by Guy Haley
Genestealer corpses drifted in thick clumps toward the floor, forming piles like bloody driftwood when the weak gravity finally brought them down. They were accompanied by the broken bodies and armour fragments of bold adepts. The Terminators were either low on, or out of, ammunition, and slowly, inexorably, things were turning against the Novamarines. Casualty tallies and situation reports clamoured for Mastrik’s attention, but he could not respond. He fought with cool determination, the shadow of desperation coalescing at the back of his mind into the will to destroy. He dodged and thrust, the weak gravity a hindrance to his movements – strike too hard, and he would be sent hurtling into the air by reactive force, move too slow and it would not be long before alien claws found a chink in his armour, and through that, his death. Mastrik and his men were therefore locked in place by their armours’ boots.
He deactivated the mag-locks in sequence so he could move effectively, but this added a further consideration to the combat, and he tired. The genestealers were made for low-gravity conditions, the long claws on their feet seeking out cracks in the ground, or grabbing with unshakeable tenacity to the armour the Space Marines wore.
In his hearts, he realised they would not last long. For every genestealer smashed into the air by a power fist, another two took its place. One by one, his warriors were dying. They were outnumbered and outmatched. The air in the chamber was running out, the gale generated by the atmospheric venting now a breeze. But the genestealers would have finished him and his brothers by the time the vacuum forced them away from the cave. He stabbed his sword into the heart of a genestealer, pushing on the pommel with his free hand to drive it home. There was only combat now, no time for tactical reaction or clever ruses. The plan had failed.
‘Ave Imperator,’ he said. ‘Soon you will see my flesh, and judge me by its story.’
‘Brothers! Smite and rend! Tear and kill! You are the Blood Drinkers, send the enemies of the Emperor to their ruin!’ Sanguinary Master Teale shouted to his brothers, channelling their frenzy. ‘Let slip your bloodlust! Only fury will save us! Drown the enemy in their own blood!’
The Blood Drinkers fought like men possessed. Their Terminators were bloody islands in a sea of blue-black alien integument. Brothers in power armour bludgeoned alien flesh with bolters. Knives ran black with alien blood. Teale’s own squad rocketed from one place to another, striking lightning blows before retreating to do so again.
Sorael listened to the Sanguinary Master’s encouragements. His own life fluids sang with the battle-joy; the desire to rip his helmet from his head and attack the aliens with his teeth was strong.
He was surrounded by genestealers, more pouring out of the gap every second. His Devastators were grappling on the floor with the four-armed monstrosities. Glimpses of blood-red armour came and went, mostly all he saw was surging, night-blue chitin.
Something slammed into his legs, knocking him forward. Another impact. Two genestealers were trying to tear his feet free of the floor. Another leapt onto his face, claws jabbing at his armour’s cowl, feet scrabbling at his helmet. He swung his sword blindly. It bit flesh, and was wrenched from his hand.
His foot came free. They were dragging him down.
He clawed at the alien on his face. Warnings sounded shrilly in his suit.
Sorael recited the opening lines of the Sanguis Moritura. He grasped the feet of the genestealer at his front as pain shot up his leg. His armour was breached.
He wrenched hard at the creature. Unexpectedly, it came apart in his hands, its blood spreading in a black fan of droplets in front of him.
Through it, he caught a glimpse of bone-and-blue. The genestealers had ceased coming from the crack in the wall, in their stead strode Squad Wisdom of Lucretius, bolters blazing, they cut down a dozen genestealers before they were noticed. They spread out. Brother Tarael of his own Chapter followed. Lightning claws flashing, he charged headlong into a knot of the aliens. The brother in the Novamarine’s squad with the heavy flamer – Sorael did not know his name – levelled his weapon and sent an expanding ball of fire into another group.
‘Emperor be praised!’ bellowed Captain Sorael. ‘We are aided! To me my brothers, to me!’
Sanguinary Master Teale heard his command, and his squad came rocketing in. Three Terminators waded through the press of genestealers, taking up station around Teale’s squad and Sorael. This group of twelve brothers formed a nucleus of resistance upon which the hinge of battle turned. The Novamarines forced their way to them.
