Treacheries of the Space Marines

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  ‘How like the taking of the Lazurite Citadel,’ Ironclaw mused aloud as the three daemon-engines crawled ever upwards, hundreds of las-rounds snapping through the air to strike harmlessly against their armoured hides.

  ‘My lord?’ the nearest of Ironclaw’s Chosen answered, his features obscured by the impassive mask of his Terminator armour.

  Ironclaw’s deeply lined eyes narrowed as he regarded the Chosen, dredging through countless years of memories. No, this warrior had not been present during the Tallarn campaign, so he had not witnessed the final battles against the fractured remnants of the loyalist armies, nor had he been present when the gleaming domes of the Lazurite Citadel had been shattered.

  ‘It matters not,’ the warsmith snarled. ‘All that matters is the destruction of these walls. Muster the warriors. We advance, for the glory of Perturabo.’

  As the Iron Warriors began their ascent of the breach, the weight of fire pouring from the defenders’ positions at the summit grew steadily more intense. The Defilers took the brunt of it, and while they could easily shrug off the blizzard of lasgun-fire, the defenders wasted no time in bringing forwards heavier weaponry. As the Defilers clambered claw over mechanical claw towards their position, the defenders opened fire with lascannons and missile launchers. The first shot, a warhead fired in haste and panic, corkscrewed through the smoke-wreathed air, its machine-spirit improperly appeased, to explode against the jagged masonry of the breach’s interior edge. The second shot was from a lascannon, the bright beam lancing downwards and missing the lead daemon-engine by no more than a metre. Enraged by this affront, the infernal will that animated the war machine sent it surging forwards so fast that the second shot aimed towards it went awry, though it struck another engine a glancing blow to its turret.

  The weapons blister mounted on the Defiler’s turret’s side exploded in a hail of sparks and razor-sharp shrapnel, the daemon-engine rearing up upon its spider-like mechanical legs and unleashing a metallic howl of rage. The weight of fire raining down from the summit faltered as the defenders cowered before such daemonic fury; then Ironclaw caught the sound of a voice bellowing for order and the fire returned to its former rate.

  ‘Mine…’ the warsmith growled, striding forwards. Using his lightning claws to aid his ascent, Ironclaw hauled himself up the rubble-strewn breach, the wounded Defiler so close behind that its massive claws and legs churned up the ruined ground about him, its hull looming ominously overhead. Now, the Defiler’s body was cratered from repeated strikes, lascannon-rounds and krak missile warheads streaking about it. Another blinding beam lanced out and this time the firer’s aim was true, striking the Defiler just beneath the mantlet of its main gun. The beast shuddered as the lascannon-round punched out its rear deck.

  Knowing his protector was slain, Ironclaw redoubled his rate of ascent until he was at the very van of the force storming the breach. Behind him, the mortally wounded Defiler thrashed and spasmed as the daemon within shrieked its pain and fury into the air. With its armour compromised the daemon was free of its arcane fetters, but it was apparent the fell thing craved not release but the blood of its foe. Unable to animate its machine-prison, the daemon had lost its ability to slay its enemies and its frustrated rage was a terrible thing to witness. The creature howled as its essence leached through the wound in its former prison, and the defenders flinched before the abominable spectacle. Inured to the taint of the warp, the warsmith gritted his teeth as he attained the plateau where the defenders waited, their faces blanched with shock and their eyes alight with terror.

  ‘Address!’ Ironclaw heard the voice again. It was a voice used to command. It was a voice used to being obeyed.

  Savouring the moment, the warsmith waited, activating his lightning claws and flexing the weapon-tipped mechatendrils that writhed at his back. Arcing energies played up and down the gleaming lengths of the wickedly serrated claws, their power field humming threateningly.

  ‘Address!’ the voice bawled again, and the sound of several meaty impacts reached Ironclaw’s ears. He took a step towards the shouts and a shape emerged from amidst the shattered blocks of masonry.

