‘You think they’ll thank you for bringing us to them?’ Tylar went on. ‘You think they’ll pat you on the back and make you their favourite pet? I think you’re no more than a nuisance to them, Amareth, an insect buzzing about their heads, and if they acknowledge your existence at all it will only be to swat you.’ The High Priest marched on doggedly, but neither he nor his henchmen rose to Tylar’s bait, perhaps because they had no answers to his charge.
Then Amareth halted before a small group of the cadavers, and his priests collected behind him, and pushed Arex and Tylar to the front of them.
Amareth waited to be noticed. When this didn’t happen, when indeed a pair of his Iron Gods detached themselves from the group and passed him by without so much as a glance in his direction, he cleared his throat impatiently. His gods ignored this too, so Amareth repeated the mannerism, and then launched into a prepared speech.
‘My lords,’ he began, ‘I am Amareth, your High Priest. I am sure you know me.’
His voice was quieter, less assured than normal. Still, it gained the creatures’ attention. Some of them turned silently to regard him, and Amareth faltered before their green-lit, hollow-eyed stares. With a sudden rush of self-consciousness, he removed his mask to reveal his sallow, too-human features, black hair plastered to his scalp by nervous sweat.
‘I… I have brought an offering to you,’ he said. ‘These people, this woman and this man here, they are related to our… to the former Governor of this world. He… Hanrik is his name, he values their lives. I thought you could…’ He trailed off, nonplussed in the face of his gods’ indifference. He glanced over his shoulder, saw his priests watching him keenly and, as far as Arex could tell, was spurred on by the growing disillusionment writ plain in their faces.
‘We wanted you to know,’ he said, ‘that we have heard your voice, and that the men who are waging war upon you, men like Governor Hanrik, they no longer represent us. We welcome you to this world, and we stand ready to serve you.’ He lowered himself to his knees, and his priests did the same. Arex almost followed suit, afraid of calling attention to herself by dissenting, but Tylar stood steadfast beside her.
The Iron Gods turned away, uncaringly, leaving the self-styled High Priest and his followers genuflecting to no one. It was a moment before Amareth dared stand again, the others following his lead but hesitantly. He was clearly shaken, but not yet ready to give up on his mad dreams of power.
He seized Arex by the arm, waved his laser pistol in her face, and gave her a push towards the entranceway to the pyramid. ‘No,’ she protested, ‘no!’ But the priests were behind her again, with their stun batons in her back, prodding her onward.
As the gateway grew before her, she was blinded by the green light behind it, had to avert her eyes from it. She longed to link her arm with Tylar’s, to draw on his strength again, but their handcuffs made this impossible. ‘Remember,’ Tylar whispered to her, ‘the Emperor has decreed that you should live. We must keep fighting for Him.’
Suddenly, the Iron Gods were stirring, noticing the strangers in their midst as if for the first time, and moving to surround them. As one of the creatures blocked Amareth’s way to the pyramid, he pleaded desperately, ‘But you can’t… Didn’t you hear what I said? I am your High Priest. I have built a church in your name, and now I bring you the means to defeat your enemies. Why won’t you recognise me?’
The creatures didn’t move. Amareth glared at them for a moment longer, then lowered his shoulders, tried to push his way past them – and four of them raised their great guns in unison, and vaporised him in a cataclysmic outpouring of emerald force.
Where Amareth had once stood, now a wisp of steam curled upwards from the ground, and Arex took no pleasure in this downfall of an enemy, this confirmation of everything that Tylar had said to him. She just felt sick.
Half the priests were on their knees again, howling in anguish, wanting to know why their gods had turned against them, what they had to do to appease them. The rest were running for their lives. The Iron Gods fired after this latter group, claiming four more kills in the blink of an eye. Then they turned their attention to the supplicants before them, and set about destroying these too.
Arex made to run after the few escapees, but Tylar pulled her back. She realised where he was guiding her, and she cried out in protest, but there was no other way. There were no eyes upon them for the moment, but that would change, and there was nowhere else for them to hide, no other shelter within their reach.