‘Sergeant Voldo of the Novamarines,’ said their leader. ‘How can we aid you?’
With the stream of outflanking genestealers cut, Sorael set about reorganising his men, and the battle for the far end of the cavern began in earnest.
Ranial fought grimly on, his brother Mastrik with him always. The mind of the beast guiding the genestealers was strong and poisonous, only with great effort was the Epistolary able to muster his own psychic might in the face of its intrusive presence.
And then, suddenly, it was gone. ‘Brother!’ he shouted urgently.
‘What, Brother Ranial? I am a little preoccupied,’ replied Mastrik. He sounded weary and angry.
‘The mind, the control of the xenos, it has gone!’
Mastrik cut the legs from under a genestealer. ‘Lord Caedis was successful?’
‘No trace remains in the warp, brother-captain. I believe so.’
The two adepts looked at one another. No new gene-stealer attacked them.
‘Come,’ said Mastrik, ‘Let us apprise ourselves of the tactical situation.’
Mastrik and Ranial left the front line of the fifty-strong Terminator band, their ranks closing behind them, and moved to the top of the low rise they surrounded.
All around the cavern, the genestealers were in disarray. They were just as ferocious, just as deadly, but the coordination between their actions had gone. They moved and fought as individual groups, not as a gestalt whole. The pressure on Mastrik’s position eased.
‘Brother! Look!’ shouted Ranial. Joy was evident in his voice. ‘Brother Aresti comes!’
From the tunnels emerged a battered group of Terminators, the first bearing the personal heraldry of the captain of the Fifth Company. Although reduced in number, the two squads accompanying the captain came into the cavern firing. Others followed, coming in ones or twos or in groups. Aresti commanded them to his side, forming them into a broad arrow. He waited for a group of stragglers, then ordered the formation forward. A further forty Terminators of both Chapters joined the fray.
‘By Corvo’s oath,’ said Mastrik, the smile returning to his voice. ‘We might just win this yet.’
Behind him, on the wall facing the giant alien ship, the combat was swinging back in the Novamarines’ favour. The relentless pressure of the alien advance slackening, units of power armoured brothers were freeing themselves from close entanglements and beginning to open fire again.
‘Let us crush them!’ Mastrik shouted. He ordered the Terminators at his position into a line also, to match that of Captain Aresti. Across a floor crowded with milling alien bodies, the two formations of Terminators closed on one another. From the eastern end of the cavern, blood-red armour replaced blue chitin as the Blood Drinkers advanced from their positions.
From somewhere behind them, a Thunderfire cannon opened up, raking the ceiling with heavy rounds.
Nearly two hundred Terminators were in the cavern now. The genestealers faltered. They fought on. Still deadly, still tenacious and cunning, but the tactical acumen and overall battle order they had exhibited before had gone.
Great was the slaughter of the xenos that day.
Chapter 19
The Heart of the Void
‘Great is the wisdom of the Emperor, to him we commit our service, to him we give our fealty. So swore Lucretius Corvo, so swear I.’ Galt prayed, running the beads of his Chapter icon necklace through his fingers. The words came to him as automatically as breathing, inculcated into hi
m from his first days as a neophyte, repeated as a novitiate, finally sang with pride as he became a full initiate. The prayers and cants grew more complex and important as he passed through each stage. They all had their purpose beyond devotion to duty, whether they were hypnotic triggers to activate his gifts, or epic histories of the Chapter that helped weld an organisation of soldiers into an order of brothers, but those first words remained the most potent.
Today, Galt gave thanks for victory. The others were returning from the hulk. There would be a proper ceremony later. Excepting the cathedral serfs and servitors, he was alone, kneeling at the feet of Lucretius Corvo’s giant statue.
When the communications had gone down, Galt had gone directly to the surface of the hulk only to find the tech-priests there under attack from xenos. The genestealers were hardy indeed, seemingly untroubled by the extreme cold and radiation of open space.
