Ultramarines

by Graham McNeill

  It thrashed like a dying animal, its one remaining leg churning the air as it fought to right itself. Sparking cables flopped from the wound and iridescent bio-fluids pooled around its shattered carapace. The machine’s binaric death-screams echoed throughout the forge-temple, a gurgling rasp of agony and hatred that hurt to hear and left bitter taste in the back of the throat.

  Telion let out his breath as the red light faded from the slit windows of its daemonic head.

  The forge-temple loosed a cry of loss and hatred, each one of the black-robed priests falling to the ground and convulsing as the scrapcode backwash of the engine’s death blew out portions of their cognitive architecture.

  Explosions flared all through the forge-temple as systems controlled by the engine began to fail. The destruction wrought by Telion’s bombs, combined with the death of the temple’s high priest, was causing a catastrophic chain-reaction of destruction. Klaxons blared, binaric warnings screeched from roof-mounted loudspeakers and a cascade effect of collapse was marching through the forge-temple.

  ‘We need to go!’ shouted Kaetan. ‘Right now!’

  Telion nodded and keyed the vox-mic. ‘Draco!’ he shouted. ‘Get back here now! Immediate exfiltration!’

  He received no response and desperately looked for any sign of the lad. Blazing fires and expanding lakes of bloodmetal hazed the air with smoke and choking fumes, making it next to impossible to see anything clearly. Kaetan led the rest of the squad back through the vent shaft that had brought them inside the forge-temple, and Telion knew he would have to join them soon.

  ‘Draco!’ repeated Telion. ‘Respond, damn it!’

  The smoke parted for an instant, and Telion’s gaze fell upon an Adeptus Astartes pattern missile launcher slowly melting in a sinuous river of lava-like steel. Draco would never abandon his battle gear, and with sinking heart, Telion knew the Scout had perished saving their lives.

  ‘Guilliman watch over you, lad,’ said Telion, turning and making his way to safety. A titanic explosion tore the end of the forge apart as he reached the vent, and Telion gripped the edge of the opening as he took one last look around the collapsing temple for any sign that Draco might somehow still be alive.

  There was nothing, and Telion ducked into the shaft as the forge-temple tore itself apart.

  They watched its final collapse from a rocky ledge two kilometres from the Maidens of Nestor. The entire plateau was a glowed haloed in sunset orange as tears of molten metal wept down the mountain’s flanks. Each glassy monolith reflected the glow of the forge-temple’s destruction, standing proud amid the devastation.

  No more would the Bloodborn craft engines of war to slaughter the defenders of Quintarn. No more would they be able to replenish their losses with impunity. Now the battlefields would be places of attrition to them, and Votheer Tark’s lack of ability as a warlord would be hideously exposed.

  Now the Ultramarines were in the ascendancy.

  Telion ran a hand across his shaven scalp before making the sign of the aquila over his heart. Behind him, Kaetan, Dareios, Zeno and Agathon did the same, honouring their fallen brother.

  ‘I shouldn’t have lost him,’ said Telion.

  ‘You didn’t,’ said Kaetan. ‘The war took him.’

  ‘The war?’ replied Telion, shaking his head. ‘No, I let him down, and now the Chapter has been deprived of a fine Scout, a son of Ultramar who never had the chance to be the warrior it was his right to become.’

  Kaetan put his hand on Telion’s shoulder and said, ‘Think on it this way. Draco’s sacrifice saved all our lives. And how many lives will we go on to save?’

  ‘One life for many? Is that what you are saying?’

  ‘It is, and you know I’m right,’ said Kaetan. ‘I too grieve for Draco’s loss, but if his death allows us to win the war for Quintarn, then I believe it was a price worth paying.’

  Telion nodded. ‘I know you are right, old friend, but to see those in their prime cut down while an old warhorse like me endures feels very wrong.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Kaetan. ‘You are Torias Telion, the Eye of Vengeance, and you will live forever.’

  Telion did not answer him, and turned towards home.

  And behind him, a mountain burned.

