Monolith

by Chris Dows

  This was a realisation evidently shared by the Raptor, whose movements suddenly became frantic. Zachariah turned and dashed towards the precariously dangling scaffolding, counting under his breath.

  ‘Ten… Nine… Eight…’

  Zachariah had once held the regimental record for rope-climbing, but that had been on the vast training grounds back on Elysia, without full armour and exhaustion. Even so, the threat of dying in a shower of rock and Raptor shrapnel put urgency into his ascent. He continued his countdown as he climbed, until he had his hand on the crazily tilted platform. He was back where he’d started his attack, and prayed to the Emperor he was high and far enough away from the emerging form below.

  ‘One…’

  The blasts threw the Raptor backwards towards the shaft, its left leg exploding into fragments and right leg completely dislocated from its socket. Screaming in pain and fury, the creature pulled itself along with its arms and tried to right itself, but it couldn’t stand. Weapons fire lanced into it from above. Zachariah craned his head upwards but he couldn’t see who was responsible.

  ‘Adullam… Pedahzur, come in.’

  There was a crackle, then he heard the Cadian swearing to himself as he fired at the crawling Raptor below.

  ‘Adullam, respond. Adullam!’

  Zachariah tried to keep the concern out of his voice but failed. Adullam had been in bad shape before the Raptor attack. He might be stuck somewhere above or, worse, buried below in a pile of rock. Regardless, the Raptor was still alive and, as such, still a threat.

  Zachariah braced himself as best he could and aimed at the flailing abomination directly below. As the Raptor filled his scope, there was a brilliant bloom of light and the creature disappeared from view into the triangular hole. A few soft flickers of light suggested the creature was trying to ignite its jump pack but they faded to nothing as it plunged to its doom. Zachariah heard Adullam bark a laugh in his headset.

  ‘Sorry to worry you, sarge. I was too busy setting up this missile launcher to talk.’

  Zachariah exhaled with relief.

  ‘Apology accepted, Guardsman. Now, let’s get off this bloody death-trap’.

  Pedahzur was the first to haul himself up through the ragged hole in the ceiling before half pushing and half pulling Adullam to safety, despite his pained curses and protestations. While they caught their breath, the remains of the gantry gave up what little integrity they had left and collapsed. Pedahzur wiped his grimy face with a dust-covered sleeve, blood from numerous cuts and grazes streaking across his cheeks.

  ‘Not that we had any intention of leaving, but there goes our chance of going back down.’

  Adullam doubled over with a coughing spasm and spat down towards the settling debris. All three moved towards the far corner of the dimly lit chamber and a sturdy looking set of ladders that disappeared into the relatively low ceiling.

  ‘The rooms get a lot smaller now until we hit the command post and temple,’ said Pedahzur. ‘If they haven’t sealed any of the entrances up, we should make good time. They probably assume we’re all dead after all that noise, so we might have surprise on our side.’

  Zachariah and Adullam gave Pedahzur a raised eyebrow and a frown respectively, shouldered their lasguns and motioned for the Cadian to take point.

  As they climbed, the ringing in Zachariah’s ears fell a tone as he screwed his eyes shut and worked his jaw. Despite the events of the last few hours, he felt very, very lucky.

  Harking back to tales from the mess room, despite a soldier’s habit of exaggerating combat, he realised that to defeat even a single Space Marine was an extraordinary achievement, let alone two. That being said, the first had been crippled and the second had been in a less than ideal tactical position. He had no doubt that more than one in a confined space with a strong defence would make things very different.

  The chambers approaching the apex were similar in configuration, save for the relative reduction in size, but as they came within two levels of the command post things changed dramatically. It started as a faint chemical smell that quickly escalated to an overpowering stench of burned flesh and promethium. Cautiously entering the chamber, it was brutally clear what had happened. Instead of sealing the floors below them, the traitors had dropped incendiary devices into whoever had been attempting to attack or retreat. Carbonised bodies and twisted metal formed distorted, hellish visions that might have come from the warp itself. Along with Pedahzur’s brothers in arms, the fires had also consumed all hopes of fresh ammunition.

