‘For the Emperor!’ roared Morvox, giving in to the urge to cry out, to vent his fury and his violence. Once unleashed, the dam-break of emotion could not be pulled back. The long repression of his animal spirits had done nothing to degrade the primal fury he was capable of – it had only isolated it, smothering it with layers of cold, calculating restraint. Now that it had gone, his wrath rose up, choking in his gorge. He could feel his body respond strongly, spiked with a rush of adrenaline and combat-stimms. The urge to slay was so strong that he felt that his hearts would burst from it.
Horrors came down at him, careering down the stairwell with fangs drawn and eyes glistening. A grotesque mutant, its stomachs spilling open with writhing lengths of sinew-flails, barrelled into his path bearing a force-hammer. Morvox beheaded it with a vicious sweep of his chainblade and kicked its body away, barely breaking stride.
Snake-faced figures leapt from the distant walls, sailing through the hazy atmosphere on gauzy membranes, spitting venom as they came. Morvox charged into them as they landed, firing from his bolter with tight precision. Three went down before he came in blade-range, each one taken out with head-shots. Before the skull-fragments had hit the ground he was among the others, punching the chainsword out and dragging it round in huge, unstoppable arcs. Blood and viscera surrounded him like a holy aura, flying high into the clammy air as his limbs moved.
His clave were equally lethal. The Iron Hands powered upwards, sprinting forwards, crashing through resistance with blunt, brutal force, pivoting on heels and bringing weapons into contact with crushing, shuddering violence. They slammed into knots of squealing mutants, cracking them open, hurling them apart and dealing death with savage purity.
But mutants were not the worst of the dangers under the arches of the soaring Capitolis. The spire had been steeped in the baleful powers of the warp, and everything within it sang with hatred, malice and madness. Huge flagstones cracked and disintegrated with no warning, opening up chasms and hurling warriors down into hidden depths. Sorcerous flames blazed out of gargoyle-faces, catching even on ceramite armour and raging across it. Translucent creatures, studded with blood-rimmed eyes and curtains of flesh, sprang down from hidden caches between the soaring pillars, careering through the gore-streaked air and clamping on to the facemasks of warriors with hooked fingers. The winding core of the Capitolis had been turned into a maelstrom of spines, hooks, barbs, flails and toxins.
Morvox ran on, leaping over a rearing creature with glowing eyes, crushing its face with his boot. He spun around, unleashing a burst of rounds into the stomach of a lurching monster with six lashing arms before plunging his chainsword deep into its stinking folds of blubber.
‘Maintain speed!’ roared Khatir from far up ahead, his voice resounding strangely from the warped architecture. ‘Purge the unclean! Slay them all!’
Morvox didn’t need to be told. Every Iron Hand sprinted onwards, thundering through the obstacles ahead. Whenever one was felled, another took his place. As inexorable as the workings of some giant, many-sectioned machine, the sons of Manus lashed, crunched, crushed and cut their way higher, ever higher, into the screaming heart of darkness ahead.
And as they climbed, the broken soul of Shardenus responded. Hurtling down from the living domes of glass and adamantium, wailing with joy and fury and wheeling high above the shambling press of mutants, the daemons came, and in their wake came terror as pure, hard and eternal as diamonds.
‘Fire!’ cried Heriat, shouting through the vox as if that could somehow make the shells strike home stronger. ‘Fire at will! Bring them down!’
All along the line, a hundred Leman Russ tanks opened up, and the wasteland disappeared in a huge plume of dirty smoke. A fraction of a second later, a vast, rolling boom cracked out, echoing between the distant burning spires. Long trails lanced out through the air, straight as gun-shafts, before slamming into the soaring walls of the Capitolis.
The tanks had ground to a halt south of the precipitous spire walls and had deployed in a long semicircle out in the chemical-shrouded wasteland. Toxic mist swirled thickly all around the immense foundations of the mighty hive, and shells left long ripped lines in it as they roared off to their targets.
