Words. Histrionic, puerile, pointless words. Such a waste of precious breath and time. Arrun kicked another load of loose rocks down towards the Tyrant and continued his ascent. The flurry of stone rained down on the Traitor Space Marine, drumming off his armour. It was necessary for him to briefly concentrate more on averting his face to avoid the tumbling red projectiles than it was to keep a good pace on his pursuit and it was ensured that Arrun maintained his slight, but essential, lead on the traitor.
He was not running away; far from it. Daerys Arrun had not survived over two centuries as a Silver Skulls warrior, nearly a hundred of those as a captain, without utilising every skill and every last scrap of knowledge to his advantage. He had read and scanned the landscape on which he now fought as a matter of course and understood not only its obvious perils and limitations, but also certain geological indications that could be useful. It had been one such telltale sign that had sent him clambering with such agility up the rockface. He moved with adroit ease from ledge to ledge, the incensed roaring behind him indicating that Blackheart was close in pursuit.
No, he was not fleeing. He was leading Blackheart into nature’s own trap. A series of warning runes lit up on his helm display, flashing dully and intermittently. A quick system check indicated that damage was now registering within the optic sensors of his helm where Blackheart’s acid attack was ravaging the complex systems. Within a very few minutes, he would lose the enhanced helm vision in his right eye.
With a series of blinks, Arrun transferred his core displays to the left eye and allowed his vision to re-adjust to the now monocular readout. He concentrated on another expanse of semi-clear valley up ahead and vaulted onwards. The limited capability of his damaged visor, however, made his target less easy to spot. It was going to come down to timing and his own recall.
Blackheart discharged another gout of flame that seared the back of the captain’s armour. The Tyrant’s size belied a significant turn of speed. But the fact that he had resumed using the in-built flamer as his means of attacking Arrun was, if the Silver Skull’s plan came to fruition, the best thing he could be doing.
He scanned rapidly as he made his way across the narrow ledge that was barely broad enough to take the width of his armoured foot. Then the working sensors in his helm picked it up again. It was there. Right there. The undeniable chemical haze of raw promethium that was bubbling close enough to the surface to be seen. All that was needed now was to drop down, wait for Blackheart to ignite it and then rejoin his brothers at the base of the mountain.
All that was needed.
It sounded so ludicrously simple when he put it in those terms, but Arrun knew better. He was a Silver Skull. He knew well that the odds were not stacked in his favour. He knew that he would more than likely be incinerated along with Blackheart. He had known – or at least had suspected – from the beginning of this situation that the price for ridding the Imperium of this traitor once and for all could well be his life. He had known it; Inteus had confirmed it and now here he was, facing it.
It was, he rationalised, a small fee. Like all those of his kind, Arrun did not fear death. It was an inevitability that he had long ago been taught to accept, even to embrace. It would be a glorious and spectacular end, worthy of any battle-brother of the Silver Skulls Chapter. But there was always a hope, no matter how slim and inconceivable, that he may yet get out alive.
His grand scheme was scuppered scant moments later when he became aware of a baleful shadow passing across him. The huge power claw that dominated Blackheart’s right arm swept upwards, then jabbed sharply down. One of its finely-crafted, lethal talons pierced through the flexible joint at the back of Arrun’s right leg, breaking through flesh, sinew, muscle and bone. The ceramite at his knee shattered as did his patella and he bit back a cry of pain as the Tyrant closed his massive fist around the Silver Skull’s leg. The cruciate ligament snapped under the pressure and the captain’s weight dropped to his foreleg.
‘Not so fast now, are you?’ Blackheart’s sneering voice grated more than the pain of his wounds and anger fired his blood to pounding. He heard it flow into his ears with a deafening roar. Then his entire world shifted perspective as Blackheart threw him bodily down the cliff face. The slither of the talon leaving the wound at the back of his leg was sickening but Arrun had no time to linger on it. He tumbled downwards, crashing heavily against the rocks as he went. His armour absorbed much of the impact as he fell, but its resilience had limits. Power armour was a great gift to the Adeptus Astartes, but it was not indestructible.