Galt had taken command, directing the servitors of the Adeptus Mechanicus alongside his own men. He had found that unpleasant. Servitors served the Emperor in their own way, as all his loyal servants did. Many served aboard the fleets and in the fortresses of his Chapter. Even so, for the Novamarines they represented a fate worse than death, for the souls of servitors were forfeit to the Machine-God, and so they could not enter the halls of their ancestors. That they laboured ceaselessly all around him was of no consequence, but a warrior must have a soul, and servitors had none. The use of them by the forge as heavy weapons platforms was tolerated along with all the Techmarine’s other peculiarities, but Galt did not approve of it.
Still, needs must. He and his men had advanced down the Adeptus Mechanicus’s strange road. All along the route, the beacons the tech-priests had set up were smashed. Teams of tech-priests had been slaughtered, along with some of the Space Marines assigned to protect them. By the time they had fought their way down and broken through to the airlock, the battle was over. Galt had ordered the Terminators resupplied and sent them off on search and destroy missions as per the original strategy.
He clenched his hands tighter about his amulet, the words of a prayer tumbling from his lips. The plan had worked, but by a hair’s-breadth. Without Caedis’s sacrifice and the death of the broodlord, they would surely have failed.
Galt’s self-doubt plagued him. He had underestimated the xenos. His initial intention to obliterate the hulk had been correct, but he had been required to find a way to clear it. The plan was in part of his own devising, and he had almost failed. He felt the eyes of Lucretius Corvo boring into him from the statue’s head. What would Chapter Master Hydariko say?
He pushed his doubts away. They had won, and he had other problems to solve before he would have the time to fully dissect the rightness of his actions. The casualty numbers ran through his mind. Ninety-three brothers of both Chapters dead or soon to be accepting the Emperor’s mercy. Among them was a disproportionate number of veterans, with seventeen of the Novamarines’ most experienced lost, and perhaps equally harmful to the Chapter, five Scouts dead on the surface. Two of the veterans would be found places in the armoured tomb-suits of the Chapter’s Dreadnoughts. Twenty-nine suits of Terminator armour from the Novamarines armoury had sustained heavy damage, two were practically unsalvageable.
Fortunately, none of the Chapter officers had been wounded, nor had any of the stone Crux Terminatus badges been lost. Much of the battlegear of the dead had been retrieved and would be repaired and re-sanctified for use by new recruits, as had the majority of the fallen brothers’ gene-seed. Overall material losses were low. The loss of Chapter Master Caedis cast a shadow over the operation. The Blood Drinkers Reclusiarch, Mazrael, had assured him that Lord Caedis had died in a fitting manner – Galt had seen a pict of the monster Caedis had slain and had been amazed – although the Chapter Master’s armour and body were missing. In better tidings for the Blood Drinkers, they had retrieved the brother trapped in the first mission.
Nearly five thousand genestealers had been slaughtered, a kill ratio of fifty-three to one. More would die soon. Already kill-teams closed in on the roosts where additional genestealers slumbered in vacuum. These would prove no trouble in their extermination. Doubtless further brothers would fall in pursuance of these objectives, but the real battle was over. An impressive result, yet still Galt agonised over every one of his dead brothers. ‘They will be buried with all honour,’ he said to himself, ‘interred in the tombs of Fortress Novum.’
Shrines would be raised to their memory. Their glories would be recorded. New brothers would take their place. Such was the way of the Chapter, and it had been so for eight thousand years.
Fortress Novum. He thought of the damage to Corvo’s Hammer, and the losses his force had sustained these last years. The surviving novitiates with them were ready for their final elevation to full brotherhood; many of his squads were under strength. He needed to restock, resupply and take new orders from his own master.
It was time to go home.
First there was the matter of the hulk’s archeotech.
A hand fell upon his shoulder. Galt opened his eyes. Sergeant Voldo stood over him.
‘Lord captain,’ he said.
‘Brother-sergeant,’ said Galt. He got to his feet and genuflected to the statue of Corvo.
‘Asking for guidance?’ said Voldo.
