Seventh Retribution
Page 23
The enemy were concealed among the hard cover around the north of the Garden. The snipers were huddled among false ruins and summer houses, or concealed on the banks of ornamental lakes. Others – no one could be sure of their numbers – occupied the buildings that stood, some almost completely intact, along the northern edge, or held the streets that terminated at the Garden’s boundaries.
Sthenelus thought he could see movement up ahead, almost hidden by the drifting smoke and kicks of mud and blood from sniper shots. He hauled open the hatch above his head and the damp, smoky air of the battlefield filled the Beast of Mardon.
Snipers were cowering around the statue of Astriina the Comely, just beyond a torn-up section of low hillside studded with falsely aged fallen pillars and archways. They wore cowls with gas masks over their heads, cables from the masks hooked up to gas bottles strapped to their backs. They carried hunting rifles, perhaps looted from the armouries of Aristeia nobles. Even as Sthenelus watched, they were lining up shots among the advancing Imperial Guards.
Astriina’s statue had showed her as an imperious, beautiful woman swathed in furs and jewels. Now she was so pocked with bullet scars she looked like her skin was sloughing off her.
‘Firing! Brace for recoil!’ shouted Sthenelus. He fulfilled three roles on the Beast – squadron commander, tank commander and gunner. He slammed a fist against a control stud beside him and a shell was rammed into the gun’s breech. The barrel of the gun was a short, wide mouth protruding beyond the dozer blade. Auto-senses built into Sthenelus’s armour projected the likely firing trajectory onto his retina, but in case those failed the simple iron sights mounted on the commander’s hatch told the same story. The firing line intersected with the shape of Astriina the Comely and Sthenelus yanked on the firing lever.
The cannon bellowed. Sthenelus could just see the dark streak of the shell carried on its long line of burning propellant. It slammed into the base of the statue and the snipers disappeared in a cloud of torn earth. The report followed a moment later, a deep boom rumbling through the earth. Astriina toppled sideways, disappearing in the smoke and debris.
Through the darkness, the enemy were charging.
<
The enemy soldiers were emerging from the gloom of the Vindicator’s shot. There seemed to be hundreds of them, appearing suddenly in the Garden’s northern expanses as if they had been waiting for the Imperial Guard to cross a line. They were hooded and masked, surrounded by a pall of green-grey smoke that bled from the gas bottles and breathing masks they wore.
<
‘Too eager,’ said Sthenelus. ‘They are vermin, but they are cunning. They had hard cover and they abandon it just as we walk into the teeth of their guns.’
‘Is it another sacrifice?’ asked Techmarine Daedelon. ‘As the Sanctifier witnessed?’
‘They do not yet kill their own,’ said Sthenelus. ‘So I think not. Squadron, support the advance! Fire at will!’
The Vindicators hurled booming artillery shells into the host of enemy troops. Whatever they had once been, the enemy had long since ceased to suffer the doubts and fears of human beings. Explosions threw clouds of torn bodies into the air, but they still advanced. Las-fire shredded their front ranks, but they did not run. They seemed more intent on a suicidal advance than the Imperial Guard had been a few moments before.
The Beast of Mardon bucked as it fired, roaring plumes of flame across the battlefield. Among the detonations, las-fire streaked back and forth between the Imperial Guard and the enemy, and the battlefield was a mad cauldron that even a Space Marine’s experience could make no sense of.
It was without reason or purpose, as if this bedlam were its own reward.
It was chaos.
The ground shuddered and split open. A hundred Guardsmen fell in as the fissure ripped across the Gardens, a vast torrent of torn earth swept into the black gash underfoot. Everything tilted sideways as the entire Garden of Astriina the Comely sank several metres. Nearby buildings collapsed and the banks of dust rolled in like dense thunderclouds. Suddenly Sthenelus could barely see anything beyond the dozer blade of his tank.
‘Back! Back!’ he ordered. ‘Turn us around! They are beneath us!’