The colossal hive towered above them, dwarfing all else and filling their viewfinders, but it was already burning. Explosions at the summit had spread, dropping like flaming tears from the distant pinnacles. A massive gouge ran down from the top of the pyramidal structure, still burning at its edges, revealing the innards of the structure within. Like an insect nest broken open by searching fingers, the exposed levels swarmed with madness. Mutated figures, tiny in Heriat’s scopes, dropped from the open wounds in the structure, screaming as they plunged to their deaths.
More explosions registered on his sensoria, this time coming from within the hive. Only one explanation existed for those readings – the Iron Hands had launched their assault from within. They were tearing their way up the heart of the spire, moving at astonishing speed. Heriat found himself wishing he could have seen them fight in there – the sight of Space Marines unleashed on prey was something that remained in a man’s mind forever.
‘Maintain fire-rates,’ he ordered, watching on his range of screens as the barrage repeated itself.
The cramped chamber rocked around him as Malevolentia opened up with its main cannon. Heriat watched the shell thunder out and crash into the walled flanks of the Capitolis. An entire section of metal and stonework crumbled into a dust-cloud of ruin where it impacted. More shells followed, blasted high by the Basilisks as they opened fire.
Even with aural protectors and inside the reinforced shell of the enormous vehicle, the noise was monstrous and unending. Shell after shell, round after round, mortar after mortar sailed through the air, punching lines through the curtains of ash and exploding against huge bulwarks of ferrocrete and adamantium.
The spire’s defenders – such as they were – initially seemed to have been caught off-guard. Many of their massive wall-mounted cannons had been destroyed in the opening flurry of fire, as if their commanders had been distracted by the cascade of destruction descending from above.
Now, though, the response had picked up. Lines of cannons on the parapets swung round and down, picking out the exposed formations of loyalist armour. White beams of las-fire and hammering torrents of heavy bolter fire scythed down from the burning ramparts, cracking into static Leman Russ plate and breaking it open. The Capitolis’s cannons were huge – as large as those that had been mounted on the outer perimeter – and each direct hit utterly destroyed its target. Heriat saw one group of three Basilisks taken out by a single shot, blasted to fragments of metal by the enormous fireball created on impact.
In standard military terms, the situation was hopeless. Heriat’s forces were exposed, out in the open, hidden only by clouds of toxic matter. A prudent commander would have withdrawn before the carnage overwhelmed him. A prudent commander would have demanded to know why the two Warlord Titans, the only things big enough to take on the spire’s enormous guns as equals, were standing immobile out in the wasteland and taking no part in the action. A prudent commander would have done something, anything, to ensure his survival in the face of such withering, deadening fire.
But Heriat’s task was not to survive. Neither was it to destroy the spire from the outside – he had nowhere near enough firepower for that. His task was simple and specific. All his guns were aimed at a small fraction of the Capitolis’s vast expanse. His commanders zeroed in on their coordinates with ruthless efficiency, ignoring the havoc wreaked among their ranks and doing nothing to lessen the dreadful impact of returning enemy fire.
Heriat recalled the text of Valien’s last full dispatch to him. He’d replied to it, congratulating the agent on the work he’d done in recovering detailed plans of the Capitolis perimeter. He had no idea whether his reply had found its mark; he hoped it had.
W
hether he’d known it or not, the data Valien had sent had been invaluable. The atmospheric filtration units studded high up on the walls were heavily guarded with massive walls of armour-cladding and surrounded by heavy weapon turrets. Their gigantic rotating blades were hidden behind adamantium mesh screens and set far back into the cyclopean flanks of the hive. They were well-guarded, well-hidden and there were dozens of them. Without Valien’s coordinates, destroying them would have been hopeless; even with them it was painfully hard.
But they could be taken down. Many units were already on fire, collapsing into ruin as the armour plate around them cracked and flexed. As they did so, the raw toxins of Shardenus Prime’s hellish hinterland were sucked up, churned around, mixed with poisonous fuel-fumes, then flushed directly into the deep innards of the hive via the capillaries and tunnels of the spire’s enormous circulatory system.
The Capitolis was a body, a single immense organism. Heriat was poisoning it.
