To draw out the parasite that has preyed on the outposts of mankind since the Golden Age of Expansion and crush them,' said Aravain. This will be a triumph to rival the destruction of Ulrakk Urg. It will be a victory that is ours alone and will remind our brother Legions that the Dark Angels will always be the First. That we can again be the force we were before Rangda.'
‘The Legion has not the strength to fulfill the duties of every mortal officer on our ships,' said Garradin. 'Even had we not committed eleven full companies to Maripose.'
‘Not if we want them to actually fight,' Brigaint agreed.
'The khrave control what we see. They hear the orders we give as we give them.’ Griffayn's near-solid image broke apart, reforming with crossed arms and bowed head. ‘No Legion could fight with those odds against them. Not even ours. The Firewing recommends we withdraw.’
Several shadowed and insubstantially rendered faces scowled
'The Ravenwing concurs,' said Garradin, with a sigh. ‘Incoming fire is increasing. Point batteries and evasive manoeuvres will serve us only so long before the main strength of the khrave's armada arrives.'
All those present turned towards the Lion, seeking guidance, or arbitration, but as was so often the case when entreating the primarch, coming away with empty hands.
Holguin gripped the podium rail in his gauntlet, the squeal of metal under forced compression startling the crew working in the recessed cogitation pits on the other side.
'They must have a weakness.'
'They do,' said Aravain, surprising himself with his interruption, and looked up. Trigaine nodded for him to continue. 'Their hosts,' he said. 'Their power is drawn from their hosts. Destroy their hosts and it will be the same as targeting the plasma furnaces of a warship.'
‘You speak convenient half-truths, brother, worthy of any Chaplain.' Griffayn's profile fluctuated as he leant into the projection field. 'You say “hosts" but what you mean is the population of Muspel.’
Aravain nodded.
'This is not Rangda,' said Duriel. 'Nor is it Ullanor Prime, and I know how impatient some amongst my brothers are to be done with this world that we might rejoin our cousins there. But we cannot exterminate a compliant populace.'
'This population is hardly compliant.' said Aravain.
'I would counter that I am in a better position to see that than you, brother, and I am still less quick to grasp upon the solution of genocide.’
'There is no way to distinguish the parasitised from those who might be saved.'
'This is what the Firewing exists to do,' said Griffayn. 'This is why you were admitted into our circle, Codicier. Give my Chaplains and enigmatus cabals a week, Sire, and I will have the solution you require.'
'We don't have a week,’ said Brigaint.
'I will be the judge of that,' said Duriel. 'I can and will hold this wall for as long as it is asked of me.'
The Lion stirred in his throne and all about him fell silent.
'The First Legion fights out of duty, not for the accolades we expect to receive. Loyalty. Honour. These are virtues best measured by a warrior's brothers, and not to be judged second-hand by those who never held a blade by their side. Centuries from now, the actions of the First will be unpicked by scholars and I do not doubt that we will be judged harshly. They will never know of our valour, of the sacrifices we made for my father's ideal. They cannot. They would not thank us for the blood we spilled upon our hands in their name. But in our hearts, in the remembrances of our own, we will know the truth - we did our duty. That is all the justification we seek and it is sufficient. We are as the Emperor made us - weapons, created for this bloody time, and as weapons we can ask nothing more of Him than that.'
He turned to Trigaine.
'There are weapons still in the Santales armourium that I will not sanction for use aboard my own ship. By my order they have been released to Redloss' command and are on their way to the planet with the full strength of the Dreadwing. The Knights of Santales will join them on the surface,' the Lion went on. 'When the khrave attack in force. Duriel will have need of your insights and your weaponry.'
Trigaine dropped to one knee and bowed his head.
'For the Lion, and for Caliban.’
Like a ripple through a still pond, beneath a moon in an auspicious phase, the Knights of Santales took the knee and swore their unbreakable vows. Their oaths went unrecorded, but would be enforced unto death by all here present.
‘What orders do you have for us, Sire?' asked one from amidst the formless lithocast wraiths whose physical locations were furthest distant from the Invincible Reason, his voice a rasp like wire pushing through wool.