‘Giving thanks for a victory delivered, and for those of our brothers who were not.’
Voldo nodded. ‘I am told you are to go into the heart of the hulk.’
‘Yes, brother. Already teams of tech-priests scour the vessels in the hulk deemed clear. Our ally Plosk is planning an expedition to its centre. It is there that he believes the STC data to be.’
‘And you do not trust him,’ said Voldo.
Galt shook his head. ‘He has omitted important details more than once. Wherever Plosk goes, I will go.’
‘You are right to be wary. Why will these tech-priests not tell us what they know? We all have the same goals after all.’
‘Forgemaster Clastrin says their organisation is as plagued by factionalism and division as any other. It may not be us he is keeping this information from. Will you walk with me? I find the chapel calming.’
Voldo fell in beside Galt. They went together slowly along the edge of the cathedral. The walls were heavy black marble, niches in the stone filled with skulls of ancient worthies who had aided the Chapter in some way. Servitor-worshippers sang songs of distant Honourum. Serfs muttered prayers as they cleaned the huge space.
‘You have not assigned me any duty, my lord.’
Galt smiled a little tightly. So, here it came. ‘You have done enough, brother.’
‘Not one brother has ever done enough, not ever,’ said Voldo harshly. ‘To rest one second is to allow the enemies of our lord time to act.’
‘So says Guilliman’s Codex,’ said Galt.
‘I quote with purpose. Let me come with you.’
‘No, I have made my decision.’
Voldo swore. ‘Mantillio, do you think me too old? Is that it? I am still in my prime, I am not ready yet for some sinecure position on Honourum counting soup rations for the neophytes.’
‘Only you can speak thusly to me, Voldo.’
‘Something I have earned, Mantillio. For long decades I have been here for you and you repay me with this dishonour.’
‘You have fought long and hard here already, and earned another fine addition to the tally of your skin. Rest, let another take your place. There will be combat aplenty for you to partake in another day,’ said Galt.
Voldo grabbed the man he had trained by the shoulder and span him around to face him. His eyes narrowed as he looked into his face.
‘What is it, lord captain? I have known you since you were a boy. You are hiding something from me.’
Galt looked to one side, then back to the sergeant. ‘My voice betrays me.’
Voldo smiled. ‘It always did. You are a fine strategician, but you have much to learn of diplomacy before you are ready f
or the Chapter Master’s throne.’
Galt nodded. He hesitated before he spoke again. ‘If I hold you back here, it is not to dishonour you, but to keep you safe, my mentor.’
Voldo gave him a quizzical look. He tightened his hand. ‘Go on.’
‘When I received my last flesh art, I travelled into the Shadow Novum. There I was greeted by one of the spirits of the dead.’
‘As it should be. What wisdom did he show you, did it concern me?’
Galt considered lying then, but untruthfulness was not part of the Novamarines creed. To do so would have been a betrayal. ‘No, brother.’
‘Well then.’ Voldo’s hand dropped.
‘It was you.’
Voldo folded his arms and looked to the floor. ‘I understand.’
‘Chaplain Odon told me that it is not uncommon to see the spirits of those who live, for it is a timeless place, and all who served or will serve our Chapter are to be found within.’
‘I know, boy, I know. I know what it means. So you would seek to deny fate?’ Voldo’s face was hard. ‘Such arrogance is not fitting for one of your office.’
‘I wanted only to protect you.’
‘What? By defying the will of the Emperor himself? Foolishness.’ He pointed a finger at the left of Galt’s chest, where his birth-heart beat. ‘To make decisions based upon this is dangerous. That way lies temptation. Have I not told you this many times?’
‘Yes, Brother Voldo.’
‘Here,’ he pointed at Galt’s forehead. ‘Here is where your true voice is. Tell me, what does it say?’
‘It says that you are the most experienced veteran in the entire Chapter in the matter of cleansing space hulks. That to leave you behind would be rash, and an insult to your pride and to the oath we all swore.’ Galt smiled. ‘It also tells me you should have been a captain long ago.’