by Nick Kyme
‘I can’t see them,’ hissed Helder, pressed so hard against the wall that Reda half-expected him to push through it.
‘Wait!’ snapped Reda as Leff edged forwards. He got a further two feet, turning to wave his comrades on, when his neck snapped back, a las-burn coring his forehead. ‘Hold, hold,’ hissed Reda.
‘We can’t wait here,’ said Gerrant.
The vox reports grew more urgent, louder now they had stopped moving. Reda shut it off.
‘There could be dozens out there,’ said Helder.
Reda gave him a scathing look. ‘Or it could be two snipers.’
The cargo hold was large, with a vaulted ceiling, and ringed with gantries. Drums and crates were piled up like hab-stacks. Plenty of places to hide.
‘We can’t wait,’ Gerrant said again and sprinted towards a bulkhead, diving behind it as las-fire stabbed at him.
‘Gerrant?’ said Reda when she couldn’t detect movement. He was partly hidden by the shadows. ‘Gerrant?’ she repeated, more urgently.
He moved and she gave a relieved sigh. Edging into the light, he put up all four fingers on his right hand.
‘Not even one dozen,’ said Reda, scowling at Helder, who had the good sense to look sheepish.
Her gaze took in him and the five other armsmen gathered around him. ‘I’ll draw them out,’ she said, ‘then you take them.’
She ran, not waiting for confirmation. One side of the corridor to the other, las-blasts chasing her all the way, until she careened into the bulkhead where Gerrant hauled her up against the hard metal barrier. His eyes looked even wilder, with a hint of reproach that Reda ignored.
The shriek-flash and solid-shot boom of the armsmen’s weapons was still fading as Reda poked her head from around the cover to see four dead traitors crumpled in the corridor, scythed to pieces.
Helder gave her a thumbs up, and she nodded.
The dead had rigid dark armour plate over ragged flak vests. They wore spiked helmets, and crude rebreather pipes stretched like rubber tentacles from beneath ugly red ceramic masks.
‘Different markings to the ones we fought earlier,’ said Gerrant, standing over them to perform a cursory inspection. He’d already checked on Tebb and Merln, shaking his head as soon as he saw the state of both bodies.
‘Could be shock troops,’ suggested Helder as he emerged from cover. ‘Armour and equipment looks better quality.’
Reda shook her head. ‘They’re a different warband. Markings, kit, tactics. Everything. Everyone wants a damn piece of us.’ She glanced at the troopers she had left, trying to ignore the figure at the back in dated Militarum fatigues, his face always in shadow despite the direction and exposure of the light. ‘They know we’re coming,’ she said, averting her gaze. ‘And if they’re setting up sentries, that means they have territory to protect. They must have a foothold close to the warp engines.’
They pushed on, straight across the hold and into a second arterial. Reda tasted acid on her tongue, a clenched fist of nausea rising in her gut. Helder vomited down his fatigues, but kept moving. A large blast door loomed ahead. It was sealed, and several feet of thick metal stood between the armsmen and the chamber beyond, but the noise of a heavy engagement could still be made out.
‘Shields,’ Reda called over her shoulder. ‘Let’s move.’
Twenty troopers, each carrying a hefty boarding shield, moved up from the rear ranks. Each shield was a rectangular slab of reinforced ceramite, pitted and scored, acid-burned, scorched and dented.
‘Line up, then we breach,’ she said. The shields locked together with a sound like a bell toll. Reda tried not to think of it as a death knell as the echo faded. They braced, their comrades gathering behind them, several making use of the firing lips cut into the edges of the boarding shields. Once they were ready, Reda turned to Gerrant and Helder, who had taken up position either side of the door, each with their hands on a heavy manual release lever.
The lights flickered, letting in a few seconds of abject darkness, and making Reda hesitate. They had no idea what they would be facing on the other side of that door. Power returned in short order and she gave a curt nod.
‘Now! Do it!’
BREACH
Gerrant and Helder yanked hard on the levers with visible effort, prompting a loud hiss of released pressure. The door split, irising open along the carefully delineated sections of the metal. It opened by degrees, admitting light, noise and a scene of unfettered violence.