  Practical. That was how they’d once done things. Back in the days of the Legion. He’d read the picts of the most ancient pages of the Codex Astartes in the timbered Arcanium, looking back to a time when the kinds of missions he was known for were the norm. Back when the Ultramarines had, so the flickering image of yellowed parchment claimed, ruled hundreds of worlds.

  There were few among the Chapter who would ever describe him or his methods as practical. Reckless, perhaps. Successful, certainly, but practical? Unlikely.

  Yet with the ending of the war against the Bloodborn, the Chapter was renewing itself. Why shouldn’t he?

  A faded aphorism within the pages of the Codex Astartes spoke of two kinds of fool, those who could not change and those who would not change.

  Cato Sicarius would be neither.

  Final Absolution was an inhuman agglomeration of void-wrecks and spatial debris. A ghost ship passing down through the galactic plane, it had breached Ultramarian space fifteen days ago. Its mass and residual bio-signs had triggered the deep augurs of the Kryptman line, bringing Valin’s Revenge and its escorts surging from the graving docks over Talassar on an intercept course.

  Even without the Kryptman line, the presence of tyrannic organisms within Final Absolution was clear. Vast resinous plates crusted its hull armour and mucus-like accretions enveloped its dorsal surfaces like cancerous blooms of coral.

  Three loathsomely organic bio-ships accompanied Final Absolution, smaller than the hulk, but still vast and grotesque in their resemblance to the nautilus beasts of Talassar’s deep ocean. Waving tentacles, kilometres-long, probed the void from cavernous maws and frills of undulant flesh rippled upon their cliff-like flanks.

  Another ten days would bring this splinter fleet within striking distance of Talassarian system space. Sicarius’s birthworld had suffered the touch of the Thrice-Born’s daemon-wrought. He had sworn a mighty oath upon his Tempest Blade that its people would not know the horror of the Great Devourer.

  Valin’s Revenge was a ship of the Second Company, but Severus Agemman had named the hulk, as was his right as senior captain. Three squads drawn from First Company’s finest warriors had been added to Sicarius’s order of battle. Their inclusion came at the behest of Lord Calgar, but Sicarius sensed the hand of Varro Tigurius in its origin. The mind of the Chapter’s Chief Librarian was an ever-shifting labyrinth that looked in a thousand directions for threats to the Chapter and the means to counter them. If he and Lord Calgar had decided the warriors of the First were needed, then Sicarius was not about to gainsay them.

  Killing tyranids aboard space hulks was what Terminators did best, but the warriors of the Second would be first in the fight.

  The lightless axial corridor was thick with beasts, scores of leaping, screeching killers of the hormagaunt genus. Sicarius’s command squad cut them down with disciplined volleys of mass-reactives. Explosions lit the way onward with strobing muzzle flare.

  At the head of the Lions of Macragge, Sicarius met the tyranid charge head on. He went low, ducking under a slashing claw the length of a scythe, and he thrust his Tempest Blade into the creature’s thorax and twisted its energised edge. Molten flesh and black-red ichor frothed over his gauntlet.

  He kicked the dying beast clear and shoulder-barged the press of aliens behind it. Bodies broke before his bulk. He stamped down on chitinous limbs, breaking arcs of bone and crushing hard shells. A jaw snapped on his left wrist, razored fangs scoring the artificer-forged plate.

  Gaius Prabian took the creature’s head with a decapitating sweep of his power blade as Malcian unleashed a roaring blast of promethium from h
is flamer. A dozen monsters shrieked as superheated gel compounds burned them to bloody vapour.

  Sicarius moved into the gap, the jaws of the disembodied head still gnawing at his wrist. The black orbs of its skull rolled over to white. Sicarius smashed it to bony splinters against the bulkhead and fired his plasma pistol. The searing beam burned out the chest of a dead-eyed horror of talons and teeth, penetrating a molten core through half a dozen more.

  Vandius, Daceus and Venatio advanced with him, bolters locked to their shoulders. With flawless target prioritisation, they pumped shot after shot into the heaving mass of alien flesh.

  Sicarius and Prabian led the charge, both warriors supremely gifted champions of the blade. Sicarius fought with the skill of a duellist, his sword arm trained since birth by the greatest fencing masters of Talassar. Prabian owned no such finesse. His blade arm was a killing tool, his shield a battering ram.

