IT IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
TO BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
PROLOGUE
PROSPERON WAS A dead world.
It had been that way since long before the moment Battle-Brother Aramus first set foot upon it. That much was clear now. But like the rest of the Space Marines of the Blood Ravens Fifth Company who had been sent to the planet, Aramus had been given his orders, and would carry them out, whatever the risks, whatever the costs.
The Blood Ravens had been tasked with recovering Imperial relics in advance of the encroaching tyranid horde which already held the planet's eastern hemisphere in its grip. There were several squads involved in the mission, each given a different objective. The squad of which Aramus was a part - ten Space Marines accompanied by the company Apothecary had been dropped in the forests of Prosperon's western hemisphere, with orders to recover a relic held in the Templum Incarnatum, a shrine at the forest's heart.
When the Fifth Company had set out for the Prosperon system, weeks before, there was still some hope that the tyranid infestation could be expunged from the planet; one glimpse of the eastern horizon, though, hazed with an endless cloud of mycetic spores, was evidence enough that the infestation had progressed too far to be halted. Vox communication planet-side was all but impossible, impeded by the shadow in the warp cast by the tyranid fleet in high orbit. And when the air blew from the east, it carried with it the scent of fungus and rot, of mildew and stagnation - the smell of tyranoforming, the stench of a dying world.
It was a tragedy for the human inhabitants of Prosperon, to be sure, to see their home of millennia consumed by the Great Devourer. Those that had the means to do so had already fled, and those that didn't could only huddle together, pray to the Emperor to protect their souls, and await the inevitable. But for the Space Marines of the Fifth Company, there was still work to be done.
Sergeant Forrin had been the first to fall, brought down by a swarm of hormagaunts who overwhelmed the veteran campaigner with their vast numbers, their vicious scythes hacking again and again at the blood-red ceramite of Forrin's power armour, until finally the sergeant's bolter and chainsword could not hold the tyranid swarm at bay any longer. The rest of the squad had been deployed in a wide-spread tactical formation as they swept through the forest, and so were too far away to reach Forrin in time to offer any assistance before it was too late. From a distance, and using the hellfire shells with which those with heavy bolters had been equipped given the extreme circumstances, the squad had dispatched the hormagaunt swarm, reducing them to a litter of blasted body parts and ichor carpeting the forest floor.
With the sergeant dead, the squad had been left momentarily leaderless, but the loss would not deter the Blood Ravens from their mission. Each Space Marine knew his duty and his role, and without Forrin to guide them, command fell to Battle-Brother Vela.
The squad continued through the forests of Prosperon, weapons ready, leaving the body of the sergeant to the attentions of Apothecary Gordian, who lingered behind to do the needful.
APOTHECARY GORDIAN READIED his reductor, crouching low over the mangled body of Sergeant Forrin. The hormagaunts had cracked open the ceramite of the sergeant's power armour like a nut's shell, and had torn the flesh beneath to ribbons, but it appeared to Gordian that the progenoid glands had not suffered damage. As he set to work, he repeated to himself the words of the Apothecary's Creed, which he carried in his heart. In his long years of service as Apothecary to the Fifth Company, Gordian had come to use the Creed as a kind of litany, a focussing agent to direct his mind to his task.
'He that may fight, heal him.'
With a steady hand, and the aid of the reductor, Gordian eased the progenoid gland from Forrin's abdomen. Had the sergeant yet lived, he would have been too far gone to be saved, the medical equipment in the narthecium that Gordian carried across his back ineffective against the extent of the sergeant's injuries. Had the sergeant yet lived, Gordian would have been left with no choice but to confer the Emperor's Mercy before extracting the gland.
'He that may fight no more, give him peace.'
Gordian had performed this manoeuvre countless times, more often than he cared to remember, but the repetition of the Creed helped him hold distractions at bay. This was no rote operation, to be carried out mindlessly, but was a solemn and holy responsibility. Reverentially, he eased the gland into a chrome bowl, and after cleaning it with a spray, slid it carefully into a self-locking tubular canister, one of ten he carried in his narthecium's rack.
'He that is dead, take from him the Chapter's due.'
That was the way he looked upon the gland, as the Chapter's due, a holy charge entrusted to a Space Marine in his initiation, that he surrendered back to the Chapter at the end of his life. Without the gene-seed carried within the progenoid gland of a fallen Space Marine, it would be impossible to create the zygote with which another Space Marine could be created. Were enough gene-seed to be lost, in time the Chapter itself would die, and the forces of the Imperium would be the poorer for it.
As Gordian was carefully reaffixing the protective canister in his narthecium, he heard a sound from behind him, and dropping his reductor to the ground spun with his bolter in his fist. It was a genestealer, scuttling towards the Apothecary with blinding speed, claws out and grasping, with flesh hooks stabbing out from its distended maw.