So, Arex took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and she trusted her companion to guide her – and, as they crossed the threshold of the black pyramid, the Iron Gods’ High Temple, Arex could feel a soul-numbing cold enveloping her, and that hateful green light burning through her eyelids.
Chapter Eighteen
It had begun to rain. Fat, freezing drops of water spattered off Gunthar Soreson’s cheeks and trickled down his neck. He had been standing here, hemmed in by the rest of his platoon, for an age. To refocus his mind, he practised training his gun upon selected points in the rock face ahead of him. He was ready to do his duty.
He had been issued with the lasgun that morning: the Krieg Lucius-pattern variant, more powerful than the local PDF model but consequently a greedier consumer of power. Gunthar had been warned that each of his three power packs was good for only twenty-five shots. However, his main concern was that he hadn’t had a chance to fire this new weapon yet, get a feel for it.
The lasgun, it had been impressed upon him, was on loan from the Krieg 103rd regiment, who expected its return. ‘When you know it’s your time to die,’ the quartermaster had said, ‘when you’re staring down the barrel of a gauss flayer, the last thing you do is, you save that gun by hurling it as far away from you as you can.’
There weren’t enough vehicles to transport everyone, so almost two thousand troopers had been marched down the space port hill, along the approach road to the city. Their route had been lined with refugees, some cheering them on, others near-hysterical, all placing their hopes in these inexperienced men in ill-fitting uniforms.
Gunthar had heard a few grumbles from the diehard complainers that they hadn’t had time to rest, to prepare themselves. He, however, had slept soundly and dreamlessly last night, felt as prepared as he could be, and time to rest, for him, would have been unwelcome time to think.
The western edge of the city was blocked by a mountain of debris, as tall as its walls had once been. A large space had been cleared before this, into which soldiers had been pouring all morning. Gunthar had admired the precision of the Death Korps Guardsmen arriving from the north and the south, their discipline putting that of his own service to shame. He had chosen not to question the disproportionate placement of PDF troopers among the foremost ranks.
This wasn’t how he had pictured this day. Even through the early stages of his training, Gunthar had envisaged a daring rescue mission, snatching Arex from the necrons before they could loose off more than a few badly-aimed shots at him. Since Commissar Costellin’s team had left without him, and had reportedly been lost to vox contact, he had been forced to rethink those expectations.
The Imperial forces outnumbered their foes, Gunthar had been told, so if he could just kill one necron he would have played his part. It didn’t seem like much to ask of him. With the Lucius-forged lasgun in his hands, he felt he could do a lot better.
A pair of flyers had been circling above, staying well out of range of the necrons’ guns. Now, they peeled off, back towards the space port, and a PDF lieutenant barked out from behind Gunthar, ‘This is it, M Platoon. They’re here. Front rank, kneel!’ The same order was echoed to his left and his right, and three hundred troopers dropped and raised their weapons. Gunthar raised his too, although with four ranks in front of him, he knew it could be some time before he had a clear target to aim at.
‘Remember your training,’ the lieutena
nt instructed. ‘Stand your ground at all costs. Those who can, switch your guns to Full Auto and give those walking cadavers all you’ve got. When a necron falls, keep firing at it. I’m receiving a message from the governor-general; he is grateful for the sacrifice we are making, and he wishes the blessings of the God-Emperor upon us all.’
Almost as soon he had finished speaking, the rock pile trembled with a succession of heavy impacts to its far side. From the rear of the Imperial formation came the answering roars of the Death Korps’ own big guns, Earthshaker shells sailing across the crumbling barricade in the blind expectation of finding targets beyond it.
The enemy didn’t wait to be massacred. Necron ghosts came pouring through the rock, and through a stuttering volley of las-fire from the front two PDF ranks. They had been briefed about these horrors, prepared as best they could have been. Still, the reality was too much for many of them, and rookies and veterans alike attempted to flee but were held by the crush of bodies behind them. To Gunthar’s left, a substantial part of N Platoon was collapsed by those cowards in their midst.
