Warhammer - Ultramarines 03 - Dead Sky, Black Sun (McNeill, Graham)

by Graham McNeill

  Honsou glanced to the glow of fires and forges beyond those of Berossus's encampments, where Toramino waited, unseen and unknown. Here, at last, Onyx caught a flash of unease.

  'He waits for Berossus to grind us and his own warriors to dust before marching in to take Khalan-Ghol and become lord of its ruins.'

  'And how will we stop him?'

  Honsou laughed. 'One problem at a time, Onyx, one problem at a time.'

  The hateful sound of massed artillery fire was muted and distant, though Uriel knew it must be perilously close to be heard this far beneath the mountains. Dust drifted in lazy clouds from the tunnel roof, and fine pebbles skittered and danced upon the floor. The darkness was absolute, even his enhanced vision had difficulty piercing the gloom.

  Heat filled the tunnel along with the hot, foetid stink of animals, though these were no animals. They were, or at least had once been, human.

  Hundreds of the Unfleshed filed along the fearful passages beneath the mountains, their winding route taking them through echoing crystal chambers, disused manufactorum and up dizzyingly steep stone channels hacked into the rock. Their massive bodies filled the passageways as they led Uriel and the others back towards Khalan-Ghol.

  They travelled through dark and secret ways under the mountains, forgotten by all save them, the hidden, abandoned culverts and the lost, forgotten passageways that led towards their fate.

  Behind Uriel, Pasanius grunted with effort, his journey made all the harder by virtue of his limb's amputation, but wherever he had encountered difficulty, the Lord of the Unfleshed reached back and lifted him onwards.

  The giant creature led the way through the darkness, his huge form easily filling the width of the passage, and were it not for his hunched shoulders and stooped head, he would surely have dashed his skull open on drooping stalactites.

  The Lord of the Unfleshed marched with newfound purpose, his long, loping stride setting a fearsome pace through the secret mountain paths. Uriel winced with every step, his breath painful in his single functioning lung and the pain of his cracked collarbone and ribs stabbing into him without the balms of his armour's dispensers to dull them.

  Further back, a twisted creature with a withered twin fused to its back carried Leonid, the stunted sibling clutching the grimacing colonel tightly in its embrace. And further back yet came Ardaric Vaanes and his two surviving Space Marine renegades.

  When the rapture of the Emperor's coming to life before the Unfleshed had died down, the creatures had embraced Uriel's cause with all the zeal and fervour of a crusade, mustering those who could hunt and fight to join them. It had made Uriel want to weep at the holy joy that infused every one of them and made his deception of them even harder to bear.

  As he had gained his feet before the Lord of the Unfleshed, it had beckoned to one of its tribe, and another of the beasts loped towards him. Uriel saw that it was the creature he had fought in the outflow pool, his sword still jammed in its belly.

  'Take blade.' said the Lord of the Unfleshed and Uriel nodded, gingerly gripping the hilt of the weapon. He had pulled, muscles straining as he fought the suction of flesh, bracing his feet on the floor of the manufactorum to gain better purchase. The sword was wedged tightly in the beast's body and he was forced to twist the blade to allow it to move. At last, it slid grudgingly from its sheath of flesh, the creature remaining stolidly silent throughout. As it came free, the giant beast moved to join the remainder of its awed brethren.

  'Thank you.' said Uriel.

  The Unfleshed nodded respectfully and Uriel had felt a glowing ember of hope fan to life in his heart.

  But his initial relief and elation at such a turn of events had soon turned sour when he had been reunited with his coMisterades and Ardaric Vaanes spoke to him.

  'They will kill you when they discover you have lied to them.' said the renegade as the Unfleshed had girt themselves for war, gathering crude iron cudgels. Most needed no weapons however, their horrific mutations equipping them for killing without the need for such things.

  'Have I?' Uriel had said, guardedly. 'I do the Emperor's work, and so now do they.'

  'The Unfleshed?' said Vaanes, aghast. 'You think the Emperor would work through such beasts? Look at them, they're monsters. How can you think that such creatures are capable of being instruments of His will? They are evil!'