Apothecary Gordian didn't pause an instant to consider, but fired off a stream of hellfire rounds. The ceramic hellfire shells smashed into the monster's carapace, allowing the payload of mutagenic acid to pour into the genestealer's torso, eating it away from within. With a hideous squeal - whether of rage, or pain, or frustration, or all three, Gordian couldn't say - the genestealer fell sprawling to the dust at his feet.
As the monster twitched and writhed on the forest floor, Gordian fired another hellfire round into the base of its skull. After retrieving his reductor and checking to make sure the gene-seed canister was safely secured on his back, the Apothecary set out after the rest of the squad.
As he moved through the forest as quickly as possible, Gordian considered the empty canisters he carried. With one already used with Forrin's remains, he had nine left. And nine Space Marines remained.
Emperor protect and guide us, Gordian thought, if I sho
uld have to use all nine…
BATTLE-BROTHER VELA WAS the next to fall. He was taking point as the squad's vanguard formation moved through the dense undergrowth, the shrine still hours distant, when a lictor burst out of the jungle before them and was upon Vela in an eye-blink. Vela managed to hit one of the lictor's ventral limbs with his melta gun, searing it off at the joint, but the tyranid surged onwards with its remaining limbs, and Vela fell beneath it before he'd had a chance to take another shot.
Aramus rushed to assist, but before he'd reached Vela's side the lictor had driven a scything talon, as long as a man was tall, right through Vela's abdomen, shattering the ceramite on front and back and lancing through the body within.
The lictor reared back, hoisting Vela's body in the air, the Space Marine dangling like a puppet with cut strings. Then, a horrible screech sounding from the monster, it began shaking Vela's body loose from the talon, readying to attack one of the others.
Aramus raised his bolter, readying to fire. At this close range, he doubted even hellfire rounds would be enough to put the lictor down before it took another victim, but the Blood Ravens were not about to retreat, and could not outrun the lictor if they tried. As he prepared to fire, though, a voice buzzing in Aramus's ear-bead stopped him. It was Battle-Brother Vela, crackling over the comms, barely audible through the interference of the shadow in the warp.
'Kill… it…'
Aramus didn't waste the opportunity that Vela's fatal injury had granted them. He knew that the battle-brother was telling the rest of the squad he was already dead, and that there remained no reason not to unleash the harshest sanction available to them. If they hesitated, the odds were that another of their number would fall before the lictor's talons.
With a nod to the rest of the squad to withdraw to a safe distance, Aramus undipped a frag grenade from his waist and, in a single motion, armed and threw it directly at the lictor, then dived for cover.
As the lictor turned its attention to Aramus, the frag grenade completed its tight arc through the air, striking the tyranid's carapace between the first and second upper limbs on the dorsal side. The grenade, set to detonate on impact, activated instantly. Aramus, still in midair in his dive for cover, could feel the concussive force of the blast rippling past him.
When he and the rest of the squad moved forward, all that remained of the lictor was a carpet of pulped remains, a few metres away from the place where Battle-Brother Vela lay.
Vela had shut down, rendered unconscious as his body struggled to combat his injuries, both those from the talon's puncture and the secondary effects of his proximity to the frag grenade's effects. It would fall to the Apothecary to determine whether Vela had a chance of recovering from his injuries, but in Aramus's experience Space Marines seldom recovered from injuries that looked as dire as Vela's did now.
They had hours to go until they reached their destination, and hours beyond that to reach the extraction point. Vela had fallen, whether he would rise again or not, and so command of the squad was now in the hands of Battle-Brother Durio.
Durio wasted no time, but ordered the remaining squad members to continue towards their target.
Aramus spared a glance at the broken and unconscious body of Vela, then racked his bolter and moved out.
* * *
APOTHECARY GORDIAN HAD known with a single look that Battle-Brother Vela was past the point of saving. Vela's body was doing its best to overcome the injuries - Larraman cells, borne by leucocytes to the site of the wound, formed instant scar tissue on contact with the air, as the sus-an membrane regulated his unconscious body in a state of suspension - but the damage was too severe, and the body was engaged in a losing battle. Even a Space Marine like Vela, a superhuman warrior in the service of the God-Emperor, was not immune to the effects of a giant hole punched through his body.
It was only a matter of time before the rapid deterioration caused by the injuries overtook the body's attempts to heal itself, and Battle-Brother Vela would be no more.
'Rest easy, brother,' Gordian said, solemnly. 'Your name will be entered in the Book of Honour, and you shall be remembered whenever the Bell of Souls is rung.'
The unconscious Vela could not hear him, Gordian knew. But such words of comfort to the dying were an ineluctable part of the Apothecary's art, and Gordian would not omit them even if he could.
'I shall take the Chapter's due, Brother Vela.'
The steel tongs of the reductor flashing in the sun, Gordian set to work. A fallen battle-brother was a tremendous loss to the Chapter, but at least with the gene-seed retrieved another generation might rise one day to take his place.
