by Ben Counter
Kekrops threw the wounded trooper to the ground. The psyker, still surrounded by her dome of light, ran into the building surrounded by half a dozen Guardsmen and the second psyker, Lysshe.
‘What is he?’ said Kekrops to Lysshe. ‘Hurry!’
Lysshe knelt beside the wounded trooper and pulled the cowl off his face. Aside from his covered eyes he had a completely normal face, with bland features and cropped brown hair. His throat had two implants that hooked to tubes running to a rebreather unit at his waist.
‘Serrick,’ said Kekrops. ‘How much longer can you shield us?’
The female psyker shook her head. ‘There is much pain and misery surrounding us. It… it drains me. These men picked their time to attack us. I can barely see through the anguish.’
‘Can you get us to the shuttle?’
‘No. Forgive me, inquisitor, but I cannot.’
‘Then it must come to us. Vel!’
‘Sir!’ replied one of the warband. He did not look like a man of the Imperial Guard, or if he was he had abandoned any uniform long ago. He was dressed in patchwork leathers and carried a shotgun that looked like he had cobbled it together from junk.
‘Signal the shuttle. Tell them to expect incoming fire.’
‘Yes, sir!’ Vel produced a handset and began barking orders into it in a shortened war-cant.
‘Lysshe?’ said Kekrops. ‘Who are we fighting? Is it the Aristeia?’
Lysshe seemed untroubled by the sound of gunfire slamming against the penitents’ building, or the return fire of the Guardsmen crouched around its entrance. He ran a hand along the wounded trooper’s face, and froze.
‘Speak to me,’ said Kekrops.
‘I… I cannot…’
Kekrops grabbed Lysshe’s shoulder and pulled the frail man away from the trooper. ‘Lysshe! I said speak!’
‘He does not know,’ said Lysshe. For the first time he looked shaken. ‘He does not know who he is. It has been… torn away from him. I can feel scars in his mind, like the stump of an amputated limb. And someone has taught him how to be a soldier. But there is nothing else. Even insanity would be something, Lord Inquisitor, but instead there is… there is but a void.’
Kekrops grabbed Lysshe’s arm, pulling his hand away from the wounded trooper. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘It is what it is, Lord Inquisitor. I can say no different.’
‘They have nothing like this,’ said another of Kekrops’s Guardsmen. ‘This world’s top military is Guard-spec at most.’
‘Then they’re not from this world,’ said Kekrops.
The low growl of twin rotors rumbled underneath the gunfire. Kekrops knelt down by the edge of the wall and glanced out of cover. A craft was approaching, weaving between the piping and raised roadways that crossed over the Manticore Gate Processional. It had a cylindrical body and cockpit with a bulging windscreen that resembled the eyes of a giant insect. Two rotors, one on either side, supported it, with a smaller one on the tail giving it the manoeuvrability to make good speed towards Kekrops’s position. A cannon, mounted under the nose, spat bursts of fire across the upper floors of the buildings along the road, sending the hooded troops diving for cover.
‘Stay close and move!’ yelled Kekrops. ‘If you fall behind, we leave you!’
The Guardsmen gathered around Serrick, who leafed through the book she carried until she reached a page that suddenly glowed with power as it was turned. She held her hand over the writing and grimaced as it scorched the skin of her palm.
‘Ready?’ said Kekrops.
Serrick nodded.
‘Move!’ shouted the inquisitor. A globe of shimmering light appeared around Serrick and the Guardsmen broke cover, Kekrops running with them.
Lysshe was the first to fall. He could not keep up, and a las-round sliced through his thigh. His severed leg skidded along the pavement and he flopped to the ground. No one turned to help him. He was not the first psyker to fall in the service of Lord Inquisitor Kekrops.
A missile streaked in from a rooftop and detonated against the psychic shield. The blast sent shrapnel carving through two more men, and others fell. Serrick stumbled, and Kekrops grabbed her arm in his huge armoured paw to drag her along behind him. The shuttlecraft was now directly overhead, banking around as it descended and brought its tail towards the warband. A rear ramp opened up into the passenger compartment, and a pair of crew stood ready to help the warband embark.
