Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘No shooting!’ shouted Hawkins as the bondsmen slammed into the Cadian ranks.

  A man with a full-facial tattoo of a spider came at him, swinging a heavy piece of iron pipework. Hawkins ducked the swing and slammed the heel of his palm into the man’s solar plexus. He stepped back as the man dropped with a whoosh of expelled air and brought his own rifle around to use as a cudgel. Three men in faded red coveralls attacked and Hawkins staggered as a clubbing fist smashed into the side of his head.

  Instinctive training responses took over and he swung his rifle out in a sweeping arc that connected with his attacker’s stomach and doubled him over. He dropped the second man with a jab of the lasgun’s butt to the head and shook off the dizziness of his own hurt. He felt hands dragging his shoulders and spun around, slammed his rifle into the chest of his attacker.

  His rifle butt split along its length against Sergeant Tanna’s breastplate.

  The Space Marine didn’t so much as flinch at the impact.

  Tanna hauled him back into the line of fighting, lifting him as though he weighed no more than a child. Tanna swept his arms out, knocking back half a dozen bondsmen with every blow.

  Many of the men fell with broken bones, but Hawkins knew they were lucky to be alive. Anyone that attacked a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes was courting death, and the restraint in Tanna’s blows was clear.

  ‘Staying here is futile,’ said Tanna. ‘We must withdraw.’

  ‘We’re not leaving without the colonel,’ replied Hawkins.

  ‘Then lethal force is our only option.’

  ‘No, we’re not killing any more of these men!’

  ‘We may not have a choice,’ said Tanna.

  The bondsmen had them surrounded, punching, kicking and screaming at them in fury. Hawkins’s Guardsmen had formed an impromptu shield wall, fighting to keep the bondsmen back with vicious blows of rifle butts. Dahan fought with the bulbous pod at the base of his halberd, which was thankfully deactivated. The battle robots were currently inactive, but it wouldn’t take this situation long to escalate to a level where Dahan felt he had no choice but to bring their terrifyingly destructive guns to bear.

  The Space Marines fought without weapons, bludgeoning the bondsmen back with blows that were delivered with a finesse that was as precise as it was bone-crunching. Wherever Hawkins looked, he saw Cadians and bondsmen locked in vicious brawls. Discipline was paying off against anger, as the raw fury of the bondsmen was no match for Cadian training. Every man in Hawkins’s command was fighting as part of a unit, each defending their fellow soldiers’ backs and expecting the same in return. Living in the shadow of the Eye of Terror demanded a dedication to martial brotherhood that few other regiments could match.

  Hawkins struggled to see if there was any way they could reach the circle of earth-moving machines where the colonel had gone to negotiate with Abrehem Locke. The deck was awash with bondsmen – there was no way they could make headway through so many men. At least not without using their weapons, and even then it was doubtful. Getting to the colonel looked hopeless, but then Hawkins saw the ex-Guardsman, Hawke. The man was doing his best to avoid the fighting, but the sheer press of bodies had forced him to the front.

  ‘You’re mine,’ said Hawkins, shouldering his way through the fighting.

  Hawke saw him coming, but there was nowhere for him to go.

  The two of them slammed together and Hawkins pistoned his fist into the man’s face.

  Hawke hadn’t survived the Guard for years without learning how to take a punch, and he rolled with the blow, ducking and slamming his own fist up into Hawkins’s gut. The ex-Guardsman was a brawler, and a dirty fighter to boot. The two of them scrapped and grappled each other without finesse, clawing, gouging and hammering at one another like drunken pugilists at a punchbag.

  Hawke fought with every foul trick in the gutter-fighter’s arsenal, but Cadians knew every below the belt trick. Hawkins saw the next blow coming, a knee to the groin, and lifted his own leg to block it. He dropped and swung his rifle around, slamming the cracked butt against the side of Hawke’s thigh. The man howled in pain, but Hawkins wasn’t about to let up his assault.

  He slammed a right cross into Hawke’s cheek and followed that up with the opposite elbow to the temple. The man collapsed and Hawkins dropped onto his chest, pummelling him with right and left hooks until his face was a mask of blood.

