The storm troopers descended into the cavern in the kill-team’s wake. At a silent signal from their lieutenant, they broke off into pairs, each advancing via a different route. Their training was obvious; they moved swiftly but silently, covering each other and scanning constantly for threats.
It was Var’myr who first saw it.
‘Cassiel,’ he said, drawing his sergeant’s attention.
It was located towards the back of the cavern, jutting some four metres from the ice. The exposed section was curved and gleaming black, as if made from obsidian: a four-sided arc, like part of a large, incomplete ring. Judging by the curve of it, Cassiel guessed that the whole thing could have a diameter of over twenty metres, most of which appeared to be embedded in the ice, a dark shadow that curved away beneath their feet.
The cavern darkened considerably around it, as if the black stone were absorbing the light. Strange symbols marked its surface.
Tanaka swore in his guttural tongue.
‘What is it?’ asked Var’myr.
‘I don’t know,’ said Cassiel. ‘A weapon of some kind, but not one made by any human hand. Who knows how long it’s been down here. Can you get a reading on it?’
‘No,’ said Var’myr, fingers sliding through the data relaying across his forearm-mounted auspex. ‘This glacier is more than one hundred and fifty thousand years old, however.’
Cassiel shook his head. Such a timeframe was unfathomable.
‘We know the Adeptus Mechanicus got this far,’ he said. ‘What happened to them?’
No answer was forthcoming.
The kill-team circled around the curved structure, keeping their weapons ready. There was something about it that made Cassiel’s skin itch. Its geometry was somehow abhorrent; its glossy surfaces made him uneasy.
‘There are some mysteries that humanity was not meant to know,’ said Tanaka. ‘This thing should have remained buried.’
‘The entire region is becoming increasingly unstable,’ said Var’myr. ‘It will probably soon be buried beneath another fifty million tonnes of ice, regardless of what we do.’
‘It is not enough,’ said Cassiel. ‘Even if it was buried at the centre of this moon, the Adeptus Mechanicus would come looking for it again, now they know it is here. They wouldn’t be able to help themselves. We have to destroy it.’
‘Destroy it?’ said Var’myr. ‘It’s been down here for Guilliman knows how many tens of thousands of years. What danger can it pose?’
‘Where is the explorator team, Mortifactor?’ Tanaka asked, by way of an answer.
‘We have to destroy it,’ Cassiel said. ‘We cannot trust the Mechanicus to leave this undisturbed.’
‘Then let us do so, and be on our way,’ said Var’myr. ‘Those rumblings are becoming more frequent.’
‘I thought your Chapter did not fear death, Mortifactor,’ said Tanaka.
‘Death, we do not fear,’ said Var’myr, his voice cold. ‘That does not mean that we invite it. Dying pointlessly, before one’s duty is done, is a blasphemy.’
Cassiel opened up a vox-channel to the storm trooper lieutenant. ‘I need the melta-charges brought forward,’ he said. Even with his helm on, it was clear that Var’myr was glaring at Tanaka. And Cassiel knew the White Scar well enough to guess that he was smiling behind his own faceplate at having riled the Mortifactor.
‘Tanaka,’ Cassiel said. ‘Help me with the charges. Var’myr, determine where to place them. I want nothing to remain of this thing.’
Cassiel turned away, paused, and turned back. ‘And don’t touch it.’
The White Scar fell in beside Cassiel, and the two of them clambered down towards the storm troopers picking their way through the chamber.
‘Why antagonise him, brother?’ Cassiel said via a closed channel. ‘Is it really necessary?’
‘Mortifactors,’ Tanaka replied. ‘They take themselves so seriously. And this one’s ignorance offends me.’
‘We were young once ourselves, my brother,’ said Cassiel.
Tanaka laughed. ‘You sound like an old man,’ he said. ‘Me? I’m in my prime!’
Cassiel smiled. Tanaka was one hundred and twenty-two years older than him, and looked it, with his weathered face and grey-streaked hair. His smile slipped however, and he paused, narrowing his eyes.
The ice dropped steeply away to the side of the ridge they were traversing, disappearing into a hollow. Steam billowed up from below, obscuring his sight.
