by Ben Counter
And in the heart of it her face, unchanged, still the same woman Lysander had seen on vel Sephronaas’s broadcast. If there had been nothing human about her, it would have been better. She would have been an enemy on a par with the alien or the daemon, utterly inhuman and easy to hate. But that human core was more disturbing than anything the rest of her became. Perhaps that was another weapon she carried with her – the fact that whoever faced her saw something of themselves in that innocent feminine face, nestled in a tangled mass of horror.
Legienstrasse plunged a limb into the ground and it rippled along the blood-soaked landing pad, exploding beneath Lysander in a spray of glistening red tentacles. They wrapped around Lysander and dragged him back, and suddenly every step forwards took an enormous force of will. Lysander tore one arm free and swung the Fist of Dorn around him, but the blunt hammer did little against the tentacles – they bent under the force and snapped around the hammer, too, so suddenly it felt like it weighed too much for Lysander to lift.
Lysander roared in frustration. The bolter fire from his battle-brothers was doing almost nothing, for every chunk of flesh they blasted out of Legienstrasse was replaced as gore welled up in the wound and solidified.
Sergeant Septuron sprinted through the chaos towards Legienstrasse. Tentacles sprouted to grab him but he slashed through them with his chainsword as he ran. One of Legienstrasse’s clawed limbs reached down for him but he dropped and rolled under it, bringing his blade up as he passed under to slice through it at a joint. It thudded to the ground behind him as he came back up to his feet.
‘Whatever in the hells you are,’ cried Septuron, ‘you will be it no longer! This is the blade that ends you, Assassin!’
Legienstrasse’s answer was a blade of bone that speared out from the centre of her torso, from between the pulsing mass of her multiple hearts. It impaled Septuron through the stomach and split the backpack of his armour in two as it exited through his back. Sparks showered out of the armour’s ruptured power unit. Septuron was still alive as Legienstrasse lifted him up off the ground.
‘Brother!’ yelled Lysander, and the most awful feeling of all was the helplessness of being almost unable to move while a fellow Imperial Fist was dying in front of him.
Two new, slimmer limbs grabbed Septuron by the arms. The bone blade twisted, forcing Septuron’s torso wide open, and for a second Lysander could see Legienstrasse’s face through the hole torn in the assault sergeant. Then the blade withdrew and Septuron dropped to the ground, by now dead.
The thought of Septuron’s muscle and bone being absorbed for Legienstrasse’s use was what spurred Lysander on, tentacles snapping at him as he took another few tortuous steps towards the Assassin.
Legienstrasse looked at Syncella now, as if she had momentarily forgotten about the Grand Master. Syncella was twisting in her grasp, her own unnatural strength fighting against the alien muscle that wrapped every part of Legienstrasse’s mutating skeleton. Legienstrasse forced Syncella towards her chest, where her organs throbbed inside an open torso.
Syncella twisted one arm free. A knife punched into one of Legienstrasse’s hearts and blood sprayed out, flowing from the Assassin’s chest as if from a fountain. Then the teeth slid from the edges of her open ribcage, forming a huge set of vertically hinged jaws that closed shut on Lady Syncella.
Syncella’s legs kicked as the teeth gouged into her waist. She was strong and she lived a few seconds longer than anyone had a right to, bracing her arms against the side of the maw to hold it wide. Bones snapped and her arms gave way, and the jaws clamped shut on her.
Lady Syncella’s lower half flopped to the blood-soaked ground, still kicking.
Legienstrasse turned now to Lysander, and new limbs, great bladed arms like those of a huge fleshy mantis, grew from her shoulders.
‘Keep her here!’ ordered Lysander into the vox. ‘If we can’t kill her, keep her on Opis!’
Agent Skult’s next two shots were aimed upwards, towards the spacecraft still hovering overhead. Twin explosions bloomed against the rearward engines, and a plume of burning fuel poured out, plunging like a waterfall of flame to the landing pad a hundred metres away. The ship suddenly drifted to one side, secondary explosions bursting around the jet holding one side of it aloft.