A massive explosion rocked Malevolentia’s chassis as something detonated close by. Lines of dust ran down from the ceiling of the command chamber, spilling across a cracked pict screen and fouling the image. Scores of runes scrolled across the remainder, feeding him screeds of data on positions, fire-rates, damage taken and units lost.
The tank-lines were exposed and unsupported. They would do well to last another hour. Two, at most. That was all the time they had.
‘Fire!’ Heriat shouted down the comm, spitting his defiance into the mouthpiece. ‘Throne of Earth, bring them down! I want to see them choke!’
Rauth crashed upwards, lashing out through a whole swathe of clutching tendrils. Everything in the core of the Capitolis had been turned into a clinging, writhing forest of stone and flesh – columns flexed like lungs, taking in air and expelling it with soft breaths. Overhead lumen-banks burst open, revealing nests of worms that fell to the stairs with wet slaps. Wall-sections burst at the seams, vomiting clusters of writhing growths that spilled across the swimming floors; spiked creatures exploded out of suspended cogitator housings, thrusting out through broken valve-shafts and exploded bronze cages.
Rauth swung his fist round, bludgeoning a swaying spawn as it shuddered away from him. He went after it, driving it to the edge of the sweeping Stair. It clung on, trembling even as its spiked tentacles flailed at him. He slammed out a final time with his blade, severing the horror’s flesh and sending it crashing through the stone railings and out into the void beyond. It tumbled away into oblivion, wailing as it went.
Rauth powered on upwards, hearing the crunch and thud of his fellow warriors as they hacked their way along the endless Stair. As they went, screams followed them from the very structure of the spire’s core. Living humans had been buried inside the pillars of the hive, or melded with the marble flagstones underfoot, or hung from huge iron chains over the bottomless abyss.
Rauth had seen such blasphemies before on other worlds and knew their purpose. Mortal agony echoed in the parallel realm of the aether, quickening spirits of ruin and weakening the bonds that held them distinct from the world of the senses. The Capitolis had been turned into a shrine of pain, an altar on which human suffering would be turned into debased glory.
If he’d been capable of nausea, Rauth would have been sickened by it; as it was, his emotional range had been drilled down to a narrower spectrum. In the absence of shock, pity or terror he simply fought on, channelling his rage into physical destruction. Clad in the huge baroque edifice of Tactical Dreadnought armour, he became a demigod of devastation. When living barriers reared up at him he tore them down. Abominations flung themselves at him, tearing at the ever-moving plates of ceramite and scrabbling for purchase, and they died, cut apart by the crackling edge of his blade or ripped open by tight bursts of bolter rounds.
Khatir remained close to him, striding with cold determination through the melee. Imanol was near too. Telach had forged ahead, accompanied by his Codiciers. The Librarian had been wreathed in a corona of ice-white fire, lighting up the paths of darkness in stark illumination and propelling him upwards with terrible, ferocious speed. Anything that got close to him, mutant or daemonic, exploded in tatters of charred flesh. He had passed on far ahead, out of reach of help, a lone bright star amid the filth and misery.
Rauth forced himself to run harder, his boots cracking the floor beneath him. Terminator armour was enormous, prohibiting the lightning-quick movements of his battle-brothers, but it was still capable of driving him onwards at a furious pace.
He knew the need for haste. Even though he had none of Telach’s gifts he could still sense the burgeoning horror waiting in the levels above. An ambient heartbeat was everywhere – shuddering down sinuous coolant tubes, reverberating up circulation shafts, thrumming across the steps they ascended. Its owner was coming quickly, fighting its way into consciousness like a foetus grappling through the fluids of the womb.
He hadn’t been quick enough. Despite everything, despite the sacrifices, the relentless assaults, the focused attack on the centre of the contagion, he hadn’t been quick enough.
Rauth had enough humanity left to feel guilt for that. He had enough humanity to feel shame, and frustration, and anger. He had none left for fear, for despair or for resignation: he would fight until the last moment, straining every muscle and overloading every bionic in his system to counteract the evil that had been birthed at the pinnacle.
