Wrath of Iron

by Chris Wraight

  The mortals they were up against had changed since the first days of combat. On the outer walls and in the upper levels of Melamar Primus the defenders of Shardenus had been almost fully human –faint mutation here and there had done little to break the pattern. Down in the tunnels, the full extent of the city’s corruption was becoming apparent. Some men had been turned into giants, bursting from their armour in folds of fleshy muscle. Others had been elongated, or given writhing tentacles instead of arms. Morvox had seen mutants with grotesquely enlarged jaws, or bulbous eyes like insects, or hooked claws dripping with luminous venom. In the flickering dark, lit by explosions and las-flares, they looked like the jumbled dreams of some insane vivisectionist.

  The mutants felt no fear. They kept advancing forwards their attackers in steady, fearless waves. Some of them still carried lasguns, and fired them coolly and carefully, aiming for armour-joints and tank-tracks. Others wielded a bizarre array of alternative weapons – heavy multi-barrelled projectile guns, cutting blades like meat cleavers, whips studded with spiked balls of iron. Their eyes, nostrils and mouths glowed with witchlight, as if they were illuminated from within by vials of corpse-gas. Their stretched-tight skin was white, like porcelain, and laced with scars and sores. Some went helmetless, exposing bizarre tattoos and piercings across their twisted faces.

  Morvox jabbed his chainsword into the gut of an oncoming mutant. He barely had time to watch the whirling blades carve their way through the plate armour before he’d swung his fist round and unleashed another bolt into the neck of an onrushing cultist. Then he withdrew the blade and lashed it upwards, just in time to meet the leap of a snake-headed warrior in close-fitting carapace armour. Every jab, parry or shot ended the tortured existence of another corrupted soul.

  Progress down the tunnels ground to a crawl. The initial burst through the gates had been met by heavy return fire from the barricades beyond. The defenders had been well prepared and supplied with banks of fixed artillery. The Iron Hands had crashed through the first series of barricades, but more lines of defence existed beyond that, banked up every five hundred metres down the long transit route. The tunnels were huge, and the main routes were interconnected by many dozens of service tunnels, allowing bands of the enemy to loop back round and attack the flanks of the invading army.

  Rauth’s elite forces cared nothing for that. The mortals were capable of soaking up the mutants’ counter-assaults, even if it meant them dying in swathes. The Iron Hands’ principal target was the far end of the tunnel, still kilometres away – the underground gates to the Capitolis. Enemy troops surged through that open portal, clogging up the tunnels with fresh ranks of horrors and replacing those who died under loyalist blades.

  Just as they had done since the beginning of the campaign, the Iron Hands pressed on remorselessly towards that goal, heedless of anything else until the task was complete. Each clave worked independently, strung out across the full width of the tunnel, carving deep paths through the lines of defenders and leaving carnage in their wake.

  Morvox strode onwards, kicking out with his armoured boot and shattering the chestplate of a struggling mutant on the ground. A brief space opened up before him, and he took the opportunity to make a long-range shot, taking the head off a lascannon operator working nearly fifty metres distant. An eyeless horror sprang up at him from the shifting shadows, screaming with inhuman bloodlust and scrabbling up at his helm. He disembowelled it with a casual sweep of his chainsword before jerking the weapon back round to punch through the torso of a raging mutant with lashing flails for arms.

  ‘Neverborn,’ voxed Fierez in warning, though his voice was barely audible over the whirr of his blades.

  Morvox nodded, dispatching a dog-faced mutant with a bolter round and smashing another aside with the butt of his weapon. He’d already felt the same thing – a tang of anticipation at the back of his mouth, as if the saliva were souring. The hairs on his remaining flesh had risen, and his secondary heart had broken into a steady beat.

  ‘Stand fast,’ he voxed on the command channel. ‘We take them together.’

  He’d barely finished speaking when the first of them appeared. It came down the tunnels like a howling wind, screeching as it came. Then more emerged, wheeling and diving like raptors. They didn’t register as targets on Morvox’s helm display – just patches of distortion that his instruments couldn’t track.