Serrick’s eyes rolled back and the book dropped from her hand. Kekrops picked her up but the shield faltered, flickering out of existence. The Guardsmen knelt by the ramp, which only had another couple of metres to descend before it touched the ground, and they fired up almost at random into the rooftops and windows around them. More fire stuttered back and more men fell.
Kekrops threw Serrick into the back of the shuttle.
‘Get her stable!’ he yelled to one of the shuttle crew, who wore the colours of an Imperial Guard medic. The medic barely had time to nod before the craft slewed sideways, gouging sparks out of the Manticore Gate Processional. Kekrops jumped back to keep from being ground into the paving beneath the hull.
One of the rotors had blown up. Its housing was torn open and the rotor had been stripped of its blades. Thick black smoke began spurting from the severed fuel lines.
‘Serrick!’ yelled Kekrops. ‘Get her… get her safe! Get to the buildings and…’
A single round thumped into Kekrops’s skull, right between his eyes.
Kekrops seemed to take a moment to realise he was dead. He stared straight ahead, as if trying to remember a lost train of thought.
Then he fell to his knees, the sound of his armour ringing out like a bell, and toppled to one side.
The shuttlecraft, unable to gain height or control itself, skidded across the road and crunched into one of the buildings. The front of the building collapsed, four storeys pancaking onto the body of the shuttle.
Lysshe lived for a while, able only to writhe and let out a low moaning. By the time a gaggle of household servants emerged from hiding to search for the wounded, however, he had died from blood loss and shock. While most tried to tend to the wounded and the dying, several gathered around the huge armoured corpse of Inquisitor Kekrops, and wondered who this man could be to have been the epicentre of such destruction.
Those who knew about such things recognised the emblems of the Imperium on Kekrops’s armour and the wargear of the soldiers who had died beside him. The Imperium, that overlord who left the people of Opis alone provided they paid their tithes and obeyed the Imperial law. And provided they did not harbour the enemies of the Imperium.
Those who knew about such things also knew that this was not over.
K-Day –12 Hours
Elimination of air defences plus command and control prior to Operation Requiem
The outskirts of Khezal hurtled past, too fast to make out any detail among the sandstone walls and verdigris tiles, the ornamental waterways and flagstoned streets. The city sprawled in every direction, a shining jewel set into the rocky equator of Opis, the picturesque spread of the city punctuated by great stone spires and pyramids in which tens of thousands were housed, or the city’s greatest had their palaces and pleasure gardens.
‘Too beautiful,’ said Brother Ucalegon, ‘to be a battleground.’
Ucalegon, as befitted the Emperor’s Champion, would be first out of the Thunderhawk gunship, first to jump down from the ramp even now opening and providing a view of Khezal streaking underneath. His golden armour had been overpainted in black, and in his hands he carried a sword with a blade of gleaming obsidian.
His fellow Imperial Fists craned their necks to get the first sight of the city they were to fight over. One of them, in huge Terminator armour, had to stoop even though the gunship’s passenger compartment had been built to accommodate the exaggerated frame of a Space Marine. He carried a shield and an enormous thunder hammer, and his face bore a mix of pride and weary wisdom that only
a lifetime of war could bring.
‘We care nothing for beauty,’ he said.
‘What ugliness we bring is the fault of our enemies, captain,’ replied Ucalegon. ‘The scars we shall leave on this world were etched by their hands. It is one more sin upon their shoulders.’
‘Then punish them for it,’ said the captain, clapping a huge gauntlet on Ucalegon’s shoulder. ‘You are the Emperor’s hand on this world. Punish them.’
Ucalegon bowed his head in deference to these words for they were uttered by Captain Lysander, the First Captain of the Imperial Fists Chapter, and a man who had earned greater respect in war than all but a handful of men that lived.
The Thunderhawk banked and the engines screamed. The ten Space Marines on the Thunderhawk could see the fortified surface of the Chalcedony Throne, the massive pyramid encased in precious-stone battlements that was their target. For many hours they had pored over its floorplans and the details of its defences, in the full knowledge that what they found inside might bear no relation to the intelligence they had gathered.