  'They carry the flesh of the Emperor within them.' snapped Uriel. 'The blood of ancient heroes flows in their veins and I will not fail them.'

  'Don't think you can fool me, Ventris.' sneered Vaanes. 'You are no messenger of the Emperor, and I can see in your eyes that you know you're not either.'

  'It does not matter what I believe any more.' said Uriel. 'What do you believe?'

  'I believe that I was right about you.'

  'What does that mean?'

  'That I knew you were trouble the moment I saw you.' shrugged Vaanes. 'It doesn't matter anyway. As soon as we get to the surface, myself and the others will leave you and your motley band.'

  'You are really going to turn your back on us? After all that has happened, all the blood spilt, the death and the pain? Can you really do that?'

  'I can and I will.' snarled Vaanes. 'And who would blame me? Look around you, look at these monsters. They are all going to be dead soon, and their blood will be on your hands. Think about it, you're going to try and storm a besieged fortress with a tribe of cannibalistic mutants, a dying Guard colonel and a sergeant with one arm. I am a warrior, Ventris, plain and simple, and there is nothing left to me except survival. To go back to Khalan-Ghol is madness, and attacking that fortress isn't my idea of courage, it's more like suicide.'

  Vaanes gripped Uriel's shoulder and said, 'You don't have to die here. Why don't you and Pasanius come with me. You're pretty handy in a fight and I could use a warrior like you.'

  Uriel shrugged off the renegade's arm and said, 'You are a fine warrior, Ardaric Vaanes, but I was wrong to have thought you might regain your honour. You have courage, but I am glad that I do not go into battle with you again.'

  Hatred flared in the renegade's eyes and his expression became hard as stone.

  Without another word, Vaanes stalked away.

  Uriel put the renegade from his mind as he saw a patch of bright light coming from ahead and realised that the noise of battle was swelling in volume as well. With renewed vigour, he climbed after the Lord of the Unfleshed and emerged, blinking into the harsh while light of Medrengard.

  The noise of the battles raging around Honsou's fortress was tremendous, and Uriel saw that the secret paths of the Unfleshed had brought them out into the rocky uplands near the base of Khalan-Ghol itself, the plains before the fortress hundreds of metres below them.

  High above, the ramparts of the fortress were wreathed in the fires of battle, and Uriel saw that they were going to have to ascend into the very heart of the maelstrom raging above them.

  Many kilometres away, the clang of picks and shovels echoed in the hot, lamp-lit confines of the mineworks beneath the great ramp. A wide gallery had been excavated, some nine hundred metres wide and with a gently sloping floor. A warrior in stained iron armour watched as hundreds of slaves and overseers hauled vast flatbed wagons bearing drums of explosives and fuel to be packed into the length of the excavations.

  The long gallery was almost full, packed with enough explosives to level the mountain itself, knew Corias Keagh, Master of Ordnance to Lord Berossus himself. The tunnels to reach the underside of Khalan-Ghol would be his masterwork. It had been hard, slow work and cost the lives of thousands, but he had succeeded in getting the complex web of tunnels to exactly the right spot. It was almost a shame to blow such a perfect example of siege mining apart.

  Thirty metres above him - if his calculations were correct, and he had no reason to doubt them, for Obax Zakayo had been very precise in his treachery - were the catacombs of the fortress, where the revenants of previous masters of Khalan-Ghol were said to haunt its depths. Keagh knew that such
tales were probably nonsense, but in the Eye of Terror it never paid to scoff at such things too openly.

  But word of these tales had filtered back to the thousands of human soldiers who had spent the last few months billeted in the garrison tunnels he had constructed within the body of the great ramp, and he had heard ill-favoured mutterings concerning this attack. He had ritually flayed these doomsayers, but a pervasive sense of dread had already taken hold.

  Despite this, all the soldiers were armed and ready to begin the assault upon the opening of Khalan-Ghol's

  belly, and Keagh was eager to finally get to grips with the foe.

  His armour thrummed in the heat, its internal systems struggling to keep his body temperature even.