Morsk wrenched the controls around and the Beast’s tracks spun in opposite directions, slewing the tank around even as the ground tilted underneath it. Sthenelus could see the Bonecracker sliding with the masses of earth pouring into the fissure that was reaching closer with every moment. Guardsmen were running in every direction, yelling for their squadmates or just sprinting away from the worst of the insanity. A Sentinel walker limped past, one of its legs almost too badly twisted to support it.
‘Trajack!’ called Sthenelus into the vox. The only reply was static, shot through with gunfire and screaming.
The Beast of Mardon was losing its fight against gravity. The tracks were spinning through loose earth. Sthenelus pulled the hatch closed over him and crouched down beside the breech of the siege cannon.
‘If they wish to fight their battle beneath the earth,’ shouted Sthenelus over the tearing of the fissure, ‘then we shall fight that battle and win it! For we will march into hell, if the enemy but halts there and faces our guns!’
The ground dropped out from under the Beast of Mardon. For a moment it was weightless as it lurched. Then the sides boomed as debris hammered against it and it finally landed with an awful crunch.
Sthenelus was rattled against the sides of the tank, drummed into the breech and the side of the hull. His head swam and the tank seemed to scream, its engine still grinding its tracks against the loose debris beneath it.
Morsk got himself upright and cut the engine.
‘Report!’ said Sthenelus.
‘I am unhurt,’ said Daedelon. ‘The machine-spirit is anguished.’
Sthenelus looked through the vision blocks but he could not see anything but a coating of grime. He opened the hatch and earth showered in.
The forces of Khezal had indeed decided to fight this battle beneath the ground, for they had built hell under the Garden.
Naked, writhing bodies, knitted together into an appalling tangled mess, formed a landscape that stretched off into the darkness. The sky of raw stone overhead was hung with tree roots reaching down from the Garden, the faintest light glistening on the expanses of skin from the tears in the ground.
The sound of their breathing was like a whistling wind, rising and falling, and the smell was an awful mixture of sweat, blood and ordure. Guardsmen, some living, some dead, lay among the bodies, the conscious trying to disentangle themselves from the limbs that suddenly surrounded them. Sthenelus could see men and women in there; all skin hues and sizes, scrawny arms wrapped around pallid guts, and no sign of the ground beneath the mass.
‘My sword,’ said Sthenelus.
Morsk pulled Sthenelus’s chainsword from its scabbard near his feet and passed it up to the sergeant.
‘They have built a vision of the warp beneath Khezal,’ said Sthenelus. ‘They have made a hell from the wretched of this world. So give thanks! For Dorn taught us to fight in hell!’
Guardsmen were crying out as they sank into the smothering mass. Others had been wounded in the battle or the fall, and wailed like animals. They reached for the Beast of Mardon, as if swimming against the current, but the blind, grasping hands held them back.
‘Brothers, do you hear me?’ voxed Sthenelus.
<
A long, low trumpeting s
ound echoed across the underground landscape. The gloom would have been impenetrable to a normal man’s vision and Sthenelus could only just make out the movement in the distance. Picking their way across the layer of living bodies were monstrous forms, three or four of them, towering almost to the earthen ceiling on long stilt-like limbs. The fleshy bags of their bodies supported drooping heads with long probosces that poked and groped among the bodies, occasionally snatching one up, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps to feed. The lowing sound was emanating from these enormous creatures, and around their spindly legs scampered smaller things, indistinct structures of flesh.
‘Do you have a visual on that?’ voxed Sthenelus.
<
‘Can you fire upon them?’
<
‘The works of the enemy,’ said Sthenelus. ‘By such works shall we know them. Morsk! Take us into firing range! Forwards and right twenty!’
The Beast of Mardon crunched through the bodies around it, tracks slurping through the sucking murk of churned bodies. Blood spattered up against Sthenelus. The Beast’s targeting still worked and the vectors lined up, lighting the outline of the closest beast as they came into range.
Sthenelus let another shell slam into the breech. The beast seemed to recognise the sound, its head turning towards the Vindicator. Sthenelus could see the eyes dotted on its head, scattered asymmetrically around its trunk.
