by Guy Haley
‘What do they find, at the end, these brothers that follow in Holos’s wake?’ said Caedis. Using his voice was painful. He swallowed, no saliva came, and the sensation of his muscles contracting was like glass in his gullet.
Mazrael shook his head. ‘None know. All die.’
Caedis closed his eyes behind his helmet visor. He sagged and nodded. Of course.
‘Will you rest, lord?’
‘No. I must climb, climb to the very summit of Mount Calicium.’
‘Very well.’ Mazrael signalled to the others that they would go on. They pushed through the vegetation, glass from the long-shattered dome crunching under their armoured feet.
Chapter 15
Fear the Alien
The Adeptus Mechanicus road into the hulk went downwards at a steep angle. Its surface was spongy but otherwise firm, the consistency of it unchanging whether it covered solid metal or bridged broad canyons. It was not of any metal that Mastrik knew; nevertheless, when the Adeptus Mechanicus advised the battle-brothers to activate the mag-locks on their boots to better secure themselves, they found the road anchored them in place well enough.
The road went down in a dead straight line for several kilo-metres, toward where the cavern lay. It had been carefully chosen, the Adeptus Astartes banking on the genestealers heading for the deepest atmosphere-bearing chamber they could. There, rather than the safety they craved, the gene-stealers would find only death.
The army descended twenty brothers abreast. They chanted their hymnals as they went, the songs of two Chapters clashing on the airwaves. Techmarines and Mechanicus adepts set relay beacons at intervals on the walls, linking the force to the fleet. The technology the Adeptus Mechanicus used was potent, almost scouring the angry roar of Jorso from their communications entirely.
The shaft and its road ended in a new airlock some fifty or so metres out from the cavern where Battleforce Anvil was to stand its ground. The airlock had been attached to the side of an alien freighter by the Adepts of Mars, in order to keep the atmosphere in the cavern. A road wide enough for the Space Marines to march three abreast was being cut on the other side of the airlock. Mastrik ordered his men to halt while the work was finished. He and Sorael went over the images of the chamber and reviewed the marching order of their men. A vanguard of seven Terminator squads were to go first to guard against ambush, followed by the battleforce’s Devastator squads. This would allow them to spread out quickly to advantageous firing positions.
Twenty minutes later, Plosk informed them that the airlock and final passageway were complete. In batches of forty, the Space Marines began to pass into the hulk cavern.
Epistolary Ranial, Captain Sorael, and Captain Mastrik were among the very first through, preceded by the guard of Terminators. Half a dozen Techmarines stood behind them; their role would be to finish the tunnels prepared by Strikeforce Hammer.
The airlock chamber was roughly skinned with a soft plastic that had bonded itself to the walls. The Mechanicus had not bothered with atmosphere extractors. The entire force would be through in six batches, and the volume of air in the cavern was so great that the loss of a few hundred cubic metres was immaterial. Thus air rushed into the temporary airlock with a thunderclap as the doors to the cavern were opened. When the next group came through, it would rush into space.
Frost rimed the Space Marines’ battle-plate as the gas condensed on vacuum-chilled metal, fogging their helmet lenses. Mastrik willed his armour to dissipate some of its power plant’s excess heat through its outer shell, and his vision presently cleared. They went out into the huge space of the cavern, Terminators first. Then the officers, who stood to one side as the Techmarines marched out and down onto the cavern floor in the wake of the Terminators. The Terminators escorted the Techmarines across the cave to where they would cut two entryways, the third tunnel’s mouth already existent, being a rent in wall of the cavern.
The airlock closed. Two minutes later it opened again. Four squads of Devastators came through, and headed to various vantage points on the cavern wall. They bounded upward relative to Mastrik’s position, pulling themselves easily along in the low gravity.
Mastrik’s bodyguard, and that of Sorael, waited at a distance as the three officers surveyed their battleground. Mastrik’s sensorium thrummed with data, too much to be properly displayed within his helmet’s display. He carried a supplementary auspex on the outside of his suit. It was plugged directly into his Terminator armour, drawing from its power and interfacing with the suit’s cogitator. Mastrik held this device up, using its screen to display a broader view of the cavern than his helmet could accommodate.
