Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  The tilt of Launo’s faceplate said that he wasn’t following.

  ‘Orks are incapable of building such a thing,’ Jerrell elaborated. ‘They must have pillaged or stolen it from somewhere. The ork commander would want to stay near it, the better to keep an eye on his treasure.’

  Jerrell turned back to Archelaos. His brow was furrowed. ‘You were correct. Knocking out Rackinruin’s power source would have been far more efficient than trying to usurp command of it. I let my hatred of the orks cloud my tactical sense. Coming to the bridge has not only cost us precious time, but the life of a battle-brother as well.’ He swallowed hard. ‘I cry your pardon. Both of you.’

  ‘You weren’t wrong,’ Archelaos corrected. ‘We simply come from different Chapters. There were two options, and as watch-captain, you chose the one you thought best.’

  Jerrell pointed to their fallen comrade. ‘And Carbrey…’

  ‘Will not have died in vain.’ Archelaos finished. ‘We still have time.’

  They left their second-to-last melta bomb behind them, set three minutes later to turn the bridge to slag. The Space Marines would either shut down the engines, or they would ride down to Chestirad’s surface atop a cataclysmic fireball. Either way, Rackinruin’s pillaging would come to an end this day.

  Their journey towards engineering was eerily uneventful. They could hear the little green monstrosities scrabbling about behind the walls and in the shadows, but none of them dared to come forth. Jerrell walked in between his remaining two men. ‘A ship this size,’ he said, ‘should be carrying several hundred full-sized orks.’

  ‘Then where are they?’ Archelaos asked. He had his sword drawn. The auspex was secured atop his storm bolter using strips torn from his robe.

  Finally, they came to a thick blast door seemingly built by giants. It towered above the Space Marines and was covered with crudely painted glyphs.

  Archelaos pulled a heavy wall switch, and it rumbled aside like a rusty curtain. Beyond was a cavernous chamber. The floor was covered ankle-deep with huge bones and fanged, lantern-jawed skulls. Amidst the charnel sat a machine that was of neither greenskin nor Imperial manufacture. It was a perfect sphere, etched in intricate patterns and lit from within by a bright yellow glow. From deep within it came a thrumming sound, like a heart beating in overdrive. Arranged around it stood five enormous orks. Their bodies were covered in layer upon layer of metal armour and cybernetic attachments. Each of them had a large-calibre cannon mounted on one arm. The opposing hand had been replaced by an unwieldy claw. Rusty cables protruded from their heads and torsos. Their faces were gaunt and starved. They stared blankly at the alien sphere as if in a trance.

  ‘Emperor protect us.’ Launo’s voice was uncharacteristically hoarse. ‘It ate them.’

  Two sharp notes cut the air, and again came the thundering, alien voice of Rackinruin. The orks snapped awake and turned to face the Space Marines. One of them, larger and more heavily plated than the rest, gave a bellow. Then they began trundling forwards simultaneously, unleashing a torrent of oversized shells.

  Jerrell lifted his shield reflexively. Even so, he felt a massive impact in his right knee. Another tore clean through his right shoulder.

  Launo stood his ground, answering back with his assault cannon. When he blew the midsection out of one of the augmented orks, wires and mechanical parts spilled forth where blood and guts should have been. The monstrosity fell over dead. When the greenskins fired at him again, chunks of his Terminator armour spalled inwards, puncturing his organs. He spat blood, went to one knee and fell to the floor.

  Archelaos dashed back next to Jerrell, spraying the storm bolter as he went. The rounds sparked and ricocheted off the orks’ armour. He glanced at Jerrell, who nodded. They would die in moments if they did not shorten the range of this fight.

  Together they rushed forwards. Jerrell collided, shield first, into the biggest of the orks and brought his weapon down in a humming arc. There was a fountain of sparks and a screaming of rent metal. The powerful leg servos in Archelaos’s suit launched him into the air and he came crashing down, sword first, amongst the rest. A mechanical limb went flying.

  Their foes’ armour made them slow but their massive claws had enough force to cleave either of the Space Marines in half. Archelaos and Jerrell ducked and parried, moving wholly on instinct. They swept at legs and lopped off their heads. The biggest of the orks was the last to go down, and did so only with a combined effort. Jerrell drove his sword into the beast’s chest with all his might, as Archelaos slashed it deeply through a hip joint. The deck plating shook as it collapsed.