  It was an Imperial Guardsman, a veteran of numerous campaigns, judging by the scar tissue visible beneath the layer of grime and soot that coated his face. As the man pulled himself erect he gunned the motor of a chainsword held loosely at his side. Almost pitiable, the warsmith mused, until his eye was drawn to more figures stirring from the gaps between the fallen blocks behind their leader. His eyes narrowed as he snarled. Perhaps there was a challenge here after all, he thought, though still it would scarcely test one of his skill and experience.

  ‘Blessed be the martyr,’ the man said, his eyes blazing with defiance. ‘For he shall live eternal by the Emperor’s side.’

  A twin flare of bitter derision and long forgotten memory flashed through the warsmith’s consciousness. For a moment, he was standing at the gates of the Crescent City, the hosts of Tallarn arrayed upon the blasted wastes before their erstwhile capital. The Caliphar was mortally wounded and his doomed armies had mustered in one last act of defiance against the Warmaster’s forces. The ruler’s vat-grown champion, a berserker-dervish of fearsome repute, had stepped alone through the city gates to confront them. That champion had said something very similar. The man was a fool, but he had died well, Ironclaw conceded.

  ‘The codes of my Legion demand I offer you one opportunity to quit this wall,’ the warsmith addressed the enemy leader, paraphrasing his primarch. He knew the man would not do so, and in truth he cared little either way. This lone defender was utterly insignificant, no matter how many of his men joined him in their futile defence.

  ‘Be gone, Emperor-hating bastard,’ the man barked. Perhaps there would be some sport here after all, the warsmith thought. ‘Be gone, for with my last drop of blood I shall–’

  Anger flaring in his bitter heart, the warsmith brought one of the metallic tentacles waving at his back sharply about. The melta-discharger mounted at the mechatendril’s tip blazed searing orange and the bold Imperial Guard leader was atomised in an instant. One moment the man had stood defiant at the summit of the breach, the next his body had been seared to angry cinders drifting upon the irradiated wind.

  A metallic growl rumbling deep in his chest, Ferrous Ironclaw swept his baleful glare across the mass of defenders arrayed against him. He knew nothing but contempt for these worthless scraps of human flesh, their flak jackets bearing the same two-headed eagle device he himself had once marched to war under. How little they knew of the deeds that had been done in the name of that sigil. How little they deserved to bear it. How little they deserved to even live…

  Baring his metallic teeth in a feral leer, the warsmith spread his serrated lightning claws wide. Unleashing a war cry that was at once a blurt of soul-shattering scrap code and a howl of primordial rage, he started forwards, his Chosen advancing in his wake.

  The slaughter that ensued was over in seconds, the blood of the Imperial Guard defenders anointing the rune-encrusted Terminator armour of the warsmith and his retinue as an offering to the Ruinous Powers. Scenting spilled viscera, the daemon-engines surged up the rubble slope with such haste that their claws and tracks dislodged mighty chunks of rubble, and brought more loose debris tumbling from the ragged edges of the shattered walls on either side. Another wave of defenders rose up from positions further back, the breach echoing to their cries of misplaced piety. Las-rounds whipped through the air, and soon the throaty roar of a battery of heavy bolters was added to the deafening cacophony of battle.

  Rounds splitting the air about him, Ironclaw gloried in the anarchy of war. Standing upon the rubble of a fallen wall, the heat of battle stinging the flesh of his face as the stink of burned flesh filled his nostrils –here was where he was created to be.

  Precise bursts of disciplined bolter-fire rang out as more of the warsmith’s squads advanced. Soon the last
of the fleeing defenders were gunned down and the breach belonged to the Iron Warriors.

  Turning his back upon the last of the slaughter, the warsmith looked down the length of the rubble slope. A pack of Maulerfiend daemon-engines had paused by the wreck of the fallen Defiler like carnivores gathering to pick over the remains of some larger predator further up the food chain than they. Then the pack was overcome by their impatience to be through the breach, each engine clambering up the loose rubble slope, their hunger to share in the killing obvious.

