Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Talos dropped into a crouch, leaning by the wall and raising his bolter. Where Guilliman’s sons worked and fought with absolute efficiency, First Claw moved with the shadowed, ragged remnants of discipline. Talos gave no order to fire this time. He didn’t need to. Their bolters opened up with throaty barks, utterly without unity, picking their targets with impunity. Of the seven remaining, three went down under the fresh hail of fire.

  The four Imperial Space Marines turned to face this new assault, half the squad moving to divide their fire with inhuman precision. Their armour was a clashing mix of grey and green, their shoulder guards marked by eagles of silver.

  Sar Zell leaned around the corner long enough to unleash a single shot, blasting a tank-killing stream of laser through the groin and thighs of the squad’s grey-helmed sergeant, annihilating him below the waist.

  Three left.

  ‘I remember these bastards.’ Sar Zell lowered his cannon, brushing away stone debris from its power tubing. Pressurised air, scalding enough to melt skin, vented in a hissing cloud from the weapon’s bulky generator.

  Talos remembered them, as well. The Silver Eagles and the Aurora Chapter had beaten elements of the Eighth Legion back from a series of targeted void raids only a handful of years before.

  ‘We need to do this quickly,’ Xarl voxed, holstering his empty pistol and revving his chainblade. ‘Who’s with me?’

  Sar Zell shook his head. ‘A moment.’

  He braced again, lifting the cannon and leaning around the corner while First Claw gave covering fire. The lascannon bucked in his fists, thumping back with violent recoil as it screamed out a beam of savage light. The torrent cleaved through one of the last Imperial warriors, disintegrating his head, shoulders and chest.

  Two left.

  ‘Ready,’ he said, lowering the overheating cannon. Stress vanes along the weapon’s side were protesting now. The barrel would need replacing soon.

  First Claw charged forward as one, chainswords grinding down against ceramite and pistols kicking at lethal range. Xarl and Talos took the kills, the former decapitating his enemy, the latter tearing his foe’s helmet off and feeding him the muzzle of a bolt pistol.

  The sergeant, bisected by lascannon fire, still lived. He dragged his way across the floor, nothing more than a legless torso.

  Cyrion and Xarl circled him, looking down and sneering.

  ‘No time for games,’ Talos warned them.

  ‘But…’

  Talos’s pistol banged once. The shell blasted the sergeant’s head and helm to shrapnel, clattering against their boots and knee-guards.

  ‘I said no time for games.’

  First Claw moved across the chamber, through the wreckage of sparring equipment, to the squad they’d saved. Only one remained. He was crouched by the bodies of his brothers looting them for weapons, ammunition and trinkets.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Talos greeted him.

  The Legionary sucked in air through his teeth, lifting a chainaxe from a warrior’s lifeless fingers. He cast his broken bolter aside, and stole another from a second corpse.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Talos said again. ‘Time is short.’

  ‘Not a sergeant, anymore.’ The Night Lord rested a boot on the back of a slain warrior. With the axe, he severed the corpse’s head, and dragged the helmet free. ‘I lost a duel to Zal Haran.’

  He placed the helmet on his head and sealed the seams at his collar. ‘Now I have Zal Haran’s helm, and he is carrion. A poetic cycle.’ The warrior looked at them for a long moment, while the fortress shook to its foundations around them. ‘First Claw,’ he said. ‘Soul Hunter.’

  ‘Uzas,’ Talos said to him. ‘We have to go.’

  ‘Hnh,’ he grunted, uncaring of the saliva stringing down from the edge of his lips. ‘Very well.’

  XIII

  LEGACY OF THE THIRTEENTH LEGION

  And still he dreamed.

  He thought not of the blood analysis taking place, nor of the drills opening his skull to the cold air and the press of curious blades.

  He thought only of the time before, when the enemy had come to Tsagualsa ten thousand years ago, bringing punishment for so many sins.

  After an hour had passed since the sky first caught fire, Talos had to admit the fatigue was getting to him. The vox was alive with brutal reports of walls falling to enemy artillery; of tanks spilling into the fortress through holes blown in the barricades; of drop-pods crashing through the parapets to disgorge hundreds of enemy squads into the castle’s outer districts.