He ran the auspex over the cavern, his eyes darting between the graphical representation and the cave, his enhanced mind comparing the two. As the Imagifer had predicted, the far wall was almost entirely taken up by the side of an immense, alien vessel. The part of it visible was several hundred metres long and two hundred high. More of it lay below and above them, inconceivably huge. Panels had come away from the body in a few places, exposing the superstructure beneath, but in the main it was sound. Where paint had survived, faded stripes of yellow and green that must have been garish once crossed the hull. Blocky alien glyphs covered a portion of it. The side of the cavern the Space Marines occupied was also as depicted by the Adeptus Mechanicus’ device. A large asteroid made up the majority of the wall. It leaned into the alien vessel high above to form a ceiling with a steep apex. Lower down, its irregular body bulged inwards, creating a choke point roughly two-thirds of the way into the cavern from the airlock. The cavern widened out beyond this, in the manner of a true cave, but even at its narrowest extent the floor was seventy metres across.
The rock of the asteroid was relatively smooth; the rest of the wall it was embedded in was not, comprising a number of smaller craft and pieces of debris jammed against each other. This part of the cavern presented a jumble of jutting spars, square caves and ledges. It was directly opposite the tunnel mouths opening into the cavern, and it was in this three-dimensional maze that a number of the combined Chapters’ Devastator squads took up station.
The tunnel mouths – two now being cut as Mastrik watched – were toward the bottom of the cavern. But to see the disposition of the Adeptus Astartes forces, and indeed the cavern itself, in terms of up and down would be a mistake. The centre of the agglomeration, and hence the pull of its weak gravity, lay at an angle four degrees steeper than the Adeptus Mechanicus’ entry tunnel, but the gravity field of the hulk was so weak as to be almost negligible. The agglomeration was large in size, but its cumulative mass, filled as it was with many cavities, was low. There was a ‘downward’ gravitational force, but if a Space Marine were to fall from his perch above the airlock, it would have taken him minutes to reach the floor.
Mastrik snapped off his auspex. ‘The Imagifer Maxiumus’s representation of the cavern is almost one hundred per cent accurate, Brother-Captain Galt,’ said Mastrik.
Galt replied, his signal conveyed by the lines of booster poles laid by the Adeptus Mechanicus and Techmarines. His voice was clear, but thrummed still, the signal waves perturbed by the uneven power outputs of the hulk’s functional reactors. ‘Good. Have your brothers take up position. Strikeforce Hammer has sealed the corridors on the upper levels and gathers for the attack.’
‘Our own men go to their tasks here, cousin-captain,’ said Sorael.
‘The tunnel mouths are being prepared,’ said Mastrik. ‘The ways within opened and all necessary escape points in the lower fifth of the three tunnels are in the process of being sealed.’
Information to that effect was flowing in from all over the hulk to the fleet and the captains in the cave. The cavern teams’ tunnel missions were going well. Flaring light from plasma cutters lit the tunnel mouths like fire in dragons’ dens.
‘Look at this place,’ said Ranial. ‘I have not experienced such a hulk before. The scale of it is impressive. It is no wonder that the Adepts of Mars wish to plunder
it.’
‘They will be able to soon, and with my blessing, for now they marshal their resources on the surface. They will enter the hulk from the cavern, but for now this is our concern alone,’ said Galt.
‘Have there been any enemy contacts, brother?’ asked Mastrik.
‘Captain Aresti reported a breakout of genestealers from sector seventeen. Sergeant Voldo is in pursuit.’
‘A breakout? Surely they lack the intellect for such behaviour, cousin,’ said Sorael.
‘Do not underestimate the genestealers, captain,’ said Ranial. ‘Their minds are alien, but powerful, and there is something…’ he trailed away.
‘Brother Ranial?’
Ranial stirred himself. ‘Nothing. Nothing as yet. I feel something, perhaps, a greater mind. It is hard to tell. The warp is confused in such a place, so much history lies upon it, so much death. These places are the houses of ghosts and phantoms. I will monitor the situation.’