  After the Maulerfiends came more of the warsmith’s Iron Warriors, their formation impeccable even as they negotiated the rough and uneven terrain. In their wake came a group of Mutilators, each a hulking mountain of armour and muscle, a former Chosen whose body had been warped beyond all recognition by the glory of Chaos. The air was thick with the stink of propellant and burned fuel, and it visibly shimmered with the proximity of the warp. Beyond a lumbering Dreadnought that had just begun its ascent, the drifting smoke obscured the remainder of Ironclaw’s army; as well as the forces of the other factions that had allied themselves to him.

  One of those factions was making its presence known even as the warsmith turned back, just in time to catch sight of a banner borne aloft by a bold, if suicidal, Imperial Guard trooper. The view beyond the summit was still obscured by the clouds of dust thrown up when the walls collapsed, but it was clear that the defenders were intent upon mounting a counter-attack.

  Good, thought Ferrous Ironclaw, let them come. Let them come on in endless waves like they did on Corinar when we breached the Shriving Wall and cast down the Lucid Tower. Let them bellow their defiance even as we scythe them down as we did upon the plains of crimson marble.

  For an instant, Ironclaw’s vision wavered as nigh overwhelming memories of past battles impressed themselves upon his consciousness. In his mind he was striding from his drop-pod onto the flatlands of Tallarn’s primary continent, the once-verdant pastures reduced to bubbling slag by the life-eater virus his primarch had unleashed upon that world. The ground at his feet was thick with the viscous slime that had once been an entire planet’s biomass. So voracious was the primarch’s curse upon Tallarn that even the world’s native bacteria had been destroyed. Without them, the rendered-down stuff of life would take years to disintegrate. The stink of so much organic matter reduced to slurry assailed the warsmith’s nostrils, the false reality threatening to overwhelm his senses entirely.

  Then a hard round spanged hard from his left shoulder, his armour’s auto-reactive systems countering the impact with a hiss of hydraulics. The sundered plains of Tallarn melted away in an instant and he was back on Bellum Colonia, in the very gullet of the breach in the walls of the Bastion Primus. A second shot whipped past his face, its stinging wake bringing him fully back to the here and now.

  Someone had dared fire upon him.

  Someone would die.

  The smoke parted as the counter-attacking defenders rushed headlong towards the Iron Warriors. This time, there must have been an entire company, and every Guardsman had his bayonet fixed to the barrel of his lasgun and was bellowing a prayer to the hated Emperor of Mankind. Squad after squad emerged from the roiling dust and smoke, throwing themselves into the defence of the breach.

  ‘Hold!’ Ironclaw bellowed, firing his serrated gauntlets to full power as his Terminator armour-clad Chosen formed up beside him. The air filled with oaths the defenders would have denounced as blasphemy had they not been shouting their own so loud they could hear nothing else. More Iron Warriors took position at their warsmith’s back, and the daemon-engines prowled behind them, barely restrained by their master’s command.

  Only one of Ironclaw’s allies had not yet made itself known, and therein lay the reason for his order to hold. The moment to unleash this ally was now.

  A shadow as dark as the abyss passed over the Iron Warriors, the smoke at their backs parting as dark waters swell at the unseen passing of an oceanic predator. Ironclaw fixed his enemy with a baleful glare, a cruel leer twisting his war-torn features. Having cast the warsmith’s gathered host in night, the shadow crept forwards towards the oncoming Imperial Guardsmen. As it passed over their front ranks, Ironclaw saw the first of them falter as their wrathful gaze was torn from the object of their hatred to the vast shape resolving itself in the breach.

  The front rank stumbled as the Guardsmen took in the shocking enormity of the war machine looming into view. Men fell, and others trampled over them before coming to a desperate halt, their eyes wide with stark terror.

  Then, it gave voice to its own war cry.

  The Traitor Titan’s war horn blared forth such a blasphemous, atonal dirge that men’s hearts froze at the sheer horror of it. The noise was in part the wailing of a gargantuan klaxon, but that was by far the lesser part. The worst of it was the voice of the god-machine venting its rage upon the souls of man, singing the doom of the Imperium and ten thousand years of hatred for the withered carrion god seated upon its throne. All of this men knew even as their eardrums burst and they collapsed to their knees, hands clasped to their heads to shut out the infernal sound.