  He’d lost all contact with the fleet above, beyond the choppiest, most nonsensical eruptions of curses and screams. He was no longer even sure the Covenant was in orbit.

  First Claw had quickly abandoned their headlong flight through the fortress, moving to take subsidiary corridors, ventilation shafts, slave tunnels and maintenance crawlways in order to avoid the enemy flooding through their haven.

  The vox, what little of it still made any sense, spoke of a bleak picture. Casualties were more than high; the Legion forces still on the ground were being devastated. Squads of enemy Space Marines were fighting with an efficiency that had no place on such a vast scale. Legion claws were shouting of enemy soldiers linking up with their brethren with vicious frequency, forming overwhelming numbers as they stormed through the primary chambers, forcing the defenders into an ever-heightening state of disorder and retreat. Every Night Lord counter-attack was met with waves of reinforcements, as the Imperials fell back in organised withdrawals, sinking to fall-back points already being reinforced by their freshly landed brethren.

  The squad halted in a maintenance duct, so confined that they had to crouch, and for some stretches, move on all fours. Cyrion’s auspex wavered in and out of readable resolution.

  ‘We’re lost,’ Xarl mumbled. ‘Accursed servitor tunnels. We should’ve stayed on the concourses.’

  ‘And be dead like the others?’ Sar Zell asked from the rear. He was dragging his lascannon behind him, as careful as he could be with the relic weapon. ‘I will take sanity over madness, thank you. I want to live to fight another day, in a war we can win.’

  ‘This is like fighting a virus,’ Talos breathed over the vox. ‘Like fighting a terminal infection. They’re everywhere. They know how best to counter us as soon as we do something. They studied us before committing to this attack. This was all planned to the last detail.’

  ‘Who were the first ones we killed?’ asked Sar Zell.

  ‘Before the Silver Eagles? The ones in armour the same green as Rodara’s sky were the Aurora Chapter. We fought them at Spansreach. I do not know many of the others,’ Talos confessed. ‘The vox is alive with names I’ve never heard. The Novamarines. The Black Consuls. The Genesis Chapter. Titles of the Chapters whose protectorates we’ve been raiding and punishing for decades. This was what our father felt, before he died. Our sins have come home to roost, just as his did.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Xarl interrupted. ‘They’re all Ultramarines. They bled in the Great War. They’ll bleed now.’

  ‘He has a point,’ said Sar Zell. ‘Better the Thirteenth than the gods-damned Blood Angels, with all their screaming kith and kin.’

  ‘Is now truly the time for this argument?’ Talos asked quietly. The others fell silent.

  ‘This way,’ said Cyrion. ‘The hangar isn’t far.’

  First Claw emerged into relative quiet. The cacophony of thudding bolters and roaring engines hadn’t faded completely, but at least here the halls were free of shrieking slaves and the bootsteps and gunshots of conflicting squads.

  ‘We missed the battle here,’ Talos voxed to his brethren. Bodies already littered the floor – some in Eighth Legion ceramite, others in the colours of the Primogenitor Chapters. ‘Praetors of Orpheus,’ he said. ‘I recognise their colours.’

  It wasn’t hard to make out th
e scene’s details. The invaders had breached the fortress at countless points nearby, rather than risk running directly against the hangar’s immense defence batteries. From their intrusion points, they’d focused their aggression inwards, splitting their landing forces between penetrating deeper into the bastion and slaughtering all who fled for the safety of the hangar on this level.

  The prophet narrowed his eyes, imagining the same scene playing out on every level, through all of the hangars around the fortress, imagining the breaches in every wall.

  ‘They will have left a rearguard,’ he warned. ‘They are too precise to forget such a thing.’

  ‘No life signs,’ Cyrion replied.

  ‘Even so.’

  Talos was the one to defile the stillness, kicking out a ventilator grille and dropping to the deck below. Despite the negative scans, he panned his bolter across the scene.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘No one. This place is a tomb.’

  Cyrion’s voice was coloured by a smile over the vox, ‘Cowardice has never been so rewarding.’