  They trod as respectfully as they could over the blackened, brittle bones of the Cadian 46th, the temperature rising from the heat still retained in the monolith’s walls and floor. The two sets of connecting ladders had been fused together, but were intact enough for them to reach the second level, which revealed an equally dreadful scene. A sudden rumble had them readying weapons, but no attack came from within or above the small, ash-covered room in which they stood.

  ‘Something heavy being dragged?’ whispered Adullam.

  The sound came again, now loud enough for the vibration to disturb the thick layers of soot coating the windowless walls. Without respirators they had to bury their faces into the crooks of their arms to muffle retching coughs, and Adullam doubled over in pain again.

  After a few seconds it stopped, and the heavy thumping of power armour could be heard moving away. The Guardsmen closed on the large smashed hole forming the entrance to the floor above. Light from the brightly illuminated Cadian facility filtered through, enough for Zachariah and Adullam to deactivate the image intensifiers in their helmets. Ducking underneath the hole, Zachariah could see no shadows of movement directly above. Looking to the wall, the ladders had been melted away completely; regardless of how they got up there, if they were spotted emerging they’d be dead in an instant. Of all the places not to have darkness, thought Zachariah ruefully.

  Their only hope was that the Raptors would be too consumed with their business to notice their arrival. Retrieving a rope lashed around Pedahzur, Zachariah fashioned a grappling hook and waited patiently for more movement. As soon as it came, he tossed the hook up and tugged sharply.

  Pedahzur was first up the rope, gingerly poking his head above floor level to see if their presence had been detected. Wreckage strewn in all directions obscured his vision, and the slain bodies of his Cadian brothers lay everywhere. In places, the reinforced flooring that extended out to the finger-like columns had been punctured, and the air whistled noisily through a number of gaping cracks and holes. One of the three sides had been blown away, as had parts of the ancient outer temple supports once cradling it. Closer and to his right, fallen beams and conduits were all that remained of the once out-of-bounds tech-priest laboratory, their arcane equipment at the mercy of the darkening sky above.

  There was no sign of the traitors, so he tapped his boots twice to the anxiously watching Adullam and Zachariah, who prepared to ascend. Pulling himself onto his stomach, Pedahzur crawled to a heap of rubble and carefully readied his lasgun to cover the entrance hole. The climb forced a gasp of pain from Adullam, thankfully unheard by the enemy.

  He’d not taken a lot of notice when he’d scrabbled to his position, but Pedahzur saw that one of the thick snaking cables he’d moved was a detonator cord – the Blood Disciples were close to blowing the place up. Very close.

  Within seconds of Zachariah’s arrival, all three moved towards the middle of the smashed command post. Its state made it difficult to gain an uninterrupted view of the heavily protected central core where the transmitter and other vital systems would be located, and Zachariah dropped to a crouch and signalled the other two to follow his lead as he spied the shadowy movements of at least three Raptors in the middle distance.

  Kneeling behind a partially demolished briefing table, Zachariah shifted position until he could clearly see two traitors working in front of a long
grey box balanced atop a blackened console. It had a series of thick cables and thinner wires terminating in rubberised plugs along its top. From his own experience of special weapons, he suspected it was a detonator in the final stages of preparation. A third, much more ornate, warrior joined them in the work. Zachariah signalled readiness to Adullam on his left and Pedahzur to his right. All three had shuffled themselves into a fair line of sight, and unless other Traitor Adeptus Astartes were busying themselves outside the structure, they had a target each.

  As they steeled themselves for the attack, the elaborately suited abomination suddenly straightened and thumped around in front of the other two, looking directly at Zachariah’s position.

  ‘So… the prey returns.’

  The voice dripped with contempt. The Raptor clearly saw them as posing no threat whatsoever and, as one, the two remaining Blood Disciples turned and moved to flank him. The abomination on the right spoke casually, dismissively. Wrapped around its left arm was some material: torn, dirty and ragged. They were Pedahzur’s colours.