Legienstrasse looked up and saw the spacecraft, her way off this planet, was mortally wounded. Skult’s turbo-penetrator shots had punched through a fuel tank or coolant line and one of the landing jets was shaking itself apart in bursts of promethium flame.
Legienstrasse broke and ran. Her weapons were withdrawn and suddenly long limbs, like those of a gazelle, were propelling her westwards towards the embattled terminal building. The tentacles slid into the pools of blood and Lysander was free. He ran after Legienstrasse, shouldering aside the dazed Aristeia troops too exhausted or confused to flee. He could hear the whining, then the screaming, of the spaceship’s engines as its remaining thruster failed to cope with the strain and sent the ship into a rapidly spinning descent. Gunfire crackled as Lysander reached earshot of the terminal, and he was aware of other Imperial Fists following him as he ran. His Terminator armour was not ideally suited to a foot pursuit, but once he had built up momentum he could keep pace with the other Imperial Fists as Legienstrasse leapt a burning barricade and vanished into the terminal building.
Lysander smashed through the barricade, kicking away sheets of steel reinforcement. Inside, gunfire hammered in every direction, filling the air with blurry chains of fire that rattled between the high girders. Sparks showered down as bullets and las-bolts burst against the corroded bronze-plated walls, and smoke hung heavy; a pall of greyish vapour that caught at Lysander’s throat. He felt his lungs contracting even as he registered the bodies heaped up around him, draped lifeless over fallen bronze pillars in the deflated, unnatural attitudes of death. Imperial Guardsmen and steel-plated heretics lay mixed up with one another, their blood mingling in gory mounds of torn flesh.
Lysander charged through friend and foe. Guardsmen huddling behind a fallen slab of wall were thrown aside as he stormed through them. A sweep of his shield knocked two heretics aside. The Guardsmen they were bearing down on had to scramble out of the way to avoid Lysander’s boots crunching down at them.
Legienstrasse was ahead, just visible through the bedlam. Men were flung aside by her long legs as she loped past. Las-fire streaked around her. Lysander followed in her wake, just keeping pace as she ducked under a sunken section of the roof that bowed down in a spray of torn girders. She vaulted the remains of an interior wall – Lysander dropped a shoulder and barged through it, throwing bricks and mortar outwards like an exploding grenade.
The battle was not his. The men of the Algol Siegebreakers would have to fight and die without Lysander’s aid. Lysander glimpsed a huge armoured figure and recognised with a lurch that it was a Space Marine – not a fellow soldier of the Emperor but one of the Traitor Legions, his power armour smouldering with inner fire, gnarled and smoking like the outcrops of a living volcano. In one hand the Traitor Marine held up an Imperial Guard officer, a colonel, by the throat. Flames were already licking around the officer’s throat. Under the Traitor Marine’s feet was a regimental standard, the face of the saint embroidered on it stained with blood and filth.
Any other time, the obscenity of a Traitor Marine would be met with Lysander’s every attention. Any other time. But not this time. The enemy was Legienstrasse. She had to die. Even the matter of honour that a Traitor Marine represented was relegated to second place to the only victory that mattered on Opis.
The hand around the officer’s throat had six fingers. Lysander knew he was looking at Karnikhal, champion of the Blood God Khorne, who had marched alongside Angron the Cursed in the black days of the Horus Heresy.
A section of the roof collapsed up ahead, showering twisted metal and masonry down in Lysander’s path. He dropped down and halted to keep from being buried.
‘We will return!’ yelled Lysander at
the Traitor Marine. ‘We will find you, and all will be repaid!’
In reply, Karnikhal Six-Finger snapped the colonel’s neck and dropped his body into the dust. He stamped on the man’s torso, grinding his bones and organs into the defaced standard.