'And then I will give you the Emperor's Peace.'
There would be only eight canisters left in the narthecium, now. But for how long?
BATTLE-BROTHER MILIUS WAS the next to fall, though he took nearly a dozen tyranid warriors with him when he went. And Battle-Brother Qao managed to dispatch a broodlord and its retinue of genestealers before the damage done by the broodlord's acid maw finally claimed him. Battle-Brother Kraal was caught by a fragmentation spore mine, and while the mine managed only minor damage to his armour, a splinter of the spore shell was driven through into Kraal's flesh, flooding his system with toxins that his oolitic kidney was unable to overcome. Battle-Brother Javier, bolter flashing and chainsword whirring, took down four raveners single-handedly, but fell beneath the scything talons of the fifth, never to stand again.
Of the eleven Space Marines that had set out from the drop-pod that morning, only five reached their destination deep in the woods, the ancient Imperial shrine Templum Incarnatum, left untended and unguarded after the local population fled the encroaching tyranids. Unfortunately, the five Blood Ravens quickly discovered that they were not the first to arrive.
'Form up, squad,' Battle-Brother Durio called out in a harsh whisper, taking up a position at the edge of the clearing. The shrine was not large, perhaps no more than two or three times the height of one of the Space Marines, and half again as wide. A roughly pyramidal shape, it squatted at the centre of a circular clearing, surmounted by an Imperial aquila in bas-relief. There was a single entrance on the base of the structure, to the left of where Durio had gathered the squad, just a few dozen metres away. Their objective lay within, only a short walk from where they stood.
But it was not to be quite so easy.
In between the Space Marines and the shrine squatted something else, a monstrous creature that towered over the shrine. It was a carnifex, a screamer-killer, and it perched on the dead grasses of the clearing on its two massive hind-limbs, the scythes of its upper limbs rising from its back, and affixed to its middle-limbs the bio-plasma weapon-symbiote whose firing gave the monster its name.
The carnifex was motionless, facing the shrine. Was it sleeping, resting, or merely waiting? The Space Marines could not know. Who could guess the actions or intent of a creature of mindless appetite and destruction?
All that the Blood Ravens knew was that the carnifex was a living engine of destruction, and that it was all that stood between them and their objective. A rampaging screamer-killer would be all but unstoppable. If they could manage to disable or destroy it somehow before it shifted into motion, then they stood a good chance of—
A high-pitched screaming pierced the air as the carnifex surged into motion, spinning around to bring its weapon-symbiote to bear on the Space Marines.
'Apothecary, fall back and lay down covering fire! Siano, Quinzi, break right!' Durio shouted, diving to the left and firing his bolter at the carnifex as he went. 'Aramus, with me!'
Battle-Brother Quinzi dived clear to the right as the ball of blinding green fire spurted from the screamer-killer's weapon-symbiote, but Battle-Brother Siano was a fraction of an instant too slow, caught by the burst of bio-plasma as it shot past them. Knocked crashing back into the trees, which were immediately set ablaze, Siano was cooked alive in his power armour, his shouts of pain and outrage squawking over the static
-laced comms.
Aramus hit the ground running, only metres behind Battle-Brother Durio, who was racing to the left around the carnifex's flank.
'Quinzi, krak grenades on my mark,' Durio shouted, firing hellfire rounds at the carnifex one-handed.
Intended for use against armoured vehicles and bunkers, the krak grenade in the early days of the Tyrannic War had been found to be just as effective against even the largest tyranids in close combat. The only problem was that you had to be extremely close to the target to get the krak grenade into position, which left you extremely close to the resultant blast. Even though krak charges imploded, instead of exploding, the blowback could be disastrous to anyone standing too close.
'Aramus, head for the shrine and acquire the objective!' Durio added, unclipping a krak grenade from his waist.
Without wasting an instant to confirm, Aramus powered on, shifting his trajectory as he ran and angling directly for the entrance to the shrine. The long, wickedly barbed tail of the screamer-killer lashed out, narrowly missing Aramus, but he paid it no mind, his every attention focussed only on speed.
Aramus was bare metres from the shrine's entrance as he heard the deafening scream of the carnifex's bio-plasma weapon building to another burst, and then the voice of Durio shouted out, 'Mark!'
The thwump of the krak grenades' implosion coincided with the final crescendo of the bio-plasma burst, just as Aramus dived through the open entrance into the Imperial shrine.
APOTHECARY GORDIAN EMERGED from behind the smouldering remains of the treeline, there no longer being any need for suppressing fire. The brief and horrible battle was over. The carnifex lay on its side, struggling to regain its footing, despite the fact that one of its lower limbs had been blown away at the second joint. One of its upper scything talons had been pulped to chitin and ichor by a krak grenade, but its weapon-symbiote appeared unharmed, and once it was upright and ambulatory - in a matter of moments, at most - it would be in a position to open fire once more.
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