He enjoyed hearing that sound. Vindicta was precious to him. All the engines of the battlegroup were precious to him – if they suffered harm, then his retribution would be terrible.
Lopi couldn’t wipe the smile from his face. Vindicta’s metallic laughter thrummed at the back of his head.
Chapter Eleven
Morvox heard the las-discharge first, and blink-clicked an audio copy into his helm’s scratch buffer.
Out of all the warriors in the clave, Morvox always heard things first, despite the fact his aural implants had never been properly upgraded. One day, he supposed, he’d report to the apothecarion and request the removal of his Lyman’s ear for an iron-banded replacement from the forges. Until then he used the organs he’d been gifted upon Ascension. For the time being, he was proud of his aptitude, though he knew that at some point in the future he wouldn’t be.
‘One of ours?’ Morvox voxed to Fierez.
Fierez’s helm was distorted by a bulbous mass under the left cheek: an inbuilt long-range auspex, lodged like a tumour amid the cabling of his battle-plate.
‘Negative,’ Fierez replied. ‘We are the only clave still in Secundus. All others are heading for the muster zone in Primus.’
Morvox ran a basic check on the audio recording, filtering the faint sounds through his suit’s cogitators and digesting the results.
Las-fire, concentrated bursts, several hundred signals, closing fast.
For a moment, he hesitated. He had orders to return to the access points north of Melamar Primus and join the muster for the coming tunnel assault. He was itching to follow those orders, since he knew the real fighting would soon take place there – chasing down bands of heretics in the fringe hives had become of peripheral importance.
The hesitation was only slight – four seconds, as recorded by his armour chronos.
‘We purge this, then go,’ Morvox said, gunning his chainsword into life.
The clave started moving. They strode out, going quietly and shifting into standard formation: Morvox at the apex, flanked on either side by three boltgun-wielding battle-brothers, with Sulzar and Gergiz bringing up the rear.
The chamber around them was much the same as every chamber they had fought through over the past few days – dark, cramped, stinking, decrepit. The few working lumens were covered in a layer of grime and threw out barely enough light for a mortal to see by. Ruined equipment was strewn across the narrow floors, smashed and trampled in some earlier engagement. Blast marks ran across the metal-mesh walls, the signs of las-fire or solid-round impacts.
Morvox paid his surroundings little attention. For him, the interior of Melamar Secundus had ceased to be anything other than a backdrop to a series of forgettable, dismal battles. He didn’t mind the endless gloom, or the hot air that wheezed arthritically through clogged filtration units, or the perpetual stink of human sweat and faeces, or the pools of blood on the floor, oozing gently into the overloading san-trenches. Such things were little different than his upbringing on one of Medusa’s titanic land engines – if anything, the claustrophobic, sepulchral surroundings made him feel at home.
He minded the tedium of the combat, which he knew was nothing more than a place-filler for the fighting to come. Nethata’s Guardsmen were more than capable of mopping up the resistance remaining in the twin Melamar hives; the blades of the Iron Hands, by contrast, should have been reserved for sterner tests.
‘More signals closing,’ reported Fierez, shunting a schematic of the chamber layout ahead into the clave’s internal grid. ‘Six hundred, all concentrated in the upcoming node.’
Morvox glanced at the summary display, quickly taking in all he needed to know. He strode all the while, passing from the narrow chamber into a long, semi-ruined corridor with a shattered ceiling and sewage frothing across the floor. His shoulder guards scraped against the walls on either side as he stomped through the slurry.
‘What are they firing at?’ he voxed, already assessing how best to bring the coming slaughter to a quick conclusion.
‘Each other,’ said Fierez.
The corridor terminated in a locked doorway. Long bloodstains ran down from the top of the frame to the floor. Noises of battle were clearly audible from the far side. Morvox heard a single human voice, louder than the others, roaring with anger.
He pointed his bolter at the lock mechanism.
‘Let’s get this over,’ he said, and fired.