  His real eyes could see them, though. He saw their pale limbs thrash through the darkness, and he saw their long hair stream out behind their slender faces. He saw their eyes, glistening like jewels, and their long fangs flashing with silver light.

  They looked fragile. For all the latent horror they carried in their wake, they looked as if they’d snap clean apart in the face of a well-aimed blade stroke.

  Morvox knew how dangerous that impression was. The ephemeral presences were only half corporeal – their true nature resided in the miasma of the warp. They were daemons: immortal intelligences born from the liquid tumult of mortal emotions. Their temporary physical form could be harmed but their essence could never be destroyed, no more than the thoughts and desires that gave birth to them could be destroyed. They were immortal, eternal, spawned in the darkest recesses of the human imagination and imbued with the malice of infinite invention.

  They hurled themselves out of the tunnels, wailing and laughing with fractured voices. Dozens of them had come, some holding hands like mortal children, others spiralling through the air with the grace of acrobats.

  The daemons drove the mortals mad. Whether traitor or loyalist, the effects were much the same – delirium, screaming, dislocated laughter, paralysis, uncontrollable spasms. Their spoor was intoxicating, maddening, wholly irresistible and utterly hateful. Men ripped their visors from their faces as the daemons swooped towards them, and the expressions on their faces were both rapt and horrified.

  Morvox watched the neverborn swoop and whirl, and felt none of that. The human capacities that would once have made him weak before such monsters had long since bled away. He could no longer suffer from the lusts and desires that they preyed on, nor could he feel the true impact of their baleful presence on his psyche. To the extent he felt anything towards them, it was disgust. They were the embodiment of everything his Chapter loathed – flesh, seductive and soft, coursing with rich, warp-spun blood and flushed with the promise of forbidden pleasures.

  ‘Bring them down,’ he ordered, tracking the nearest of them with his bolter and opening fire.

  Khadi felt like screaming. She’d been screaming for real just a few minutes ago, yelling out her devotion to the Emperor like she’d never doubted anything about Him, His angels or His Imperium in her short life. Her fists had been up in the air like all the rest of them, clenched tight and ready for use in what was to come.

  Then the doors had opened, and hell had come through them.

  She’d run to start with, jostling with the others in Marivo’s unit, anxious to get to the front quickly and bring her weapon to bear. Everyone around her had been the same – bullish, eager, pumped with aggression and bravado and fragile confidence.

  She’d seen Marivo go first. He’d always been the keenest and the fastest. The encounter with the Iron Hands had reinforced his world view, restoring the confidence that had been briefly knocked by his injuries and the slaughter of the Warhawks. He’d bellowed with defiance, holding his lasgun in one hand while sprinting forwards with the rest.

  She’d stayed close behind him all the way in. The rousing words of the black-armoured giant had still been echoing in her mind back then. If she’d been a bit more wary, a bit more experienced, she might have guessed that she’d been manipulated, and that her battle-mania was at least partly induced, but the whole embarkation hall had been roused into a frenzy – thousands of soldiers, all of them desperate for nothing but killing, and that had a powerful effect.

  So she’d pushed herself as
hard as anyone, maintaining her position in the company near the front, watching for the first sign of action with anticipation.

  It was the noise that had got to her first. In the confines of the tunnels, the din had been thunderous. The Iron Hands had crossed the threshold first, and the crash of their massive weapons unloading had sent a wave of ear-ripping energy slamming around the hall. Then the first ranks of mortal troops had charged through the breach, adding blinding volleys of las-fire. By the time the tanks had ground their way to the threshold, things had got truly deafening. Huge barrels had opened up in concert, blazing and thundering and filling the air with a choking smog of bitter smoke.

