Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia

by Guy Haley

  ‘A band of hrud advanced before the horde and came to the void shield, its barely perceptible shimmer flaring brightly as the aliens encountered it, bringing more light to the surface of Gholghis than it had experienced for millennia. A crackling boom preceded the shield’s collapse as it burned itself out. The mountain shook. The generators are overloaded. How is that possible?’ said Zolan. ‘Who knows what is possible here? How does one displace time into the warp?’ said Dantioch. His throat ached. ‘They use the life of the universe as a weapon. Void shields will not stop such a thing - only will and iron.’

  A thin black line of dead hrud, like scum from a filthy tide, marked the position of the downed shield. The aliens held for a moment, then came on again in a single mass. Converging in an arrowhead on a single point, they trampled the mush of their comrade’s bodies.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Dantioch. ‘They’ve passed the inner range marker.’

  ‘Right into the killing field,’ said Zolan. ‘We may die, but so shall they.’

  The fortress’ guns gave voice. Blasts of fire shot from the walls, driving back the dark light of the hrud. Munitions fell among the creatures, but most did not explode. Instead, their explosives decayed or their metal failed. Some went off with weak bangs, or shattered into flakes of oxidisation midflight. Where they did detonate, hundreds of the hrud died, but the xenos were so numerous that they swallowed up the bombardment like the ocean swallows stones.

  Dantioch put out a general order to his men that they come out to repel an escalade, and the Iron Warriors crowded onto the wall, weapons ready. Support teams set up their heavy armament and unleashed their long-range weapons into the creatures.

  ‘Ready!’ commanded Dantioch. His breath was coming hard, and the irritation in his throat was becoming unbearable. He coughed a little, but far from alleviating the sensation, it worsened it.

  The sound of three hundred boltguns racking simultaneously was loud enough to penetrate the thunder of the bombardment.

  ‘Pick your targets!’ he shouted.

  The main body of the hrud did not come for the walls. They sank out of sight into the ground some four hundred metres short of the fortress.

  ‘They are going into the watercourse,’ said Dantioch. ‘Stay alert. Watch for the soldier-caste.’ He scanned the silent black mass. They made no direct attack, but drained away into the ground to follow the channel in the rock. He leaned out over the wall and looked down. The stone was crumbling over the course of the subterranean river. It would be worse on the south wall.

  ‘Why aren’t they attacking?’ said Zoltan hoarsely. ‘We cannot prevail, but I would put the metal to them.’

  ‘They do not need to attack,’ said Dantioch.

  A garbled vox message screeched in his ear. He could make no sense of it but the source was clear. He looked to the sky.

  ‘They are moving into attack vectors in orbit,’ he said. ‘It will not be long before they move on us down here.’

  The tide of hrud ships were crawling apart from one another, their uncertain shapes tilting. Then lightning stabbed across the sky. Purple aurorae coursed over the planet’s atmosphere as the fortress’ upper void shields absorbed the energies of exotic weaponry.

  Light stabbed out from the crowd of hrud, targeting the weapons batteries.

  ‘Heavy teams, concentrate on the discharge points!’ shouted Dantioch. The effort made him cough.

  More hrud advanced from the shimmering curtain, and these were all of the soldier-caste. Strange lights surrounded them, and odd, flexible-limbed walkers staggered in the midst of their throng. Half of these bore strange, bulbous cannons, and they advanced to range and set themselves squarely into the ground, opening fire not many metres from the edge of the light curtain. Glimmering energy loops caressed the wall, shearing off the barrels of guns and toppling buttressing in showers of crumbling stone.

  ‘They have all this back to front. Why send their non-combatants forward before their warriors?’ said Zolan.

  ‘The entropic field. So many of them together will kill us more surely than a gun,’ said Dantioch. Every passing second weighed on him more heavily than a decade.

  Vox bursts took all his attention.

  ‘Warsmith! There are hrud in the fortress!’ said the first.

  A dozen more followed, all shouted over the sounds of frantic combat.

  ‘This is Squad Forty. They’re pushing on the gate.’

  Before Dantioch could request further details from the sergeant, his ident-rune blinked out, replaced with the doleful red of a mortis signifier.