The Lion spoke then his commands, but his words were not meant for Aravain and his brothers.
The Knights of Santales were already marching from the dais. To do their duty.
TEN
I
The sun fell first.
Claws of shadow stretched out from the snow-capped knuckles of the Namastor Peaks, slicing across the shrieking chaos of Maripose as far as its fortress peninsula. Duriel could not help but wonder if there was some symbolism at play, or at least a deliberate attempt at psychological warfare as only the deeply psychic xenos mind could comprehend it, hearkening as it did to primeval terrors that only emerged from the forests at night.
The city of Maripose had fallen next.
Then Coccyges.
Then Lament.
Wrath-pattern starfighters, Xiphons and Primaris-Lightnings tumbled from high altitude flight and into the skies of Muspel like flies drawn to a carcass. Their hulls bore the paint schemes and insignia of a hundred different Aeronautica divisions, from battle-groups assigned to dozens of warzones across the Northern fringe. Huge-bellied army conveyors and Mechanicum ark landers sank into the upper atmosphere like tectonic plates being lowered into place from orbit. The cumulative ferocity of ten thousand desist thrusters, mass stabilisers and plasma drivers struck the sky with the sickly plumes of a stricken atmosphere. Muspel's blanket cover of thick black clouds had already scorched from the hemisphere, and these were simply the opening phases of the battle that would follow.
Then Merigion.
Then Nigris.
Only Uncus, the wave-lashed rock upon which the Vaniskray was perched, still stood in the Legion's hands.
Hydra, Hyperion and Praetor batteries stabbed skywards, re-igniting the night with a pulsing light-shower of contrails, tracers and pounding skybursts. They fired at will. No Legion aircraft contested the skies. Duriel had judged the enemy too numerous to be battled head-on, and the dedicated landing facilities of lament too difficult to hold against such a host. As it had proven. Duriel had sacrificed as much strength as he could spare to delay the thrall-host's advance, but he had known that the duty the Lion had given him would ultimately be executed here.
The Vaniskray was besieged.
Massed columns of tanks and mechanised infantry rolled across the Nigris Bridge. Stormswords and Stormhammers with reinforced ceramite bolted onto their glacis plates led the advance a rolling wall of super-heavy armour and bristling mega-batteries shepherding the battalion-strength force of mixed armour and transports. Ionian Russ tanks maintained a constant and heavy rate of fire as they advanced, a thunder that rolled across the strait. The massive fortification of the Nigris bridge-fort took its punishment stoically, barely even trembling under the onslaught.
But the Stormswords were not yet in range.
The guns of two thousand Tactical and Tactical Support legionaries hammered the leading edge of the avalanche with fire. Cataphractii Terminators equipped with plasma blasters and Reaper autocannon added their fire. Servitor-operated artillery’ casemates, hermetic structures enclosing quad-linked lascannons, Earthshaker cannons and volkite carronades, stabbed the bridge with fiercely powered beams and massive shells. Bullets and energy beams alike pranged from the thick frontal armour of the super-heavies. Conversion beamers, ranged by Duriel's own hand to the point
of minimum instability and maximum power, carved the biggest tanks like plas-tek models. Induced subatomic implosions collapsed the wheezing wrecks onto their tracks. The gutted hulls of lighter main line tanks, Valdors and Leman Russ, died in droves. It was not enough. The weight and momentum of oncoming vehicles shunted the wrecks unceremoniously aside.
'Brace!' Duriel roared, voice augmitted to maximum volume, as the forward wedge of Stormswords finally rolled into range.
A fully armoured Space Marine could fear little on the battlefield. The standard-issue small-arms borne by most of the galaxy’s races, mankind included, pattered off Mark IV power armour like gravel, while shrapnel that would have flayed a squad of baseline troopers was as deadly to the transhuman warrior as vapour. But when the battery of Stormsword super-heavy siege cannons unleashed their fury upon the walls, even the legionaries dropped behind the battlements and braced. Only the Dreadnoughts and Terminators remained defiant, and only then because there was nowhere large enough for the gigantic warriors to take cover.