  Ironclaw raised one taloned arm high as he watched the proudly borne banner waver, its custodian stumbling upon the bodies of fallen comrades, his gaze fixed wide-eyed upon the form in the breach.

  The Titan was, as the name suggested, a vast war machine. Vaguely humanoid in form it towered dozens of metres into the tortured skies. One of its arms was a colossal power fist, with which the god-machine grasped the ragged edge of the breached wall to steady itself as it began its ascent of the rubble slope. The other was a laser weapon able to unleash such fearsome power that it could, in theory, pluck a warship from low orbit, should the Ruinous Powers confer their blessings upon the weapons-moderati. Beneath a metres-thick carapace, on which was mounted a pair of multiple-missile launcher pods, glowered the head that served as the machine’s cockpit, its eyes aglow with warp-spawned furnace fire.

  The god-machine hauled itself forwards, uncaring of the rain of debris dislodged from the shattered wall as it gripped the side. Though not one of the warsmith’s warriors showed an iota of fear, the counter-attacking Imperial Guard were by now paralysed by the awesome sight.

  The warsmith clenched his taloned hands, the air ringing as the serrated blades scissored shut.

  The god-machine heard, and the god-machine obeyed.

  The multiple-missile launchers on the Titan’s carapace erupted into fire, dozens of guided munitions closing on their target within the blink of an eye. The summit of the breach was transformed into a vision of hell, men and masonry swallowed up in the raging infernal fires. The overpressure propelled jagged shrapnel outwards in a tidal wave of death that shredded those defenders not consumed by the fires, razor fragments scything through the air and ricocheting from the dull metal armour of nearby Iron Warriors.

  Even before the fires had fully receded, Ferrous Ironclaw saw that the defenders had been slain to a man. Nothing but scattered fragments of charred flesh and the stink of flash-cooked meat remained of the hundred and more men.

  The breach was taken. Now the Bastion Primus must fall.

  Within the hour, the Iron Warriors had marched down the reverse slope of the breach, howling daemon-engines pressing forwards as the warsmith’s squads consolidated their victory. The Titan strode onwards, hauling itself up and through the breach using its colossal power fist before taking position on the other side, Rhino and Land Raider armoured vehicles passing under its vast bulk as it stood overwatch.

  Beyond the breach, the interior of the Bastion Primus was a mass of structures crammed together seemingly at random. As was common in such fortifications, an open space separated the wall from the city proper, a space in which the defenders could muster a response to an attack such as the Iron Warriors had undertaken. As Ironclaw led his warriors out and onto the rockcrete expanse, he knew that such a res
ponse would surely be launched at any moment, and he scanned the tall buildings beyond for any sign of it developing.

  The buildings were constructed from a pale sandstone far weaker than the black masonry of the curtain wall, and barely any of them were untouched by the hand of war. Most bore signs of the thunderous preparatory bombardment the Iron Warriors had launched before their final assault, the once finely wrought statues of saints and martyrs covering their surfaces now pock-marked and burned. Others had almost entirely collapsed, leaving little but blackened skeletal remains. Centuries of experience of war told Ferrous that a ruined cityscape was far harder to take than an intact one, for the defenders could move through it by unpredictable routes, fire upon an attacker from every cracked wall and launch devastating, if suicidal, ambushes from the least expected quarter. Scanning the line of ruins, the warsmith caught sight of just such a defending force, a mass of figures appearing from the rubble.

  A blurt of scrap-code told the warsmith of the Titan’s eagerness to lay waste to this second wave of defenders, but Ironclaw’s sub-vocalised growl silenced it. He was master here, and even the god-machine towering overhead would acknowledge that fact.

  A second burst of feedback-laced machine code told Ironclaw that the mighty war machine would heed his will, if reluctantly. Satisfied that the Titan would hold its fire, the warsmith studied the killing ground between the breach and the mass of buildings.