Loping after him in long, superhuman strides, Blackheart utilised the speed of his descent to ensure that the moment Arrun crashed to a halt, face up to the darkening sky, he descended on him like a raptor snaring a rodent. The Tyrant’s booted, armour-shod foot crunched down on what remained of Arrun’s knee. This time, he couldn’t hold back the yell of agony.
The spectrum of warning runes flashing before his eye were winking more angrily now, their pace steady and telling him what his battered and bruising body already knew. The damage to his armour was extensive and the core systems were failing rapidly. A steady hiss of gases escaped from the cracked fusion pack on his back. Summoning every ounce of his energy and that which remained in his armour, he flung his lightning claws out wide. Coruscating lightning arced from talon to talon, forcing the Tyrant back.
This close, he could see every detail in Blackheart’s hideously deformed and reconstructed face. The grey skin was all but dead where it covered the many metal plates and augmetics that held him together. Where he had caught Blackheart in the face close to his jaw, he had torn strips of flesh from it and the cadaver-like expression that was leering down at him was the nightmarish vision of a daemon.
Dazed and injured, Arrun nonetheless gathered his strength and wits about him, dragging himself backward. He felt his tibia shatter under Blackheart’s weight and dragged himself up as much as he could until he could pull himself into a sitting position. He stared up at his enemy through his damaged helm visor.
A thin trickle of spittle, still tainted with acid, dribbled from the Tyrant’s mouth down his chin. It was evidently something that happened frequently, his teeth and lower jaw having long been replaced with augmetics. They were constructed from a metal that seemed at least strong enough to cope with his murderous salivation.
The captain was broken, but he was not beaten. A burst of chemicals flowed through his body, the pain inhibitor injectors had somehow survived the fall. The sudden release from the agony gave Arrun the impetus to bring his right claw round in a swing. But dazed as he was, his ability to judge the distance had become impaired and the attempted strike barely grazed against the cracked and pitted red ceramite. It was as though he barely patted the other warrior gently against the cheek.
‘You disappoint me at the last, Daerys Arrun,’ said Blackheart. ‘Until now, you have proved yourself if not my equal, then at least a worthy opponent. Your Corpse-God would surely be proud to know how his servant has failed him.’
‘I do not need your empty words of meaningless heresy, traitor.’ Arrun went for another strike, but his energy was draining from him rapidly. His injuries could no longer keep him upright and he slumped back against the rock, arms outstretched with no strength to move them.
The Tyrant stared down at him dispassionately. There was no emotion in his mad face at all. His visage held no hate, no disgust, no pity... nothing. Not even triumph was evident in his expression. He was devoid of anything that could have marked him as remotely connected to sense. The one remaining eye rolled insanely in the half-metal skull and the power claw clenched hungrily, flame dripping from the nozzle in the palm. Lowering his axe so it rested against the Silver Skull’s forearm, Blackheart’s face slowly cracked into a cruel smile.
‘Do you see clearly now, Daerys Arrun? So it must always end for slaves to the False Emperor. I will deliver you from the true ho
rror of his so-called truth. This is my mercy.’
He raised the claw, ready to deliver the killing blow and then stopped abruptly as the whine of a jump pack caught his attention.
He was calm.
It wasn’t really all that strange. He was used to dealing with tense situations and so over the years had developed a mental partitioning process, discarding those thoughts and distractions that threatened his focus. By the accurate and careful calculations of his own internal cogitators, Correlan estimated that he had three point two minutes before the bomb in front of him detonated. Even if they evacuated the building now, the chances of them surviving the blast were so tiny it was barely worth the calculation. So he didn’t calculate it. There was no point.
Instead, the Techmarine did something he had not done since his earliest days in the workshops of Mars. All of the carefully recited litanies and knowledge that he had thrown at the current problem had not helped. So it was time to resort to the most basic of measures.
He guessed.
