by Ben Counter
Geryius was still below, digging with his hands in the loose stone. He couldn’t see Privar among the falling masses of dirt.
Orfos could see more clearly now. Nothing above him. The top of the ridge was a short sprint away. He put his head down and ran. The doctrines of the Space Marines taught that a battle-brother was safer the closer he was to the enemy, where his greater strength, his training, his force of will, counted for the most. A Space Marine was not trained to be a speck in anyone else’s gunsight.
Orfos reached the ridge. He dropped to his belly. The ridge looked across to a great tumult of upheaval, where thousands of years ago pressures in the planet’s crust had formed jagged spikes that stuck up in every direction, a pathless mass of mountain which looked like it never ended.
Right in front of him, from the reverse slope of the ridge, lurched a human form swathed in plague-stained rags. Orfos sized it up in the split second it took for it to reach him. Its head and upper torso were horribly swollen, forming a single neckless lump giving it an awful, top-heavy outline. Asymmetrical eyes rolled through tears in the green-black rags. In one clawed hand, wrapped in sodden greyish flesh like that of a drowned man, was the long-barrelled autogun he had used to snipe at the Scout squad.
Orfos blew a fist-sized hole in the mutant at point-blank range with his bolt pistol. The exit wound, rather larger, was a fountain of greyish flesh erupting from the mutant’s back.
The mutant’s upper torso split open like the egg sac of a giant spider. Segmented limbs unfolded in a shower of colourless, lumpy gore that spattered down over Orfos.
Each limb ended in a blade. Not a talon, but a blade, a knife or a piece of hammered metal, forced between the split end of each limb and tied closed like a primitive’s spear.
Orfos ducked as the mutant slashed at him. His combat knife sliced over his head and took off a limb. The limb thrashed and sprayed blood like a water hose. Orfos dived into the mutant, tackling it to the ground, forcing his weight down onto it. It reached up at him, one blade carving a long line of pain across his face and another punching into the flesh of his upper arm.
Orfos had the bolt pistol barrel up under what remained of the mutant’s ribs. He blew another two holes in it, even as an eye rolled up to stare at him from the innards crowding its sundered chest.
‘Whatever you are,’ snarled Orfos, forcing his knife up out of the mutant’s grip, ‘I am the last thing you see.’
He rammed the knife down into the mass of organs. There had to be something in there it could not do without. He tore the blade out again and plunged again and again, and each time a fibrous wreck of tissue and bone was thrown out.
The mutant stopped moving, save for a few hindbrain spasms that kept its limbs twitching. ‘Brothers!’ Orfos gasped into the vox. ‘Eyes about us! There will be more.’
He kicked himself free of the mutant’s wrecked body. He looked down into the smoke-choked valley. Enriaan and Privar were emerging from the smoke and running up the slope. Geryius was behind them, covered in grime and smoke dust.
‘Vonretz?’ voxed Orfos.
‘We should have razed the camp!’ yelled Geryius. ‘We should have killed the whole damn lot of them! I’d have lined them up myself!’
‘Brother, focus!’ ordered Orfos. ‘We are beset by enemies!’
‘Enemies we could have killed days ago! What cost would a camp full of scum have been, to kill the traitors among them?’ He pointed up at the two Naval fighter-bombers just visible over the opposite ridge as they made a return pass. ‘One payload from a bomber and these filth would have burned in the mud!’
‘You forget why we are here!’ snapped Orfos. ‘Even in the claws of wickedness, we fight for the humanity that bore us!’
Orfos’s eyes did not leave the pair of fighter-bombers. Something about their path caught his attention and would not let go.
One spiralled off path. It fell, caught in a flat spin, dropping out of view as sparks showered from the control surfaces of its wings.
The other kept on course, ignoring the loss of its twin. A few seconds later and the sound of the first fighter’s crash reached Orfos’s ears, a rumbling, shattering boom in the distance.
‘Scatter!’ yelled Orfos. ‘Scatter! Strike incoming!’
The fighter-bombers were compromised. One of the pilots had survived the attempt to take his craft over – perhaps, of the pair of pilot and co-pilot, only one was a traitor and in their struggle they had thrown the fighter-bomber into a spin from which it could not recover. The other had been taken over cleanly. The many scenarios that flashed through Orfos’s head all ended in one fighter lost and one compromised, its mission to wipe out the Scouts tracking the pilot’s fellow traitors through the mountains.
