Ultramarines

by Graham McNeill

  Techmarine Renius had been working on the barricade for almost twenty minutes. A krak grenade would have been quicker, but too noisy for Sicarius’s liking. The Termite-made tunnel was too narrow for him to join his Techmarine up front and lend his assistance. He had no option but to sit back and let Renius do his job.

  Patience was not one of the captain’s virtues, and he chafed at every second of enforced inactivity. He wished he could contact Sergeant Lucien – better still, Brother Ultracius – to ask how their part of the operation was proceeding; but he was probably too deep underground, and, anyway, vox silence was advisable.

  Renius wrenched the last stinking body from a wire tangle and passed it up the sloping tunnel to get it out of his way. Sicarius noticed that the Korpsman had been stripped of his body armour and weapons – by the orks or by his own comrades?

  There was a sizeable gap in the barricade now, which Renius squeezed through feet first. Sicarius followed him eagerly, and lowered himself into a dusty mine tunnel taller than he was and, thankfully, three times as broad. A chain of lumoglobes was strung from the ceiling, but they were inactive.

  The darkness was total, and Sicarius could only see in infrared. The mine tunnel ran north-south. To the north, it ended in a blank rock face, while to the south it had collapsed around a broken support. It was approximately four hundred metres long, with two openings in its eastern wall.

  The first opening had caved in too and was completely blocked; the second, according to the Krieg captain’s information, might lead them to the Indestructible. Sicarius detected a faint current of air between the opening and the one through which he had just emerged, which was a promising sign.

  ‘They ought to have posted a sentry here,’ he grumbled. ‘If I were Khargask, I would have posted sentries.’

  ‘Perhaps he had none to spare,’ Brother Lumic suggested, clambering out of the tunnel wall behind his captain. Like the rest of the Ultramarines, he moved with a stealth and precision that belied his considerable bulk. Still, every scrape of his armour against rock, every contact between his boots and the ground, sounded like a crack of thunder in Sicarius’s ears; as had his own.

  ‘There are hundreds of kilometres of mine tunnels,’ added Renius, ‘and no way for the orks to know where we might enter them. If their leader is as smart as we think he is, he’ll have set up tremor sensors to detect any digging or drilling.’

  ‘I would still have had these tunnels patrolled,’ said Sicarius, obdurately.

  The rest of his team had joined him in the tunnel by now. They numbered five in all: the captain, the Techmarine and three veteran battle-brothers from his command squad. He wished that Ultracius could have joined them. He missed the Dreadnought’s pragmatic counsel, not to mention his heavy bolters and power fist.

  He cranked his auto-senses up to maximum sensitivity. He could hear tiny insects crawling in the nicks of the walls, but detected no other signs of life, no body heat or exhaled gases, within his range.

  Cautiously, he advanced towards the unblocked tunnel entrance, motioning to his brothers to follow at a discreet distance. The tunnel ran eastward, its mine props intact, for as far as he could see. It was an open invitation.

  He looked again. There had to be something else, and now he saw it: a metal thread, a fraction colder than the surrounding air. It was stretched across the width of the tunnel, forty metres in. He pointed it out to Renius: ‘A tripwire.’

  The Techmarine ventured forwards and crouched in front of it. He followed the wire with his eyes, to a hidden recess in the northern wall. He reached into the hole and teased out a bundle of crudely-constructed stick bombs, holding them by their handles. He lowered the explosives carefully to the ground; only then did his servo-arm crane over his head to snip the wire.

  Renius stood up, turned back to Sicarius and nodded.

  Another barrier awaited them, further along the tunnel.

  This one wasn’t constructed as the last one had been; the tunnel roof had simply collapsed, though whether by accident or design was impossible to tell.

  Sicarius’s auspex revealed a path through, wide enough for an undersized human being to negotiate – or something wirier. It wasn’t nearly wide enough to accommodate an armoured Space Marine – and any attempt to broaden it, Renius warned, would likely only bring more earth down on top of them.