  Archelaos’s breathing came in shallow, rapid gasps. His armour was filled with ragged, fist-wide bullet holes. ‘We have to… stop the… ship.’

  ‘You’ve been injured,’ Jerrell said.

  ‘Yes, but we’ve no time for that.’

  Together, they turned towards the alien sphere. The orks had obviously tried, in their crude way, to integrate the device into their own mechanical systems. Thick, rusting cables formed a nest at its base, and ran off in all directions. Red paint had been splashed across every surface. Gears and corrugated metal were piled everywhere. There was a cracked display screen recessed into a square box and surrounded by levers and buttons. Archelaos kneeled down and removed his helmet. He leaned in close to examine it. His face was covered with beads of sweat. He saw Chestirad in the foreground, a massive moon in the distance, and two bright dots that obviously represented their cruiser and this abomination of a ship. Alien hieroglyphs scrolled by at a furious rate.

  ‘I’ve served three enrolments in the Deathwatch.’ Jerrell said, slowly reaching out to touch the silver ball. ‘I’ve never seen the like.’

  ‘I have,’ Archelaos panted. He began pressing lightened buttons. ‘This is khrave technology.’

  Jerrell pulled back. ‘The mind eaters?’ he said, referring to them by their more common name.

  ‘They’re really more like… mind copiers,’ Archelaos managed. ‘They steal memories. Imprint themselves with… personalities that… aren’t their own.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Quite.’ Archelaos smiled grimly to himself. Although he was now certain that he would die in the service of the Deathwatch, he would always be a Dark Angel. Secrets were his forte. ‘The orks must have… found this. Tried to use it…’

  ‘And it ended up using them.’ Jerrell was suddenly very glad that Archelaos had been assigned to his team. ‘Can you disable it?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Let’s pray,’ Archelaos muttered, ‘that this is… main drive.’ He indicated a particular knob and pulled.

  The air was cut once again by a piercing alarm that rang on and on. The metallic, alien voice that followed was deafening in its volume.

  ‘Forget it,’ Jerrell shouted. He grabbed the final melta bomb in both hands and moved to clamp it on to the metal sphere.

  ‘No, Jerrell!’ Archelaos screamed, but it was too late. The moment the bomb made contact, the watch-captain felt a cold presence swirl around inside his skull, rifling through every thought he’d ever had.

  The room shook. The alarm became a scream, and the thrumming heartbeat of the khrave machine turned into a single, gut-wrenching tone. A pulse of energy threw the Space Marines across the room to land among the bones. Jerrell felt himself turned inside out for a moment, a tell-tale sign of travel through the warp. Terrible forces pressed around him. Then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over.

  Jerrell was still holding the now charred and useless melta bomb. He got up, cast it aside, and walked back to the machine. The image on the screen had changed. Chestirad and its moon were no longer hanging there, replaced instead by a distant star. Ten planets orbited around it. The fourth one was highlighted. Hundreds of bright dots, other starships, were scattered nearby. He knew this beleaguered system. It was home to one of the lar
gest concentrations of orks in the known galaxy; the focal point in three full-scale wars between the Imperium and the greenskins.

  ‘Armageddon, Archelaos,’ he laughed. ‘Of course it would take us to Armageddon. It brought me to where I’d most like to be.’

  Archelaos lay in a motionless, crumpled heap. He was no longer breathing. Jerrell hauled his body into a sitting position against Launo’s corpse, and placed the feather crested pommel of his sword into his hand. Then he picked up his own weapons and stood facing the entryway of the chamber.

  ‘We’ll take them together,’ he said. There was a glint of madness in his eye. ‘You and I, brothers at the end.’

  Within moments, he knew, this ship would begin filling up with filthy, swearing, murderous orks. They would come in the hundreds, the thousands, and they would find him blocking their way. He couldn’t wait to get started.

  WEAPONSMITH

  Ben Counter

  Brother-Sergeant Chrysius grabbed a handful of filthy hair and rammed the peon’s face into the side of the fuel tank. Bone crunched under the impact. He threw the dead man aside and backed up against the huge cylindrical tank.