Aspire to the condition of the primarch. Aspire to the union with steel.
He crashed onwards, decapitating a howling mutant that swung down from a thicket of cables with one hand while disembowelling another with a casual punch of his storm bolter barrels.
A daemon hurtled towards him, bounding down the twisting stairs like a feline.
Rauth winged it with the storm bolter, blowing a section of its trailing leg clean away. It shifted, slipping sideways with impossible speed. Rauth’s armour matched it, compensating for the sudden motion with a thousand tiny servo movements. He swung his blade round in a sparkling arc of ice-blue lightning.
It tried to evade again, but misjudged. Rauth’s weapon bit deep, and its disruptor field exploded into a snaking, lashing orb of expelled energy. The daemon screamed, throwing its head back and baring lines of fangs. Rauth pushed deeper, working the blade hard, carving through the unholy flesh. He ignored its raking claws, even when they sliced through his own plate and bit down to the metal workings below. The two of them – beast and man – grappled together for a while longer, each gouging chunks out of the other, rocking back and forth and breaking open the wide marble steps beneath them.
Then the light in the daemon’s eyes faded. Its broken body collapsed onto the floor. A rushing like storm winds built up, followed by a sharp snap. Rauth drew his sword back and kicked his left boot forwards. The heavy serrated sole crashed down on the creature’s head, cracking the bone.
Rauth let himself look down at the vanquished daemon for a moment. Its lithe body was twisted into contortions, the lilac skin broken in a dozen places.
He applied force, and his boot shattered the daemon’s skull, grinding the warp-woven bone into dust.
Then he was moving again, lumbering up the winding path towards the uttermost summit. As he went, he saw more creatures of the dark heading towards him, each with an equal desire and capacity to slay. They clogged the way ahead, clawing and racing to be the first into contact with him, swarming down the corridors like insects. They threw themselves into his path, uncaring of their own debased lives, only concerned with slowing the progress of the Angels of Death for long enough. Simply pushing through the close-packed crowd of them took too long – there were too many, too many.
We are running out of time.
‘Onwards!’ Rauth roared, his voice thick with frustration. ‘Break them!’
Nethata watched the Capitolis burn. Out in the wasteland, he could see Heriat’s forces taking heavy punishment. Every t
ime a Leman Russ was reduced to smouldering metal scrap by a las-beam, a pang of terrible shame stabbed at him.
They are my men. They are my machines.
He knew what the Commissar-General was doing. He had seen Valien’s dispatches, and saw where Heriat was aiming. Nethata admired his precision under fire. For all that he had been betrayed, for all that Heriat’s actions had destroyed his own position, he couldn’t muster much more than wry admiration in response.
Heriat had been right. Nethata had always known, in his soul, that his actions had been folly. The Imperium never tolerated dissent. Its very being lay in the absence of dissent, the lack of mercy, the dispassionate application of discipline. It had been foolish, imbecilic, to think that he could have proved the exception.
Nethata sat in the chassis of one of the few tanks left to him, commandeered from its Galamoth commander less than a hour ago. The tiny command space in comparison to Malevolentia made drawing up acceptable tactics difficult – he had poor control of the comm-network, and a number of commanders were still unable to speak directly to him on secure lines.
The delay had given him time to think, at least. His initial response had been to go after Heriat, to aim his remaining guns at Malevolentia and try to disable it. In his initial fury, had been able to, he would have done it.
Then the attack on the spires had begun, and the carnage had escalated quickly. Even as Nethata had rushed to assert his control over the resources he still had left, wall defences had opened up and started destroying Heriat’s Basilisks.
Nethata’s dreams of an orderly, measured attack lay in ruins. All loyalist forces save those under his immediate command – just over a hundred battle tanks with supporting troop carriers – were fully committed, locked into a death-grapple with an enemy that could no longer be withdrawn from.
That presented him with two options: he could pull his own forces back, retreating ignominiously from the front in the hope that he’d be able to salvage something to use at some later point, or throw his lot in with the man who’d only just betrayed him.
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