Muspel shook to the roar of an apocalypse. The walls were pulverised, great gouges torn out of them. Artillery' towers were toppled. Ramparts were obliterated, the knights sheltering behind them atomised. Huge, vertical cracks appeared through the walls. The fortification groaned like a hero run through with a blade, wounded mortally but determined to stand, to take one last blow for the Imperium of Man before succumbing.
Duriel drew his axe. Beside him, one of the consuls assigned to him by the Lion, a vigilator by the name of Anariel, did the same with his Calibanite sword.
'For the Lion!' he yelled, as with a thunderous growl of engine power one of the Stormhammers pulled ahead of the rest.
It was fitted with a dozer blade wider than the tank was long, heavy weapons fire pinging off it as the vehicle accelerated towards the bridge-fort's gates. Behind it, human and augmented-human storm troopers poured out of Dracosan and Triaros carriers even as the vehicles slewed to a stop, assembling lightweight siege towers and scaling ladders on the run. Space Marines rose from cover to mow them down with bolter fire. Conversion beam towers and artillery placements continued to stab at the lighter vehicles in their range. Troop transports and support tanks disappeared in geysers of plasteel and ceramite. The mortal soldiers charged through it. They had lost none of their combat discipline to their khrave domination, even as they had shed all of their fear of death. The first squads made the wall.
'Prepare for escalade!' Duriel bellowed. 'Stand to repel!'
Along the length of the wall Tactical Support legionaries drew their combat blades. Their Tactical brothers blasted straight down with bolters on full-auto. Stationed along the battlements at intervals, twenty Leviathan-pattern Siege Dreadnoughts powered up their arrays of near-range battlefield arcana whose lethality an entire squad of Cataphractii could only imagine, shrouding themselves in atomantic shielding. The Leviathan was a spectacularly rare pattern of Dreadnought, and no Legion but the First had the resources or the means to commit so many to a single action. Even they did not do so lightly.
The Stormhammer smashed into the gate.
The structure withstood the impact for about a second before exploding inwards, followed by the screeching mass of the super-heavy tank. Rolling over caltrops, tank spikes and gutting lasers, it crashed through the inner gate, slewing onto the esplanade and into the fire of Duriel's own main-line tanks, assault troops and infantry reserves. It was dead before it had stopped moving, bin it had fulfilled its task. With the uncanny precision that so characterised the actions of the khrave, hundreds of scaling ladders hit the wall at the same moment that the Stormhammer breached the outer gate.
Secutarii wielding arc lances and mag-shields and encased in hard-fitting augmented carapace flooded Duriel's section. A blow of his axe clove a mag-inverter shield in twain. Duriel kicked the reeling warrior from the wall. His servo-armature unfolded, scorpion-like, to punch another into the back of a merlon, breaking both. All around him, warriors fought as knights of the First, obliterating the thrall-skitarii with point-blank bursts of bolter fire or outfighting the cyborgised assault troops man to man, meeting them combat blade to arc lance and besting them. A machine-amplified bellow rang out from the left as Ancient Domniain swept a dozen veletarii storm troopers from the rampart with a blow of his siege claw. The Leviathan turned ponderously, incinerating an entire wave of the assault with gouts of chemical fire from his phosphex discharger.
'We could use some of the mortal auxilia to man the point guns," Anariel shouted.
'We cannot trust them,' Duriel returned. 'I will call on them only when things can get no worse.'
A burst of bolter fire sounded off to the right. A knight of the 27th Company screamed a warning at the same moment he was hurled bodily from the battlements. The knight held his trigger down, bracketing what appeared to be a bruise in the materium with explosive shells, before breaking against the flagstones below. The deformity manifesting above the wall continued to discolour, extruding as it did so the most hideous abomination of the basic anthropoid plan that Duriel could have imagined. Two arms, two legs, the shadow of something monstrous, a nightmare reflected in liquified obsidian. It was a slit in the real.
The knights on the wall turned their fire onto it. Seven different guns left distortion haloes around the impermeable circumference of a psy-shield as the xenos creature turned its eyeless face to look' down the length of the rampart. With a single thought it bettered Ancient Domniain's destructive endeavours, blasting a hole through the legion's gunnery line that thrall troopers surged to fill.
