Angel Exterminatus

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Find cover,’ said Wayland’s voice in his helmet. ‘Now.’

  Sharrowkyn ran for the wide-mouthed pipes, each twice as tall as his stooped-over height, and threw himself inside. He pressed himself flat against one curved wall.

  ‘Boom,’ said Wayland.

  A cataclysmic detonation shook the world with seismic force. Atmosphere compressed and burst as a pressure wave pummelled its way along the pipe, crushing Sharrowkyn to the wall. Hammering echoes of secondary explosions crackled and thumped, and he felt the autosenses of his armour resetting in the wake of the pounding soundwaves and blinding glow. The pipe was concertinaed and warped as though it had been stepped on by a battle engine, and light broke in through cracks in the steelwork.

  Sharrowkyn picked himself up and ran towards the far end, checking his rifle was clear of obstructions. A shape appeared silhouetted at the end of the tunnel: bulky, armoured and post-human. Sharrowkyn’s weapon was already at his shoulder and he put a single toxin shot into the target’s centre-mass. The warrior crumpled with a strangled cry and Sharrowkyn vaulted the body, only vaguely noticing the hideous facial disfigurements and the strange, long-necked weapon he carried.

  Reaching the end of the tunnel, Sharrowkyn backed up against the buckled steelwork of the pipe, ducking a head out to see what was going on.

  It wasn’t good.

  The enemy had reacted far faster than they’d expected. Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children were circling around to form an unbreakable perimeter. Gangs of soldiers in khaki uniforms spread methodically through the construction site, sweeping the area with a thoroughness that surprised him until he saw they were Selucid Thorakites.

  Here and there, Sharrowkyn saw the bulkier shape of traitor legionaries, bellowing orders or directing their charges with a clubbing blow. Sharrowkyn took a moment to listen, trying to gain some sense of whether he had the dubious honour of being the first Imperial servant to succeed in killing a traitor primarch. Some wailing voices claimed to have seen Fulgrim’s head split open by the killer’s bullet, while others claimed the wounded primarch himself was leading the hunt for his would-be assassin.

  The truth was impossible to know, and he didn’t have time to stick around and sort fact from fiction.

  The enemy couldn’t have closed the noose just yet; he still had time.

  But only if he moved now.

  Sharrowkyn ducked out of the pipe and made his way farther from the amphitheatre, moving where the darkness aided him, embracing shadows where the harsh beams of searchlights passed over him. Every metre he gained was a victory, but he was running out of space and time to manoeuvre as more and more warriors flooded the construction yards.

  ‘Wayland, are you there?’ he hissed over the vox. ‘I could use some more back-up here.’

  Static buzzed from the speakers in his helmet, and he wondered if Wayland had been caught and killed in the moments since triggering the charges. The Iron Hand didn’t have his flair for stealth work, nor had he trained in Raven Guard escape and evasion techniques. Sharrowkyn owed Wayland his life after he’d pulled his wounded body onto a gunship on Isstvan V, and the thought of that debt going unpaid left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  Sharrowkyn pushed onwards, crawling through pools of stagnant oil-polluted water, beneath heavy lifter rigs and between stacked building materials. He ran along the edge of a high-walled ravelin, its interior stacked with coiled razorwire, bladed sawbucks and other tools of the besieger. He heard the creak of a footfall an instant before he realised there was someone behind him, and dived forwards as a squealing blast of sonic force blasted a metre-wide hole in the modular plascrete wall. He rolled and brought his rifle up, pressing down on the trigger and emptying the solid needle magazine in the time it took to aim. His shots pierced the Emperor’s Children warrior’s breastplate and misted his chest in a mass of pulped flesh.

  The legionary laughed hysterically and brought his weapon to bear again.

  ‘You only get one chance,’ said Sharrowkyn, dropping his rifle and drawing his two shoulder-sheathed gladii. Each black blade was a slice of utter darkness, non-reflective and near frictionless. Sharrowkyn leapt, and his first blade sliced through the warrior’s sonic weapon, the second buried itself in his neck.

  And still he wouldn’t die.