Even before the shell had hit, he was moving.
The door exploded away, hurled through the air and into a close press of bodies beyond. Morvox followed it in, bolter in one hand, chainsword in the other. A mortal soldier stumbled into his path, blinded by flying shrapnel from the door’s implosion, and was cut down by his spinning chainsword blades. Another tried to get to his feet in front of Morvox, hurriedly bringing a lasgun to bear. Morvox backhanded him, hurling him five metres away before the man landed with the crack of breaking bones. Several more troops staggered away, covering their eyes and scrambling to get clear. Morvox loosed three rounds into their retreating backs, felling them instantly, before stalking after more.
By then the other Iron Hands were through the door. They fanned out into the chamber, laying about them with calm, methodical precision. Muzzle flare from their bolters lit up the scene ahead of them in angry flashes.
Morvox never stopped moving. He soaked up the detail of his surroundings in precise stages, killing all the while, using his bolter sparingly and cutting broad swathes with his chainsword.
The chamber was mid-sized – a refectory, by the looks of the broken steel tables and long benches scattered across the bare floor. The lumens had been smashed, plunging the place into near total darkness.
The soldiers were Shardenus regulars. They had dug in behind rows of upturned tables with their backs to the door and had been resisting incoming las-fire from the far end of the hall when they’d been disturbed. Bolts still shot out from that direction, spitting across the refectory in intermittent blazes of colour.
Morvox felt a glancing impact on his breastplate and rocked back on to his heels. He lashed out savagely with his gun-hand, crunching in the skull of a reeling mortal. Then he mag-locked his bolter and strode forwards through the lines of overturned tables and startled soldiers.
‘Hold position,’ he voxed on the tactical channel to the rest of the clave. ‘Something strange is going on here.’
More las-beams arced out through the darkness, though few were aimed at him – the whole melee had descended into confusion. Behind Morvox, the Iron Hands moved with dreadful, inexorable power, hacking and blasting their way through the hapless Shardenus soldiers with contemptuous ease. The whip-crack of las-fire was soon mingled with the wet crunch of breaking bodies and the intermittent thud of bolter fire.
Morvox strode down the length of the refectory, casually smashing aside any mortals who blundered into his path. The remaining Shardenus troops had started fleeing by then, dropping their weapons into the mire and searching frantically for some kind of refuge. A few of them wept like children, terrified by the night-black giants in their midst despite all the marks and sigils of protection carved into their suppurating flesh.
Las-beams continued to flicker out from the far end of the refectory, many of them poorly aimed. Morvox walked straight into the heart of the incoming torrent, grunting as his plate was hit by several more beams.
A lumbering figure bl
undered into his visual field: a mutant, dressed in the remnants of a Shardenus Guard uniform, running blindly away from him. He was far bigger than most of the others and was decked out in plates of loose-fitting carapace armour. In place of his right arm he had a forest of writhing, stubby growths, each ending with a curved hook.
The mutant screamed as he ran, and the sound of it somehow cut through the cacophony around him. He took several las-beams to the chest as he blundered onwards, but they seemed to fizzle out before they did any serious damage. A trail of glowing spores streamed out in his wake, shimmering with phosphorescence.
Morvox went after him, catching up quickly and hauling his chainsword back for the swing. As the blade was about to plummet down into the mutant’s back, something made him hold back.
‘For the Emperor!’ came a voice, as clear and unsullied as daylight.
Morvox stayed his hand, just in time to see a mortal dart out in front of the mutant. The man’s head was bare, and a line of blood ran down his temple. His unruly blond hair swung around his face as he shoved a lasgun right into the mutant’s distorted torso. He fired, and the point-blank blast halted the creature in its tracks, sending it reeling backwards, chest smoking. Before the man could reload, the mutant lurched back into the attack, punching out with its hook-handed arm and aiming at the man’s neck.