It was difficult to comprehend at first, and Reda experienced a measure of resistance as the armsmen lingered upon the threshold as if the air had thickened to the consistency of oil.
Light warred against dark, as sporadic gun flashes and the flare of powered weapons lit up the vast and gloomy chamber. Skirmishes were being fought over every inch of the place, small seas of bodies washing up against each other, clashing then parting before swelling together and charging again. Sparks flew from chainswords hitting hard armour or striking other blades. Tight groups exchanged close-arms fire over scraps of cover. Mobs overwhelmed individuals, dragging them down through sheer weight of numbers. Champions sought each other out and duelled, hell-bent on a heroic end.
It was madness. Reda noted at least half a dozen different traitor warbands. They battled for spoils against giants in blue power armour. They battled each other for the right to kill and claim those spoils. Near-naked savages, the frosty rime of the void still melting off their steaming bodies; flesh-masked cannibals wielding butcher knives and blood-matted cudgels; black-armoured soldiery with blank-eyed rebreathers and Munitorum-issue lasrifles; metal-clad hulks wearing visored war-helms, heaving spiked boarding shields. Too many to count, too many to kill.
And amongst the hordes moved the warriors of the old war, the Heretic Astartes. Of these dark legends, Reda mercifully saw little. She had witnessed Space Marines at war before. It was a brutal, terrifying affair, but to see them clash against each other… She realised they had no business being in this fight. But they were here and the notion of retreat had been excised from her psyche long ago.
She caught a fleeting glimpse of Colonel Kraef amidst drifting smoke, grey patrol cap, chainsword aloft as he led a large group in heavy carapace and carrying point-mounted guns. At his order, a rapier hummed to activation and jabs of hot, red light scythed the darkness.
‘Move! Get in there!’ she roared, and it felt like they had been standing still for minutes. Time had slowed, anchored by the inertia of fear, but as those words left Reda’s lips, it sprang forwards again, alarming, dizzying and raucous. She lost sight of Kraef almost immediately.
A spit of angry promethium doused a clutch of ragged-looking traitors, turning them into candle flames. They collapsed, burning, writhing, their throats too scorched to scream even in their death throes. The warrior bearing the flamer that had killed them stomped through their brittle bones and ash, the red warning lumens catching his armour and turning the blue to violet. A moment later he was borne down by the horde, his fuel reserve igniting in a beautiful, angry sunrise that stripped bone and left a blackened, fire-licked void in his wake.
‘Throne of Terra…’ gasped Helder, as white as the dead, crouched behind his comrades’ barricade.
Even Gerrant had grit his teeth, his autocarbine gripped so tight he was about to crack the stock.
They had to fight. If they just kept moving they would die.
‘Engage them! For Macragge!’ roared Reda, discharging her shotgun at the nearest traitor. A cannibal in black-brown daub turned hard as his shoulder blew out, scattering gore and bone. The rest of his tribe took heed. Whooping and hollering, they sprang towards the armsmen, as agile as felids, brandishing knives and baring needle-toothed smiles.
They hit the shields hard, blades scraping against ceramite. Solid-shot and las-fire took a toll against them, but the cannibals had the numbers and soon they got to stabbing and rending.
‘Break the line and let them in,’ shouted Reda, and the shield wall bowed
and parted, letting through the daubed warriors who staggered on, drunk on slaughter, savage-eyed and wild. Shotgun blasts and auto-fire scythed through them. The cannibals notched up a few more kills but as the shield wall wrapped around them, herding them, crushing them, they lost their numerical advantage. Sensing the end, they barrelled into each other, a maddened herd lost to fear. Some were trampled or impaled on their own knives. Others were crushed against the shields, now locked and braced and turned into a deadly unbroken circle.
It was over quickly, and as Reda took stock she realised they were well past the threshold now and deeper into the chamber. She felt giddy, light-headed and worried she might pass out, believing at first that the sheer intensity of the battle had overwhelmed her, until she saw a large section of the upper wall had cracked and was slowly leaking atmosphere. She ordered rebreathers on immediately, partly distracted by the cohort of pallid-fleshed servitors and robed tech-priests trying to seal the breach. Clutches of traitors harassed them, and she saw several servitors dragged away to be dismembered in the hungry shadows.