  Sharrowkyn wrenched his blades clear as the warrior opened his distended jaws impossibly wide. He’d thought the warrior’s monstrous appearance was a hideously carved helmet, but now saw the error of that assessment. Nightmarish surgeries had transformed his enemy into something less than human, a parody of what evolution had wrought over millions of years and deemed fittest for survival. He screamed with deafening volume, and though Sharrowkyn silenced him with a blade thrust that punched through the back of his plasticised skull, the damage was done.

  The enemy had a fix on his position.

  Sharrowkyn sheathed his blades and scooped up his rifle, running for the edge of the construction site. More gunfire puffed the earth and more screams of the hideously transformed warriors echoed around him. Sharrowkyn climbed to the top of an earthen ridge, violating the cardinal rule of skylining himself, and looked for a way out.

  There wasn’t one.

  He ducked back as more gunfire punched the ridgeline and dropped to his haunches as a host of mortal soldiers and traitor legionaries converged on his position. Four glistening Land Raiders rolled into sight, followed by a dozen Iron Warriors Rhinos. Traitors disembarked with grim efficiency, marching towards their trapped prey.

  Sharrowkyn slotted home his last clip of solid needles and scrambled back up the slope as more gunfire stabbed towards him. Las-burns scorched his armour, and damage indicators flickered angrily on his helmet visor. He turned and brought his rifle to bear, each shot pitching an enemy warrior to the ground.

  He saw crew-served guns being wheeled into place: quad-lasers, small-calibre howitzers, tunnelling mortars. At least a thousand enemy soldiers surrounded him, intent on taking him alive and making him pay for what he’d done.

  ‘Damn, but they’re making sure,’ he said.

  Sharrowkyn heard the roaring of engines behind him, the throaty intake of hot air being gulped into powerful vectored ramjets. A storm of dust devils blew up around him as a multi-spectrally camouflaged gunship rose up behind the ridge on throbbing banks of jetwash. Coloured a dull midnight grey, its swept-back wings bristled with cannons, and its stubby prow with linked banks of heavy bolters. Missile racks on its upper fuselage locked into place with a clatter of loading mechanisms.

  The Storm Eagle dipped its tapered nose and Sharrowkyn saw Sabik Wayland in the cockpit.

  Wayland nodded and Sharrowkyn dropped flat as a hurricane of shells blitzed down the slope, shredding anything living in a storm of explosive mass-reactive shells and armour-busting penetrator rounds. The traitors scattered as the nose of the Storm Eagle swung left and right, turning the ground below Sharrowkyn into a boiling cauldron of hot metal and chewed up flesh. The noise was incredible, a never-ending hellstorm of chugging bangs, rotating ammo hoppers and clinking shell casings falling in a brass rain.

  The enemy Land Raiders weathered the storm of gunfire, but Wayland wasn’t done.

  Four missiles detached from their mountings and slashed down at the heavily armoured vehicles. Three of the tanks detonated instantly, blooming fireballs immolating the soldiers who’d taken shelter behind them. A fourth lurched like a wounded animal, crushing Emperor’s Children beneath its flaming bulk before internal explosions blew it apart from the inside.

  The quiet that followed was like the aftermath of a terrible accident, the stunned silence before true horror kicks in. Sharrowkyn used that moment to scramble up the slope towards the Storm Eagle. The assault gunship hovered on a cushion of superheated air that turned the top of the ridge to glass. The barrels of its rapid-firing cannons bled heat and drooled smoke. Its assault ramp slammed down and Sharrowkyn wasted no time in leaping aboard.

  ‘Go!’
he shouted as he slammed a palm into the closing mechanism.

  The Storm Eagle spun on its axis, furiously nimble, and Sharrowkyn was hurled against the fuselage as Wayland punched the engines. The gunship dropped and flew close to the earth as it jinked and wove an evasive pattern through the siegeworks. Sharrowkyn struggled to reach the cockpit, dragging himself along via handholds on jutting stanchions and crew harnesses.

  He dropped into the co-pilot’s seat, seeing the red earth and rocky mountains swinging wildly through the armourglass canopy.

  ‘You cut that one fine,’ he said.

  ‘If you’d kept up with me, I wouldn’t have had to,’ returned Wayland.