  ‘We are not safe yet,’ said the prophet.

  The hangar stretched out before them. Despite being one of the fortress’s more modest launch platforms, the western quadrant’s secondary hangar bay still housed over two dozen gunships and storage shuttles. At capacity, the workforce would number over two hundred souls; servitors and slaves alike engaged in the duties of maintenance, refuelling, rearming and repair.

  Talos breathed out slowly, and swore under his breath. The ground was littered with the remains of the slain. Half of the gunships and shuttles were wrecked by sustained weapons fire. Several were now little more than smoking hulls, while others had had their landing gear carved out from under them, now resting crashed down onto the deck.

  ‘There’s no need for a rearguard when they were this thorough,’ said Sar Zell. ‘Come on.’

  The gunship Dirge nestled at the far end of the hangar, still held ten metres above the ground in its docking clamps. Speckles of tracer fire dotted the gunship’s armour-plating, but the principal damage wasn’t to the flyer itself.

  ‘Oh no,’ Sar Zell complained. ‘No, no, no.’ The others stood in silence, watching for a moment.

  ‘Focus,’ Talos ordered them. ‘Stay alert.’

  First Claw, still accompanied by Uzas, fanned out through the hangar, their bolters up. Talos remained with Sar Zell, and gestured to the gunship. ‘We need to get off this world, brother.’

  ‘We’re not leaving in that,’ Sar Zell replied. The Thunderhawk had escaped most of the harm inflicted upon the rest of the bay, but the sabotage was still complete. The docking clamps gripping the gunship were shattered; the fact they still held the Thunderhawk aloft was a miracle in itself.

  ‘We can destroy the docking clamps,’ Talos said. ‘Dirge will survive a ten metre fall.’

  Sar Zell nodded, though it was vague and almost devoid of actual agreement. ‘The rotating platforms along the deck are inactive. The control chamber is ruined.’ He gestured to a raised deck overseeing the hangar’s operation below. More bodies lay across the consoles – many of them scorched husks of charred meat – and every machine in sight was gouged by blades or darkened by flamer wash.

  ‘We can take off with the positioning carousels,’ Talos breathed slowly.

  Sar Zell turned his gesturing arm to take in the wreckage lying across the hangar floor, many of the hulks reaching halfway to the ceiling.

  ‘And what do you want to do with all of this detritus? Blast it aside with rocket volleys at suicidal range? I can’t fly a gunship through this. We need the hangar systems operational to clear the way. Without them, it will take days.’

  Talos held his tongue as he scanned across the husks and wounded gunships. ‘There. That one. That will fly.’

  Sar Zell‘s gaze lingered on the burned husk for several seconds, his keen eyes flickering over the condition of the hull. The Thunderhawk stood close to the hangar bay doors, ruthlessly stitched by heavy-calibre fire that had clearly and cleanly punched through its layered armour-plating. Its midnight paint was left charcoal grey-black, the crow-like hull entirely seared by flamer weapons. Even the reinforced windows had melted, leaving the cockpit unprotected. Smoke breathed from the shattered window, evidence of earlier internal grenade detonations.

  ‘It might,’ Sar Zell said at last. ‘It will mean taking off through the dust storm, and the smoke rising from the burning fortress. The engines may suffocate in the ash.’

  ‘Better than dying here,’ the prophet replied. ‘Get to work.’

  Weighed down by his lascannon, Sar Zell made his way across the hangar and went to find out if the gunship would fly, one way or the other.

  The hangar’s funereal serenity lasted a handful of minutes before it was breached by Imperial soldiers in white livery.

  Sar Zell was already in the pilot’s throne, relieved by the sound of the engines cycling up to readiness. The gunship had taken a beating, but it would fly.

  Admittedly, he knew they’d be without heat-shielding when they went through the atmosphere (solvable, by sealing themselves outside of the cockpit, behind the bulkhead, leaving the gunship’s machine-spirit to take over), and in vacuum once they reached the void (no real threat, if their armour was sealed), but first things first, at least the Thunderhawk would take off.

  ‘More Praetors,’ Sar Zell voxed.