She hurried on as the armsmen broke apart into smaller squads, seeking cover and engaging the smaller groups of enemy fighters. Her squad, which included Gerrant, Helder and seven others, briefly brushed shoulders with a battle-scarred group of Ultramarines in old-style war-plate. Their sergeant, who wore no helmet and had a craggy, weathered countenance with close-shorn white hair, nodded once to her before hurling orders as he and his men were gone again, lost to the melee.
‘What the hell are we doing here, lieutenant?’ asked Gerrant. ‘What’s the plan, other than to survive?’
They were taking cover and a fleeting moment of respite before re-engaging again.
Reda caught her breath. Her armsmen were strung out across the chamber, caught up in skirmishes or with heads down plotting their next move. She still couldn’t see Kraef but knew he was in here somewhere, fighting.
‘We try and reach the colonel and consolidate our forces. Failing that…’
Ahead, up a broad metal stairway thronged with dead and dying Ultramarines, she caught sight of the warp engine. It was colossal, a massive metal orb around which spun three studded, gyroscopic rings at hypervelocity. The metal, which was psy-conductive and forged from no ordinary mineral, was meant to shroud the reality-bending effects of the engine, but gossamer strands of unnatural light eked through its seams and made the air around it appear to shudder and vibrate. A figure stood in the shadow of its light, occupying a void space and apparently oblivious to everything around him in the same way that everything else was oblivious to him. A man in uniform, his face covered by darkness.
Reda tore her gaze away, instead fixing it upon the robed and power-armoured figure standing in front. Ithro Arkaedron did not stand alone as the psy-lightning crackled from his armoured fingertips and force staff. Two honour guard stood with the Librarian, fending off any traitor who came within reach. Scores of the dead lay at their feet. Two amongst the many bodies wore the same winged helms and gilt-edged war-plate as the standing honour guard. Despite their obvious prowess, they were losing.
Arkaedron shouted something, his hands and staff seemingly in perpetual motion as he conjured and abjured with fire and will. Reda did not have the language to comprehend though she saw the effects easily enough, a jagged arc of light tearing from the eyes of the silver eagle perched at the top of the staff to engulf a baying host below.
It took seconds to reduce the traitors to little more than ash and blackened bone, but more were coming, and Reda’s gaze was drawn to something else that came with them. At first she thought it was a vagabond, dressed in ragged attire, shuffling on dirt-black feet, naked from the waist up and emaciated to the point of starvation. But then she saw the chain shackled around his neck and the manacles around his ankles. He turned, as if sensing her regard, and she saw his eyes… as red as fire, and scorching their sockets black. Shadows coalesced around his body, slowly taking on form and consistency. He smiled too wide, like a sickle pulling at the edges of chapped and bloody lips…
‘Reda…’
The man who was not a man began to turn, no longer shuffling but gliding, his thick and yellowed toenails scraping along the floor, the sound like the scratch of a discordant harp or the shriek of a blunt knife against a whetstone…
‘Arna!’
Reda blinked and saw Gerrant. The vagabond was not looking towards her. He hadn’t come closer. Only the echo of that scraping remained, fading into tinnitus. She went to answer but her teeth were clenched so hard that it took a few seconds to get her jaw moving. The taste of warm iron tanged her tongue.
‘I’m here,’ she said, surprised at the roughness in her voice.
Gerrant looked annoyed. ‘I know you’re here, lieutenant. I asked for orders.’
Reda thought fast, still trying to banish her lingering disquiet. She gestured.
‘Hug the east wall, cover to cover, and move up,’ she said. ‘We need to find a position from which we can mount some kind of defence. Get a toehold, maybe some reinforcements. We’re in this fight, we need to make a difference.’
Gerrant nodded, his eyes lingering on hers for the slightest of seconds before they moved out. Half the squad had shields and went out in front. They got a little over six feet, the others right up behind them with heads down, when a deafening blast tore them apart. Pieces of ceramite cascaded like lethal rain, and three soot-black and bloody bodies sprawled partially dismembered on the chamber floor.
Ears ringing, Reda realised she was down. Gerrant lay nearby, alive but barely moving. Then she heard Helder.
‘My shitting leg! Blood of Hera, my leg!’