Orfos leapt over the crest of the ridge, leaving the mutant’s torn corpse where it lay, and slid down the scree slope on one hip. Enriaan and Privar were not far behind. Privar slipped and fell, rolling end over end and yelling as his broken arm was forced further out of shape.
Orfos was on his feet and running. A cleft in the rock ahead formed the entrance to a pitch-black cave. It was impossible to tell how far in it went, or whether a Space Marine Scout could force his body all the way in at all, but it was the only shelter anywhere near.
He looked back. Geryius was silhouetted at the top of the ridge as the fighter boomed over, dangerously low, fast and straight as an arrow. A shower of black specks fell from it into the valley.
Cluster munitions. A hundred bomblets detonated at once. The valley exploded in flame. Geryius was lit up and thrown off his feet, hurled off the ridge down the slope. The valley shook and a wave of darkness was vomited up into the air. Orfos dived into the cave, the other two Scouts close behind him. Rogue bomblets were falling everywhere, sharp cracks bursting somewhere overhead, each followed by a shaking like an earthquake. The sound of the mountains themselves complaining, a terrible creaking and cracking from far below, shuddered the ground.
Orfos could see Enriaan and Privar in the entrance behind him, Geryius scrambling down the slope, as debris rained down as thick as a blizzard. Beside Privar, tucked up against the opening in the rock, was a body. It was human, wrapped in the same robes the King of Crows and his cohorts had worn since they escaped from the Emperor’s Embrace. The feet were bloody and torn, wrapped only in red-soaked bandages. A single bullet wound glinted in the back of the head.
‘There,’ said Orfos, over the pattering of stone on stone from outside. ‘A straggler. He was slowing them down. They executed him, and the blood is not dry yet. They went this way.’
Geryius made it into the cave. His face was streaming with blood from the wounds to his scalp caused by the falling shards of stone.
‘He’s gone,’ said Geryius. ‘The sons of dogs. Vonretz is gone. I couldn’t find him.’
‘Focus, brother, and avenge him,’ said Orfos. ‘We cannot pause to pay our respects now. We move. With me.’
The caves spiralled into the mountain, cramped, wet and pitch-black. Chill wind howled through them as if through the pipes of a flute. Orfos moved as fast as he could, shouldering through confines almost too cramped for a hunched-over human let alone a Space Marine.
Vonretz was dead. Nothing could change that now. But the mission could still succeed. The King of Crows could still be brought in, alive, and the truth about the war on Opis could be wrestled from him. Orfos told himself this as he stepped knee-deep in freezing water, an underground stream rushing through the heart of the mountain.
Light strobed. Gunfire hammered out, echoing against the walls of the many-chambered cavern that opened up above the Scout squad. Orfos half glimpsed ragged figures with autoguns aimed down at him and opened fire, shooting down one with a burst of bolt pistol fire. Another was lost in the shadows.
The Scouts splashed past him. ‘You take one brother, you must take us all!’ yelled Geryius, and rattled off half a magazine at the shelves of dripping rock.
A grenade splashed into t
he water. Orfos dived against one wall and stone showered against him, opening up cuts on his face and hands. But it was nothing that would slow him down.
A mutant lurched from the water, its form skeletal and its face a skull wrapped in dripping muscle, its hands talons. Orfos picked it up, folded it backwards, felt its spine come apart and rammed it down into the stone floor. Its skull crunched and it fell still.
A chainblade whirled. In the darkness Orfos could gauge its location, arrowing towards Enriaan, but Enriaan turned the blade aside with the body of his sniper rifle and threw a crunching elbow into the ribs of the attacker. Orfos barely glimpsed scaled skin and bony spines as Enriaan slid a combat knife up into the mutant’s chest and carved it open from navel to neck.
Privar was backed up against one wall, peering into the shadows overhead, looking for targets.
‘Onwards!’ yelled Orfos. ‘They want us trapped down here! Onwards, and bring the fight to them!’
