams, while the Marines Mordant became ghastly sculptures of melted plate and scorched flesh. As the intense flare of the detonation faded, the two Space Marines managed a few more seconds of dreadful, twisted life before dying.

  ‘Darrius,’ a stunned Sol Ventor said. He had used his gauntlet to shelter his face from the heat. He now raised it above his head.

  From the deck below, the captain could hear equipment being moved. Without moving the barrel of the bolt pistol, the shipmaster gestured towards the smouldering openings melted into the floor. Looking down, Ventor saw the impossible. Marines Mordant Space Marines in faded blue and silver, stepping up mounds of piled equipment to climb through the holes in the deck: three proceeding from each. Ventor knew the Space Marines. He recognised their markings and even the scars on their plate, caused by acid-splashes, fangs and claws. These were Marines Mordant that he had fought beside against the chittering hordes of the alien tyranid.

  ‘Brothers, no,’ the captain said, his voice brittle. He looked between Darrius and the arriving Space Marines. ‘What have you done? Do you know what you have done? You have sided with traitors and in doing so have become one of them. You have sold out your primarch to the highest bidder and betrayed your blood. Think, brothers, of what you do. Think on what you would say to your Emperor, if you were before him now – your souls as easy for him to read as an open tome.’

  The lead Space Marine cleared the seals of his helm and took it off as his compatriots closed in the plasma guns trained on the captain.

  ‘Dissemble,’ the leader ordered.

  As he approached Sol Ventor, his plate began to blot and darken. Like a death world reptile changing colour, his power armour lost its silver and blue patterning, its scars and markings. Revealing the scaled ceramite and besmirched viridian beneath, the sizzling transformation made the captain’s eyes blink and his mind ache. For a moment, the patrician features marking a successor son of Guilliman and white hair of a Vitrean were visible. With the fading ache came a revelation. These were not the Marines Mordant he had fought with. He had only imagined them as so. They were warriors of the Alpha Legion.

  The face beneath the helm belonged to no brother of Sol Ventor. His skin had a copper hue, while hologrammatic tattoos of serpents danced with angle and movement above the interloper’s ears and around the back of his bald head. Unsmiling but satisfied, the leader had eyes that burned both with intelligence and a piercing darkness, making his gaze hard to hold. Despite this, Ventor’s own eyes picked out in the stranger’s appearance the subtle signs of surgery and face-transplantation.

  ‘I do think of what I might say to the Emperor,’ the Alpha Legion commander told Ventor. ‘In fact, I speak to Him every day. I hope that my hearts and soul are as easy to read as yours, captain. For I tell Him that, unlike the Marines Mordant, I fight for Him still.’

  With the slickness of a striking snake, the Alpha Legion commander drew his scoped bolt pistol and aimed its elongated barrel at the captain’s chest. There was not the crash Sol Ventor expected. Bolt rounds thudded through his breastplate with an almost silky hiss. He felt them, hot and terrible, tearing through his chest. His multi-lung and hearts. Staggering back, the Marines Mordant captain fell. Agony lanced through his chest. He coughed up blood, thick and warm. He heard his ruined hearts beat no more. Staring up, he could see the Alpha Legion commander standing over him. There was no malice in those eyes, only understanding and cold necessitude.

  Sol Ventor felt the darkness closing in. It was a darkness that he knew would claim not only him but his genic brothers also – for the Marines Mordant had fought their last battle and they had lost.

  δ

  The Viper’s Nest

  ‘Mina,’ Occam the Untrue said to the operative. ‘The doors.’

  The Assassin, still disguised as the ageing shipmaster, stepped over the body of the dead Marines Mordant captain. As she moved across the bridge she hooked the toe of a boot beneath an abandoned combat shotgun on the deck. She scooped up the weapon and stepped through the smouldering bodies of serfs. Working the pump action, she took her place by the elevator doors.

  Occam’s legionnaires didn’t need instructions. The difficult section of the operation was over. Now they slickly fell to completing the mission. As Beta, Zeta and Theta rose from the holes in the floor to attend on their master, Reznor got to work on an auxiliary console. He double-checked that no order had been sent to the dorsal gun decks to fire the barge’s bombardment cannon and began re-establishing orbital vox communications. While Malik and Autolicon Phex aimed their plasma weaponry down into the pits, ensuring the bridge could not be retaken the way the Redacted had entered, Sergeant Hasdrubal opened a vox-channel with the High Serpen
t to update him on their situation.

  ‘Well?’ Occam asked.

  ‘I have ordered the Seventh Sons to disengage and retreat back to the boarding craft,’ Hasdrubal told him.

  Occam nodded. The death cultists had only ever been a distraction. He had never intended them to blood-and-guts their way through even the skeleton crew of an Adeptus Astartes battle-barge.

  ‘Send my regards to the High Serpent,’ Occam said. ‘Tell him that his flotilla is cleared to withdraw. He is to leave the Serpent’s Egg and one lighter for our convenience.’

  ‘What of the bonded crew?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Large numbers are concentrated on the gun decks, drawn there from the rest of the ship by orders to repel boarders.’

  Occam the Untrue nodded to Hasdrubal and himself.

  ‘Jam vox communications between sections,’ Occam ordered. ‘Then seal the batteries off from the launch bay and the rest of the battle-barge. I want you to open the airlocks on the thorax gun decks and drop the battery integrity fields. Let the crew feel the embrace of the void.’

  ‘Aye,’ Hasdrubal said. It was a cold order to carry out but Occam and his sergeant both knew that the Marines Mordant would have done the same to the attacking Alpha Legion in a heartbeat.

  ‘Anything from Lord Carthach?’ Occam asked.

  ‘Nothing on the Bas-Silica open channels,’ Arkan Reznor confirmed. With his mechadendrites extended and moving across the shattered runebanks, he was already reinstating operations to several of the least damaged consoles. ‘Perhaps they are having trouble taking the Librarius or the last of the First Company veterans.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Occam said, checking his chronometer. The Angelbane’s merciless actions usually ran like clockwork. Such synchronicity was the reason it had been so important that the Redacted take the command deck of the Assiduous when they did. If Carthach had experienced problems with the Marines Mordant psykers or if Chapter Master Pallidax had managed to hold off the Alpha Legion’s overwhelming attack, then Occam would have expected word from the Angelbane.