  Still she’d run, coughing and stumbling and trying to keep her weapon primed for use. The gates had drawn nearer, vast and intimidating, looking even more fearful as flames from earlier explosions licked up the huge columns on either side of them. She’d seen men go down around her, tripping and losing their precarious footing in the headlong rush. Those men had been trampled into the ferrocrete by the ranks coming behind them who could not have stopped running even if they’d wanted to. The entire army, company by company, had swept its way into the tunnels, and its dreadful momentum was by then utterly unstoppable.

  She nearly screamed first when the Warhounds unleashed their weapons. The report of the first Titan’s colossal arm-mounted guns lashed around the echoing chamber, and it felt like the entire hive spire was rocking on its foundations. Then the next one fired, and then the third – huge, blistering columns of preternatural energy, lighting up the eternal gloom of Shardenus’s underworld like the blaze of starship engines.

  She risked a quick look over her shoulder to see the Warhounds striding into battle. Seeing them in motion astonished her – awkward, tilting, stalking along like the daemons of legend and rumour, only they were daemons of iron and adamantium and as tall as hab-blocks.

  Khadi told herself then that they were on her side, that their anger was directed at the enemy, that their machine souls were blessed and sanctified by the Immortal Emperor and were therefore no threat to her. Still, they made her blood chill.

  She turned back, frantically trying to keep her place amid the rush and roar of the charging army. When her company gained the line of the broken gates she almost didn’t notice – her ears were ringing from the noise and her vision was blurred and streaked from the array of flashes, flares and explosions.

  ‘For the Emperor!’ someone cried, possibly Marivo. Then they broke across the barrier.

  Khadi nearly fell while clambering across the twisted and jutting mess of ironwork. She nearly lost her grip on her lasgun as she pushed her way past the burning remains of a troop carrier, its tracks still grinding even after the chassis had been turned into an empty shell of molten slag. She nearly broke her right leg falling down the steep drop on the far side, down into the pits where the grav-trains had once plied their ceaseless rotary journeys, and nearly blinded herself staring straight into the site of an incendiary detonation just metres away.

  She felt her heart hammering and her throat constrict. She felt her panic return, stiffening up her limbs and making her gorge rise and her pulse race.

  Ahead of her, the tunnels yawned away into the far distance, huge and criss-crossed with bright lines of tracer fire. Soldiers swarmed across the base of them like insects. The mass of men stretched from side to side of the enormous space, carpeting it in a sheet of glinting helmets. Rockets, mortars and lascannon blasts arced overhead, hurled down into the depths of the tunnels by the slowly advancing tank columns. Every so often the Warhounds would fire, and eye-watering bursts of energy would lance overhead, briefly outshining all else.

  Khadi forced herself to concentrate, to keep her feet, to maintain position. From far ahead she could hear the volume of screaming and shouting getting louder. Bolter rounds thudded in constant streams, drowning out the whisper-quiet discharge of the thousands of lasguns.

  Her mistake was to look up, out beyond the crash and press of battle and into the high vaults of the transit tunnel.

  Up there, high above the clash of mortal arms, things were in the air. They swooped down from the roof, laughing with voices like the massed shrieks of animals. Khadi caught glimpses of purple – like long cloaks rippling in the wind. She saw pale limbs flashing in the dark, far too long for mortal limbs. She saw curved scimitars, and long claws snapping.

  One of them looked at her. One of them, high up, sweeping over the battlefield like a twisted goddess of nightmarish legend, locked eyes with her for the briefest microsecond.

  In that moment, barely more than a thought-space long, Khadi saw what manner of creatures dwelt in the underworld of Shardenus.

  Then she screamed for real. She screamed until her throat was hoarse, dropping her weapon and burying her face into the slime and stink of the ground beneath her. She forgot everything around her. Her hands shot out, and she clawed at the ground, as if somehow she could burrow deeper and escape the terror.

  Around her, men did the same. She could hear them – weeping, raging, crying out like children.

  Dimly, like a memory of a dream, she heard Marivo’s voice shouting something out. He was still on his feet, then.

  It didn’t matter. She’d seen the nature of the enemy. She’d seen what was waiting for them. She’d seen the first fragments of the nightmare in the Capitolis coming for them.

