The Stormbird began to shake around them as the pilot decreased the shuttle’s speed in preparation for the drop. The assault doors opened and the red lights positioned all through the interior of the Stormbird turned green.
A continuous ringing tone sounded over the inter-vox: the signal to jump.
Zahariel was first down the ramp and he felt the air screaming around him, alongside the sudden feeling of weightlessness in the split-second before gravity caught hold of him and he activated his jump pack to compensate. Eliath, Attias, Hadariel and the others were right behind him, exhaust flares spreading from their packs like fiery wings as they descended towards the mining station five hundred metres below.
He missed Nemiel’s presence for a moment, but pushed such thoughts from his mind as he saw the dusty hardpan rushing up towards him.
It was time for war, time to let the Dark Angels fly.
AS THE ANGELS descended, they were not met by anti-aircraft fire from ground-based batteries, or entrenched and heavily armed defenders. Their drop was unopposed, and Zahariel was thankful for such small mercies, remembering far worse training drops where live ammunition had been used to make things more ‘interesting’.
They made their landing in the area of open scrub in good order.
Having landed, the Dark Angels fanned out, advancing on the mining station at One Zeta Five in a loose skirmish line, helmets down and weapons at the ready. At first sight, it was as though they had entered a ghost town. The station was eerily quiet, though Zahariel’s senses were alert to the growling psychic presence buzzing at the edge of perception.
A ridge of high cliffs rose above the station to the west, but otherwise its perimeter was surrounded by open desert on three sides. In the centre of station, over the minehead, there was the enormous drum of the cable-winch, designed to bring the miners up and down to the angled mineshaft that ran at a forty-five degree angle into the ground, as well as raising the ore they had mined to the surface. In turn, it was surrounded by a ramshackle collection of prefabricated huts, and the barracks used as sleeping quarters for the miners.
Wheeled ore-bins were dotted throughout the station, some overturned with their cargo spilled out. As Zahariel and his men moved from the outskirts of the settlement towards the admin buildings in the immediate vicinity of the minehead, they found all the intervening huts and barracks empty. One Zeta Five seemed to be deserted. The only sound Zahariel could hear was the terse back-and-forth of inter-squad vox. Beyond that, the entire area was silent.
‘There’s something here,’ he heard Hadariel say. ‘I can feel it.’
‘I agree,’ replied Zahariel. ‘There should be animal sounds, but all I can hear is silence. There’s something here and its frightened away the local fauna.’
Using the same channel, Zahariel heard Hadariel link comms with the squads on the other side of the station.
‘Hadariel to the Lion. Any sign of the enemy?’
‘Nothing so far,’ came the terse reply. ‘I can see their leavings, though.’
There was blood on the sand.
In some places it had hit the ground in small scattered droplets, in others it took the form of larger puddles, staining the soil and already starting to stink in the midday heat.
Here and there, Zahariel could see objects scattered around their advance.
Discarded auto-weapons, a las-torch, a broken comms-unit, detonator cord: all left lying in the sand. Zahariel glanced up at the sky, where the Stormbirds turned in wide and endlessly repeating circles, thousands of metres above them.
Zahariel suddenly became aware of a rising and repulsive odour like the slaughterhouse smell of rancid blood mixed with the cloying sickly sweet stench of rotten fruit.
He tried to shout a warning, but it was too late.
The prefabricated metal of the building nearest Attias ruptured as something massively powerful tore through it and leapt to the attack. Zahariel saw a glimpse of scales, vertically pupilled eyes and a fanged mouth opening wide.
The creature spat something in Attias’s face and his helmet erupted in hissing smoke as though doused with acid. It leapt upon the stricken warrior, its whip-thin arms wrapping around Attias as it tore at him with razor claws that sliced open its victim’s power armour like tinfoil.
It wrapped its forearms around Attias’s torso and there was a wet, awful sound as dozens of retractable claws hidden along the creature’s limbs emerged from inside muscular sheaths and stabbed through the warrior’s armour.