They were not loading goods from the maglev into the Thunderhawks. They were uncoupling the cars from one another. The reasons for this became obvious when one of the ships swooped in low enough for several Corsairs to scramble aboard. Cargo claws unfolded from the ship’s belly and mag-locked into place around the cars. Big enough to take two apiece, three of the transports were airbound again swiftly.
As they rose into the low, swirling grey clouds of the stormy sky, Daviks espied them from his vantage point at the landing site. His brow furrowed as he stared up at them. They were transport vessels, certainly not going to be capable of any sort of warp travel. That meant that they had to be headed for another location, perhaps elsewhere on the planet or...
‘Dread Argent, this is Captain Daviks.’
‘Go ahead, captain.’
‘Perform another series of sweeps within the Gildar Rift.’ He raised his eyes to the rapidly disappearing Thunderhawks. ‘There may just still be something out there.’
The Assault Marine roared towards Huron Blackheart with such alarming velocity that when the impact came, it sent the Tyrant flying. Brother Nakos’s chainsword roared a throaty promise of bloody dismemberment. The jump pack flared with a surge of power and Nakos hit the ground running before surging upwards again ready to dive upon his enemy.
Freed of the Tyrant’s not inconsiderable weight on his leg, Arrun was able to get himself shakily to his feet. He was gravely wounded and barely able to stand, but barely able meant that he still had strength left in him. ‘Mostly dead is still slightly alive,’ he had been told once.
Moving was a near impossibility because of the extent of his wounds, although it didn’t stop him trying. He limped several steps down the mountainside and, gritting his teeth, urged a fresh surge of power through his claws.
By some providence, they still worked. ‘Nakos...’ Arrun attempted to vox to his battle-brother, but the transmitter in his helmet had been damaged along with nearly every other system as he had fallen. His own life support indicators kept fuzzing in and out of visibility.
He turned with agonising slowness towards Huron Blackheart as Nakos struck out with his chainsword. With an inhuman roar, Blackheart met the attack with characteristic resilience. The tungsten teeth of the weapon bit determinedly into his armour and ceramite chips flew in all directions. Blackheart threw the Assault Marine off as though he was little more than an irritating insect.
The Silver Skull stumbled backwards and in the fleeting second it took him to regain his footing on the rocky ground, Huron Blackheart had closed the gap between them. Fire flaring from his palm, he unleashed a gout of hellfire that was hot enough to melt the joints of Nakos’s wargear as though they were nothing. A cry, muffled through the helm came from the unfortunate warrior and Blackheart completed his response by spearing Nakos through the chest with his monstrous claw.
‘I do not like to be interrupted, worm,’ the Tyrant said, his voice a breathy rasp. ‘Time to pay the price for your insolence.’ The warrior died slowly, struggling to free himself until the moment he drew his last breath. Arrun saw and noted Nakos’s bravery but, more, he saw the body of one of his battle-brothers impaled on the hand of a traitor.
Every last shred of self-control left him at that point. To see yet another of his Chapter brought to ruin at the hands of Huron Blackheart drove him to levels of self-determination and super-human capability to which only a Space Marine could ever truly hope to aspire.
Above them, one of the Thunderhawk transports rose into the sky, two cars of the maglev clutched beneath it. Its movement only briefly distracted Arrun’s focus, but he was rewarded moments later by a concussive blast of pressure as it exploded, a shot from one of the Devastator’s rocket launchers ending its escape run. The sullen, angry sky blossomed into light, debris raining down on the ground below. The sound of the Thunderhawk’s demise drew Blackheart’s attention and he turned his head, a scowl on his face.
Ignoring his limp, ignoring the fact he was effectively blind in one eye, Daerys Arrun let out a savage roar of his own and bodily flung himself at the Red Corsair. Three more of Nakos’s squad were rapidly descending into the crater, having picked up Nakos’s urgent call across the vox. They saw the two Space Marines engaged in a furious fight, their respective claws locked together as each struggled to gain the upper hand.
The two warriors were almost a match for each other, even with Arrun as terribly injured as he was, but it was this in the end which gave Blackheart the opportunity to deliver a mighty backhand strike with his power claw. The impact ripped Arrun’s skull-helm from his face and it bounced to a halt several feet from where they fought.