Legienstrasse had stopped too, on the other side of the fallen roof section. Her legs were fusing together into sturdy supports banded around with muscle and her forelimbs were now great shovel-like wedges of bone. Her expression did not change as she rammed them into the ground ahead of her, tearing up the floor and revealing a deep hole beneath her.
Lysander scrambled over the rubble. Men from both sides were trapped under him, still yelling. As he watched, Legienstrasse opened a hole just big enough for her swollen form and forced her way down, into the hole and out of sight.
Lysander reached the edge of the hole. Wetness shone beneath him in the red flashes of las-fire. He jumped down and landed hip-deep in rushing water.
No, not water. Fuel. Legienstrasse had found one of the fuel lines that ran under the spaceport. The stench of it was so great an unaugmented man could not have breathed at all.
Lysander could hear Legienstrasse splashing and slithering up ahead. He glimpsed fish-like, scaled masses writhing away into the darkness. He ran after her, forcing his way against the flow.
Legienstrasse left bony spikes in her wake, embedded in the side of the pipe. Lysander kicked them aside and knocked them away with his hammer. A web of stringy membrane clung to him but he ripped it aside and wrenched the worst of it out of his eyes.
He was closing on her. A muscular tail was powering her forwards but she had absorbed so much biomass that she was scraping along the sides of the pipe. She was shedding bony spurs and lashes of muscle, edged with teeth, that slashed at Lysander as he ran, but they did not slow him down. His Terminator armour, and the armament of shield and hammer, meant he was a soldier built to charge on and not slow down no matter what was thrown at him.
Fire sparked behind him. Lysander caught it in the corner of his eye and risked a glance behind him.
Karnikhal Six-Finger was leaning down through the hole, illuminating the section of pipe with the molten fires of his armour. He reached down and a six-fingered hand shone in the darkness, liquid ceramite dripping from a slash in its palm.
The molten metal hit the torrent of fuel.
Lysander saw the flames as if in slow motion. Liquid fire billowed up towards him, the fuel torrent vaporising into a flash of boiling flame. Lysander threw his shield up in front of him as the impact hit it and the shield slammed into him with the force of a battering ram.
He heard the biological screech of Legienstrasse ahead of him. But he saw nothing. Instead of the fire, there was darkness.
Then the scream was the ringing of the bedlam in his ears, and by the time he slammed into the crumbling rockcrete of the fuel pipe, he was able to feel nothing at all.
K-Day +17 Days
Operation Requiem
The rituals of Khezal had, more than two weeks after the first Imperial Guard troops went in, become rooted in the minds of the men.
One never went into any underground structure, even a half-collapsed cellar or sunken maintenance shed, alone. Ever. Enough had been devoured by fist-sized fleshy spiders, or had shot themselves for no reason, or simply vanished, after descending alone.
Each day, before sunrise, almost every soldier who was able wrote a request to the Emperor on whatever he had to hand – a page torn from a field manual, a shard of metal shrapnel – and buried it in the rubble dust that choked Khezal’s streets. It was a tradition of one of the Guard regiments that had caught on. Most of them simply asked to see the next sunrise. Some begged for one confirmed kill that day, so that when the writer’s own death came he would have at least balanced it against the stolen life of an enemy. A few asked for a hated officer to fall in battle before he fed any more of his men into the choked killing alleys and lightless underground warrens.
A few drops of water were allowed to fall on the ground before drinking, no matter how scarce clean water might be, because the earth of Opis would drink your blood if you did not slake its thirst.
Boots were blessed every morning, because if you lost your boots, you were sure to die that day.
Sergeant Sthenelus of the Imperial Fists was watching one of those rituals now, being enacted among the Imperial Guardsmen sheltering in foxholes and waist-deep trenches dug into the southern end of the Garden of Astriina the Comely. This pleasure garden stretched for whole city blocks on each edge, and before the battle had been a sculpted landscape in miniature, with summer houses and follies on ornamental lakes separated by stands of trees. False temple ruins had stood on low hills, to be enjoyed by the Aristeia and wealthy craftsmen who lived in the exclusive housing blocks overlooking the Garden.