Attias dropped, his blood staining the sand as the monster leapt away, its strangely jointed legs propelling it over the rough terrain at an incredible speed.
Bolter rounds chased it, exploding against the buildings of the mining settlement, but failing to hit their target.
Zahariel watched as the beast vanished from sight. There was something wrong in the way it had moved, its knees and ankles flexing at peculiar angles.
More gunfire erupted from around the compound and frantic cries came over the vox as more of the Dark Angel squads came under attack.
Choking back a cry of rage, Zahariel rushed to the side of his fallen comrade.
Attias’s helmet was a smoking ruin, the stench of scorched metal and skin sickening, even filtered through the auto-senses of Zahariel’s armour. Attias writhed in agony, and Zahariel fought to tear his helmet free. The helmet’s armour clasps had burned through, and Zahariel had no choice but to wrench the smouldering armour from his friend’s head.
The helmet came free from the armoured gorget and Attias screamed as the skin of his face came with it, ropes of flesh drooling like molten rubber from the remains of his helm.
‘Get back!’ cried the squad’s Apothecary, pushing Zahariel from his comrade’s convulsing body. The Apothecary went to work, the hissing tubes, needles and dispensers of his narthecium gauntlet the best chance of ensuring Attias’s survival.
Zahariel stepped away, horrified at the bloody mess where his friend’s face used to be.
Hadariel pulled him away. ‘Leave the Apothecary to his ministrations. We have work to do.’
Eliath stood next to Zahariel and said, ‘By the Lion, I’ve never seen the like.’
Zahariel nodded in agreement and slapped his hand on the heavy bolter his friend carried. ‘Keep your weapon ready, brother. These things move fast.’
‘What are they?’ asked Eliath. ‘I thought this was a human world.’
‘That was our mistake,’ replied Zahariel as more gunfire and vox-chatter cut through the shock of Attias’s wounding.
‘Hostile contact,’ reported another squad sergeant, ‘Reptilian beasts. Came out of nowhere. Fast moving, but I think we wounded it. One dead. Moving on.’
‘Understood,’ said the Lion. ‘Message understood. All units continue to the centre of the settlement.’
THE STRANGE REPTILIAN beast attacked twice more, each time emerging from hiding to attack with unnatural speed and ferocity. Each time the monsters attacked, they would draw blood, but no more warriors fell to their ambushes, though many were forced to discard portions of armour as the xeno creatures’ acid eructations melted their Mark IV plate.
The Astartes pushed deeper into the settlement, bolters chattering as they methodically advanced in an overlapping formation, one squad moving forward as another covered it.
The attacks grew more frequent as they drew nearer their objective, and as they gained the inner reaches of the settlement, Zahariel saw that the creatures had gathered in a mass of rippling, scaled bodies before the entrance to the mineshaft.
Zahariel felt his gorge rise at the sight of such unnatural creatures, their anatomy twisted so far from the human ideal that he could think of no classification of form to assign them. Each limb was multi-jointed and appeared to move and rotate on a number of different axes. Their bodies were sinuous and rippled with iridescent scales that were translucent and somehow ghostly, as though their bodies were not quite… real.
‘What are they?’ asked Elia
th.
‘Unclean xenos creatures,’ answered Hadariel.
Gunfire sounded from the three open sides of the settlement, and Zahariel saw the Lion emerge from behind a tall structure of rusted sheet metal. Once again, he was struck by his primarch’s physicality as he led the warriors of the Dark Angels from the front, his sword raised and the fury of battle in his eyes.
No sooner had Lion El’Jonson appeared than the xenos creatures set up a terrible keening cry, though whether this was in fear or anticipation, Zahariel could not say.
They surged forward in a boiling tide of scales and claws, and the Dark Angels charged to meet them.
Bolters blazed and exploded wetly inside the creatures. Each wounded creature fell to the sand and began dissolving into a pool of glassy, viscous fluid.
The two foes met in a storm of blades and claws. Zahariel was face to face with a screeching creature with an elongated head and rippling, coloured eyes with vertical slits. It hissed and bit at him with such speed that its first attack nearly took his head off.