Stunned from the sheer force of his opponent’s blow, it was easy for Blackheart to twist his opponent down to his good knee at the same moment as his power axe arced downwards with uncanny speed towards the captain’s injured leg.
The crackling crescent blade sliced through the damaged ceramite, severing Arrun’s leg at the knee joint. With his failing strength, Arrun swung one last time with his own claws but to no avail.
‘Your Prognosticators did not foresee this, did they?’ The taunt was cruel and barbed and had completely the wrong effect on his victim. With a half-smile that took every ounce of effort and will he could muster, Arrun raised his eyes to meet those of his killer.
‘You could not be more wrong, Lugft Huron. They foresaw this with great clarity.’ His voice was fading with the last of his strength, but he found it within him to speak again. He did not know if what he said was true, but he fought back at the last with the only weapon he had left to him. The words dripped from his lips, each one weaker than the last.
‘And they have seen your end.’
The effect of those six words on Blackheart were devastating. For a fleeting second the madness fled and left nothing in its wake but cold, unadulterated evil. The Tyrant leaned closer, so close that Arrun smelled the acid-stink of his breath.
‘Chaos knows no end,’ he said in a whisper. ‘I will take everything your pitiful, dying Chapter throws at me and I will crush it all.’ He wrenched his axe viciously from the rock and without speaking another word, raised the weapon above his head, ready for the final blow that would cleave Arrun’s final, tattered thread of life.
Blackheart struck downwards, the axe glinting in the refracted blue light still sparking uselessly from Arrun’s lightning claws. The captain’s eyes were transfixed on the razor edge as it fell towards his chest. He felt the first two blows as they struck, the blade biting deep furrows in his battered armour. Even to the last, his hallowed power armour stubbornly tried to shield him. The third blow shattered the breastplate completely, shards of ceramite and plasteel pattering from the Tyrant’s own wargear and driving deep into the captain’s crippled body.
Blackheart laughed, a cruel, unforgiving sound. Vashiro’s words from so long ago blazed across Arrun�
��s memory.
There is no sound as eloquent as the vashka snake’s tail when it sounds before a strike.
Finally, at the last, Daerys Arrun understood.
The Tyrant’s axe fell for a fourth time, crushing the fused ribcage, cleaving right through Arrun’s torso and burying itself in the armoured backplate. The Silver Skull’s body thrashed once or twice in reflexive spasm and then was eternally stilled.
Blackheart twisted the axe viciously, tearing the flesh of his victim still further. He yanked the weapon back out of the corpse and it was only with supreme control that he didn’t fall to repeatedly smashing into Arrun’s body until nothing remained but pulp. The smell of blood as it oozed slowly from the Silver Skull’s body was maddening. The vitae coated his axe blade, dripping from its end.
Dropping to a crouch, Blackheart thrust his hand into the gaping wound his axe had made. Once, many years ago, the task of recovering the progenoids of dead battle-brothers had fallen to him when there had been no Apothecary to carry out the task.
The fates, it seemed, had chosen to favour Daerys Arrun more in death than they had done in life. Blackheart’s blow had rent the captain’s body apart, but the implant remained carefully cocooned behind a remaining chunk of bone. Without a reductor or further smashing of Arrun’s chest, the prize would remain elusive, or his attempts to claim it would result in its ruination.
Hurling curses, Blackheart got back to his feet. He had no more time to spend concerning himself with the conceit; the Space Marines who had witnessed the death of their captain had regained control of their senses and were headed towards him. With a twisted smile, Blackheart reached up with his hand and turned his flamer in their direction.
‘We must leave. We need to withdraw our forces from this planet now, my lord.’
The Corpsemaster’s whisper came into the Tyrant’s ear, even as he coolly watched the two Assault Marines burn. He made no response, concentrating as he was on the matter at hand.
Warriors of the Imperium - Andy Hoare & S P Cawkwell Page 67