A knight garlanded in a sergeant's laurels bellowed a challenge and charged, chainsword revving. The xenos did not even turn to face him, plucking him from the parapet with an invisible hand and throwing him screaming into the sea.
'The khrave,' Duriel whispered. 'The khrave have come at last.'
He whirled in horror as fresh insurgencies of violence ripped into the very heart of the Legion's defences, even from as far back as the Vaniskray's great keep where the gonfalons of battalions, companies and individual champions fluttered in the tortured thermals. Everywhere, monstrous black xenoforms appeared as if from air. Teleportation, while poorly understood, was widely utilised. Even the orks were capable of a primitive exploitation of the principle. But Duriel had never before heard of it being employed with such exquisite precision. It spoke to a mastery of the warp that was breathtaking.
A warrior khrave stalked towards him as if it were a serpent of smoke. It had form, but not one Duriel could fix upon in his mind All he could take from it were impressions: cruel joints, sharpened bone structure, black skin that was at once paper-dry and shiny It smelled of rust. Its movements came with a crackle and snap reminiscent of beetles being ground under an alchemist's pestle.
Duriel's servo-arm whirred, plates Hipping back to arm plasma-repeaters, flamers, arc claws, anything that could conceivably hinder such a beast. Sizzling streamers of plasma scorched across the warrior khrave's psy-shield, enveloping it in the swollen coronae of aborted suns At the same time, Anariel hacked it with Calibanite steel. The xenos appeared to deflect the blow even after it had been delivered, rewriting the preceding second and a half to turn ii aside on its arm. Duriel looked on in shock as the khrave made a dismissive gesture, crushing the vigilator in his armour.
'For Caliban!' Duriel yelled, dousing the khrave form and his mortally wounded consul in flame as he charged. And then he swung, servo-assist motors in backplate, plackart and gardbrace adding their cries to his as he pushed them for every last iota of strength.
From time immemorial, throughout the long terrors of Old Night, and from civilisation's dawn in the long-forgotten ages that had preceded it, fire and blade had been the chosen weapons of knights, of those whose duty it had been to stand against the darkness.
The khrave swerved, not just agile but pre-emptively swift, joints popping as it bent under Duriel's axe-blow. It lashed out a shadow-clawed fool. Duriel punched it
aside on his servo-arm and hewed his power axe into the khrave's thoracic skeleton. The xenos emitted a shriek that bypassed the ears and the sense cells of the skin, reverberating outwards from the primitive ganglia of his brain stem into the more sophisticated cortices that pressed around it. With a grand unfurling, the injured khrave threw him back, a wrecking ball of psychokinelic power that pushed him hard up against the ramparts. A hundred systems blinked in protest.
Grimacing in pain, he looked up, over the embattled ranks of his reserve units in the esplanade. He watched for only a moment, barely able to mist his own transhuman senses as a teleportation rift many-fold larger than any he had yet seen split the far end of the road in half. Reality inverted itself with an implosive crump. Inside became out. lire microscopic rolled outwards into massivity. The unstable rift collapsed back upon itself, folding into the warp with a loathsomely organic pop as the inhuman war machine took its first nautiloid step onto the Vaniskray.
Thought failed him.
The Titan's aspect was tantalisingly reflective. Its size varied constantly, ranging between that of an Emperor-class Battle Titan and an Imperial Knight whilst simultaneously occupying exactly the same amount of road. Its dimensions, apparently, were whatever it deigned to adopt at any given moment. Weapons fire disappeared into its shape. Numerous arms undulated from its core body. It mounted no obvious weapons systems, but Dark Angels fell before it as if struck. Their lungs stopped working. Their hearts stopped beating. Brains engineered to feel no fear short-circuited under psychic pressure. Predator turrets rotated and Malcadors turned grindingly to address this new threat from the rear, as the Vaniskray's colossal servitor guns simultaneously opened fire. The onslaught bounced harmlessly off the Titan's uncertain shape, psychic trauma throbbing from its shields like a concussive wake, and two kilometres ahead of its insertion point Duriel felt his brain stammer.
A psychic Titan.
He could never have conceived of seeing something so monstrous.
Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 13