He leapt back and fired into the creature’s belly, the bolt passing through before detonating. Wounded, the creature slashed at him with its claws and spat a gobbet of acid mucus towards him. He swayed aside from the acid, but took the brunt of the monster’s claws across his chest.
Zahariel cried out as its claws seemed to pass through his armour to slice the meat and muscle of his chest. The pain was intense and cold, and he gasped at the suddenness of it.
In the instant of contact he recalled the soul-numbing chill he had felt in the forests of Endriago just before he had encountered the Watchers in the Dark. This beast was just as unnatural as whatever the Watchers had been set to guard, and he knew with utter clarity that they were not simply another form of xeno creature, but something infinitely more dangerous.
Zahariel dropped his bolter and drew the sword fashioned from the Lion of Endriago’s tooth. The monster came at him again. He swept his sword through the creature’s slashing limb, and stepped in to cut upwards into its chest, the keen blade slicing the insubstantial meat of its body like a sopping cloud.
For all their speed and ferocity, the ghost-like monsters could not hope to stand against the relentless stoicism of the Dark Angels, who closed the noose of their warrior circles and slaughtered them without mercy.
Zahariel watched the Lion fight his way through the monsters as though possessed with a killing fury beyond imagining. His sword clove through the creatures, turning half a dozen to wet piles of jelly-like fluid with every blow.
Nemiel fought alongside the Lion, his skill nowhere near the sublime majesty of the primarch, yet no less determined. His cousin was a fine warrior and, beside the Lion, he looked every inch the hero he was.
Within moments of the battle starting, it was over, and the last of the creatures were despatched. Where before the mining settlement had rung to the sounds of bolters and screaming chainswords, silence now fell as the Dark Angels regrouped.
‘Secure the site,’ said the Lion as the last of the monsters was destroyed. ‘I want that Stormbird with Brother-Librarian Israfael’s weapon on the ground in two minutes.’
‘Where are we going next?’ asked Chapter Master Hadariel.
The Lion pointed to the yawning chasm of the mine-shaft that plunged steeply into the flanks of the cliffs.
‘Underground,’ said the Lion. ‘The enemy is beneath us.’
RHIANNA SOREL HAD been afraid on many occasions, but the fear that had gripped her since her abduction from the streets of Shaloul was like nothing she had ever known before.
When the soporific effect of the flowers had worn off, she had found herself bound and blindfolded as she was taken to some unknown destination, carried in a conveyance of some comfort into the searing hot deserts around the city.
Their destination had been a mystery, for her captors said nothing on their journey, but had fed and watered her over her protests. Wherever they were taking her and for whatever purpose, they clearly wanted her alive and healthy when they got there.
Her only method of telling the passage of time was that the heat of the day had diminished and that the night was cool and silent. She could hear footfalls around the vehicle she travelled in and the creak of its wheels, but the only sounds beyond that were the soft cries of the wind over the grainy sand.
Despite herself, she had slept, and upon awakening had been carried from her conveyance by a number of people. She wept as she feared the touch of the creatures she had seen wearing the masks during the festival of lights, but her bearers appeared to be human, inasmuch as they sweated and grunted like humans as they bore her onwards.
Her blindfold had slipped and she had caught sight of prefabricated metal structures, like those used to house workers in mining or agricultural settlements. Strange sounds surrounded her, odd shuffling movements that sounded like footsteps, but which had an odd, off-kilter rhythm that made her think of the strange creatures once more.
Her journey had continued underground, the cool, musty air of a cavernous passage unmistakable. A strange metallic taste hovered in the air, and an electric tension crackled in her hair and from the jewellery she still wore.
The metallic reek grew more powerful, the stink of it filling her nostrils, and she gagged on the cloth in her mouth. She had kept her eyes screwed tightly shut as her captors carried her deeper and deeper into the earth, terrified of what she might see if she attempted to discover where they were.