  Sharrowkyn shrugged, unwilling to argue the point as the gunship’s wild manoeuvring threaded a path through waving streams of anti-aircraft fire. Wayland’s hands danced over the controls, flaring the engines, pumping out targeting decoys in their wake and avoiding the most predictable flight paths. The Storm Eagle’s agility was far greater than any Legion aircraft Sharrowkyn had flown in, and its stealth capabilities ensured that none of the coordinated fire patterns of the Iron Warriors came close to touching it.

  As the craft powered away from the valley, its madly twisting course was replaced by something approaching level flight.

  ‘We’re clear?’ he asked.

  ‘Their own gunships will be scrambling, but they’ll not catch us before we’re back aboard the Sisypheum,’ said Wayland.

  ‘What about their orbital launches?’

  The Iron Hand snorted in derision.

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Wayland. ‘I designed the Nighthawk-pattern, remember?’

  Sharrowkyn grinned and rapped his knuckles on the edge of the armoured bucket seat. ‘You know, Sabik, I think the Mechanicum might give this variant their seal of approval after all,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘Eventually.’

  SEVEN

  I Was There

  The Paths Above

  Flesh Tribute

  Fulgrim toppled in slow motion, like the mightiest tree in the forest felled without even knowing the rot was in its roots. Perturabo was at his brother’s side before anyone else in the amphitheatre was even aware of what had happened. He caught Fulgrim’s head as it struck the flagstones of the stage with a sickening crack. With a thought he summoned the Iron Circle and bellowed at the crowds now surging from their seating in horror to keep back.

  ‘Brother!’ cried Perturabo, scanning the upper tiers of the Thaliakron for signs of the sniper. He replayed the moment of the bullet’s impact, analysing and triangulating the shot’s origin point. He saw nothing, but any marksman worthy of the name would have already displaced.

  The crashing footfalls of the Iron Circle surrounded him, forming an unbroken ring of protection. Legs braced, shields locked, the robots swathed Fulgrim and Perturabo in shadow and steel. The shot had struck Fulgrim on the right temple, a neat wound that appeared to have no twin on the opposite side. Whatever projectile the would-be assassin favoured was still inside his skull.

  ‘Fulgrim,’ said Perturabo. ‘Speak to me.’

  ‘Brother…’ said Fulgrim, his eyes like nuggets of onyx amid the streams of blood running down his face.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Just think,’ whispered Fulgrim. ‘You will be able to say you were there…’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You were there the day that Fulgrim fell.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Perturabo. ‘This is nothing. You and I both have taken worse wounds than this in our time.’

  ‘I fear you may be wrong, brother,’ said Fulgrim, reaching up to grip his arm as though ready to deliver a valediction.

  Blood continued to stream down Fulgrim’s face, and Perturabo knew that shouldn’t be happening. Even a legionary’s body should have sealed the wound by now. A primarch’s physiology should have ended this blood flow almost instantaneously. Had the Emperor stooped to using the envenomed tools of the assassin now? Perturabo’s anger coalesced into a compressed supernova at such dishonourable stratagems. Only cowards refused to face their foes in the arena of battle, and the thought that his gene-father had sanctioned such shadow killers was a stain on every memory he had of him.

  Perturabo heard the growl of his automata and the whine of their hammers powering up. Artificial muscles thrummed with building power, ready to destroy whoever or whatever was approaching.

  Fulgrim stirred from his repose and said, ‘It is Fabius, my Apothecary…’

  ‘Let him in,’ ordered Perturabo, and the Iron Circle parted long enough to allow a hunched figure in the livery of the Emperor’s Children through. Perturabo took an instant dislike to this Fabius: the hollow cheeks, the unkempt hair and the gaunt hunger in his gimlet eyes that looked him up and down as though measuring his coffin.

  The Apothecary’s armour seemed out of place on his body, like the carapace of something larger worn by the parasite that had killed it. A squatting spider of a mechanised contraption lurked at his shoulders. As he set to work on his fallen primarch, Perturabo smelled a witch’s brew of evil aromas – embalming fluids, noxious chemicals he couldn’t place and an abattoir’s worth of stale blood – that no amount of disinfectant would ever conceal.