Hearing more gunshots behind him, he glanced to find the necrons’ skin-coated ghouls already in the heart of the Death Korps’ ranks. The Guardsmen, of course, had been expecting just such an ambush, and they were blasting their attackers to the ground before their talon-knives could be brought to bear. Gunthar recalled his first encounter with those ghouls, in the dead of a long-gone night, another life. He remembered how afraid he had been of them then, but all he felt now was hatred.
The situation in front of him was rather less hopeful. The would-be deserters had been rallied by the harrying screams of their sergeants or just by the realisation that they couldn’t retreat and so might as well defend themselves. The air was sizzling with a latticework of las-beams, but the necron ghosts were soaring through this with ease, and when one of them was struck it hardly seemed to be hurt at all.
Fortunately, Death Korps grenadiers were in sniping positions, small mounds of rubble giving them height to fire over the heads of the troopers in their way. Their melta guns hissed and, although some of the ghosts sailed untouched through the blasts, more of them were destroyed. Still, the survivors were relentless, scything their way through scores of men and, before Gunthar knew it, the rank in front of him was kneeling and it was time for him to step up.
His Krieg gun had no Full Auto setting. ‘One well-aimed bolt from this will suffice,’ the quartermaster had told him. ‘There is no need for waste.’ Of course, he had been taking the wielder’s eye for granted in that equation, for Gunthar’s first two shots went hopelessly astray. His third hewed closer to the path he had envisaged for it, the fourth and fifth closer still, but he was losing precious seconds. A necron swooped in front of his face, and Gunthar thought it was coming for him, couldn’t target it in time, but instead it dropped onto the kneeling trooper in front of him.
The trooper swung his lasgun, tried to bat his attacker away, and the ghost was indeed dislodged but it took its victim’s face with it. The trooper threw up his hands but recoiled from his own touch, sprawling backwards into Gunthar, and for a terrible moment their gazes met. The trooper’s eyes were filled with raw, uncomprehending horror, white against a bloodied mass of exposed sinew. Feeling a surge of fury, Gunthar unleashed a vengeful fusillade in the escaping ghost’s direction.
The last two of his beams were dead on target, and he could have wept with frustration as they passed through their intangible target.
His lieutenant bellowed again and, with a numb disbelief, Gunthar discerned the command for his own rank, the new front rank, to kneel. His time was almost up, and he hadn’t yet scored his single kill, the best he could hope for now. He forced his thoughts away from the troopers who had died wanting of that goal, didn’t dare consider what that might mean for the outcome of this war.
Gunthar’s novice regiment had been given two speeches this morning. The second, from Colonel Braun with the governor-general in attendance, had been a stirring oration on the subjects of honour and glory and devotion to the Emperor. The Krieg drill instructors, however, had got there first with a treatise on death, and even then Gunthar had known which of them was being the more honest.
A ghost came streaming towards him and he focused on his aim, let the vile apparition grow in his sights, refusing to let it hurry him. One well-aimed bolt. It stabbed into an eye socket, extinguished the green light in there, sent the creature spinning helplessly head over tail. Gunthar’s first blood, if only metaphorically in the case of these bloodless horrors. His first unequivocal kill.
He could have leapt to this feet and cheered at that moment, could have died with a smile on his face, had a hand not gripped him by the ankle, had he not looked down, alarmed, into the imploring eyes of the faceless trooper, still alive though he must have been in unendurable pain. A part of Gunthar’s old self, his compassion, welled inside him, and he almost gave the man what he so clearly wanted, the mercy of a las-beam through the brain, but the voice of a Krieg instructor inside his head berated him for taking his eye off the enemy, and for the potential waste of ammunition.
On that first score, at least, the phantom voice had a point.