  His squad hurried into place alongside him. They were his battle-brothers, men he had fought alongside for decades: Vryksus, who had been bested at the Tournament of Blades seven years ago and still wore a black stripe down the centre of his faceplate as a mark of shame; Myrdos, whose study of the Imperial Fists’ past heroes made him the tactical brain of the squad; Helian, the monster and Gruz, who treated combat as an art. Assault Squad Chrysius, ready to kill.

  The sound of their ceramite soles on the deck was drowned out by the noise of machinery. This level of the station was a fuel depot, where enormous stirring mechanisms churned the vats of starship fuel to keep it from separating and congealing. Between the vats laboured the peons, marked by brands on their faces. They all had the same raised scar blistered up across their lips and crushed noses. Only someone who knew of their allegiance beforehand would recognise the shape of it – a stylised skull with a grille for a mouth, like the face of a steel skeleton. Chrysius had estimated thirty peons held this floor, all of them armed, none of them ready for the wrath of the Imperial Fists.

  Twenty-nine, he corrected himself. The body of the man he had just taken down slid to the floor beside him, leaving a glistening slick of blood on the side of the fuel tank.

  ‘Chrysius to command,’ he whispered into the vox, for he habitually fought with his helmet removed and did not want his voice to carry. He went into battle bare-headed because the facial tattoos of his youth, acquired in a half-remembered previous life among the hive gangers of the Devlan Infernus, were his personal heraldry and it was cowardice not to display it. ‘In position.’

  ‘The assault has begun,’ came the reply from Captain Haestorr. ‘Execute, Squad Chrysius.’

  Chrysius gave the signal, a clenched fist punched forwards, and his squad charged from their hiding place.

  The peons had no idea they were about to be attacked. Even when the Imperial Fists stormed into the open, bolt pistols hammering, the enemy took several seconds to realise it. In those seconds half a dozen men were dead, pinpoint shots blasting heads from shoulders or ripping holes through torsos.

  ‘Helian, Gruz, go high!’ ordered Chrysius, pausing amid the carnage to take stock of the situation. A foot ramp led to a series of walkways circling the upper levels of the fuel cylinders. Enemies might be up there, and they would have excellent positions to fire on the Imperial Fists. Brother Helian was first up – half a metre taller than some of the other Imperial Fists, his armour had been altered to fit his frame and even Gruz looked small compared to him.

  Chrysius spun around to see three peons taking up firing positions behind a bank of machinery. They had solid projectile guns of simple but effective design, perhaps even capable of putting a hole in power armour at close enough range. Chrysius did not intend to find out.

  He ran right at them. It was not the natural reaction for a human being faced with a gun, and the peons reacted with shock when they should have blazed every bullet they had at the charging Imperial Fist. But Chrysius was post-human and not afraid of being shot. That was the first thing the hypno-doctrination had weeded out of him.

  He vaulted the machinery and crashed down onto the first peon. This one’s face was so disfigured by the brand he seemed to have no nose or lips at all, just a torn snarl of blistered flesh that failed to cover his broken teeth. His eyes were yellow, and they rolled back into his head as Chrysius’s weight crunched into his ribcage.

  Chrysius thrust his chainsword into the belly of the next peon, squeezing the charging stud as he stabbed. The chain teeth chewed through the stomach and spine with a spray of blood and smoke. Chrysius barely even had to look to fire in the opposite direction, into the last peon, leaving three holes in his chest so huge that his upper body flopped away, the centre of the torso completely gone.

  ‘Report. Sound off!’ ordered Chrysius. More than ten seconds had passed since battle had been joined. It would be a good way towards its conclusion by now.

  ‘Helian. Nothing up here.’ Helian sounded disappointed.

  ‘Myrdos. Four down, am holding.’

  ‘Vryskus. Under fire. Five have fallen to me!’

  ‘Gruz,’ voxed Chrysius. ‘Gruz, report!’

  The reply was the yellow-armoured body of Brother Gruz slamming into the floor ten metres from Chrysius’s position. Chrysius ran up to him, grabbed his wrist and hauled him into the cover of the machinery. Gruz’s pistol and chainsword lay where he had fallen, the teeth of the chainsword stripped away.