  The heat in the tunnels was fearsome - more than Keagh would have expected at such a depth - but he paid it no mind, too intent on the spectacle of destruction he was about to unleash.

  The battlements were aflame, gunfire and steel scything through men and stone in devastating fusillades of heavy calibre shells. Mobile howitzers moving in the midst of the armoured column approaching the top of the ramp rained high explosive shells within the last line of bastions, filling the air with spinning fragments of red-hot metal.

  Men died in their hundreds, ripped apart in the devastating volleys or flamed from the wall by incendiary shells fired from the upper bastions of the approaching Titans.

  But Berossus was not going to take Khalan-Ghol without a fight and Honsou's Titans and revetted artillery positions had laid-in targeting information and punished the approaching column terribly. Tanks exploded as armour-penetrating shells slashed down from above and tore through their lighter upper armour. Such casualties were bulldozed aside without mercy, tumbling down the steep sides of the ramp to smash to pieces on the rocks below. But no matter how many Honsou's gunners killed, the column continued its relentless advance.

  Honsou gripped onto a splintered corbel of rock and watched the approaching army with a mixture of exhilaration and dread.

  Logistically Berossus had the upper hand, and he was using it to strangle the life from the defenders of his fortress - or what was left of them. Onyx was right, they could not defeat this army conventionally.

  But Honsou did not intend to fight conventionally.

  'Come on, damn you!' he shouted into the deafening crescendo of noise. He straggled to penetrate the gunsmoke, but could see nothing through the acrid fog.

  Onyx looked at Honsou in confusion, but said nothing as more shells landed nearby. Whizzing shrapnel ricocheted from the walls and Onyx leapt before Honsou, allowing several plate-sized blades of metal to hammer into his daemonic flesh rather than shred his master.

  'Onyx!' called Honsou, dragging the daemonic symbiote to its feet. 'Look towards Berossus's army and tell me what you see!'

  Onyx staggered over to the edge of the wall and shifted his vision patterns until he could see clearly across the entirety of the battle. Streamers of fire and starbursts of explosions flickered like distant galaxies, but his eyes pierced the chaos and confusion of the battle with ease.

  The lead elements of Berossus's army had smashed their way onto the spire's plateau and were less than a hundred metres from the last wall that stood between them and final victory. Dreadnoughts howled in battle fury and the Titans strode behind them like avatars of the gods of battle, weapons roaring with prayers to their dark masters.

  'Berossus is at the wall!' shouted Onyx. 'He will be upon us in moments!'

  'No! The ramp!' returned Honsou. 'What's happening at the end of the ramp!'

  'I see tanks, hundreds of tanks', yelled the daemonic symbiote, barely audible over the concussive booms of artillery fire. 'They are gathered beside the entrance to the mineworkings at the base of the ramp and are simply awaiting their turn to begin the climb.'

  'Excellent.' laughed Honsou. 'Oh, Berossus, you are even more of a fool than I took you for!'

  Satisfied that there was just the right amount of explosives, shaped and arranged to explode upwards into the fortress, Corias Keagh retreated swiftly from the gallery beneath Khalan-Ghol, unwinding a long length of insulated cable from the servo-rig on his back. Darting pincer arms mounted on the rig kept the cable from fouling and ensured that it remained straight and level.

  'Here should do it.' he said to no one in particular as he turned into the armoured bunker he had constructed for just this moment.

  The pincer arms cut the cable and craned oyer his shoulder to hand him the brushed copper end of its length. Synchronous timers had been calibrated from his armour's own power unit and he hooked the end of the cable into a power port on the chest of his breastplate. A winking red light on his helmet's visor turned to gold and he felt a physical stirring as the charges he had set armed.

  He opened a channel to his lord and master and said, 'Lord Berossus, the charges beneath the fortress are set and ready to be detonated.'

  'Then detonate them now.' came the familiar growling rasp of his master's voice. 'We are almost at the head of the ramp.'

  Pausing to savour this moment of his greatest triumph, Keagh allowed the dim silence of the tunnel to

  enfold him before sending a pulse of energy along the length of the cable.