  He hauled the man upright and shouted in his face.

  ‘Stop this now before someone gets killed!’ he shouted.

  Hawke spat a mouthful of blood and even through his mangled features, he was grinning.

  ‘You bastards started this,’ he coughed. ‘Your man shot one of ours.’

  ‘I don’t know what that was about, but if you don’t call your men off, people are going to die.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ said Hawke, as a figure clad in black and silver landed next to one of Dahan’s battle robots. Silver threshing limbs swept out and the robot’s right arm was severed cleanly from its chassis. Another whipping blow and its head spun away from its neck as though it had been punched off by an ogryn.

  A second robot was felled as its left leg was sheared off at the hip, and it crashed to the deck with its motors screeching and its augmitters blaring in machine pain. Hawkins released Hawke and stared into the flickering red eyes of a cybernetic killer.

  The arco-flagellant knelt in the ruin of the two Cataphracts, the gleaming silver electro-flails sparking with electrical discharge as the oily lifeblood of the robots burned away.

  ‘Kill. Maim. Destroy,’ it said.

  The Renard’s keel measured just under three kilometres, which meant that its normal turning circle was correspondingly large. A starship’s hull and internal structure was designed to withstand the stresses of the void and vast forces of acceleration, but no human shipwright had ever designed a vessel of such displacement to be nimble.

  But that was just what Emil Nader was asking of it now.

  They were clear of the Speranza, and with a last nod towards Ilanna Pavelka, he hauled the controls around and fired a sequenced burn of manoeuvring rockets along the length of the hull. Vectored thrust from the starboard prow jets fired at maximum thrust, while the port-side jets on the ship’s rear and dorsal sections provided counter-thrust to complete the pivoting turn.

  Emil felt himself pressed into his seat as local gravity within the Renard increased. The superstructure groaned as torsion forces tried to buckle structural ribs and twist the keel into unnatural shapes.

  ‘Lambda deck breached,’ said Pavelka. ‘Hull stresses thirty per cent past recommended tolerances. Engine containment field strength diminishing.’

  Emil didn’t answer. What would be the point? He’d always known this manoeuvre wouldn’t be possible without suffering. He could feel the ship’s pain, but forced himself to ignore it. To halt their manoeuvre now would be just as dangerous. He fired another sequenced blast of thrust, rolling the Renard onto its back relative to the Speranza. He let the turn continue until the two vessels were facing one another, before firing the main engines with a corrective burn on the vectored thrusters to stabilise their yaw.

  The Renard was shaking itself apart as conflicting thrusts placed intolerable loads on its superstructure. Steel girders the thickness of Titan legs were twisting like heated plastic, and precision-machined panels were bursting from their settings as the ship warped under stresses beyond what even the most exacting inspector might demand.

  ‘Lateral distance to Speranza is closing,’ said Pavelka. ‘Remember, she’s in a downward spiral and our closure rate is increasing.’

  ‘Compensating,’ said Emil, his fingertips dancing over the control panel to apply an insistent thrust to keep them a more or less constant distance from the Ark Mechanicus. The mountainous bulk of the Speranza began shifting over the Renard as the smaller ship slid past below. The controls were fighting him all the way as the rogue gravitational forces surrounding the mighty
vessel slammed into the Renard.

  Scads of the upper atmosphere shimmered around the Renard, evidence of the descending spiral track of the Speranza. Striated bands of gaseous colours were bleeding into the black of space and Emil read a sudden and alarming spike of heat on the Renard’s ventral surfaces as he was forced to factor atmospheric friction into his course corrections. Gravity had the Speranza in its grip, and it wouldn’t be long before that grip became unbreakable.

  Emil dragged his eyes from the view through the canopy. What he was seeing out there didn’t matter for now. Instead, he kept his gaze focused on the slender route he had mapped towards the Renard’s shuttle, a hair-fine parabola that only a lunatic might think was possible. He wasn’t even aware of the adjustments he was making to their course, an innate skill and feel for the motion of a starship informing his every action. The structure of the Speranza flew over them, titanic manufactories and enormous processing plants slipping past silently as the two ships passed at what was, in spatial terms, point-blank range.