‘Ten seconds!’ came the voice of the gunship’s pilot up ahead. The passenger compartment was bathed in red light and the roar of the air outside was joined by the howl of the gunship’s engines as they fired to arrest the craft’s descent. Ucalegon pressed the stone blade of his sword to his forehead and let the words of a familiar battle-prayer run through his mind, blessing the blade and his soul with words Rogal Dorn had written down ten thousand years before. Then he fastened his helmet on his head, squad icons lighting up against the helmet’s eyepieces.
He was the Emperor’s Champion. He had been anointed as such just a few days ago. The Emperor was watching.
A break in the decorative stonework yawned suddenly below, a gun port with the muzzle of a huge artillery piece ready to defend the Chalcedony Throne from assault. But the history of Khezal had seen no enemy assault its palaces and bastions for hundreds of years. Not until that very day, when the first shots of the war for Opis were being fired all across the planetary capital.
‘Go!’ yelled Captain Lysander, and the gunship pivoted. Ucalegon grabbed the edge of the ramp and braced himself, ready to jump, as his grav-restraints detached and left him free to move. He powered forwards, the nerve-fibre bundles of his armour adding to his own strength, and he was falling, the darkness of the Chalcedony Throne’s interior rushing up to swallow him.
His auto-senses adjusted instantly. The barrel and machinery of the artillery piece had coalesced from the darkness before the next Space Marine landed beside him, followed by Captain Lysander. In a few seconds the whole force had disembarked.
Even the filters built into his armour could not conceal the smell. It was familiar from a hundred battlefields. Not just rotting flesh, although that was the greater part of it, but everything that accompanied it – old blood, stale sweat, smoke, hot metal.
Beneath Ucalegon’s feet was sandstone, cut into decorative tiles. Behind him was a square of Opis’s sky, bright and clear. Above him was the barrel of the gun, polished and unused for a century.
And in front of him was hell. There was no other way to put it. He was in hell.
But he was an Imperial Fist. He had been in hell before. And this time, he was the champion of the Emperor.
The stone blade seemed light in his hands as he yelled and charged into the madness.
The battle had come swiftly to Khezal.
The inhabitants had known that it was coming. The people of Khezal had been raised to believe the words of the Aristeia, to accept that these great and wealthy people had the right to speak for them and decide what the truth really was. But even so, the reassurances of the Aristeia’s highest echelons, who deigned on occasion to address them from the balconies of their palaces and temple complexes, had not satisfied them completely. Some said the massacre in Makoshaam was the elimination of malcontents among the peasantry, the beginning of a purge. They had happened before, leaving shadows and lacunas in the history of Opis. Others maintained that the Aristeia were fighting among themselves, and that soon armies of peasants would be trained up to join them. That had happened before, too, and whole generations were missing from the family trees as a result.
But some said it was even worse. Some said that Opis was under the threat of something that it had not been troubled with since the dawn of the Age of Imperium. Something from outside. Something from off-world.
The first sight of that threat dropped into the Cemetery district of Khezal on columns of burning exhaust, in the form of cargo landers fitted with armour and disembarkation ramps. They crashed into the tangled, ancient streets of the district, one of the historical hearts of the city where the criminal guilds and secret societies ruled the alleyways, and disgorged the heavy infantry of the Mhosis Karn Avengers. The Imperial Guardsmen wore body armour of such weight that only men from a high-gravity world like theirs could wear it and fight at the same time, perfect for the cramped streets.
They met Aristeia’s troops there, in the shape of two household regiments carrying the banners of their patron aristocrats. The Aristeia were on high alert, ready for both civil unrest and open warfare, but the Imperial Guard specialised in the close-quarters butchery with bayonets and lascarbines that ensued.