  The warrior was post-human, no question of that, but the sheer number of self-administered surgical scars visible through his thinned hair and upon his exposed forearms made Perturabo question whether that was enough for this man. Had the grotesques in Fulgrim’s carnivalia been his creations?

  ‘My lord!’ exclaimed Fabius, examining the bright, oxygen-rich blood leaking from the wound. ‘This must be how the Sons of Horus felt on Davin. It is truly the worst feeling I have known.’

  ‘Shut up and heal him,’ ordered Perturabo, in no mood for melodrama and disliking the comparison with the Warmaster.

  ‘Fabius,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I can feel it in my head.’

  Fabius addressed Perturabo. ‘What manner of weapon did this?’

  ‘I don’t know, but the entry wound is too small for a bolt-round. There’s too much impact trauma for a las-weapon, so my guess is some kind of solid-slug rifle.’

  Fabius nodded and turned back to Fulgrim, the flexing narthecium unit mounted on his shoulders obscuring the work he was doing. Perturabo wanted to step from the protection of the Iron Circle to find out what was happening beyond the Thaliakron, but he didn’t trust Fabius to be left alone with Fulgrim. Something told Perturabo that no one would be safe in this man’s company for long, their flesh a canvas upon which he would practise unnatural surgical experimentations.

  Beyond the shields of the robots, Perturabo could hear the furious anger and growing terror of the crowd. They had all seen the Phoenician go down, and every second they were kept in the dark as to his fate would spawn ever more elaborate rumours. With a final suspicious glance at Fabius, Perturabo stepped from the Iron Circle’s protection.

  He found the warsmiths of his Trident waiting for him, circling the artificial guardians like bull grox protecting a birthing mother. Emperor’s Children stood beyond them, scavengers waiting to pick off the weakest member of the herd. The imagery was unpleasant, but apt.

  The Emperor’s Children moved with bow-taut urgency, desperate to learn of Fulgrim, but unwilling to risk the wrath of the Iron Warriors and their primarch’s bodyguard.

  A warrior in thickly-ornamented Cataphractii plate strung with flayed skin and hung with ribbons of bone stepped forwards, his whole face a burn scar that had healed poorly and been inexpertly treated. The warrior’s eyes were cataracted nightmares of pink-veined fluid that wept viscous tears along the craggy ruin of his features.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Perturabo.

  ‘Julius Kaesoron,’ answered the warrior. ‘First Captain. The Phoenician?’

  ‘He lives,’ said Perturabo. ‘It will take more than a poor marksman with a
rifle to end a primarch.’

  ‘Let us see him,’ demanded Kaesoron, making to push past.

  Perturabo put his hand on Kaesoron’s chest. ‘Don’t make me stop you,’ he said.

  ‘He is our primarch!’ protested the warrior.

  ‘And he is my brother,’ snapped Perturabo.

  Kaesoron’s milky eyes swept over the highest tiers of the Thaliakron, his expression unreadable through his scarring.

  ‘So much for the vaunted Iron Warriors security,’ he said; an arrogant dismissal that made Perturabo want to smash his skull with Forgebreaker’s head. ‘This should not have happened.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Perturabo, forcing his anger down. ‘It shouldn’t. And if Fulgrim hadn’t insisted on this theatricality, then it could have been avoided. Not even Valdor’s warriors could have protected him.’

  Kaesoron opened his mouth to disagree, but Perturabo shut him down first. ‘You can do nothing for your primarch now. Busy yourself with catching whoever did this. Hunt him down and kill him.’

  ‘The hunt is already under way,’ said Kaesoron. ‘A single marksman has no chance of escaping this treacherous act. Likely he will be caught within five hundred metres of the building.’

  ‘And if he is not?’

  ‘Even if by some miracle he manages to slip the net, there is no way he can get off-world or escape the fleets of ships in orbit,’ said Kaesoron.

  Perturabo tested that thought and found it wanting. ‘If your fleet assets were arranged in any halfway recognisable formation, I might agree with you,’ he said.

  Kaesoron stiffened at the insult, and Perturabo arched an eyebrow as he saw the man’s gauntlets curl into fists.

  ‘Do you want to die, little man?’ said Perturabo. ‘Or has my brother’s Legion become stupid as well as barbaric since swearing their oaths to Horus?’