Helder rolled around on his back, clutching at where his left knee ended in a cauterised stump. Reda rubbed her eyes, trying to knead away the blurring, still in shock.
A traitor in red-stained fatigues with battered brass plates stitched onto her gear held a smoking launch tube and was prepping for another shot. She looked like ex-Guard. Very, very ex-Guard. She dropped a flange-headed missile down into the tube and was hefting the launcher onto her shoulder when a las-beam took her in the forehead and she fell back out of sight.
Gerrant had crawled up on his knees, a scavenged laspistol in his outstretched hand. He locked eyes with Reda. He didn’t look so good, but managed to gesture with his chin. Reda followed it. Another squad had seen them through the smoke and was moving up in support. Sergeant Yenti with about fifteen troopers. Reda waved them over.
‘We need to regroup,’ she said to Gerrant, scrambling her shotgun back into her hands. One of the other survivors, Menkin, grabbed Helder, who was still screaming.
He was about to start dragging when both men burst into flames as if spontaneously combusting.
Chains scraping against the deck caught Reda’s attention as she made a visor of her hand to ward off the heat. The fire died away quickly, leaving Menkin and Helder as burnt meat, still steaming as the chained figure emerged through smoke. Not the vagabond. This one was short and stocky. Dirt caked the pits of his milk-white skin, a grubby rime that lapped reams of flab like a snapped girdle. He was naked and only the extent of his girth kept him decent, if such a word could be applied to whatever this bloated thing was.
The corpulent man was not alone. He had minders dressed in long rot-brown robes and padded hauberks of rusty chain-mesh. One turned his face towards the armsmen, half-hidden by a grey moth-eaten hood. Reda saw teeth, perfect white teeth fixed in a permanent grin.
The fire exchange began with Sergeant Yenti’s men, who opened up with lascarbines and autorifles. A rank of dirty stubbers replied in kind. They’d been modified to fire metal barbs, and one of Yenti’s men screamed as the wretched ammo tore up his flesh.
Reda fired too, followed swiftly by the remnants of her squad. A barb hit Jenka in the throat, her arterial spray painting the deck and one of her comrades as she fell. The grinners were dying too though, the crossfire from both armsmen squads punishing them. Al
l the while, the pale and bloated man amidst their ranks giggled, as if amused at all the deaths.
Then he lifted a fat finger.
Unzel came apart, splitting into four equal quadrants as if cut by a surgical las. The pieces struck the deck with a thud – perfect, clean, horrific.
Yenti got off a good shot, scoring a grinner’s cheek but hitting the corpulent man in the left temple. The fat thing scowled, hissing like a wounded felid. Then he smiled, turning his gaze to Yenti, who was lining up another shot when his arm tore from his body. No one touched him; it just came away as if pulled, dangling strings of red tendon and wire-thin sinew. He staggered, his mind lost to shock and sudden, catastrophic blood loss.
Two more of the grinners fell at the same time, stitched up by las-fire. A gap appeared in the throng of minders. Reda took her chance.
Half the corpulent man’s head came off with a shotgun boom, skull fragments and grimy matter spattering a grinner. He jerked, the chains attached to his bulk whipping around like a thresher blade and segmenting the last three grinners into separate legs and torsos.
‘Try laughing that off…’
Reda’s sense of triumph was short-lived. Something else was coming for them.
Because of course it bloody is.
It was moving heavily and cutting through everything in its path. Spikes protruded from dark war-plate that appeared to shift and vibrate like oil on water, monstrous images coalescing and collapsing only to reform again a moment later.
An Ultramarine stepped into its way, brandishing a broken blade, and despite the condition of the warrior’s armour and the obvious wounds he had suffered to reach this point, Reda dared to hope.
The Ultramarine bravely stood his ground. Clenching his sword in both hands, he declared, ‘For Macragge!’
The fight was startlingly brief, and it left the proud warrior gutted on a saw-edged blade. His fingers still clenched and unclenched impotently, reaching for his fallen sword as the Traitor Marine walked on. It wasn’t unarmed for long. It drew an axe from a sheath of human skin, barely breaking stride. Closer, Reda felt the brutal violence radiating off its body and heard the discordant hum of its generator. And the smell… it reeked of cold and decay, of dying things and primordial fear.