The docks of Khezal, with the expanses of industrial yards where generations of warships had been assembled from the steel flowing from their glowing forges, were the next to feel the footfall of an outsider. The men of the Gathalamor 912th Light Infantry jumped from fast Valkyrie gunships, and rushed between the forges and dry docks to capture the anti-aircraft guns that had barely been able to respond to the suddenness of the assault. The Gathalamorans cut prayers into the chests of the Aristeia soldiers defending the guns, and even before the guns were spiked and blown up they had built a heap of bodies to burn as their offering to the God-Emperor.
The Subiaco 27th, fabled killers drawn from prison worlds and made useful with mental surgery and combat drugs, landed in the waters off the picturesque Pearl Dragon Coast. Many were killed by the impact of their low-firing grav-chutes against the water, or were knocked out and drowned. A good three-quarters of them survived to attack a huge villa complex, one of dozens along the coast where many Aristeia spent their days when not attending to matters of household governance or planetary politics. The Subiacans threw the bodies of the few defenders out into the ornamental ponds and off the cliffs into the sea.
The picture was repeated on a dozen battlefields scattered across the city. Most took down defences, like radar towers or anti-aircraft installations, and in doing so unlocked the door that would let the main Imperial force land for the major assault on Khezal. But others were looking for something. They had been briefed by the intelligence officers of Commander Tchepikov’s staff, and their own officers led them in the knowledge that they were hunting moral threats in the streets of Khezal. The armed forces of Khezal were huge, numbering hundreds of thousands the Aristeia could put under arms along with their own standing household forces, but defeating them would be only half the battle. There were worse things in Khezal than men with guns.
The Imperial Fists were among those sworn to find them.
The raw stuff of the stars poured down the walls, liquid fire like multicoloured lava spewing from the molten emotions of the warp. Bodies writhed in the fire, naked and contorted. Hands reached blindly. Disintegrating human forms rose like ash above a fire, screaming as they merged with the flames rippling along the ceiling. The walls of fire seemed to be held in place with chains, the iron glowing red in the heat. The floor was a mass of charred bones and red scorched bodies, the living writhing through the ashes of the dead. Serpentine creatures, with boneless limbs that whipped and coiled, lashed the figures immolated in the walls and columns of fire, leaping in a frantic dance from victim to victim.
Torrents of flame poured through rents in the ceiling, or burst in geysers from the floors below. Madmen gibbered prophecies even as they burned. Those who cou
ld move gouged at their eyes or tore out their entrails. Those who could not were broken and misshapen by straining against the spiked chains that transfixed them in place.
Lysander had seen such scenes before. They were always different, for Chaos could not do its work in the same way twice. But they were always made of madness, the expression of the fools and maniacs who had given in to the warp’s promises. It was human madness, not yet the full insanity of the warp. It was human evil, and Lysander had fought his way through human evils for centuries.
‘Brothers!’ yelled Lysander as he drew his thunder hammer, the Fist of Dorn, from its scabbard on the back of his Terminator armour. ‘Here the Enemy lurks, ignorant of his death! Let us educate him! Let the Emperor’s cold wrath extinguish this pyre!’
Lysander’s squad, along with Emperor’s Champion Ucalegon, forged through the fire in Lysander’s footsteps. It was indeed like fighting through a funeral pyre. Lysander’s armour heated up, the joints scorching. Bolter fire snapped at the daemons who danced through the flames – whip-fast, like sea creatures disturbed by a predator, they flitted into hiding.
‘Who will face the Hand of the Emperor?’ yelled Ucalegon above the screaming of the damned. ‘Is there a champion of your gods who will test himself against this blade, or does the warp vomit forth only cowards?’
The answer came in the form of burning hands that tore out from the cataracts of flame. They belonged to serpentine daemons that slithered through the fire. They had a dozen eyes each, smouldering deep-crimson scales, and they drooled sizzling venom from mouths full of asymmetrical fangs.
‘Fast drill!’ yelled Lysander. ‘Volley fire and advance!’
Almost before the first trigger finger was down, the daemons were among the Imperial Fists. They tried to wrap their snake-like bodies around the Space Marines to crush and burn them. Bolter fire shredded many, but others slipped through the gunfire as if they barely existed in real space at all.