  Sicarius consulted his uploaded maps to find a way around. He sent two brothers to scout a pair of likely looking tunnels, while he explored a third. Barely had he taken ten strides along his tunnel when he detected another cave-in ahead of him and was forced to turn back, frustrated.

  He heard a flurry of movement behind him, from the tunnel he had just left, then a squeal and a sharp snap of bone. He hurried back, to find the Techmarine and Brother Filion standing over a dead gretchin.

  ‘It came crawling through the blockage, captain,’ explained Filion. ‘We heard it before it could see us and were waiting when it poked its head out of the dirt.’

  They listened, all three of them, but heard no more creatures coming after the first. Still, the presence of just this one confirmed that they were drawing close to their objective – and that this area, at least, was patrolled.

  ‘If we’re lucky,’ said Renius, ‘there will only be gretchin down here. The orks will be manning the guns up top as we planned. Still, we cannot allow one gretchin to see us and live. It will scuttle straight back to its masters with word of our approach.’

  Brother Gallo’s explorations bore more fruit than the others, thank the Emperor. They marched along an ascending, narrowing tunnel, and soon heard noises ahead of them: the capering and screeching of many more gretchin.

  The others held back as Sicarius crept to the tunnel’s end. It opened onto a precarious stone ledge: it was a gallery, in fact, with a handrail, which circled and overlooked a large natural cavern.

  It looked as if the cavern had been used as a storeroom for mining equipment. However, its roof had partially collapsed too, and its occupants were busy digging scraps of metal out from under the wreckage. Presumably, Khargask had set them to that task – which made Sicarius wonder, once again, what his objectives were. What was he trying to build?

  A single lumoglobe had survived the collapse, hanging from a frayed wire. In its flickering white light, Sicarius counted twenty gretchin, scampering sure-footedly across treacherous heaps of debris.

  He returned to his battle-brothers and appraised them of his findings. ‘We have no choice,’ he told them. ‘We have to go through them.’

  He sent Lumic and Filion out onto the gallery first and had them circle left and right respectively. The gretchin heard them almost immediately, of course, their pointed ears twitching as their oversized nostrils sniffed the air.

  By then, however, Sicarius had vaulted the balcony rail.

  He landed with an unavoidable clang, though the pair of gretchin he had chosen to use as crash mats softened the sound somewhat. One of them died instantly, crushed by his plummeting weight. The other tried to wriggle out from under him, but Sicarius thrust his gladius through it.

  He used the short-bladed weapon rather than the Tempest Blade. The hereditary weapon of his family and symbol of his role as Knight of Talassar was his preferred weapon, but the gladius was better for such close quarter fights. It didn’t have the reach of the larger blade, but then it hardly needed it. Five, six, seven gretchin piled eagerly on top of Sicarius, clawing and snapping at him viciously. Some of them hacked and bashed at his armour with primitive knives and clubs. At least the orks hadn’t armed them with guns, he thought.

  It wasn’t these gretchin that worried him.

  Others of their kind had been wiser, or just more cowardly. They had seen the other intruders up on the gallery and had known they were outmatched. They had scattered, and several of them had made straight for the exits.

  Eight tunnels
led away from the cavern in all, at various levels. Sicarius’s map had indicated that at least two of them could lead to the star fort. Sure enough, the majority of the gretchin were headed towards those tunnels.

  Brother Lumic leapt into their midst, his boltgun drawn. He was too late to stop three of them from reaching a tunnel mouth. He clicked his weapon to full auto and sprayed the gretchin from behind, cutting them down.

  The others did as Sicarius had expected they would. They scattered. They leapt behind – and, in some cases, under – mounds of debris, or made for the openings on the opposite side of the cavern. It was this latter group that concerned him the most. If they were left wandering the mine tunnels…

  It wasn’t an issue. The fleeing gretchin found Brother Filion in their path, and fully half of them shied away from a confrontation with him. The remaining three tried to bull rush him out of their way and swiftly paid for their mistake.