  The gravity fields sought to pull the two ships together, but Emil kept them apart with deft flares from the dorsal vectors and an unimaginably delicate hand on the controls. At such differential speeds and at such close range, even minute alterations in pitch meant kilometres of space between the two ships would vanish in seconds.

  ‘There, up ahead,’ said Pavelka.

  Emil risked a quick glance through the canopy and saw a glint of reflected light from the shuttle’s hull. The term shuttle was misleading, as that vessel was itself over two hundred metres long and thirty wide. The tether holding it in place was invisible, but that the shuttle wasn’t being buffeted from side to side by the Speranza’s gravity envelope was enough to tell Emil it was there. Its perceived motion was caused by the Renard’s erratic movement, which – minute as it was in relative terms – was still hundreds of metres to either side.

  All of which would make scooping the shuttle up in the Renard’s forward cargo bay… tricky.

  ‘Captain,’ said Emil. ‘We see you and are closing on your position.’

  ‘Understood,’ came Roboute’s voice over the vox. ‘You still reckon you can make this work?’

  ‘Please. This is me you’re talking to. It’ll be like threading a needle from the back of a racing land speeder while blindfolded,’ said Emil. ‘Easy money if you fancy a wager.’

  ‘You think I’d bet against you?’ asked Roboute. ‘You’re as insane as Rayner.’

  ‘Rayner couldn’t wipe his own arse without a map and a servitor,’ said Emil. ‘Now shut up and fire the rig’s drives when I give you the word.’

  The shuttle steadily grew in size through the canopy, becoming a vaguely rectangular smear of light, then an identifiable silhouette of a trans-orbital ship, and finally a unique vessel. Emil fought to keep the buffeting movement of the Renard to a minimum, knowing that even the tiniest movement out of place would see both ships torn apart by a collision at towering closure speeds.

  ‘Emergency depressurisation of frontal cargo hold,’ said Pavelka. ‘Opening frontal cargo doors.’

  Emil felt the change in the Renard’s flight profile instantly. Aerodynamic properties that were irrelevant in space were suddenly of vital importance now that they were skimming the upper atmosphere. A winking light chimed on the panel.

  ‘Now, captain,’ said Emil. ‘Fire those engines for all they’re worth.’

  The evacuation of Brontissa had been a nightmarish race against time, a countdown to extinction faced by billions of people with no clue as to the horror of what awaited them. A trading hub in a prosperous arc of the Melenian Dust Belt, Brontissa squatted at a confluence of trade routes and military channels, supplying both staple and exotic goods to the surrounding sectors, as well as providing a haven for weary captains to rest and recuperate while seeking out fresh contracts as their fleets were refitted in the web of orbital dockyards.

  The full horror of the tyranid race was not yet appreciated by the people of the Imperium. Few could believe that such an unimaginable threat could exist within the Emperor’s dominion, and fewer still had heard anything more than scare stories told third or fourth hand. Only when planet after planet of the Dust Belt went dark was something of the terrifying nature of these extra-galactic predators understood.

  System monitors sent to investigate were never heard from again, and only when a demi-fleet led by an ageing Apocalypse-class battleship encountered the vanguard of the tyranids was the scale of the threat understood. Only two ships escaped to bring warning back to Brontissa, but by then it was already too late for the majority of the populace. Regiments of Imperial Guard from adjacent systems and in-transit forces of Space Marines from the Exorcists, Silver Spectres and Blood Angels were diverted to blunt the threat.

  An entire Titan Legion walked the surface of Brontissa, and as the military might of the Imperium assembled, its populace fled in their billions as worldwide panic finally took hold. Every ship that could be lifted into orbit took flight, their holds and corridors packed with refugees, and thousands were killed in the stampede to flee their doomed world. Many more died as the skies above Brontissa filled with colliding ships attempting to thread a path through the orbital architecture without heed or care.