  Malcian’s flamer unleashed another burning stream, lighting the axial with the glow of a furnace. Alien bodies burned with a curious snapping sound, like fresh kindling on a bonfire. Bolter shells detonated hormagaunts like chitinous bladders, their noxious blood spattering the wall in vast quantities.

  Siciarius saw something larger than a gaunt lope down the corridor, wreathed in the play of fire and shadow. Even hunched over, its bulk was impressive, ridged and bony, with sharp chitin-hooks running the length of its spine. Its skull was a bulbous horror of ridged, overlapping plates.

  ‘Warrior genus,’ said Prabian. ‘A big one too.’

  ‘Too big?’ said Sicarius.

  ‘Big enough that we ought to take it together.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  The tyranid warrior’s alien lips peeled back from its elongated jaw to reveal long, yellowed fangs. Hissing saliva drooled, and a black tongue coiled from its red-raw gullet. The creature barrelled forward on monstrously powerful legs, trampling its smaller kin in its hunger to reach Sicarius.

  Twin blades of acid-edged bone unfurled from folds in its upper limbs.

  Sicarius pressed himself against the shielding protrusion of a corroded stanchion and said, ‘Brother Malcian, give me some light.’

  Malcian took a braced stance and a stream of liquid fire played over the creature. Its flesh ignited and it screeched in pain. Bolter shells detonated against its armour.

  It left chunks of corpse-white flesh in its wake.

  Prabian stepped from cover and swung his power sword in his favoured decapitating strike. A killing move, but one that could leave a warrior dangerously exposed. A flesh-wrought sword flashed up to block the blow, a second thrusting for the champion’s midriff.

  Prabian rammed his shield into the bonesword, cracking the bio-weapon in two. At the sound of the blade snapping, Sicarius swung low and rammed his plasma pistol into the side of the alien’s reverse-jointed leg.

  He pulled the trigger and the creature’s knee vanished in an explosion of molten bone and flesh. The monster crashed to the metalled deck and Sicarius spun, reversing his Tempest Blade to ram it down, one-handed through the back of the fallen beast’s skull.

  Its agonised thrashing ceased instantly.

  Sicarius left the sword embedded as the hormagaunts screeched in sudden abandonment, reeling in animal confusion. Sicarius knew the signs well enough; until another brood-leader imposed its dominance the tyranids were easy prey.

  ‘Kill them all,’ he said.

  The Lions of Macragge advanced in a line to carry out their captain’s orders.

  Leaving the slaughter of the ’gaunts behind, Sicarius and his command squad pushed towards the bridge. In a normal boarding action, that location would be heavily defended, but the swarm creatures counted no particular region of the ship – save for the nests of the hive lords – as more important than another.

  Sicarius climbed the processional steps towards the bridge. The walls were a mixture of resinous excretions and scorched metal. Glossy veneers of pulsing organic tubes pierced acid-burned bulkheads.

  ‘Sergeant Ixion,’ said Sicarius. ‘Report.’

  ‘Moving up sub-deck seven-six-alpha. Heavy resistance.’

  Sicarius nodded; he’d planned for this. The larger, more aggressive forces of Ixion and Manorian were drawing the greater concentrations of tyrannic warrior creatures.

  Leaving the path to the bridge relatively undefended.

  Relatively. Already he heard scratching claws behind the walls and beneath the deck plates. The grunts, brays and screeches of incoming ravager packs were getting louder.

  ‘Do you require assistance, sergeant?’

  ‘Macragge’s Avengers need no help to kill tyranids, sire,’ replied Ixion, with the precise mix of arrogance and respect Sicarius cultivated in all his warriors.

  ‘Good work, sergeant. Keep pushing them hard, draw in as many as you can. And be ready for the withdrawal order.’

  ‘Understood. Ixion out.’

  Sicarius switched vox-channels.

  ‘Manorian,’ he said. ‘Time to objective?’

  ‘Current rate of advance puts us at sub-junction sigma-three-three in four minutes.’