The third group of Space Marines were entering the cavern. The cave was coming alive to the movement of transhumans in brightly coloured armours.
Sorael bowed his head. ‘With your permission, Captain Galt, Captain Mastrik, I will make my way to my own position.’ Sorael had been given oversight of the far end of the cavern, the pocketed area part closed-off by the asteroid.
‘Be aware, brothers of two Chapters,’ said Galt. ‘We will not have found every way into the cave. We do not know the location of every genestealer roost. The enemy is legion. Be on your guard.’
‘As ever, lord,’ said Sorael. He quoted the Codex Astartes, ‘The enemies of men are many, our vigilance cannot cease for a moment.’
‘That is so, captain of the Blood Drinkers, that is so.’
Forty minutes later, and the tech-priests confirmed that all doors marked for sealing had been sealed. Two new tunnel mouths gaped lips of raw metal in the skin of the alien ship. Three twisting ways through a half-dozen major ships and masses of lesser debris were ready. Each sported spurs leading off to the five genestealer roosts. The last stragglers of Hammer rejoined the main force near the surface, some twenty kilometres away from Battleforce Anvil. The Techmarines of Anvil re-emerged from the tunnels back into the cavern and made their way to Mastrik’s position. There they saw to the siting of their Thunderfire cannons and prepared their servitor drones for combat. Everything was in place. The cavern stilled, and a peculiar peace fell over the space.
‘Captain Galt, Battleforce Anvil is prepared,’ reported Mastrik.
‘The Hammer is ready to strike,’ said Aresti.
‘All demolition teams stand ready to detonate on my mark,’ ordered Galt.
On the surface, five demolition teams. Comprised of Adeptus Mechanicus servitors, they were guarded by the few novitiate Scout Space Marines accompanying the two Chapters, clad in space suits as their bodies were not yet ready for power armour.
Each team’s site differed, and their equipment was suited accordingly. At site Alpha, a large laser weapon stood poised to burn its way through one hundred and fifty metres of hulk. At Beta, shaped charges were attached to the skin of the hulk, only a metre or so from the roosting genestealers on the other side. And so on, each breaching method designed for its particular spot on the agglomeration’s surface, each one with the exact same purpose in mind – to rupture the hulk and vent the atmosphere of the roosts into space. The teams retreated to surface armoured craft, or took off in their shuttles, or stood by drilling rigs, and waited breathlessly.
‘All demolition teams!’ Galt’s words rang out across space. ‘Prepare to vent atmosphere in three, two, one, mark!’
At five places, three differing methods of breaching the hulk were activated. The explosives were the most rapid. Sheets of metal peeled away in short-lived fire bursts and wheeled into space. Then the laser-cut hull sections. The result was the same, white geysers of flash-frozen gas rushing into space.
The officers of the Adeptus Astartes watched as their auspexes detected a burst of sudden movement in the roosts.
Captain Aresti’s forward group was stationed in a large chamber at the head of the corridor leading down to the roost designated ‘Perdition’. At their post, they felt the rumble of the detonation through the ceramite of their Terminator plate and their minds sharpened. At first, there was no sign the breaching had been a success. Then scrips attached to their armour wafted as the air in the hulk stirred. The current rose quickly to a howling gale. The noise of it was muted within Aresti’s Terminator armour, its sensorium warning him of the air’s flight with a persistent pinging.
On the auspex, the roost chamber came alive with red motion indicators.
‘Roosts are active,’ he said. ‘Prepare.’
With satisfaction he imagined the genestealers coming awake, fighting over one another to get away as their precious air was drawn away, scrabbling for the exits. Not all of them would make it; some would be sucked out into space by decompression where they would perish. Aresti wondered if the genestealers knew fear. He prayed it was the case, such wicked things should feel what their victims felt.
Further alarm chimes sounded in his helmet.
‘They come!’ shouted Brother Lucello of Squad Blazing Dawn.
‘Stand ready!’ ordered Aresti. The auspex showed a crowd of red dots coming up the corridor leading down to the roost. ‘Wait until they are in the corridor before opening fire!’