‘What is it?’ said Tanaka, suddenly serious.
‘Probably nothing,’ said Cassiel. ‘Go ahead. Collect the melta-charges. I’ll be with you in a moment.’
Tanaka shrugged, and continued on down to meet the storm troopers. Cassiel eased himself off the side of the ridge, and climbed down into the steam, finding adequate handholds in the ice wall.
The descent was short, and soon his feet met the ground once more. Steam billowed around him, and moisture that would turn to ice as soon as he was away from the volcanic updraft beaded upon his armour.
He advanced, stepping gingerly, ensuring that the ground would take his weight before moving forward. He squinted, peering through the fog and steam.
‘Blood of Sanguinius,’ he breathed as the vapours parted.
A dozen bodies were scattered before him, half buried in the ice. Each corpse had been skinned, exposing frozen, dripping musculature. It appeared as though something had fed upon them: chunks of flesh had been torn from the bone, and entrails lay scattered. It was clear to Cassiel from the tortured poses, silent screams and anguished expressions on skinless faces that these horrors had been enacted while these people were still alive.
He saw an iron cog-wheel embedded in the forehead of one of the tortured bodies – the holy symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus. He’d found the missing explorators.
That was when the screaming began.
Cassiel was up the sheer cliff in an instant, barely touching it. His long blade Aruthel was unsheathed, humming with power. He didn’t even remember drawing it.
Two detonations echoed through the cavern. Bolter fire.
‘Lieutenant, pull your soldiers back and regroup,’ he ordered. ‘Kill-team, to me.’
Another scream. Cassiel broke into a run, drawing his ornate bolt pistol as he rushed towards the piteous cry. He saw blood spray across an angled wall of ice. More than one of the storm troopers was down. Cassiel strained to locate a target as he ran.
There. Target lock.
A hunched thing of tortured flesh and blood, hands ending in half-metre talons slick with gore. It ripped open the throat of a storm trooper, unleashing a fresh torrent of red. It pressed its face into the gushing fountain – drinking, or perhaps just revelling in the sensation.
It was an easy mark, even at a run.
Cassiel’s bolt pistol barked. Two shots struck the target, one in the back, one at the base of the neck. Those detonations should have ripped the creature – man? – to pieces, but they did not. Its flesh was torn, exposing dark metal bones.
Sprawling, the creature righted itself and swung towards him with a snarl. Its face was a dull metal skull draped in dead flesh. Its eye sockets were hollow pits, dark and fathomless, but tiny pinpricks of light lay deep within them, like cold green stars glinting in the void. Gore caked its jaw. Viscera dripped from its hollow ribcage.
A necron warrior, then, but like none that Cassiel had ever encountered before.
More of the creatures were among the storm troopers spread throughout the cavern, ripping and tearing. Shouts and screams echoed in the gloom. Hellguns whined as they powered up, then barked as their power was unleashed, sending angry red beams cutting across the open space. He heard Var’myr open fire again, and Tanaka incanting a tribal war-chant before his heavy bolter ripped across the cavern in a ceaseless stream of fire.
Cassiel
quickly closed the distance with his foe. It was edging towards him, moving on all fours like a beast. He fired on it again as he ran. The bolt slammed it onto its back – its chest was a blackened ruin, but its metallic ribcage still held. Cassiel sprang off an uneven ice-boulder, leaping high, Aruthel humming in his hands. He came down on top of the deathly creature, landing with one knee upon its chest, buckling it inwards. He drove his blade into the beast’s cranium, forcing it deep. It gargled a death rattle, and the pinpricks of light in its empty sockets faded.
A scream came from nearby and he spun, whipping Aruthel free. A storm trooper had fallen to one knee, and blood was pooling beneath him. Another of the skeletal creatures draped in dead, frozen flesh was hauling itself up from the ice beneath the Ordo Xenos soldier, its talons hooked into the man’s leg.
Sheathing his blade, Cassiel took two bounding steps and grabbed the bloodied necron around its neck, hauling it off the stricken trooper. It thrashed like a feral beast, lashing at Cassiel with its talons.
