by Marc
Rius, himself a veteran of Ichar IV, was no stranger to the horrors of the hive-mind. But no matter how many times he witnessed the foul abominations, nothing would ever inure him to them. He could only face each battle with the resolve and courage of the Ultramarines, as laid down in the ordinances of the Codex Astartes by the primarch of the Ultramarines, Roboute Guilliman himself, centuries before.
A unit of tyranid warriors emerged from the slavering ripper swarms to confront the Ultramarines. As Rius watched, a bonesword sliced down through the ceramite shoulder pad of one Space Marine’s power armour, severing the skin and sinews underneath. As soon as the serrated edge connected with flesh, the nerve tendrils within the bonesword delivered a potent psychic jolt to the warrior’s body. The stun would only be momentary but it was long enough for the tyranid, howling in triumph, to remove the man’s head from his shoulders with its second blade.
Striding behind the charging tyranid warriors, lording it over his swarm, the hive queen’s consort came into view. The hive tyrant was a truly terrifying figure to behold. The monster stood over two metres tall and its presence exuded a malign intelligence that filled the Ultramarines with dread.
Rapid bursts of laser energy struck the hive tyrant, but to no effect: the monstrosity’s toughened carapace absorbed the lethal blasts. With unintelligible roars, and no doubt telepathic signals as well, the master of the swarm directed the broods to seek out the humans and destroy them, consuming all available bio-mass in the process as well. The tyrant had to die!
KILOMETRES OVERHEAD, THRUSTERS fired, desperately turning the vast spacecraft on its axis, but it was too late, and the Gauntlet of Macragge collided violently with the asteroid-sized pod launched from the hive ship. The massive spore mine detonated with the power of a thermonuclear explosion, the resultant shockwave shaking the spaceship.
Chunks of bone-like shell as thick as a fortress wall bombarded the craft. Some shards disintegrated as they struck the vessel’s force-field but the shields had been damaged by the initial explosion and provided only intermittent protection. Other fragments struck the vast ship like meteors, wrecking communications antennae and tearing holes in its hull through which the accompanying shower of acids, algae and virus-bearing particles could gain access to the craft’s interior.
The Imperial Navigators reacted swiftly, bringing the six kilometre-long vessel under control. Fission-boosters firing, the Gauntlet of Macragge moved off in pursuit of the bio-ship.
The prehistoric world resting six hundred kilometres below appeared as a welcoming blue-green paradise, its atmosphere streaked with wisps of white cloud, a total contrast to the smog-polluted planets that were so often the refuges of humanity. Jaroth’s airless moon, no more than a planetoid that had become trapped by the larger astral body’s gravitational pull, rose over the glowing nimbus of the planet. Then the stricken bio-ship came into view.
From the bridge of the Ultramarines’ flagship, Commander Darius watched through the view screen wall as the Gauntlet of Macragge closed in on the tyranid craft. The gigantic curled body of the organic vessel was tilted at a strange angle and appeared to be drifting. However, as the mighty gothic cruiser closed the distance between itself and the tyranid craft, Darius could see yet more spore mines and other sleek, finned creatures being disgorged from the bio-ship’s gaping hangar-wide mouth.
‘On my mark, hit that abomination with everything we’ve got!’ the commander ordered the soldiers at their control consoles. Returning to his throne of command Darius sat down, never once taking his stern gaze from the monstrosity displayed before him on the view screen. His brow furrowed. ‘Fire!’
A hundred turbo lasers blazed into life, great beams of intensely focused light energy striking the already weakened tyranid mother ship. In a blaze of coruscating fire, the nautilus shell of the massive space-travelling organism splintered, mountainous shards flying from the creature and its soft internal organs rupturing as its body depressurised. Its hundred kilometre-long innards spilling into space, the great creature dropped away from the cruiser as it was caught in Jaroth’s gravitational field. The bio-ship plunged towards the planet’s surface through the atmosphere, its shattered shell glowing red hot. As Darius watched, the organism began to burn, its pink flesh cooking as it hurtled planetward.
THE TERMINATOR SQUAD moved cautiously through the undergrowth with grizzled Sergeant Bellator at its head. The Space Marines covered the jungle in front of them and to either side with sweeps of their guns, monitoring their motion sensors for signs of potentially hostile life. The surrounding trees were alive with sound. Unknown bugs clicked and hummed while mosquito-like insects as long as a man’s hand buzzed around the armoured warriors.
With the defeat of their hive tyrant, the tyranid hordes had been thrown into disarray. Pressing home their advantage, the elite warriors of the Imperium had routed the foul alien army. The less determined termagants and hormagaunts had fled immediately but the rampaging, bestial carnifexes continued to hammer the Space Marine ranks.
Even when its fellows lay dead around it, one of the screamer killers relentlessly charged a razorback. Smashing into the tank, the alien horror scythed through the plasteel armour, its razor-edged killing arms flailing. A living engine of destruction, the carnifex had gutted the vehicle and slaughtered its crew before it was felled by a bombardment of missiles from an Ultramarines Whirlwind.
There was a screeching cry from deep within the trees to the right of the Terminators’ path. Sergeant Bellator fired off several rounds from his storm bolter into the foliage. All was quiet again.
‘Precautionary fire.’ Bellator’s growling voice came over the Terminators’ comm-units. ‘It could have been a tyranid.’