  After that, nothing mattered at all.

  Clave Arx opened up with its bolters, blazing out across the darkness of the tunnels. All across the battlefield, the other claves did the same, letting rip with tight volleys of bolter rounds. For a few scant seconds, the daemons danced their way through the hurricane of projectiles, weaving around the lines of fire with staggering agility and poise. Some sped off into the heights, shooting skywards like loosed rockets.

  Others hurtled earthwards, spinning and tumbling into range with smooth, careless smiles on their deadly faces. They crashed to earth, rolling and skidding amongst the grappling armies and scattering men in all directions as they landed. Then the screaming began in earnest.

  ‘That one,’ said Morvox, breaking into a run towards the nearest fallen daemon and stowing his bolter. From long experience, he knew that blades would cut deeper than bolts.

  As one, the clave charged towards it. The daemon rose from the ground to meet them, hurling the broken bodies of mortal troops away from it with casual, whiplash movements. Blood sprayed after the tumbling corpses, fizzing hot and trailing with purple smoke.

  The daemon laughed. It was taller than the mortal men around it, shaped in the likeness of a human woman but with an unearthly purple sheen running across its skin. Warp essence flickered across its lilac flesh like quick-

  silver, catching the light and refracting it dazzlingly.

  It shouldn’t have been beautiful. Its legs were bent backwards like an animal’s and its arms terminated in huge, crab-like claws. Its long, straggling hair moved of its own accord, as if ruffled by the winds of unseen worlds. Its face was stretched into a thin, grotesque parody of a mortal woman’s beauty. Blood ran down its chin, spilling over the ornate armour that clung to its otherwise naked body.

  And yet it was beautiful. Even Morvox, elevated into an existence of pure violence, could sense that. The neverborn had been created from desire, and desire still lingered over it like the stench of death on a corpse.

  As he ran towards it, the daemon ripped the entrails free of the last of the mortal soldiers it had burst in amongst. The man, still alive and impaled on its extended claw, arched his back and cried out in agony before dropping heavily back to the ground. The daemon licked a length of stringy gore from its claw, turned to the approaching Space Marines, and grinned.

  Fierez got into range first. He fired a series of rounds from his bolter while still charging, each of them perfectly aimed at the creature’s head and body.

  The daemon
evaded the bolts, flickering between them like a broken vid-pict image. It waited for Fierez to come to it, grinning all the while and opening its claws. The Iron Hand mag-locked his bolter, still running, and drew his power sword. The blade ignited immediately as the disruptor roared into life.

  Then he stopped, dead, arms poised for a blow that never came. Purple flames rippled across his armour, pooling in the joints and bursting out through his helm lenses. The daemon leapt atop him, squatting obscenely on the Space Marine’s static shoulders. With a theatrical flourish, it plunged its claw down, cracking open Fierez’s helm and burrowing deep within.

  A flash of aether-born light shot out, sweeping from the epicentre like the blast-wave from a void explosion. Fierez’s armour shattered, exposing both metal and muscle beneath.

  By then Morvox was in range, and he leapt towards the creature as bolter fire from his battle-brothers slammed out, pursuing the daemon as it bounded away from Fierez’s tottering form. The daemon skipped through the lines of fire, shifting in and out of focus as it danced around the lethal torrent.

  ‘Blades!’ roared Morvox.

  He would be next. He was closest, and fastest. The daemon knew it too, and looked back at him to gauge his mettle.

  For a split second, they locked eyes. The daemon’s were dark, like pools into the void. Morvox’s were semi-bionic and ringed with metal. Neither were remotely human.

  Then the daemon blew him a kiss, somersaulted high into the air, and swept down towards him with the light of killing in its ethereal face.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Valien heard the mortal’s whimper before he saw him. He crouched down, stilling his own breathing, letting his aural augmetics do the hard work for him.

  Twenty metres away, stationary, alone. Easy prey.