Then followed a series of transfers, as she had been handed reverently from one set of arms to another, until she had been laid against an upright slab of what felt like smooth stone.
She stood with her back to the slab of stone, the sound of a slow and terrible heartbeat booming in the air, as though she were trapped in the ribcage of some enormous beast. Her hands were untied, though they had been secured to the stone slab by some metallic clamps fixed with sliding bolts.
Hands gently cradled her face, and she shuddered at the touch.
She felt her blindfold being removed and blinked in the sudden light.
Before her, she saw a man in a crimson robe with a mask of gold, expressionless and unknowable, on his face.
‘Dusan?’ she asked, more in hope than in any expectation of being right.
‘Yes,’ said the masked man. ‘It is me you speak with.’
Even in this nightmarish situation it made her want to cry to hear a familiar voice.
‘Please,’ she cried. ‘What are you doing? Let me go, please.’
‘No, that cannot be,’ said Dusan. ‘You are to become the Melachim, a vessel for the ancient ones who dwell behind the veil. You will bring us victory against the unclean ones.’
‘What are you talking about? This doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Not to you,’ agreed Dusan. ‘You are godless people and this is a godly act.’
‘Your god?’ said Rhianna. ‘Please, let me go. I promise I won’t say anything.’
‘You lie with your words,’ said Dusan neutrally. ‘It is the way with your people.’
‘No!’ shouted Rhianna. ‘I promise.’
‘It makes no difference now. Most of your people are dead and the rest must soon follow when you host the Melachim. As I said, there will be pain, and for that I am sorry.’
‘What are you going to do to me?’
Though she could not see his face, Rhianna had the distinct impression that Dusan was smiling behind the immobile surface of his mask.
‘We are going to defile you,’ he said, pointing upwards. ‘Your impure flesh will be home to one of our angels.’
She followed his gaze and wept tears of blood as she saw the angel of the Saroshi.
TWENTY-THREE
THE DARKNESS OF the mineshaft was no obstacle to the Dark Angels, their armour senses easily compensating for the utter blackness beneath the cliffs. Each step took them deeper into the planet’s surface and brought retribution for all the deaths suffered at the hands of
the Saroshi treachery closer.
Zahariel felt the psychic power beneath the earth as an actinic tang in the roof of his mouth, an unpleasant taste of rancid meat and corruption. He glanced over at Brother-Librarian Israfael and saw that he too suffered the vile reek of the warp.
Israfael’s Stormbird had touched down barely moments after the Lion’s order had been issued, a team of servitors and Mechanicum adepts helping to deploy the modified cyclonic warhead from the aircraft’s interior.
Zahariel had been reminded of the bomb secreted in the Saroshi shuttle when he had first seen the device. It resembled an ovoid cylinder strapped to a hovering gurney with chain link restraints. Numerous wires and copper-plated tubes surrounded the device, and Zahariel could plainly see why it could not have been dropped from the air.
Without any words spoken, they had set off into the depths of the world, the Lion leading the way as the angels began their descent.
The going was easy, and Zahariel wondered what the Saroshi were doing beneath the world. Mistress Argenta had spoken of creatures being dragged from the empyrean and given material form, and though such things sounded like the dark nightmares of madmen and lunatics, the things he had seen on the surface had made him rethink that comforting delusion.
If such things were possible, what other kinds of creature might lurk in the depths of the warp? What manner of powers might yet exist there, of which humanity was not yet aware?
Their path wound deeper and deeper into the ground, and the Dark Angels travelled in silence, each warrior wrapped in a cocoon of his own thoughts. Zahariel kept company with his worries that an irreparable gulf had opened between Luther and the Lion, for the two warriors were normally inseparable, yet here was the Lion going into battle without his brother.
Zahariel had told no one of what Luther had told him in the moments before the Saroshi bomb had activated, and he feared for what the future might hold if that fact came to light. Indeed, it might have already come to the Lion’s notice, for little escaped his understanding.
He forced such gloomy thoughts from his mind as the Lion raised his hand to indicate a halt. The Lion sniffed the air and nodded.
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