The middle section of the rock barricade was blown out, the top section collapsing into the gap and slip-sliding. A solid wave of debris flowed in Gunthar’s direction, blessing his dead comrades with an unexpected burial, threatening the same for him.
The next he knew, he was floundering on his stomach, his head hurting but he didn’t know why. He tried to push himself up, and a gobbet of blood splashed onto the back of his hand. He must have been cut, he thought, by a splinter of rock, rendered insensate for a moment. Of all the ways he had imagined falling today… Not this way, he thought. He raised himself to his hands and knees, dropped again as gunfire ignited the air above him.
He raised his head, tentatively, and peered through the blur of what had now become a steady drizzle of rain, and he saw them. For the first time, he saw exactly what the Imperial forces on Hieronymous Theta were facing.
The cadaverous foot soldiers, of course, Gunthar had encountered before, and they had been ghastly enough in small numbers. They stalked towards him now in their hundreds, their thousands, and the sight of their identical, expressionless skull faces almost froze his heart in his chest. Their long-barrelled guns vomited beam after beam of green lightning into the Imperial ranks; where that lightning struck, good men were reduced to ashes. But the foot soldiers weren’t the worst of it.
Arrayed behind these were even larger figures, with larger, twin-barrelled guns, which belched out streams of emerald energy over the foot soldiers’ heads – and flanking these monsters were necrons that appeared to have been butchered like the ghosts, the lower halves of their bodies removed and the upper halves fused to heavily armoured flying skimmers. Their right arms had been replaced by bulky gauss cannons, the right sides of their skulls by targeting auspexes.
Framing this nightmare army were the necron tanks. Gunthar’s drill instructors had spoken of these, of the damage they could do. They were pyramidal in shape, fashioned from a dark green metal – techno-sorcerous metal, Gunthar had heard, which, like the necrons themselves, could regenerate from almost any wound – and they hovered a few metres off the ground. Stamped in gold upon their sides were profane symbols, and green lightning flared within their enclosed turrets. They bristled with weapons, mercifully silent for now, but Gunthar knew instinctively that he wanted to be somewhere else before those guns came within firing range of him.
For now, however, he was trapped where he was, between the clawing, slashing ghouls behind him and the lightning weapons of the foot soldiers ahead, and for a moment, he saw no hope. The necrons had to be unstoppable. He had reckoned without the Death Korps of Krieg.
The Krieg Guardsmen, the majority of them, were no better armed than Gunthar was, than many of his comrades had been. The differe
nce was that they knew how to use their weapons for maximum effect. They exhibited flawless teamwork, squads of Guardsmen focusing their fire upon one foe at a time until it fell – and the Korps’ heavy ordnance was beginning to make its mark too. The necrons were too close for the Earthshakers to bring their cannons to bear, but the smaller Medusas were more than taking up the slack, consuming whole clusters of the oncoming forces with each explosive shell they spat out.
Something thudded into the ground beside Gunthar, half-burying itself. A second later, he was pelted by flaming scraps of metal and he realised that the first object had not been a shell as he had first feared, but a necron skull. He scrambled out, revolted, from beneath the creature’s fragmented remains, only to find them crawling, slithering, across the rubble, piecing themselves back together. The green light snapped on in the skull’s eye sockets, and Gunthar remembered his gun. He jammed its barrel into the necron’s right eye, and he pulled the trigger.
His second kill was less cathartic than the first. For long seconds Gunthar couldn’t tear his gaze away from that metal skull, fearing that as soon as he turned his back its eyes might flare into life once more. His head was beginning to clear, enough for him to wonder why he wasn’t dead yet. The necrons had overlooked him, down here on the ground, but he knew this wouldn’t last once he started firing at them again.
He pushed himself backwards with his elbows, rolled behind a small mound of debris. It would grant him some cover from the necrons in front of him; the ones behind, he would just have to pray kept their sights forward. He cleared a little hollow atop the mound for his gun barrel, used it to steady his aim.
Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 78