The rest were still coming. Impossibly, they were still coming. The range closed and Borhus’s pistol added its fire to the fusillade. Then the charging bodies met.
Two priests went down under a crunch of ceramite versus bone and weak flesh. Borhus barged through their broken remains and didn’t slow.
Aetius dropped back, spun, mashed a tattooed face between the wall and the stock of his boltgun, then swung his weapon up and resumed firing. Bolts lashed past Borhus to pick off stragglers.
More stave-wielding electro-priests filled the passage ahead, surrounding a floundering giant in black power armour. Jaggai. The priests had him, the way a pack of scavenger creatures could bring down a larger beast. The Space Marine’s wild lunges were spun aside by whirling staves that then cracked against knee, groin and elbow seals, and across Jaggai’s unarmoured face. Each blow sent a spasm of unresponsiveness through the White Scar’s armour, as though it were being drained of power.
As Borhus approached, the priests peeled off from their wounded prey and rushed him. Borhus met their counter-charge with a swing of his thunder hammer. It was a tank killer. Against a barechested electro-priest it was a sheer, glorious overkill.
The priest’s body burst open, as though a high-yield microexplosive had been implanted inside his chest and set off. His blended constituents flew apart at the blast front of a sonic boom, plastering Borhus’s battleplate and breaking the remaining electro-priests against the walls. He stamped through what little was left, trusting Aetius to finish any survivors and tend to Jaggai.
It took him a few seconds to reacquire Valtohm’s ozone trail. He drove a fresh clip into his bolt pistol and broke into a run.
The passage continued down for several hundred metres more to a large chamber, tall but relatively narrow, a hollow, acute-angled version of the exterior pyramid that surrounded it. The chamber was dominated by a high metal gantry, sterilely lit by banks of ultraviolet lamps directed inwards from plastek-walled observation rigs mounted on the sloping walls.
Skitarii were already there, piling into the chamber from secondary access corridors in the other three walls, and fanning out to find cover amongst the bulky instrumentation that dotted the edges and amongst the outlying stanchions of the scaffold itself.
They would be trying to secure the Hybernaculum. Or possibly contain it.
Borhus pushed himself to a flat-out sprint for the central structure, radium rounds burning up the surrounding consoles and deck plates at his heels. On the opposite side of the gantry, a tracked Kataphron Destroyer growled into the chamber on armoured tracks, escorted by a unit of skitarii firing from the hip. Borhus rang off half a clip to discourage them and veered right. A bolt ricocheted from the hardened plating of the Destroyer, but none of the skitarii were hit. They vectored their approach to match his, taking up staggered positions within the scaffolding and resumed firing.
Even now data uplinks would be tethering the disparate skitarii elements into a single combat algorithm. Once that happened he was dead. Even now–
A dark-robed skitarii with a black titanium facemask rose from cover three metres in front of him and aimed, though at that range he scarcely needed to.
There was a loud boom and the console that the skitarii had been using as cover exploded in his face. That hadn’t been a rad carbine. It had been a boltgun.
Borhus glimpsed Luhgarak on the walkway high up in the scaffold. The Space Marine ducked behind the safety rail as return fire from the ground raked his position. Valtohm was several levels higher still and, as Borhus watched, scrambling up a ladder towards the summit.
A wild cry pulled Borhus’s attention back. A pilgrim in singed rags vaulted the smouldering console, whirling his stave overhead. Another followed. Electricity balled his gauntlet apparatus and arced violently, dragging across the gantry walls and splitting back and forth with his brother’s stave, like two poles of a battery. A charging battery.
Firing off to the side, Borhus ran for the gantry’s lowest walkway and leapt. It was four metres from the ground. An impossible jump for a man. But he was more than a man: he was a Space Marine. His body twisted, like a high jumper, his line of fire stitched upwards, chewing up the stave-wielding pilgrim from waist to neck and blowing the shoulder off his gauntleted brother. His back struck the walkway, aluminium planking rattling under his weight as his pistol clicked empty. He vaulted to his feet, spun around and looked up.
Valtohm was sprinting across Borhus’s diagonal, torn robes flapping about his ankles as he took the final, short, stretch before the top. The spectre of death was right behind. Luhgarak took the steps behind the fleeing electro-priest in a single bound, landing in a firing crouch with his boltgun sweeping up for the finishing shot. Almost mirroring the weapon’s movement, Valtohm swept around, electricity bunched in his fists, and before Luhgarak could pull the trigger the electro-priest thrust his open palms forward.
A savage ribbon of lightning plucked the Space Marine from his feet and pushed him from the gantry. The lightning flickered back and Luhgarak fell. His flailing arms caught around a hanging chain and he swung down, smashing bodily into the bulk of the scaffold. Smoke coiled from the powered seals of his armour’s joints. If not for the insulating properties of his ceramite battleplate, the Space Marine would surely be dead rather than merely maimed. A group of skitarii closed in on his position from below, carbines trained upward, but Lugharak was going nowhere.