Using his forward momentum, Cassiel slammed it against an ice wall, sending out a spread of cracks across its surface. He forced the creature’s head back and sent a bolt from his pistol up into its metallic brainpan. He released his hold on it, and it flopped to the ground, broken, its skull a ruin of twisted metal.
He turned away, scanning for fresh targets.
He made to re-enter the fray when one of the creatures leapt onto his back, spitting and snarling, its talons slashing at his collar. While it could not breach his armoured plates, the flexible fibre-bundles at his joints – and his neck – were not so well protected. Razored claws sliced through to his flesh, carving deep into his shoulder.
Cassiel threw it off with a curse, warning icons flashing before his eyes. He didn’t feel any pain. All he felt was the urge to kill – the urge to taste blood, though the creature had none to shed.
It was the one that he had just put down: its ruptured skull was reknitting itself, flowing like liquid silver back into its original form. Cassiel gripped Aruthel in both hands and carved the blade in at its neck. It raised its bladed claws to ward off the blow, but all it achieved was to lose both hands, along with its head. Cassiel kicked the metal cranium away.
‘Beware,’ he said across an open channel. ‘They are self-repairing. Their fallen rise again.’
The foul creatures were setting upon the corpses of the storm troopers – and those who were not yet dead – ripping and tearing. Their talons eagerly sliced away the soldiers’ carapace armour, exposing the flesh within, and they tore into it with relish, expertly flensing skin from muscle and bone. Others buried their faces in stomach cavities and throats, snapping and jerking. They snarled and spat at each other, like wild animals fighting over the spoils.
Cassiel snapped off a pair of angry shots, smashing two of the feeding beasts back. The others seemed oblivious or uncaring of the danger, intent on gorging themselves… though they were creatures of little more than metal and malice, with no flesh to feed. Every chunk of meat they swallowed simply flopped, wet and glistening, from their hollow ribcages to the ice, yet they seemed driven by an insatiable, ravenous hunger. It was obscene.
The ice cracked beneath his feet, and a taloned hand shot up and locked around his leg. Swivelling Aruthel in one hand into a downward grip, Cassiel thrust the blade down into the ice, skewering the creature’s head even before it had emerged.
More of the creatures were appearing, and those that fell simply rejoined the savage attack moments later, their mortal injuries repaired. The storm troopers were being butchered. The survivors had formed a tight knot of defiance in the centre of the cavern, dragging the wounded with them. The storm trooper lieutenant was at their centre, barking orders and snapping off shots with her hellpistol. Cassiel saw her die a moment later, yanked to the ground with her throat torn out, and he cursed.
Cassiel felt torn. Part of him desperately wanted to pull his team out, to save those soldiers who still drew breath. Duty was his life, however. It had been built into his genes. The mission was paramount.
‘We must finish this,’ he barked.
The Blood Angels sergeant moved through the slaughter with a grace that belied his size. Spinning, wielding his blade in a two-handed grip, he cut the legs from beneath one of the deathly creatures rushing at him frenziedly. Still turning, he sliced the blade through the torso of another, carving it neatly in two. Aruthel sung a keening wail as it sliced through the air.
Briefly free of assailants, Cassiel joined the knot of storm troopers and took up a position at their fore. Tanaka joined him, walking steadily backwards, his heavy bolter coughing death. Each controlled burst of fire smashed the enemy backwards, and Cassiel saw metal limbs shorn from bodies, yet even that damage was repaired.
‘Something is happening,’ said Tanaka, in between bursts.
‘I see it,’ growled Cassiel.
Beneath their feet, green light was glowing up through the ice. It was coming from the black xenos structure that curved underneath them.
One of the creatures leapt at Cassiel from a ledge above, talons extended to impale him. Before he could raise his weapon, a kraken bolt struck it from the side and its skull disintegrated into shards of metal. Cassiel looked up to see Var’myr staring down his smoking bolter from his position up at the curved black obelisk. He nodded his thanks, and the Mortifactor inclined his head in acknowledgement. Cassiel saw several fallen creatures around Var’myr’s position, and another pinned beneath his boot, thrashing wildly. The Mortifactor had not been idle.