  Chrysius glanced at the panel on the forearm of Gruz’s armour, where the power armour’s sensors read off the user’s life signs. His battle-brother was alive.

  ‘Helian!’ yelled Chrysius into the vox. ‘Helian, what’s up there?’

  Chrysius saw Helian running along the walkways above. He was firing at something out of sight and return fire, heavier, was hammering back at him.

  Chrysius saw a ramp leading up to the tank behind him. It might take him up behind the unseen enemy. He ran for it, bolt pistol held up ready to snap off shots at anything that wasn’t Brother Helian. Gunfire stuttered from below him – he would have to leave Myrdos and Vryskus to deal with the peons below.

  The great dark shape that barrelled towards him, around the curve of the fuel tank, was too big to be one of the peons. It moved too fast. Chrysius jammed the trigger down by instinct but the shot didn’t fell it, and a great weight slammed into him.

  It was a Space Marine, in battered power armour the colour of smoke-stained steel. The faceplate of the helmet was like the visor of a feudal knight, with dark red eyepieces and a grille over the nose and mouth like a jaw full of steel fangs. That same shape, the stylised, skull-like image, was emblazoned in silver on one black-painted shoulder pad.

  An Iron Warrior.

  The traitor’s weight was on Chrysius and he could barely move. His chainblade was pinned down by his side and his bolt pistol was jammed under the Iron Warrior’s torso, the barrel pointing down.

  The Imperial Fists had suspected the Iron Warriors had a hand in the taking over of the orbital habitats around Euklid IV, but here was proof. Proof that would kill Chrysius in a matter of seconds if he could not fight like a Space Marine when it counted.

  Chrysius let go of his chainsword and forced his arm out, feeling muscles wrenching. He grabbed the back of the Iron Warrior’s helmet and yanked it back, forcing the enemy’s head back and taking some of the weight off. He drove a foot into the walkway below him and rolled over, throwing the Iron Warrior off.

  ‘Did you think you could hide here like vermin?’ gasped Chrysius. ‘Hide from the sons of Rogal Dorn?’

  ‘Brave words, whelp of Terra,’ replied the Iron Warrior. His voice was a metallic grind, distorted through the helmet
filters. He tried to draw a bolter from a scabbard on his waist but Chrysius grabbed his wrist and the two grappled there, face to face, a test of strength with each trying to throw the other down.

  The Iron Warrior won.

  Chrysius toppled off the walkway, the railing parting underneath him. He slammed hard into the top of the fuel tank amid a tangle of cables and pipes. The Iron Warrior’s bolter was out and he snapped off a rattling volley of shots. Chrysius rolled to make himself a moving target as explosive shells hammered home around him. Blooms of flame erupted as fuel lines were ruptured. A ball of fire rushed up, masking Chrysius for the second it took him to get onto his feet.

  Chrysius fired blindly through the flames. He counted off the shells in his bolt pistol’s magazine, knowing he was outgunned and outmuscled by the enemy.

  But this was not just an enemy. This was an Iron Warrior, a Traitor Marine who had engaged the Imperial Fists in battle after bloody battle to test their strength against the scions of Rogal Dorn. Between the two, there was nothing but hate.

  Enough hate to propel the Iron Warrior through the fire, closing with Chrysius in a couple of seconds, a combat knife in one hand and the bolter in the other. Chrysius just had time to turn to face his assailant before the knife stabbed home.

  Chrysius had earned his laurels through an expertise in hand to hand combat that few Imperial Fists could better. He recognised the strike, a low one to the relatively vulnerable joints between the abdomen of his power armour and the chest plate. Chrysius drove the heel of his hand down, knocked the combat blade off target, and blasted off the remaining shells in his pistol into the Iron Warrior.

  One shot rang off the Iron Warrior’s shoulder guard, doing nothing more than adding another scar to the pitted paintwork. One hit the chest, blowing a crater in the ceramite but nothing more. A third, the last, punched into the Iron Warrior’s thigh, ripping through his thigh joint and blasting muscle and bone apart.

  The Iron Warrior bellowed in pain and dropped to one knee. Chrysius was on him. His chainblade was left up on the walkway, but he still had the hands of an Imperial Fist.