A rad-round banged the underside of the walkway where Borhus stood. He drew in to the inside edge, cutting down the shooters’ angles, and crouched for good measure. He looked up, seeing several levels of slightly sloped aluminium walkways that worked their way around the gantry to the top where the structure narrowed. There, high above, he saw Valtohm gesture a still-coruscant hand over Luhgarak as if in blessing, then turn with a smile and move more calmly for the summit.
Borhus snarled. Overconfidence. It would ever be the downfall of the weak.
Springing from his crouch, he leapt across the stanchion-filled interior of the scaffold, bypassing two ladders and a walkway, and clamped his gauntleted fingers over an aluminium plank. The light metal bent under his grip, its properties making it impossible even to establish a mag-lock. One-handed, he swayed. Binharic blurts of astonishment issued from the skitarii below. He ignored them as, with a heave of bionic strength, he threw the rest of his body up and landed on the deformed walkway with a thump.
He dropped again into a crouch long enough to mark Valtohm’s progress and reaquire his bearings, then sprang again. Two more ape-like leaps and swings carried him within arm’s length of the summit, each successive jump carrying him a little higher than the last as the gantry’s pyramidal structure narrowed.
He caught the edges of the final walkway in both hands, hanging beneath. Then, with a grunt and a whine of servos, he swung himself like a pendulum until he could hook a heel over the lip of the platform and drag himself up onto all fours. He panted, mildly exerted. Two bootprints of molecularly soldered ceramite were burned into the aluminium beneath his face, where Luhgarak had stood. It was astonishing that one man with so rudimentary an apparatus could generate such force. What was the upper power limit of Valtohm’s weapon? What was its carrying capacity? How quickly could it be recharged between shots? Borhus had no answers.
Standing, he slid a fresh clip into his pistol and strode forwards. The electro-priest’s ozone trail was intense now. At the walkway’s end, Borhus set his boot onto an aluminium rung and, one handed, climbed to the summit.
Ultraviolet banks shone down upon the small aluminium platform. It was crowded with magnetometers, field modulators, dosimeters, oscilloscales and spectrophotometers. The dry whir of cogitator cooling fans was like a hymnal. The altar, the focus of the Adeptus Mechanicus’s curiosity and devotion, was a humanoid object, preserved like a relic of an ancient saint within the throbbing halo of a networked suspensor grid. Th
e figure seemed to glow under the attention, but that glow was simply the static effect of the suspensor field.
That was the literal explanation, the logical explanation, but the entity within the field exuded a soulless malevolence that defied Borhus’s conceptions of logic.
It was some manner of xenos being, though specifics of race were impossible to be sure of given the field effects distorting Borhus’s view. Given the nature of this world, Borhus could posit an informed guess. Necron. He shivered before an inexplicable chill. The entity appeared to be in some kind stasis, and if his guess was accurate, and the being was indeed a necron, then it had likely been in this state for millions of years. This was what Rygel Sul had unearthed here after the xenos had been pushed back, and what had since captivated Valtohm and his followers. The Hybernaculum.
Startled from positions of prayer, electro-priests armed with staves and gauntlets hurried out of Borhus’s way and moved protectively in front of the Hybernaculum. Valtohm turned towards him with hands raised.
Surrender? Or a threat?
Borhus took a step forward and tightened his aim on the electro-priest’s forehead. ‘You should have held back on Luhgarak. I doubt you have another shot like that left in you.’
Valtohm’s flesh-melted lips parted into a mortis grin.
‘I will not allow you to awaken this… thing,’ growled Borhus.
‘I don’t want to awaken it,’ said Valtohm sharply, sounding genuinely appalled. ‘Alive it is just one more material being, but here–’ the priest turned to look upon the entity, gleaming dully ultraviolet within the hazing cocoon of the suspensor grid. ‘Do you understand what this is, Space Marine? There is no power source for this. A self-perpetuating stasis. Not a single electronvolt expended in waste. The fundamental forces of the universe in balance.’
‘I understand. It is a perfect abomination.’
‘It is a miracle,’ Valtohm breathed.
Borhus’s finger strengthened on the trigger, and he shifted his aim from Valtohm to the entity within the Hybernaculum itself.
‘No!’ screamed the priests in ragged unison as they rushed forward, unwittingly clearing Borhus’s shot.
‘The flesh is weak,’ he sneered.
Then he fired.
Mass-reactive bolts blazed across the suspensor field. Some were deflected, spraying out in all directions. Consoles exploded. Bulky diagnostic arrays went up in sparks. Electro-priests fell, scythed down by shrapnel, stray round or simply thrown onto their faces by the force of exploding terminals, enveloped in guttering voltaic fields.
Some punched through, however. Enough.
Enough.
As soon as he thought it, he knew there could never be enough.
As the bolts encountered the stasis field, they stopped, frozen in time as absolutely as the xenos entity itself. Even their liquid hydrogen propellant tails remained fixed behind them, tiny cones of perfectly captivated light.
Although clearly impossible, the entity appeared to mock him from inside its prison. Borhus threw aside his pistol with a snarl and hefted his thunder hammer.