Cassiel’s gaze was drawn to the black obelisk behind Var’myr. Green light was spilling from the glyphs and symbols upon its surface.
‘Var’myr,’ said Cassiel. ‘Fall back.’
The Mortifactor bent down towards the screeching, flailing creature trapped beneath his boot. He grasped its skull in one huge hand and, with a violent wrench, tore it loose.
‘A keepsake,’ he declared as he stood upright.
Then he shuddered, and the metal skull slipped from his fingers.
A glowing blade of green light emerged from Var’myr’s chest, transfixing him. Then the blade was sharply retracted, and Var’myr slid to his knees.
A towering being stood behind the fallen Mortifactor. It was as different from the hunched, flesh-wearing creatures as night was to day. Tall and broad-shouldered, it would have loomed over even Cassiel and the tallest of his Chapter brothers. Its skeletal limbs were a gleaming silver and it was decked in heavy plates of black obsidian. It carried a three-metre halberd ending in a humming blade of pure energy. With a swift motion, it brought the weapon around in a lethal arc, and took off Var’myr’s head.
‘No!’ bellowed Cassiel.
The air behind the deathly metal being shimmered and distorted, and more armoured figures materialised. The nature of the curved obelisk was now clear. It was not a weapon, as Cassiel had suspected at first, but something far worse.
It was a gateway.
Five of the elite, armour-clad beings stood up there now. They bore a mix of energy-bladed halberds and one-handed axes, though their blades were similar, made of nothing more than crackling energy.
Var’myr’s servo-skull hovered just above the Mortifactor’s corpse, its red eye flickering. Then it too was cut down, carved in two by an energy blade.
The air shimmered, like silver-dust catching the light, and a final figure appeared, materialising within their protective cordon. It was a creature of alien, yet undeniably regal, bearing.
This newcomer was stooped, and its protectors towered over it, yet it exuded a palpable aura of dominance. It wore a cloak of golden scales and a gleaming cowl, and its ribcage was armoured in polished ebony. Its skeletal limbs were bound in circlets of gold and obsidian and covered in xenos hieroglyphs, and it leaned upon a golden staff topped with a flaring winged icon pulsing with viridian radiance.
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It stared around its surroundings, craning its neck one way then the other, like a vulture. Its gaze swept across the ice cavern before settling upon Cassiel. It held his gaze, eyes burning with deathless, pitiless fire. It croaked something indecipherable, speaking in a language that was already dead a million years before the birth of humanity. It was the voice of the crypt, conjuring images of dust and dry sands. This was no unthinking automaton, Cassiel realised. This was an impossibly ancient being, filled with bitterness and anger, bound within a shell of metal.
The creature jabbed a skeletal finger in the Blood Angel’s direction, and spoke again in its dead language. Tall shields of glowing green light sprang to life upon the off-weapon arms of the axe-wielding guardians, and they stepped to the fore, forming a protective shield wall.
Then, as one, the necrons began to advance.
Cassiel’s rage was threatening to overwhelm him, and he struggled to control it. It would be so easy to give in…
His vision began to cloud, a reddish tinge over everything he saw, and the pounding of his hearts – his secondary beating now, too – drowned out all else. His lips curled back, and had he not been wearing his black-painted helm, his elongated canines would have been exposed.
Var’myr’s blood, spreading from his headless corpse, was almost painfully bright. Everything else was as nothing… except for his foes. He glared at the advancing xenos warriors, and a shameful, animal growl rumbled from his vox-grille. His grip tightened on the haft of his blade as he prepared to attack.
No.
He must remain in control. His duty demanded it.
He forced himself to breathe deeply, and forcibly loosened his grip on the blade. The red haze began to clear, though it hung around the fringes of his vision, ready to descend again at any moment. The black tendrils of his hatred recoiled, temporarily, and once more it retreated to its lair. Its time would come.
‘Storm troopers,’ he growled. ‘Be ready. My brother and I will hold them. Split, and get around behind them. Use the charges. Destroy that gateway.’
‘How do we hold them?’ asked Tanaka.
Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters Page 6