  Sicarius had deliberately been fighting a defensive battle, outnumbered by his attackers but wanting to keep them occupied, letting them imagine that they stood a chance against him. The time for that pretence had ended, as Renius and Brother Gallo dropped into the cavern to each side of him.

  The gretchin were quick to see that they were beaten, their rabid jabbering giving way to terrified squeals. They dropped away from Sicarius, but found they had nowhere left to run. He caught one as it tried to scrabble away from him; it squirmed and scratched and spat as he crushed its windpipe with one powerful arm.

  His brothers employed their gladii where they could. They slashed and stabbed at their enemies’ throats and stomachs, until the air was heavy with the stink of xenos blood. Only once did Renius have to loose off an explosive bolt-round, at a gretchin that had almost managed to slip past him and away.

  Barely two minutes after it had begun, the skirmish was over.

  It took a little longer for the surviving gretchin to be rooted out of their hiding places in the rubble and efficiently executed, usual­ly by a quick slash of a blade across the throat. Sicarius and Filion did the honours, while their brothers stood guard over the exit tunnels. Sicarius was glad to see that no orks or other creatures had appeared in response to the noise they had made.

  At last, his auspex detected no more living beings in the cavern, other than the five Ultramarines themselves. They collected their enemies’ bodies, intending to cover them in case something did eventually pass this way. Renius counted the dead and reported that there were nineteen of them.

  ‘There were twenty,’ Sicarius growled.

  He double-checked the Techmarine’s count, but found no fault with it. Behind his concealing helmet, his face folded into a scowl. ‘I saw twenty gretchin here,’ he reiterated, knowing that all present would understand the import of his words.

  ‘One of them got away.’

  CHAPTER VII

  In the end, after long weeks of waiting, the inevitable happened suddenly.

  Kenjari heard the order through his earpiece, without fully understanding it; perhaps, rather, without wanting to believe it.

  The voice of the Krieg captain had been entirely dispassionate, too much so for a man who was sending other men to their deaths.

  He bent his knees. He lifted another shell off the pile and onto his shoulder. He straightened up and turned, and his blood turned to ice-cold water.

  His crewmates were climbing down from the Earthshaker platform. His sergeant yelled at him and jabbed him in the side with a bayonet. He almost dropped the shell, trying to place it down. His hands were trembling.

  He did what he had to do. He followed his sergeant, although it was the last thing his leaden feet wanted. As they hurried through the trenches, they were joined by tens, scores, hundreds of other Krieg soldiers. They could have been as scared as he was, thought Kenjari, but he doubted it; anyway, if they were, it wouldn’t show.

  He kept an eye on his sergeant’s stripes, knowing that if he lost him he would struggle to locate him again. Conversely, he was sure that if he tried to hide himself, the sergeant – worse still, Commissar Dast – would find him.

  His four-man Earthshaker crew were joined by six more to form a squad. The other Korpsmen were forming into groups of ten too, and spreading out along a wide, straight trench. They were at the eastern edge of the trench network, Kenjari realised, as close as they could get to the enemy. Emperor, this was really happening!

  A blue-armoured giant was wading through the throng, his shoulders squared, his gauntlets clasped behind his back. His face was masked, like the faces of the Korpsmen, with metal rather than cloth but equally impenetrable. Kenjari had never been this close to a Space Marine before, and was daunted by his palpable presence.

  He recalled his brief hope of salvation when the blue ships had arrived; it seemed even more absurd to him now than it had then. When first he had set eyes upon a Krieg Korpsman, he had feared him to be an angel of death. The Adeptus Astartes, however, were often given that nickname too.

  Kenjari stood in the trench among the others, their bodies pressing in on him, his nostrils filled with the stench of his own terror. He had drawn his lasgun, following his sergeant’s lead, but his hands were so sweaty that he thought it might slip out of them. He had tried his best to keep the weapon maintained and to understand its functions; he prayed it would work for him when he needed it. For what it might be worth.