Gunfire spattered down. Impacts cracked off the back of Orfos’s Scout armour as he sought a way out. Ahead, groping almost blindly, he found a cleft through which the stream was rushing. Chest-deep now, he followed it into utter darkness. Even a Space Marine’s eyes could not see. Geryius was still firing, and Orfos could tell it was at random.
‘Geryius, follow!’ shouted Orfos. ‘Enriaan, bring him! Bring him!’
Geryius swore and fought as Enriaan almost dragged him into the darkness. The sound of the rushing water was louder here, and Orfos fancied that more than one stream converged in the freezing waters that swirled up to his shoulders.
Light glimmered ahead, catching the foaming water. Orfos could see sky through a crack in the rock.
The mutants had been posted there to slow the Scouts down, in case the traitors on the fighter-bombers failed to kill them. They were protecting something. That something was the King of Crows, Orfos knew it. He had to push on, he had to pursue. He knew that he was close. The desperation in the enemy’s tactics was obvious now. They were throwing their lives away to buy time for the King to escape. But there was not enough time to escape an Imperial Fist when he had an enemy’s scent.
Orfos lost his footing on the slippery rock. He tumbled out into the light on a rushing tide. He rolled onto his front and saw that the underground river emerged onto a rocky ledge overlooking an endless expanse of mountains, as if the land itself had been torn up by a giant hand. The water spilled, fast and shallow, over the ledge into a waterfall that plunged out of view.
One of the ragged plague victims was waiting for the Scouts. Orfos’s hand was quicker. His bolt pistol was up and he just had time to recognise the fatigues, webbing and body armour of an elite Aristeia household trooper before he put two bolt-rounds into the soldier’s chest. The soldier took a couple of steps back and fell over the edge, off the ledge and out of sight.
Orfos glanced left and right. He saw movement to the left, where the remainder of the plague procession was hurrying out of sight. Orfos ran after them, splashing through the rushing water and fighting to stay on his feet.
He backed up against an outcrop of rock and checked his bolt pistol’s load. He had two shells left in the magazine. He took out a new magazine to swap it in.
Before he could reload, a shadow fell over him. It was a horror in tattered skin, wings spreading. Tentacles hung from its chest and abdomen, snaring around Orfos’s face and neck as it glided over him.
Orfos was on his back in the water before he could think; head bound, unable to breathe. His pistol was out of his hand as he grabbed at the tentacles wrapping around his face. He turned over, feeling them bunch up and entwine, and with all the strength he had he tore them free.
He heard a scream. The freezing water was suddenly warm for a moment as blood poured out of the thing’s torn chest. Orfos was up out of the water, gasped down a desperate breath, and saw the mutant rearing up over him. Its wings were stretched across bony spines spreading from behind its shoulders, its skin was a slimy grey-black and its face was split in two by a vertical mouth. It had three eyes, the one in the centre of its forehead a red sphere without a pupil. Its chest and stomach were a ruined mess, the stumps of its snaring tentacles oozing gore. Bony blades speared out from its elbows, dark with long-dried blood.
Orfos leapt on it, knocking it back with his weight. He grabbed one wing and wrenched it, feeling the spines break and the membrane of skin tearing.
Then he dropped to one knee, grabbed a wrist and ankle, and lifted the winged mutant out of the water. He spun and let go, hurling the thing off the edge of the waterfall.
Its good wing tried to flap, to keep it aloft, but it could do nothing but spin as it fell over the waterfall. Orfos could hear it shrieking, like a bird of prey with a victim in sight, the sound falling away as it fell.
Orfos was aware of Geryius and Enriaan struggling onto the ledge through the freezing torrent. But Orfos was too close now. He couldn’t pause, not when the King of Crows had thrown so much into stopping him here.
Orfos jumped over the rock and saw, on a narrow path winding off down the mountainside, the King of Crows.
Orfos had not known what he would see when he came face to face with the King of Crows. He could not stop various images pressing their way into his imagination – a towering being with a crown of black feathers, a man without a face or a form, a regal man enrobed and dripping with gold. But he had forced them all out and left his mind open, so he would not be led astray by a preconception about what the King of Crows actually was.
Even so, it was no surprise at all to be looking into the face of Lord Speaker Kallistan vel Sephronaas.