Had it landed, the blow would have taken the man’s head clean off. By then, though, Morvox had seen enough. He swept his chainsword round in a wide arc, carving straight through the creature’s upper body. The whirring blades dragged through the corrupted flesh, churning it up and throwing gobbets in all direction.
The mutant screamed, and Morvox jerked the blade down, tearing through ribs and organs. With a throaty cry of agony, the mutant broke into a death-spasm, flinging its tortured limbs out and shuddering in time with the rhythm of the cycling teeth of the chainsword.
Morvox wrenched the weapon free and let the mutant collapse to the ground. Then he turned to face the other one, the lone soldier with the blond hair. For a second, he let the chainsword blades whirr on – his instincts were to keep killing. In truth, that was all he ever truly wished to do.
The man’s expression halted him. It was ecstatic. His eyes, full of defiance and determination, shone in the dark like jewels. Morvox could see evidence of wounds all across his body, especially around his shoulder, where blood had seeped through bandages.
Behind that man, arranged in ranks three deep, were other fighters, all of them decked out in variants of Shardenus military uniforms with the insignia removed. A woman stood just beyond the blond-haired man. Behind her, hundreds more had taken their positions, each with a lasgun in hand. They were all staring at Morvox, everything else forgotten in the face of the giant standing before them.
‘Praise His immortal name!’ cried the blond-haired man, falling to one knee before Morvox and making the sign of the aquila.
Morvox glanced down at him, uncertain how to react. From behind him, he could hear the final sounds of butchery as the Iron Hands finished off the remaining Shardenus soldiers.
‘Who are you?’ demanded Morvox, letting his chain-sword run freely, still poised to use it.
‘I am Alend Marivo, lord,’ replied the man, his face transported with excitement, as if some long-planned scheme had just come to fruition. ‘Of the 9th Platoon, 3rd Company, 23rd Shardenus Imperial Guard. Loyal to the Throne of Terra, as are those who serve under me.’
He rose to his feet again, showing no fear of the whining chainsword held just a hand’s breadth from his face.
‘We are ready to serve, lord,’ said Marivo, looking directly at Morvox as he spoke. ‘What are your orders?’
Still Morvox hesitated. The only indigenous mortals he’d seen in the Melamar hives had been traitors or civilians, and both had been slaughtered in droves. The man before him was neither. He showed no trace of fear; only expectation.
Morvox let his chainsword gutter out. As the blades slowed, flecks of torn flesh dropped to the floor.
Morvox considered the question. He knew the scant forces under Marivo’s command would be of little consequence in the battles to come. A few hundred troops, each armed only with las-weapons, would be little more than a hindrance to the main battlegroup – their rations and supplies alone would probably outweigh any military benefit they could bring.
And yet.
‘How long have you been fighting?’ Morvox asked, trying to modify the machine-growl of his voice so it didn’t sound like a threat.
‘Since you made planetfall, lord,’ said Marivo proudly. ‘We brought down a defence tower when the airborne assault began. Since then we’ve been harrying the traitor forces, aiming to join with you, just as Valien instructed.’
‘Valien?’
‘Your agent, lord,’ said Marivo. ‘Surely you know?’
Morvox grunted, and stowed his chainsword. By then his clave had finished their work. They came to join him. At the sight of more armour-clad monsters striding through ankle-deep pools of still-steaming human gore, even Marivo swallowed.
‘What now, brother-sergeant?’ asked Fierez, barely looking at the mortals.
Morvox ignored him. He ran through the options for an unusually long time – five seconds – before reaching a conclusion.
‘You will come with us,’ said Morvox to Marivo. ‘All of you. The spearhead is in the Primus hive. You will be given your orders, and will deploy accordingly.’
The Guardsman nodded. His eagerness was palpable.
‘By your command,’ he said. ‘We wish to serve again, all of us.’
Morvox regarded Marivo coolly. Once, perhaps, he would have found such dedication to duty admirable. He had served with mortals before, and had witnessed great heroism as well as abject wretchedness. Back then, he had felt that heroism required some kind of reward, some kind of encouragement. In a darkening galaxy, the mass of humanity needed support as well as censure. To abandon them, to use them for some greater purpose; that had seemed careless at the least, callous at the worst.