  ‘Shall I destroy them, Shamhuth?’

  Somewhere from inside the metallic red form, a laugh devoid of humour crackled forth.

  ‘We shall all take them, my brothers. We have no time for this distraction.’

  The left Raptor charged towards Adullam who ducked out of the way behind a steel plate, but his improvised cover took the full force of a bolt at close range and propelled both the steel and the man through the weakened exterior wall. As the creature moved to finish his attack on Adullam, Zachariah targeted Shamhuth’s weapon and fired repeated controlled bursts, crippling the bolt pistol into uselessness. The third, flag-carrying Raptor emitted an amplified howl and lumbered directly towards Pedahzur who, to Zachariah’s utter astonishment, started running towards the scarlet-suited behemoth, screaming oaths about his colours being lost and firing crazily as he went.

  The flag-bearing Raptor shared Zachariah’s amazement for a split second then, regaining its bloodlust, powered towards the Cadian, bolt pistol now swapped for a chainsword which rattled in anticipation of a fresh victim.

  Pedahzur jigged left behind a roof support, throwing himself towards a heap of bodies where he could see what looked like a missile launcher. It was damaged, but the firing mechanism seemed intact and there was a shell in the pipe ready to go. He hefted up the bulky tube. The Raptor was less than three metres away and nearly on him. At this range, Pedahzur didn’t even bother to aim – he pulled the trigger and the shell hit the Chaos Space Marine squarely in the chest. The blast shattered the creature, but at such close range, the shockwave hurled Pedahzur into the air. He never saw the fractured bulkhead strut that ended his life.

  The same explosion rocked Shamhuth back on his heavily armoured feet and knocked Zachariah to the ground. Adullam’s attacker turned from his pursuit and screamed in fury at the loss of his brother, thundering towards the prone form of Zachariah. A krak grenade diverted the Raptor rather than stopping it, and as debris rained down on him, Zachariah scrambled towards the outer temple structure and a narrow maintenance ledge that ran around the battered shell of the command post.

  The freezing wind whipped around his body, chilling his exposed cheeks and mouth, but it wasn’t the cold Zachariah was concerned about. He’d exited between a series of outer supports and there was no way he could bring his weapon to bear, even at close range, without losing his balance. He also couldn’t make it to the pillars above and to his left without negotiating half a dozen stanchions and exposing himself to attack.

  Adullam’s attacker made no attempt to conceal its arrival from Zachariah. Ducking forwards, he peered around a thick vertical girder and saw an armoured foot clamping claws around the inspection ledge a few metres away, the sheer weight of its armour reducing the rockcrete to rubble. The creature’s jump pack roared into life and Zachariah flattened himself back against the command post wall, squeezing behind another support positioned closer to the prefabricated structure.

  A volley of bolts sailed past the Elysian, but the Raptor’s angle of attack was as impeded as his own from this position. It was a stalemate the traitor legionary wasn’t interested in maintaining. Zachariah felt the floor beneath him shatter from carefully aimed fire. Within seconds he’d be standing on thin air.

  He looked again at the temple columns. He would never make it to their cover. The creature moved a little closer, still firing into the ledge, and a plan presented itself.

  Grabbing a grenade, Zachariah pulled the pin and counted up to three seconds of detonation, before heaving himself onto the ledge and hurling it at the base of the nearest pillar. He didn’t see the explosion, as he had to duck back to avoid a volley of bolts. Bellowing in frustration, the creature returned to its destruction of the ledge, causing a large chunk of floor to fall away.

  A sharp crack filled the air, followed by the crashing of rock on metal. The firing stopped, and a scream of anger drowned out the whistling wind. Zachariah poked his head out and looked down to see the Blood Disciple disappearing from view. The grenade had done its job; his calculations had been correct. All he had to do now was work out–

  A scarlet-armoured fist punctured the plating mere centimetres from his head. His instinctive turn away from the lightning-fast movement unbalanced him, pitching him into the rest of Shamhuth’s massive arm. The creature grabbed the Elysian by his shoulder armour and yanked him back into the panelling with all its lethal might.