  A screaming horde of starships blasted into high orbit, but the tyranids were not some mono-directional mass of unthinking drones. They had devoured Imperial worlds before and had learned from each slaughter. The volume of space around Brontissa was seeded with billions upon billions of bio-organisms. Some were lethally intelligent hunter-killer creatures as vast as Imperial battleships and formed like frond-mouthed conches. Others were little more than organic mines, billowing in dense, spore-like clouds to cripple fleeing craft to be devoured at leisure.

  Space around Brontissa became an orbital graveyard, a spinning, metallic wasteland of crippled starships. The fortunate ones died swiftly when their ships lost atmosphere and oxygen, but some survived long enough to be boarded and overrun by chittering hosts of flesh-eating monsters.

  Roboute had brought the Renard to Brontissa to refresh his contacts in one of the system cartels, a diverse organisation that ran everything from absurdly overpriced luxuries to illegal narcotics and underground relics of dubious provenance. He kept his dealings with its potentates to a minimum, but there had been a passing of a long-lived patriarch, and the proper obeisance needed to be made to the newly appointed scion.

  It had been an excruciating week of enforced formality and overblown theatrics, but Roboute had endured it for the sake of the vast sums these particular clients brought to his coffers. But when rumours of the impending alien threat began circulating, Roboute knew better than anyone the truth of this rapacious xenos breed. Everyone in Ultramar knew of the tyranids and the unimaginable scale of the devastation they could wreak.

  Warning everyone he knew to leave Brontissa, the Renard lifted from the planet’s surface amid a panicked armada, surviving several near-misses and once being clipped by the void array of a system monitor in blatant contravention of shipping rights of way. It had been a dangerous escape requiring some deft flying from both Roboute and Emil, but they had broken into open space before the unsuspected englobement of the planet was complete.

  Just before breaking through the closing trap of bio-organic ships and orbital spore mines, Roboute had witnessed Captain Makrus Rayner of the Infinite Terra attempt a rescue of a beleaguered vessel he believed was carrying his wife and daughter. Roboute knew Makrus only tangentially, as a conveyor of goods thrice removed, but he had liked the man’s spirit and his willingness to fly anywhere.

  Already trailing a hull’s worth of parasitic polymer fronds from a detonated spore mine, the Infinite Terra was in no state to manoeuvre. Its vectored engines were clogged with frothing biomass, and its void arrays were snapped after the impact of dozens of burrowing beetle-creatures with teeth like underground drilling rigs. The ship Rayner believed his family to be aboard was much smaller, a car
go lighter that could just about break orbit, but little else. Without inter-system capability or warp engines, there was no way it could escape the darting, bullet-nosed devourer beasts on its tail – Rayner knew it.

  With his forward cargo bay wide open, he’d flown through the upper reaches of Brontissa’s atmosphere – already turbulent with insidious tyranid micro-organisms that were consuming the oxygen and nitrogen in the air – and attempted to scoop up the cargo lighter. With both ships moving at orbit-breaking speeds the resultant explosion was visible from the planet’s surface, flaring briefly as a miniature sun before fading into the distorting colour spectrum of the atmosphere.

  The shockwave had swatted away a number of organisms turning their rudimentary senses towards the Renard, and though Roboute had not known Rayner well, he owed his fellow spacefarer a debt of gratitude.

  Roboute later learned that Rayner’s family were on a different ship altogether, one that escaped the terror of the evacuation and had sought them out to pass on the heroic manner of the man’s death. Rayner’s daughter had returned to Anohkin with Roboute, entering into a mutually beneficial business arrangement that lasted until her ship brought back the Tomioka’s saviour pod and Roboute had seen the possibility of a life beyond the boundaries of the Imperium.

  Thinking back to the moment he had seen the Infinite Terra vanish in a searing nuclear fireball and watching the approaching form of the Renard, he wondered if he’d made a grave error in having Emil attempt the same manoeuvre. Probably, but it was too late to change anything now.

  Roboute flipped open the ship-wide vox.

  ‘Everyone hold onto something,’ he said. ‘This might get a little rough…’

  Watching his own ship approach at speed while he was tethered in place was like watching a vast mega-organism approaching through the depths of the darkest ocean, its jaws wide to devour the tiny morsel before it without even realising it was there. This was going to be like a bullet flying back down the barrel of a gun and was just as risky as that sounded.