Morvox found he could no longer summon up such thoughts. As he looked at Marivo, he saw only the pathetic eagerness, the naivety, the lack of power. The man looked too fragile, too weak. Too fleshy.
A sensation like an itch broke out across the back of his neck.
‘You will do your duty,’ Morvox said, and turned away.
Nethata glanced at the auspex readings, and allowed himself a glimmer of satisfaction.
‘Maintain course,’ he voxed to Malevolentia’s commander. ‘We have them now.’
Since close-range hostilities had broken out, Nethata had withdrawn from the main turret and hunkered down with the rest of the tank’s crew in the main command unit. Malevolentia had been kitted out with high-gain scanner equipment, giving him an overview of the entire warzone. He and Heriat pored over it, studying flickering motes on rotating hololiths, plotting ingress routes, marking weaknesses in the ever-extending supply lines.
‘We are still some distance from Rauth’s coordinates,’ said Heriat. His voice was even – he was just stating the fact.
‘I know that, Slavo,’ said Nethata, affecting unconcern.
Even as he spoke, he recognised how much of a strain it put on him to disobey a direct order.
No, that was not right. He was disobeying nothing, and the relationship between Rauth and the Guard was not entirely simple. The Adeptus Astartes was a separate branch of the Imperial military machine, a vast, sprawling force of trillions that encompassed a million worlds and battlefields. The Guard did not answer to them, and they did not answer to the Guard. Only convention and expedience made Rauth the overall commander of the Shardenus operation; the vast majority of Territo’s resources owed their direct allegiance to Nethata.
And so it was perfectly within his rights to take his time responding to Rauth’s summons. Nethata had fr
eedom of manoeuvre, the right to exercise his judgement, a duty of care over his men.
The Ferik were his men. In the normal run of things he looked out for them – ensured they got their supplies in decent time, were well-equipped and supported, didn’t end up being driven into useless dead ends. He had stood by long enough while Rauth had herded whole companies of prime soldiery into ruinous, bloody gunfights. He’d seen the casualty rates from the Melamar front, and they had stuck in his gullet.
The tank battalions were different. Nethata had maintained full control over them, just as he had with the long-range artillery pieces. They were his weapons, ones over which the Iron Hands, now they were fully occupied with spire-fighting, could not easily lay claim.
So he didn’t disobey; not quite. He just took his time in responding. A warzone was a complicated place, and the targets before him just kept lining up.
Malevolentia rocked as its enormous cannon fired. Nethata didn’t need to look at the tactical display to know how devastating the impact would be. The enemy didn’t possess tanks of the same calibre, though they had plenty of units capable of troubling the rest of Territo’s convoy. In the broken wasteland between the hives, the fighting had become thick and difficult.
‘The Warhounds are leaving,’ said Heriat.
Nethata only half-listened, still held rapt by the dancing lights over the hololith pillar. He could see his forces, company by company, forcing their way north alongside the burning flanks of Melamar Primus. In the distance, even more immense, were the walls of the first Axis hive. Beyond that, out of range of all useful sensor readings, was the Capitolis, the ultimate target.
‘This is the right approach,’ said Nethata, talking to himself. ‘Rauth would see it too, were he not so pig-headed.’
Shardenus Prime was, essentially, a ring of subordinate spires arranged around the Capitolis in the centre. Only one element of that protective circle had been broken – both Melamar conurbations were shattered and smouldering. Nethata could see that a direct approach across the wasteland in such conditions would be a mistake of an elementary nature. An invading army, out in the open, would find itself sandwiched between the huge guns mounted on the Capitolis walls and supporting fire from the unharmed Axis, Hierat, Ceres, Temnos and Phelox hives. Even the mighty Iron Hands would suffer in that scenario.
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