It was made of bodies. They had lost much of their definition, as if melted or partly dissolved, but torsos and limbs were still just visible among the wrinkles of its sagging body.
‘Recall, my brothers, the parable of Rodrigar,’ said Sthenelus. ‘Though he fought from within a Predator tank, he carried with him always his chainsword, and always gave it the greatest honours when it came to his weapon-rites.’
Sthenelus fired, and the Vindicator’s cannon roared. The corresponding blast bloomed in the middle of the beast’s torso and its legs buckled, as it let out a terrible bleak trumpeting. Torn flesh poured down.
Purplish fire tore from the massive wound, spraying down into the massed bodies. An unnatural light, in colours that could not properly be comprehended by a human eye, bled in every direction and reality seemed to twist, twitching in response to the sudden burst of energy.
‘And his battle-brothers mocked him,’ continued Sthenelus. ‘Brother Rodrigar, they cried, why place such trust in a blade when the might of the war machine protects you?’
The remains of the beast’s torso split open. Instead of a ragged hole, the space was filled with swirling purple flame, boiling and flashing with power. More fire vomited out in a waterfall, carrying half-formed bodies, indistinct and quivering.
<
‘But Rodrigar,’ said Sthenelus, his train of thought unbroken, ‘listened not. He polished the teeth of his chainblade and communed with the machine-spirit of its motor. And came the time his Predator tank joined battle against the liars that men call eldar.’
The half-formed things uncoiled and struggled to the surface of the human mass. They were misshapen and asymmetrical, crowned with malformed horns. Their skin tore and bulged and their lopsided faces were twisted with the agony of their sudden birth.
‘Daemons,’ hissed Brother Morsk. ‘Throne above us, hells below, daemons spill forth from the immaterium.’
‘Recall, Morsk, the parable,’ said Sthenelus, ‘and act accordingly.’
The Beast of Mardon lurched forwards, bodies crunching. It rode up over knots of bodies and down again, as the eyes of the other warp gate beasts turned to fix on it. Blood and gore were sprayed up the sides of the tank and Sthenelus wiped blood from the eyepieces of his helmet.
‘Then,’ continued Sthenelus, ‘the xenos crippled Rodrigar’s Predator with an alien weapon of deceitful design. The war machine was laid low, its mighty tracks torn, its engine weeping clouds of oily smoke. The alien sought to breach the war machine and defile its machine-spirit. But face to face they came with Brother Rodrigar!’
The Beast of Mardon crunched closer to the warp gate. Liquid fire was now lapping at its front armour, carrying on it a tide of charred and disintegrating bodies as well as half-formed daemons. The mewling daemon-things were raking at the tank with their claws, trying to grab a handhold and drag themselves onto it. Sthenelus fired again and the blast from the cannon shredded the daemons clustering in front of the tank. The shell detonated at knee height to the beast and it fell, the torn warp gate plunging into the sea of burning bodies.
‘And Rodrigar despaired not! For he had honoured his humble blade with the same fervour as the war machine, and it served him now! For while the war machine was lame and weakened, the blade did not falter!’
Sthenelus leaned out of the hatch and speared one daemon through the neck with his own sword, the chainteeth shredding the glowing daemon’s flesh. They were translucent, their organs visible squirming under their transparent skin, and they howled as they reached blindly for the tank.
The tank pitched up against a tightly packed mass of bodies. It lurched down again, and Sthenelus was face to face with the fallen beast. Its glassy black eyes rolled to stare at him. The massive wound in its side looked out onto a boiling starscape, a window into another realm. It sought to drag Sthenelus’s eye to stare into it, but it was a fragment of the warp and to become lost in it was to invite madness. The weak-willed would walk dumbly into it. The stronger might still have their minds haunted by what they saw in there – glimpses of the future or the past, carefully poised lies wrought to drive them mad or turn them on their own. Sthenelus focused on the gate beast instead, even as its trunk split open to reveal rows of tooth-like barbs reaching up into a wet, slurping gullet.