  ‘The gates!’ Dantioch said, and pointed back the way they had come onto the wall.

  The gates blew outwards, carrying the small figures of legionaries on its shock front. Their bodies moved unnaturally through the air, and the blades of shattered metal that chased them fell to the ground in slow motion. Hrud warriors oozed out onto the eastern wall before the dead of Squad Forty had a chance to hit the ground. Their presence was discernible only obliquely; they slithered into a firing line like black sheets dragged through midnight waters, but though they appeared ethereal, the hrud’s weapons were not. Green blazes skipped through reality, punching Iron Warriors from their feet in showers of melted ceramite and adamantium. The legionaries were sluggish to respond, slowed by age.

  ‘Fire!’ ordered Dantioch.

  His voice was croak. All around him the fortress was falling into disrepair, as surely as if it had been left abandoned for long millennia. Erosive runnels marked the surface of smooth ashlar. Metal corroded and failed. The beating mechanical heart of the fortress faltered, and alarms rang from every quarter. The hrud were pressing in from the gate, while others were attempting lesser doorways onto the walls.

  ‘There are hrud on every level,’ Vastopol voxed him urgently.

  ‘Give me numbers!’ shouted Dantioch over the whooping howls of hrud temporal weaponry and the return thunder of bolt guns.

  ‘Warsmith… I can provide no clear estimate. There are too many of them. Auguries are going dark across the engagement zone.’

  Dantioch cursed. The Iron Warriors were being pushed back into a knot on the wall. Lesser doors in the cliff face behind the wall-walk were opening. No more Space Marines emerged, but more hrud came out. The Iron Warrior’s heavy guns were falling silent. His warriors faltered, their lives worn away by the pernicious temporal effects of the hrud. By the time the aliens were close enough to attack with their envenomed claws, eschewing their guns, the legionaries in the front line could barely stand. Casualty figures ticked upwards relentlessly.

  The planet shook with another powerful tremor, causing Gholghis to roar in pain and send sheets of rock tumbling from its peaks.

  ‘We can’t win,’ said Dantioch suddenly.

  The Iron Warriors lowered their weapons.

  ‘To the watchtower,’ said Dantioch. ‘There is little we can do here.’ They ran swiftly along the wall-walk, their footfalls pounding against the stone in time with the beat of the guns, an explosive metronome that paced out the measure of their lives heartbeat for heartbeat. But the entropic fields of the hrud made a mockery of time’s progression, and they aged as they ran, their fortress bathed in deadly temporal radiation. The door to the watchtower was set directly into the stone at the end of the wall-walk, centuries away. Dantioch’s breath wheezed in his helm as he ran.

  The tremors grew to a fully-fledged earthquake, bringing down the wall behind them. The soldier-caste hrud on the plain had advanced beyond the point where the migrating aliens sank from sight into the ground, intensifying the wild temporal effects bedevilling the defenders. Space Marines fell as they ran, their rusted armour falling to pieces and shattering enfeebled bones. Those Iron Warriors that could fought in a desperate rearguard action, their efforts hampered as time began to skip. Moments from the future impinged on the present.

  Dantioch was no longer running, but stood indecisively.

  ‘We can’t win here,’ he said
suddenly.

  Then he was running again, and the door was close at hand…

  He reached for it, but found himself rolling from bed as alarms stirred him from slumber.

  ‘Gatekeeper, report.’

  He shook the past away. He focused on the present: the door to the watchtower. The tides of time tugged on him like those of a surging ocean, pulling him out to drown in deep water. This was no illusion, but a genuine effect. Iron Warriors around him flickered from being, shrouded by the same squirming of tormented time and space.

  Dozens of them were dying. Dantioch slammed into the door. The mechanisms to open it were blinking erratically. The metal was holed with corrosion. He kicked at the door, denting it. He raised his leg to kick again, but the strength was not in him, and his foot skidded off the metal.

  The battlements rang to the horrific shrieks of the hrud, virtually indistinguishable from that of their weaponry.

  ‘Melta!’ he panted. He reached out a hand. He was exhausted. The cries of the hrud were getting closer.