  He strained to hear his sergeant’s voice over the crashing of manmade thunder. His eyes were distracted by flashes of man-made lightning. His orders were the same as those of the rest of his squad, the rest of his regiment. The Death Korpsmen of Krieg were to rise up out of their trenches into that raging storm. They were to march on the star fort, the fallen castle, and wrest it back from its usurpers.

  It didn’t sound like much of a plan to Kenjari.

  Not that he had a say in it. It seemed like an eternity before a whistle blew, somewhere, and the sound was taken up and amplified by Krieg officers closer to hand; an eternity, and yet the time passed in a heartbeat.

  The men of Krieg surged forwards, almost trampling him in their rush to mount the trench wall. If Kenjari thought he could hang back, though, he was mistaken. His sergeant grabbed the scruff of his neck and dragged him bodily up after him. His gloved hands scrabbled to find purchase on the uneven surface and he almost dropped his gun again. He managed to dig a boot into the side of the wall and lever himself upwards, flopping onto his stomach with his legs dangling behind him. The sounds of shelling seemed suddenly much louder and he didn’t want to raise his head, but his sergeant was there again, hauling him to his feet, propelling him onwards.

  Kenjari found himself running. He couldn’t see where he was going. He was following the soldiers ahead of him through the smoke, spurred on by the soldiers – the identical soldiers – at his heels. He spotted a rank insignia on an epaulet and realised that the captain had sent his officers out here to be slaughtered too. He had seen no sign of Dast in the trench, however.

  He trampled over coils of razor wire, already demolished, flattened into the hard earth by the tracks of the Space Marines tanks. A monstrous shape emerged from the haze in front of him, then resolved itself into two smaller, angular shapes: a pair of tanks. One of them was dead, a gutted metal corpse, which the other was using for cover. Its main gun belched out fire and more smoke, and blazed a trail towards the Korpsmen’s objective like a route marker.

  A moment later, fire blossomed among the soldiers to Kenjari’s left and only a little way behind him, close enough that his neck was seared by the blast heat; he could smell their burning flesh. They didn’t scream; or if they did, he couldn’t hear them over the guns. Were the men of Krieg really so stoic, he wondered dimly, or was it just that they hadn’t had time to suffer?

  Would he suffer, he wondered, when the fire consumed him too?

  He didn’t know how far he had to go. He couldn’t see
the star fort through the smoke, and he had lost all sense of time and distance. He felt as if he might have been running forever and might yet be. The thundering of the shells to every side of him – the Imperial tanks were still firing, despite the risk of striking their allies – had merged into a continuous roar; except that sometimes, his ears picked out a louder, closer explosion than the others and he knew that another ten or twenty or thirty masked soldiers had just been wiped out.

  This wasn’t at all how he had pictured it in his nightmares. He had thought he would see his death coming.

  He had lost sight of his sergeant, after all. The soldiers around him may have been his squad-mates or not, Kenjari couldn’t tell. It crossed his mind that he could pretend to stumble or to have been hit by shrapnel, just fall to his stomach and let the others pass over him; but he was afraid they might trample him to death or he might be shot by an officer who saw through his deception, so he kept on running.

  Then, to his surprise, he saw it: the star fort, or at least its towers looming over him in menacing silhouette. The sight of it lent strength to his weakening legs and bolstered his straining lungs as, for the first time, he thought he might be one of the fortunate few, the ones that actually made it there.

  He focused his thoughts on that goal and followed the Korpsmen’s stout example. He willed his feet to fall one after another, his chest to rise and fall as he sucked in iron-tasting filtered air in an almost mechanistic rhythm. He lost heart as the towers seemed to grow no larger in his sights. He had misjudged their distance, he realised, deceived by the sheer scale of the construct and the intervening smoke.

  He was all too close to the star fort’s guns, however.

  The next explosion dazzled him and may have burst an eardrum. Its heat wave knocked Kenjari off his feet, and for an instant he thought it could well have been the one. He was caught, unexpectedly, by the Krieg Korpsmen behind him. They saved him from falling; had they not, he wasn’t sure he could have picked himself back up.