Now it was a grotesque scar, an open wound where torn earth replaced shattered buildings, where the remnants of the place’s forced beauty served only to make it all even uglier. The firing lanes across the Garden were all but impossible to avoid so the Guardsmen who held its southern third dug themselves into the ground, crawling on their bellies to keep out of the sights of snipers who occupied the shattered habitation blocks overlooking the northern reaches. They were Deucalians, a mixture of the 120th and 309th, with a few squads from the 122nd Storm Troopers. A few thousand men crouched in ones and twos as grey dawn broke through the pall of smoke and rubble dust that turned the sky the colour of stone.
The ritual was the confession. Only a couple of priests remained so men too wounded to fight, but still able to move, had taken up the spiritual slack. They went from trench to foxhole, hearing the sins of the day and night before. Everyone had something to confess. If you didn’t the Emperor would forget about you, and His grace would not save you from a sniper’s bullet or booby trap.
‘I lived when my friends did not.’
‘I killed a man, but I do not know if it was a friend or an enemy.’
‘I let my lasgun run dry, and did not realise until the firing had stopped.’
‘I was too afraid to move, and lay here all through the night.’
There were no punishments demanded by the makeshift confessors. If there was a punishment due, the Garden of Astriina the Comely would surely be generous in handing it out.
Sthenelus watched this through the vision blocks mounted around the hatch of his Vindicator siege tank. His three-strong squadron was sheltered as much as was possible in a series of artillery craters that had scoured one corner of the Garden. His tank was the Beast of Mardon, and the battle-brothers of his squadron manned the Granitefang and the Bonecracker nearby.
<
‘The time is close, lieutenant,’ replied Sthenelus. ‘Glory does not wait for us. She drives us on.’
<
‘I can feel the teeth of my tanks,’ said Sthenelus. ‘They grind in frustration. The longer I hold them back the wilder they will be. They will yearn to charge forward, and their shots will be ill-aimed.’
<
‘Your fear is your failing,’ replied Sthenelus. ‘If your men see it, they too will be afraid. But if you show no fear, they will forget, in the chaos of battle, what fear is.’
Voices chattered over the vox. Acknowledgement messages flashed in rapid regimental code.
Through the vision blocks, Sthenelus could see a tattered standard being unrolled. It was carried by a man who had lost one hand and most of his other arm, and who now served by carr
ying the standard in the crook of his remaining elbow. It was the standard of the 309th Deucalian Lancers, and carried the emblem of a warhorse in full gallop with a dozen battle honours named underneath.
<
‘Onwards!’ ordered Sthenelus. The Beast of Mardon ground forwards on its tracks, riding up over the sodden sandbags that had corralled it against sniper fire. The Vindicator’s driver, Brother Morsk, was almost hidden by the huge breech of the tank’s siege cannon and Techmarine Daedelon, the squadron’s engineer, was crushed into the rear of the tank in a space between the cannon’s huge shells. Morsk swung the tank around so it showed its front dozer blade to the direction of the enemy.
The Imperial Guard jumped from cover and advanced. Few of them ran. Officers held swords high and led the way, walking out across the chewed-up mud and shattered tree stumps. A pair of Sentinel scout walkers strode towards one flank, surrounded by the incongruous jungle world camouflage of the storm troopers.
Sniper fire took the first toll. Men’s heads snapped back and they fell, left where they lay by the advance. Others were cut down and wounded but not killed, and their cries mixed with the battle-oaths.
Sthenelus’s squadron was some way behind the front rank of men, and he saw through the vision blocks as the gunfire took ones and twos, then handfuls. A preacher continued to shout the words of the Emperor’s scribes even though the men around him had all been cut down and few ears could hear him. A Deucalian Guardsman was shot through the abdomen and slumped against a dry fountain, alongside bodies that had lain there for days.