‘Never let it be said that an Iron Hand failed to bring a big enough weapon,’ he said.
‘You are right, iron brother,’ said Valtohm, tilting back his head to meet Borhus face to face and raising his gauntlets. Electricity vaulted between them with a succession of air-burning cracks. ‘Flesh is weak, but the Motive Force is power.’
Lightning flared from Valtohm’s hands, dragging through the circuit of staves and upraised gauntlets of his surviving acolytes, even lancing across the glowing body of the Hybernaculum itself. It crackled across Borhus’s optics. The Deathwatch captain drew back his thunder hammer and charged.
Too late.
He felt the miracle of the Motive Force course through his body. The insulating properties of ceramite were irrelevant now; the lightning was too powerful for that, less an assault than an exalted state of being. His suit connections haywired, and short electrical pulses caused his body to spasm. His bionic eye exploded in its socket, its flesh counterpart simply melting, dribbling down his face before the jelly steamed from his boiling skin. Somewhere in amongst the flurry of impulses shorting through his brain, he remembered to scream. He felt agony, bloody rapture, but through it all he could see. The lightning connected him to the infinite circuit that was the universe, and opened his eyes to the truth that Valtohm did indeed have a blessing to bestow.
The flesh was weak.
Matter was weak.
And in a deliverance of rampant energy, Borhus of the Iron Hands finally saw the truth inside the light.
THE ZHENG CIPHER
Josh Reynolds
The radium carbine bucked in Alpha 6-Friest’s hands as she pivoted and fired at the hormagaunt springing towards her out of the press of battle. The rad-bathed bullet punctured the alien’s skull, scorching the chitin black as it passed through and out the other side. She spun, carbine juddering as she fired again and again, trusting in her targeting sensors to send the bullets where the Omnissiah willed.
As she moved, her augmented limbs carrying her smoothly from one firing stance to the next, she took note of the disposition of her skitarii, calculated the efficiency of their current firing pattern, and found it wanting. 6-Friest stepped back, avoiding a scything talon, and smashed the butt of her carbine into the wailing hormagaunt’s fang-studded maw. The front of the alien’s skull crumpled and burst, spattering the front of her armour. Even as it fell, she was already seeking out new prey. The radium carbine slid through her fingers, spinning swiftly back into a firing position with a casual twitch of her wrists.
Which was not to say that Kotir-8 was all that hospitable otherwise. The once harmlessly barren mining colony had been reduced to a xenos-infested wasteland, stripped of what little life it had possessed, its rocky gorges and snow-capped crags covered in a seething carpet of organic savagery. There had been two hundred and sixty-three extraction facilities on Kotir-8. Now there was one. Soon enough, there would be none. It was as inevitable as rust and ruin.
The facility in question rose above the seething horde. It was a hummock of metal and stone, built to withstand the worst environmental hazards the galaxy could throw at it, and to protect the extraction plant and its workers. Defence emplacements consisting of plasteel weapon blisters swivelled and rolled, spraying the forecourt of the facility with autocannon fire and cleansing flames. While the facility’s firepower was substantial, it barely slowed the frenzied mass of alien bodies that swarmed about its walls like an angry sea of chitin and ichor. Soon, those defences would fall silent, ammunition cylinders and fuel drums emptied, and the armoured doors would buckle and burst, as they had two hundred and sixty-two times before.
Speed was of the essence. The facility held something too precious and important to allow it to be so sava
gely consumed. That was why 6-Friest and her combat-maniple had been dispatched, to fight their way across the arid plains and jagged crags from their point of arrival at one of the fallen facilities, to this last redoubt.
She recalled the juddering descent, the orbital lander losing pieces of itself as it plummeted through the swirling clouds of alien madness. Flying bio-forms – gargoyles, harridans and worse things – had converged on the lander as it pierced the upper reaches of the atmosphere, tearing it apart as it fell. She had lost two skitarii in that hellish descent, torn from their safety harnesses by the claws and tendrils of the monstrous creatures and dragged out into the crawling sky. Others had died on the march, pulled away from the others and into a tangle of talons and teeth, or else consumed by alien bile. But the vanguard had marched on, as relentless as the will of the Omnissiah itself. And now that they were within sight of their goal, 6-Friest had no intention of slowing down.
6-Friest signalled the closest of her combat-maniple, and they swung their carbines around, aligning them with hers. As one, they fired, punching a hole in the frenzied ranks of the enemy. Just beyond the leaping, skittering forms of the hormagaunts, she could see two more of the multi-limbed warrior forms striding forward.
<9-Jud, target the synapse creatures.> A moment later, 9-Jud’s radium jezzail shrieked. The long-barrelled rifle was a precision weapon, requiring a steady hand, eye and mind. 9-Jud had all three, thanks to the blessings of the Omnissiah. One of the tyranid warriors staggered as a bullet smashed into its chest. It lurched forward, screamed and toppled, black bile and steam spurting from its open jaws. The last of the warrior-forms broke into a loping run, smashing through the massed ranks of its smaller kin in its hurry to close the distance.
The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Page 7