  The rest of First Claw came running. Five of the enemy left the odds close to even, and both squads took cover among the endless opportunities within the wreckage. Talos crouched with Cyrion, checking his ammunition reserves.

  ‘We are cursed,’ he said. ‘No one alive should have our luck.’

  ‘No?’ Cyrion blind-fired over the debris they were hiding behind. ‘If anyone deserves to die for their crimes, brother, it’s us.’

  Talos lifted his bolter to add his fire to Cyrion’s. In the same moment, all firepower from the enemy ceased.

  Talos and Cyrion exchanged glances. Both of them slowly looked above their barricade, letting their bolters lead the way.

  All five of the Praetors had left the safety of their cover. All five stood in the open, their limbs locked tight, shuddering as spasms wracked their bodies. As First Claw watched, two of them dropped their weapons. Their unburdened fingers trembled and curled, all control lost.

  A figure stepped into view behind them. Horns curled in an elegant rise from his skull-faced helm, and his T-shaped visor looked upon the scene in expressionless silence. In one armoured fist, the figure held an ancient bolter; in the other, a staff of mercury-threaded black iron, topped by a cluster of human skulls.

  The Praetors’ shaking helms clicked with flawed vox signals, as they tried to vocalise their torment. Smoke hissed from their melting armour joints, and their epileptic quivers redoubled. As holes appeared in their armour-plating, the screams finally broke free from the molten decay.

  One by one, they collapsed to the hangar decking, liquidised organic filth spilling in slow gushes from each armoured suit.

  The figure lowered its staff, and walked calmly towards First Claw.

  ‘You weren’t thinking of leaving without me, were you?’ asked Ruven. His voice lacked even the shadow of emotion.

  ‘No,’ Talos lied. ‘Not for a moment.’

  Wind roared in through the sundered cockpit window. Uzas’s cloak of flayed skin flapped in the rushing gale, and the skulls hanging on Xarl’s armour-chains rattled in bony chorus. Sar Zell sat in the pilot’s throne with the comfortable lean of a soul born to be there.

  From the air, the fortress was a stain across the landscape – a castle in the first throes of becoming devastation incarnate. Smoke poured from its broken battlements, with rows of defence batteries aflame and the outer levels ravaged. Scars across the stone showed the impact craters of drop-pods, while a haze of whining, roaring gu
nships and landspeeders swarmed through the burning skies in an insectile cloud.

  First Claw’s stolen gunship juddered as it climbed, its intake valves breathing in smoke and its engines exhaling raw fire. It took no more than a few heartbeats to boost up into the pall of smoke now hanging over the fortress. Tracer fire chattered past them from below, knocking on the hull as it scratched home.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Sar Zell voxed over their shared link.

  ‘It did not sound fine,’ Talos ventured, from his own shaking restraint throne.

  ‘We’re in the smoke. We’re fine now, at least until the ash slays the engines.’

  Talos pointed ahead of their ascent. ‘What is that?’ the prophet asked. A bright blur, fierce as a second sun, blossomed in the black smoke-clouds above them. Veins of fiery light spread in every direction from its white-hot core.

  ‘It’s a–’ Sar Zell never finished the sentence. He wrenched the control columns, banking the gunship so sharply that every bolt and plate within its construction heaved in torment.

  The second sun flashed past them with a carnodon’s roar, still streaming atmospheric fire on its insane descent.

  Talos released a breath he’d not realised he’d been holding. The drop-pod plummeted from sight.

  ‘That was close,’ Sar Zell admitted.

  ‘Brother…’ Talos gestured the same moment the proximity alarms caught up and started their tuneless pulse. ‘Something else.’

  ‘I see it, I see it.’

  Whatever it was, it strafed alongside them – a mirror image in ascension – streaming the same fire from its engines. For a moment, the avian shadow broke through the plumes of smoke, just long enough to reveal the markings along its hull, visible even through the char damage.

  ‘Ultramarines Thunderhawk,’ Talos warned.

  ‘I said I see it.’

  ‘Then shoot it down.’

  ‘With what? Curses and prayers? Did you have time to load the turrets before we left, and simply chose not to tell me?’