  Someone pushed a fusion charge into his hand. He slapped it on the door and stepped back. When it went off, the sense of displacement in time intensified. For a moment, he had no idea where he was, flitting up and down his own timeline…

  Cold wind stroked his face, making him start. A deep valley plunged away at his feet, the mountain on the far side of its shadowed gorge hazed by distance. His hands were boy’s hands. He wore a rough shirt and no shoes. Something bleated below him. Marooned on a ledge was a young caprid. He shook away the confusion caused by the visions of war and monsters and began to nimbly climb down to rescue the animal. He must hurry, or his father would be angry with him.

  ‘Dantioch!’ a voice said. ‘Warsmith!’

  The scene dissolved. Vastopol was in front of him. ‘I was on Olympia…’ said Dantioch. He looked at Vastopol’s face. ‘You have become old.’

  ‘We all have. What are we to do? What are your orders?’

  Somehow, he was in the watchtower, the tall bastion and control hub of the fortress. Machine consoles burned. Techmarine Tavarre worked with the methodical nature of a man in his laboratory, repairing what he could. The thick plasteel door had become a holed piece of scrap. Iron Warriors took its place, barring the doorway, ducking in and out of cover and loosing shots down the stairs at the things creeping up them. A wave front of killing cold preceded the hrud, alternating with unbearable heat. The stone screeched as it shifted within their deadly entropic fields.

  ‘They’re targeting the warsmith,’ snarled Zolan, ‘making him sick with age.’

  ‘Brother!’ said Vastopol. The warrior-poet’s face was gnarled with wrinkles he had not had earlier that day.

  ‘They’re coming again!’ shouted Zolan.

  Dantioch shook off his fugue. With a thought he tripped the emergency extraction beacon in his armour. It signalled the Iron Ward, his flagship cruiser in orbit above Gholghis. Within seconds, Stormbird gunships would be scrambling to collect them.

  ‘We leave this fortress,’ said Dantioch. ‘Seal the door with stone We will not be returning.’

  Zolan nodded and brought forward a demolition team. They slammed charges onto the stone that anchored themselves into place with self-tapping bolts. Their battle-brothers died providing covering fire.

  ‘Back! Back!’ Zolan shouted. Screeching xenos warriors reached into the room with long, flexible arms and yanked a Space Marine from his feet. Zolan grabbed his hand and pulled back, but to no avail. Against a healthy Iron Warrior, even a crowd of hrud would stand no chance, but their entropic fields had enfeebled him and he was dragged to his death.

  ‘Detonate,’ ordered Dantioch.

  Stone blasted into the room, banging off their armour in fist-sized chunks. Gravel pattered down, swirling veils of pulverised rock drifting over the mound of rubble blocking the entrance to the control chamber.

  ‘All this, destroy it too. Leave nothing for them,’ said Dantioch, gesturing at the systems yet surviving. He watched his weary men limping from place to place, laying charges. There were nine of them left in the control chamber.

  Dantioch opened a vox-link. ‘This is your warsmith. Warriors of the Fourteenth Grand Company, heed me. Iron that will not bend will shatter. We withdraw. All who can, make your way to the landing pad. Iron within!’

  ‘Iron without.’ There were pitifully few voices to give the response.

  The Iron Warriors withdrew in a cloud of rock dust and fire.

  The Stormbird’s engines screamed as it leapt skywards. Dantioch watched the planet fall behind them on its internal screens. The hrud continued to pour over the plains, disappearing into the ground as they flowed on towards their mysterious destination. Warriors swarmed the battlements, and their guns continued to pound the fortress. The scattered dead of the Iron Warriors lay on the rockcrete of the landing pad; several of them had died as they had run for escape, their bodies giving out. Stormbirds rose from other parts of the fortress, bearing away the few survivors. From the control room, only a few had made it to the landing pad. No others had heeded his call to join him there Four in total had escaped.

  Tavarre lay wheezing against a bulkhead, barely able to move. Vastopol was in little better shape.