  The mountain itself shook with the force of the blast far below, thousands of tonnes of ordnance and fuel exploding in one simultaneous blast that instantly atomised a whole swathe of the bedrock of Medrengard. Honsou staggered and fell to his knees as the Shockwave rippled throughout the fortress. Tall towers that had stood for millennia crashed down to ruin and every fighting man was knocked from his feet.

  Tanks, and even one of Berossus's Titans, tumbled from the ramp as the Shockwave fanned upwards from below. Cracks split the stonework of the battlements and hundreds died as they fell to their deaths upon shattered ramparts. The main wall crumbled, torn like paper and breached in a dozen places by the shear forces twisting the mountain.

  Aftershocks continued to rumble, shaking Khalan-Ghol to its foundations and Honsou heard a deep, answering roar, as though the fortress itself cried out in rage at this violation.

  His fortress had been breached, but Honsou felt nothing but elation as the growling tremors that gripped his fastness began to fade.

  'Now I have you, Berossus!' he snarled. 'Iron Warriors, ready yourselves!'

  PART FOUR

  T ENEMY OF MY ENEMY...

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Corias Keagh felt the thunderous roar of the explosion force its way down his tunnels like the bellow of an angry god. He braced himself against the wall of his underground bunker, confident that his works would survive this violence he had unleashed. He heard the metal of his tunnel supports groan in protest at the power of the Shockwave, but Keagh had been digging mines and bringing ruin to fortresses from below for thousands of years and knew his craft well.

  Only when the temperature readout on his visor leapt upwards did he realise that something was amiss.

  He heard it first as a whooshing rush of superheated air, forced through the tunnels ahead of something unimaginably hot. He rushed out into the tunnels as a terrible fear suddenly seized him.

  Leaping from tunnel to tunnel, a flashing cloud of incandescent vapours foamed along the length of his workings. Behind it came a roaring, seething orange glow of molten metal and Keagh heard the screams of the soldiers as the lethally hot steam boiled the flesh from their bones.

  He knew then that every one of the thousands of men in the tunnels beneath the ramp was going to die. His tunnels had not breached the sepulchres of Khalan-Ghol, but somewhere else entirely.

  But how could that be, when the location of Keagh's breaching gallery had come straight from Obax Zakayo...?

  In the split second Keagh had left of life, he realised that that they had been horribly deceived - that all they had striven for was ruined.

  He turned to run, but even one as enhanced as an Iron Warrior could not outrun millions of tonnes of roaring molten metal as it spilled fro
m the forges of Khalan-Ghol, destroying everything before it and liquefying the earth of the ramp as it went.

  Keagh was engulfed in the rushing torrent of fire and had the exquisite horror of a last few seconds of life before his armour was melted away and his flesh vaporised.

  Uriel felt the immense power of the subterranean explosion spread through the landscape and stumbled, gripping the sharp rocks of Khalan-Ghol's peak tightly as the tremors shook the foundations of the world itself. Plumes of glowing, orange steam geysered from the foot of the mountain and, as he watched, more and more began bursting from channels cut into the monstrous ramp.

  'What in the Emperor's name?' breathed Uriel as he looked up and saw the top of the ramp sag and collapse upon itself as though the weight of earth supporting it was being steadily removed.

  'A countermine?' shouted Pasanius.

  'It would need to have been colossal to cause such damage.' said Uriel, shaking his head.

  'Emperor angry at iron men.' roared the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Strikes them from heaven!'

  'He does indeed.' nodded Uriel, risking a glance at the gory features of the creature and feeling immense relief that Vaanes was not here to see the expression on his own face.

  The renegades had turned their backs on them, spitting on this last chance for redemption and had marched away without a single word as soon as they had reached the surface. Uriel had watched them go, his heart heavy at their betrayal of what it meant to be a Space Marine, but relieved that he himself had been tested and not been found wanting.

  Truth be told, there was some merit in what Vaanes had said. Perhaps this was a suicide mission and would see them all dead. And perhaps as well there was merit in survival, for where was the glory or honour to be had from their deaths?

  But Uriel knew that for a true warrior of the Emperor there was no terror of death, only the fear that he might die with his works unfulfilled.