‘With every thrust, a head!’ cried Sthenelus. He hacked left and right at the daemons trying to clamber up to him. He cut through a hand, bisected a skull. The daemons had barely enough cohesion to maintain a physical form and they fell apart under his blade, or were ground beneath the tank’s tracks. Another metre closer and Sthenelus was within striking range of the beast. ‘With every slash, a life lain down before the Emperor’s wrath! And when his brothers came to reclaim the shattered war machine, Rodrigar had heaped up around it a host of the alien dead!’
Sthenelus leapt onto the top of the hull and rammed the chainblade down into the warp gate beast’s head. It punched in through one eye and emerged from the orifice formed by its split trunk, blood spraying from the whirring teeth. He twisted it back and forth, wrenching deeper into the gristle and brain. The thing’s eyes rolled back and bulged, oozing pale gore as the brain matter behind them was pulped.
The whole beast spasmed. Flashes, like lightning, burst from the warp portal, and like breaking glass cracks of power crazed across the portal surface.
Sthenelus tore the blade free.
‘Thus ends the parable of Rodrigar.’
‘We’re bogged down,’ said Morsk. ‘Any deeper and we won’t get out.’
‘Take us back, brother! Reverse, all speed! We have struck what blows we can. The Chapter must know of the enemy’s works here.’
The Beast of Mardon forced its way backwards through the tide of burning bodies. More daemons clawed at it, their bodies being forced up into the track housings and shredded.
Like a sea monster breaching the surface, the warp gate beast erupted back out of the burning mass. It bellowed, spraying gore from its ruined head, power pouring uncontrolled from the open wound in the warp in its side. It loomed up on torn and broken legs, high above the Beast of Mardon, dedicating its last moments to crashing down on the tank and crushing Sthenelus who was only halfway back into the commander’s hatch.
The roar of a siege cannon broke through the howling of the daemons. The shell slammed into the face of the beast and blew it back, shattering it into
a rain of shredded meat and bone.
Sthenelus threw himself flat on the tank’s hull as gore spattered down over him. He wiped the back of his gauntlet across his faceplate to reveal the Bonecracker behind him, riding up over the knotted bodies. Its siege cannon smouldered from the shot it had just fired, the shot that had blasted the stricken warp gate beast into bloody chunks.
Brother Kallistar clung to the tank’s upper hull and Brother Dyess, commander of the Bonecracker, stood in the commander’s hatch shooting down the clambering daemons with his bolt pistol.
‘Brothers!’ cried Sthenelus into the vox. ‘The Bonecracker yet lives!’
‘These daemons you set free!’ came Dyess’s reply. He had to shout, for his tank’s comms no longer worked. ‘They did us the honour of turning us right side up! And my brothers from the Granitefang begged a ride!’
‘My thanks will have to wait until we are free of this place,’ said Sthenelus. ‘Take us back, drivers, find us a way up and away! Lysander must learn of this!’
The two Vindicators made better headway now through the bodies as the daemons writhed, blind and ill-coordinated with the shock of the warp gate’s implosion. The beasts were lowing and stampeding at random in the distance, the fires of the warp dying down.
The warp gate glimmered out, its last energies bleeding into the grazing-place of the warp gate beasts. In those last moments narrowed eyes stared from the other side, hungry daemons denied their feast.
But they were content to wait a little longer. They would not stay hungry for long.
Lysander threw open the doors of the Apothecary’s bay.
Sigismund Point greeted him, the Imperial Fists base on the Battle Plains, with the smudgy grey mountains in the distance to the west and the pall of smoke over Khezal to the north-east. Labour servitors were taking delivery of crates of ammunition and supplies from an Imperial transport vehicle at the gates. Sergeant Kirav was conducting bolter drills with his fire-team, which now included some of the battle-brothers from Septuron’s squad. The Thunderhawks Peril Swift and Gilded Pyre were parked at the far end of the camp being refuelled under the eye of Brother Gorgythion.