  Sergeant Zolan was the worst, however. He had fought to the end, stumbling only as he entered the belly of the Stormbird. He had fallen on the landing ramp as it closed, and had not moved since. Dantioch had wrestled his helm from Zolan’s head, and now he sat at his side, holding his hand. Away from the hrud, his mind cleared a little, and more than the terrible weight of age, it was shame that made Dantioch bow his head.

  He had failed.

  ‘Prepare the warp engines for emergency jump,’ he voxed the ships in a croaking voice. ‘We withdraw.’

  Zolan gripped his hand a little tighter. Rheumy eyes opened in a face so aged that it no longer looked human.

  ‘You did what you could. Not even Lord Perturabo could have held that fortress,’ said Zolan.

  ‘You were right, my friend. We should have left days ago.’

  ‘No one can blame you, Dantioch,’ whispered Zolan, his head sagging to one side. His words were slurred, as if with sleep. ‘Retreat is not in our nature.’

  ‘Dogma is no substitute for wisdom.’

  ‘Try telling that to our primarch,’ said Zolan. His withered lips managed a smile. His eyes slid closed.

  Dantioch bent over the sergeant’s ear and whispered into it. ‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. This is the Unbreakable Litany.’

  ‘And may it forever be so,’ breathed Zolan. It was his last breath. Four personnel runes remained lit in Dantioch’s helmplate. Zolan’s flickered, and went dark to the chime of the mortis sign. The noise of atmospheric passage ceased as the Stormbird broke the hold of Gholghis’ weak gravity. The silence of space Dantioch brief respite from a war that could not be won. Now he must face Perturabo.

  NINE

  ASSASSINATION

  824.M30

  LOCHOS, OLYMPIA

  ‘They are marvellous, brother,’ said Calliphone.

  The balcony of Calliphone’s apartments jutted far out from the side of the palace of Lochos on layered corbels of stone, overlooking the Platea Stratiotis. On the neatly sectioned decorative paving of the parade ground below, the army of Perturabo gathered. Amid the squares of soldiers awaiting inspection by Dammekos, three dozen war machines of Perturabo’s own design idled their engines. Their insignia were freshly painted on newly minted armoured hulls. Broad linked tracks vibrated with the energy of powerful engines.

  ‘They are nothing,’ Perturabo said without false modesty. He knew he could do better. ‘I did what I could with what we have available here.’

  ‘They are better than the steam landships the other cities have,’ said Calliphone.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, genuinely pleased. His foster sister’s opinion wa
s one of the few he cared about. ‘They will bring us victory. Victory will bring more resources, more resources will mean better machines and that will lead to—’

  ‘More victory,’ she said, resting her hand on his arm. Her head was level with his elbow, and she had to reach up to touch him. ‘You’ve proven your worth in battle more than once, brother. It is about time father allowed you to apply that formidable mind of yours to strategy. But, and I ask you gently because I do not want to offend you, is this war wise?’

  Only Calliphone could question him so openly without annoying him, though her need to cosset his temper did irritate. ‘Kardis will attack us. Their recent ostentatious protestations of alliance make me all the more suspicious that it will be sooner rather than later.’

  ‘They may have been sincere,’ she said.

  Below, optios and decurions yelled out as Dammekos walked down a thickly carpeted stair into the square. The thunder of polished boots echoed from the walls of the palace, startling birds into flight.

  She pulled back from the balustrade and walked to the couch set at its rear. Food and drink was set out for them there under an awning of coloured silk. She dipped a taster into the wine - another device made by her foster brother - and consulted the dial. Satisfied it was untainted, she removed the device and ladled a measure into her goblet. ‘It is a dangerous course of action. If we attack them…’ She shrugged.

  ‘When we attack them, Calliphone,’ said Perturabo. ‘You will not convince me otherwise. Dammekos is eager.’

  ‘When, then. Tomorrow you will plunge all of Pellekontia into war. It will spread from here. No one will trust us. We will have no alliances.’

  ‘It is only dangerous if we lose,’ he countered. ‘And we will not lose. Kardis has access to the only substantial supply of copper on this continent. If we can take it, it will enable me to build far more potent machines than those armoured vehicles in the square. Imagine if every one of our warriors were equipped with a lightning gun instead of a rifle? Armour would be useless. The walls of many cities would become obsolete overnight.’