Orfos had last seen that meaty, finely-bred face on the pict-broadcast vel Sephronaas had sent to the Imperial forces. Now he was without his periwig or the robes of a Lord Speaker of the Aristeia, and wore the drab fatigues of a household soldier, but it was unmistakably the same man. He even had the translator with him, the mousy scrap of a woman crouching behind him like a whipped dog. Even on the run, forced to scrape and crawl like a rat through the Emperor’s Embrace camp, vel Sephronaas had not been willing to give up the one luxury, his translator, that marked him out as living in a different world to the masses of Opis.
Vel Sephronaas, the King of Crows, froze as he realised he was face to face with Orfos. Vel Sephronaas was a large man but Orfos was far, far taller. And though he did not have his bolt pistol with him, the combat knife that Orfos drew was more than enough to slice the Lord Speaker of the Aristeia clean in two.
‘You need not die,’ said Orfos. ‘You need not even suffer. Give yourself to the Imperial Fists. It is over.’
Impossibly, vel Sephronaas smiled. ‘You really know nothing, do you?’ he said. He used Low Gothic instead of the Aristeia’s own language. ‘What does suffering mean to me? What does death mean, when I have seen what I have seen?
Orfos took a step closer. ‘Lord Speaker. It is over.’
‘It was over before you got here,’ came the reply. ‘When you walk into the hell they have prepared, it will be over for you, as well.’
‘Who are they?’ said Orfos. ‘Who rules Opis? If not the King of Crows, who has done this to your world?’
Vel Sephronaas laughed, and Orfos knew it was a cover for something. Vel Sephronaas was drawing a weapon from the webbing of his fatigues. Orfos recognised the shape of a plasma pistol before it was out, and had weighed up the distance between him and vel Sephronaas. A Space Marine with a combat blade could lunge and kill, creating a long lethal distance, but vel Sephronaas was a step or two too far away. Orfos would be shot before he struck home.
Orfos jumped back, rolling over the rock behind which he had taken cover a few moments before. The first plasma shot boiled away half the rock and Orfos was forced back by the wave of superheated air.
He hit the water. There was gunfire all around. Orfos realised that Privar and Geryius were swapping gunfire with troopers on the other side of the ledge. Enriaan was wrestling with something down in t
he foam.
Vel Sephronaas was aiming at Orfos, the plasma pistol in his hand glowing as its power coil recharged.
Orfos plunged his hand into the water. It closed on the butt of his bolt pistol.
It had two shots left. Orfos only needed one.
Orfos aimed and fired, and blew the upper half of vel Sephronaas’s head off.
Orfos turned and saw Enriaan slitting the throat of the trooper he was wrestling with. Another was stumbling back, chest blown open by Privar’s pistol. Geryius had the last of them in a headlock and Orfos could hear the wrenching snap as he broke the soldier’s neck.
The only sound was the rushing of the waterfall and the wind through the mountains.
Vel Sephronaas’s body was still upright. Everything above the upper jaw was gone.
‘That’s the King of Crows?’ said Geryius.
‘It was,’ said Orfos, approaching the body carefully. There was nothing to say vel Sephronaas wasn’t a mutant himself, one who kept his brain somewhere other than his skull.
A prickling on the back of his neck was all the warning Orfos had, and it wasn’t nearly enough.
The shot whistled past him. The pain hit a moment before he heard the report of the shot from far behind him, echoing around the mountains.
The pain was a hammer against his senses. He reeled and almost fell back. He raised his hand to steady himself against the half-melted rock, but no hand came up.
Orfos’s right arm had been blown off at the elbow. Splinters of bone stuck out of the gory mess of the stump.
The shot had gone through Geryius first. It had punched through the Scout’s midriff, blowing a wide red hole in his stomach. Geryius fell back against Privar, who caught him and dragged him into the shelter of the cave entrance.
Orfos was on his knees now. His stomachs were turning with the shock and he couldn’t breathe. He had just enough wits left to follow the path of the bullet, and on a distant mountaintop he saw the pattern of the rock shifting as someone moved out of a sniping position. Orfos could just make out a masked face and a long sniping rifle, the shooter’s form disguised by the way its bodysuit mimicked the rock around it like cameleoline.