  The air fled from Zachariah’s lungs and he only just retained his balance by grabbing the stanchion he’d been hiding behind. The plating behind him was peeled away like the skin of a fruit and he could hear Shamhuth venting his fury on the structure. Once again a metal gauntlet took hold, this time around his neck.

  Pulling him up, the traitor ripped Zachariah’s helmet off and inspected his bruised and bloodied face as the Elysian gagged on the stranglehold. Perhaps it was some distant memory of familiarity, or a grudging respect for a prey that had managed to dispatch several of its brethren that caused the traitor to pause. Either way, the veteran sergeant thought there was only one real response to such a situation and, with a supreme effort, spat where he thought its eyes might be. With a roar the warped Space Marine held Zachariah out at arm’s length, ready to drop him to his death.

  ‘Put him down. Now.’

  It was more of a croak than a shout, but both Elysian and Raptor heard just fine. Over the abomination’s shoulder, Zachariah was astonished to see the battered form of Adullam, a meltagun trained shakily at Shamhuth’s back. After the briefest pause, its head turned. The Raptor’s words were spoken calmly and deliberately.

  ‘As you wish.’

  Zachariah was used to the sensation of falling. It was as familiar as eating and drinking, but this time it was without a grav chute – a recurring nightmare become reality. He saw the traitor’s open hand ascending away from him and imagined rather than heard the scream of fury from Adullam as he fired the weapon at Shamhuth.

  The Raptor launched its jump pack and managed to clear most of the shot, but the edge of the blast caught the right side of its shoulder armour and melted the starboard intake into a heap, spinning the creature at great speed past Zachariah’s freefall.

  The veteran sergeant’s mounting panic fled, replaced by a whirl of calculations and adjustments. Shamhuth’s port engine sputtered briefly then died in a trail of smoke. The Elysian flipped himself around in midair and pitched his body downwards. His eyes were streaming from the wind, and breathing was virtually impossible, but his aim was true. The Raptor’s attempts to arrest his fall slowed his relative descent and within seconds the abomination was in range, no more than half a mile above the sprawling surface of Ophel Minoris.

  Zachariah hit the Raptor’s smouldering armour around the waist, throwing them both into a spin. Shamhuth gave a grunt of surprise and flailed around, trying to swat Zachariah away. The traitor m
anaged to catch him in the shoulder, sending him flying off into the air, but still falling at the same rate. Curling into a ball, Zachariah used every trick in the book to reposition himself, this time approaching from the Raptor’s blind spot. He hit the jump pack hard, just as the one good engine roared into life.

  Zachariah gripped onto the rounded lip of the remaining intake with his gloved fingertips, heat searing through his battered gloves. He would have to let go. The creature furiously turned its head from side to side, writhing and jerking its arms to throw him off. It was then that Zachariah glimpsed something – a melted hole in the armour between neck and helmet, doubtless caused by Adullam’s shot. Holding on with a single hand, Zachariah reached for his final grenade. Releasing the pin, he thrust it into the gap and let go for a split second, grabbing onto the inactive starboard exhaust with charred fingers.

  His hands were wrenched away by the force of the grenade’s detonation inside Shamhuth’s armour. Gobbets of flesh and shards of metal spewed in every direction, some slicing through Zachariah’s arm and leg. The pain meant nothing to him. He was entirely focused on the now separated jump pack which, unencumbered by the huge weight of the Chaos Raptor, rose into the air. Grabbing hold with both burned hands and ignoring the agony, Zachariah held on.

  The speed was extraordinary. His arms screamed with pain, and his head spun with the increased altitude and the violently shaking pack. He couldn’t keep this up much longer. To his left the peak of the monolith came into view and the thrust increased, then stopped, the arc steepening into a drop. It wasn’t a perfect projection, but it’d have to do; at the closest point to the structure, Zachariah let go as the now useless jump pack fell away.