  Bolter fire, muted by the vox, and the wet smack of cold steel into alien flesh echoed in Sicarius’s helm. The tactical overlay on his visor put the sub-junction five hundred metres from the sergeant’s current position. Hard to believe Praxor Manorian would take so long to reach an objective.

  ‘Make it three, and the company banner’s yours to lift when we return to Macragge.’

  ‘We’ll be there in two,’ promised Manorian.

  Severus Agemman’s eyes darted over the updating engagement sigils on the battle-logisters of Valin’s Revenge. The Lions of Macragge had secured the location the Techmarines had divined to be main engine control. Already the Revenge’s augurs showed heat blooms in Final Absolution’s engineering decks.

  Within the hour, the corrupted hulk would be diverted from its current path, taking it and the hideous xenos threat within beyond the eastern fringe.

  ‘Your plan is working, Cato,’ said Agemman, hating the grating, artificial wheeze he now heard in his voice.

  An all but mortal wound sustained at the claws of the thrice-born daemon lord had almost ended him on in the keep of Castra Tanagra. Only a cybernetically rebuilt chest cavity and an indomitable will to survive had kept his name from being added to the Temple of Correction’s walls.

  ‘Are you surprised?’ asked Librarian Felix Carthalo, a brooding presence at his side. ‘Did you expect it to fail?’

  Agemman shook his head, wondering if the prescient powers of the Librarian read more than just his tone. In any engagement with tyrannic foes, the psychic might of a Librarian was a boon, but Agemman never relished fighting alongside the Chapter’s warrior mystics.

  ‘Far from it, Brother Carthalo,’ said Agemman. ‘That Cato’s plan is working surprises me not in the least.’

  ‘Your tone suggests otherwise,’ replied Carthalo. ‘Did you hope it might falter, necessitating a combat deployment for the First?’

  Hearing the echo of his own desire to be unleashed in the Librarian’s voice, Agemman said, ‘The First Company live for war, Brother Carthalo. It is what we are bred for, but Captain Sicarius’s strategy is a good one. If all goes to plan, our strength will not be needed.’

  ‘Then perhaps the fates will present us an opportunity even amid Cato’s success,’ said the Librarian with the ghost of a smile playing around his thin lips.

  Agemman turned from the battle-logister to face his senior squad sergeants, Tirusus, Gaius and Solinas. The three warriors were encased in bulked plates of tactical Dreadnought armour painted the cobalt-blue and pearlescent white of First Company.

  Each was a hero of the Chapter, warriors whose names were known throughout Ultramar and beyond. Their faces were patchwork tapestries of scars earned in the thousand years of
service to the Emperor shared between them and carved into their skin. These men had carried his mortally wounded body from Castra Tanagra in the dying moments of the battle against the daemon lord’s host.

  Brothers was too small a word for the bond they shared.

  Sicarius’s plan cast Agemman’s warriors in the role of a quick-reaction force, a teleport reserve to smash any enemy counter-attack.

  A vital role, certainly, but not one that suited First Company temperaments. Despite his diplomatic words, Agemman saw the hope in each sergeant’s eye that he had seen a flaw in Sicarius’s plan.

  ‘Don’t let Cato’s past reputation fool you,’ said Agemman, wincing as the cybernetics grafted to his chest sent a spasm of pain through him. ‘Yes, some past stratagems of my brother-captain may have appeared reckless at face value, but they were never without a sound tactical basis.’

  ‘Even though they might have taken victory to see it,’ said Solinas, ever the quickest to find fault with Second Company’s captain.

  ‘Victory requires no explanation,’ quoted Gaius.

  That gave them a smile.

  Agemman nodded, ‘Very true, Gaius, but my surprise stems from seeing this plan’s roots so firmly entrenched in the teachings of the Codex Astartes.’

  Tirusus nodded. ‘Perhaps the fighting on Espandor has given Sicarius–’

  ‘Captain Sicarius,’ Agemman reminded him.

  ‘Apologies,’ said Tirusus. ‘Perhaps the fighting on Espandor has given Captain Sicarius a newfound respect for the primarch’s teachings.’

  ‘Or that he scents change in the wind,’ said Solinas.