The Terminators formed into a line. They raised their weapons. The whine of assault cannon barrels rotating up to firing speed cut over the roar of escaping air.
The genestealers came out into the corridor, as sudden as bats scared from their cave. Bowed, crooked backs crested with high knobbles jostled one another as the genestealers stampeded, their multiple arms held up protectively under their bellies. They turned as one, like a flock of birds in flight, down the corridor leading to the cavern. They came on and on, an endless flood of shining blue chitin and lurid, purple flesh.
‘Fire!’ ordered Aresti.
Nine storm bolters and two assault cannons gave voice. The howl of the wind was lost under a storm of explosions. A swathe of genestealers were cut down, falling as crops fall before the harvester. Craters the size of men’s heads marred their exoskeletons, their innards burst outwards as if as desperate to escape as the genestealers were. Lines of bright fire stabbed out from the assault cannons as tracer rounds helped their bearers draw a bead on their targets, although in truth this simple aid was not required, and nor was that of the suits’ sensoriums. There were so many genestealers that it was impossible to miss. But as many as the Terminators mowed down, twice as many fled down the corridor.
Something changed. A portion of the flock turned, peeling off from the mass of their comrades. Hissing, their long tubular tongues waving in the air, they rushed the Terminator line, claws snapping.
Ten, then twenty, then three dozen fell. The stream of genestealers escaping the roost had split in two, half going down the tunnel to the killing zone, the other charging the Terminators. It was a good thirty metres across the chamber to the Terminator line. The genestealers tumbled headfirst, heads exploding, limbs blown free. A few took the bolts and did not slow. They came closer, though their wounds were terrible. Not a single one made it within grasping distance. Their bodies piled up so high that they were forced to clamber over one another, and still they died.
Suddenly, the second stream ceased. A wall of dead xenos lay across the chamber, blocking the Terminators’ line of fire to the fleeing aliens.
Almost as if they planned it, thought Aresti.
He ordered his adepts forward, but by the time they had reached the pile of dead and pushed their way through, the stampede had become a trickle of stragglers. His squads loosed shots after these as they fled, killing some. The auspex’s motion detector feeds calmed. The rash of red spots moved off down the corridor.
‘Squad Novum’s Expanse, head into the brood chamber and eliminate any remaining genestealers,’ ordered Aresti
. ‘Squad Blazing Dawn, finish off any wounded and prepare to follow me. Phase two of our mission is done.’
Aresti checked the datafeeds from the other squads in Strikeforce Hammer, and called up the squad sergeants under his command one by one. All reported similar experiences – genestealers in flight, some diversionary or protective tactics at all roost entrances, many dead xenos. Strikeforce Hammer had sustained three casualties, only one dead, and they were being recovered without incident. He looked around the chamber at the piles of aliens. His sensorium highlighted each corpse in bright green as it counted them. Fifty-nine dead or dying.
Squad Novum’s Expanse pushed on into the roost chamber. Blazing Dawn’s warriors went from alien to alien, caving in the heads of those that still twitched with their power fists.
Reports came in from elsewhere. Altogether they had slaughtered one hundred and thirty-six of the genestealers, not counting those that had been annihilated in the venting episode, or that were wounded and had fallen further on. Only the entrances to the upper three roosts had been so covered. The other two were too far into the hulk’s body. Space Marines deployed there would potentially have been caught between two forces of genestealers. Those roosts had been mined, but they had been allowed to empty without the numbers of aliens being thinned by direct fire. The full brunt of those roosts would fall upon Anvil.
‘The genestealers come,’ Aresti signalled to Galt and Mastrik. ‘A good tally has been made here. We advance.’
‘Lord captain.’ Sergeant Kallat of Novum’s Expanse spoke. He was close by the reactor the roost had been warmed by, and his vox signal suffered. His voice broke up.
‘Say again brother,’ said Aresti.
‘…signs of hundreds of genestealers… I…’
The emissions of the reactor killed the transmission, but Aresti understood.
‘Brother Lucello, give me an estimate of overall numbers killed or fled from this roost.’