Had it been a tyranid? Rius wondered. It could just have been one of Jaroth’s indigenous life forms. There was no way of knowing. With the main tyranid force wiped out, the Terminators had been sent into the jungle to carry out a clean-up operation. With the hive tyrant gone, many of the tyranid troops had gone rogue, randomly attacking Space Marines that far outnumbered them or fled into the primeval jungles where it was harder for the Ultramarines to follow.
Although the tyranids had been defeated, the veteran squad was still tense with anticipation. The Ultramarines’ lines were miles away and out here in the depths of the jungle they were as much the aliens as the tyranids.
‘There’s something up ahead,’ Brother Julius said, breaking the communication silence. The others checked their motion sensors. Several red blips had appeared at the outer limit of the small displays.
‘Be ready, brothers,’ the squad sergeant hissed.
The fronds gave way to a clearing. On the far side of the glade was the crumpled fuselage of an Ultramarines Thunderhawk gunship.
It was instantly obvious to the veterans what had happened. A broad hole gaped in the side of an engine housing. Its edges were corroded with an acidic slime and splinters of bone were lodged in the plasteel hull around it. The living cannon of a biovore had fulfilled its deadly purpose. Having been fatally hit by the spore mine, its crew no longer able to control it, the aircraft had come down on the forested plateau.
A scorched path through the jungle showed where the Thunderhawk, its engines burning, had seared through the trees. It had flattened everything in its wake until it ploughed into the clearing, the soft soil thrown up around it putting out the fires.
But what had happened to the crew?
‘Spread out!’ Bellator instructed and the Terminators immediately began to take up appropriate positions around the crashed craft.
The blips were still present on their motion sensors. From the readings Rius could see that almost all the organisms were actually inside the downed gunship. As yet, however, the Terminators had not made visual contact with them. Were they the injured crew, tyranids or denizens native to the planet? Were they hostile or totally harmless?
As if in answer, Rius heard his sergeant’s voice again over his comm-unit: ‘Expe
ct the worst.’
Cautiously the squad strode across the glade, the servo-assists in their cumbersome suits whirring, closing in on the Thunderhawk with every step. When the craft had gone down it had probably been assumed that the crew had perished. However, it was just as likely that the crash would have gone unnoticed to the Ultramarines commanders as wave after wave of mycetic spores hurtled down onto the teeming battlefield. Whatever the case, a rescue attempt had not been ordered.
From Rius’s motion sensor, it appeared that the creatures inside the Thunderhawk had stopped moving. Were they aware of the Terminators approaching them? There were too many blips for it to be any surviving crew members, the Marine convinced himself – but were they tyranids?
Brother Hastus was the first to reach the crumpled fuselage. He edged his way towards the open cargo bay hatchway as the others covered him. Several seconds dragged by as Hastus checked the interior of the cargo bay. A wave of his power fist and the rest of the squad moved in.
Rius followed Brother Sericus into the shadowy interior of the crashed Thunderhawk, the optical sensors in his helmet adjusting from the glare of the clearing to the gloom instantly. Lightning claws raised, Sericus advanced slowly through the gunship, brushing aside dangling pipes that dripped oily fluid into the chamber.
Rius glanced down at his motion sensor and then immediately looked up at the ceiling in alarm. A six-limbed, insectoid nightmare dropped out of the darkness. His reflexes working far faster than conscious thought, the Ultramarine automatically raised his power fist to protect himself. The creature hit its crackling distortion field and screamed as its carapace shattered; it fell squirming onto the floor behind Rius. Julius stepped over it, thrusting a whirring chainfist into its face. Then another of the purple-skinned monstrosities was on his back.
Genestealers! His worst fears had been confirmed. Before he could train his weapon on the tyranid construct and blow its vile carcass apart, the monster plunged a taloned claw through the back of Julius’s armour. It yanked it out again, dragging with it the man’s spine, slick with blood.
A hail of armour-piercing shells from Rius’s bolter punched through the genestealer’s exo-skeleton and the alien’s corpse joined that of Brother Julius on the floor of the cargo bay.
Something heavy slammed into Rius, sending his heavily-armoured body sprawling on the metal floor with a resounding clang. Gripping his left arm between its vice-like jaws, another hissing genestealer was trying to bite through the ceramite shell to get to the flesh within. The creature was swiftly dispatched with a bullet to the temple but even in death the genestealer’s jaws refused to release their grip. Several more shots shattered the creature’s skull allowing Rius to extract his arm.
To his left, Brother Sericus was grappling with two of the tyranid creatures, one gripped in each fist. A jet of orange flame illuminated the cargo bay as Brother Hastus kept yet more of the creatures from approaching his overwhelmed fellows.
Rius clambered to his feet, shaking the genestealer’s blood from his suit. Brother Bellator stood in the open hatchway, assailed on all sides by the rest of the genestealer brood, defending himself as best he could at such close quarters with his power sword. The savagery and ferocity of the genestealers was terrifying. His storm bolter blasting, Rius rushed to the sergeant’s aid.
Another flare from Brother Hastus’s flamer struck the frenzied press of purple bodies surrounding Bellator and the reek of burning alien flesh filled the chamber. With a sizzling flash an oily puddle ignited, the flames rushing back through the cargo bay following the trail of black liquid to where it cascaded from a broken fuel pipe. Sericus’s horrified gaze followed the progress of the fire, his chainfist still embedded in the metal wall through the skull of a twitching genestealer.
Rius reached the edge of the hatchway and the overwhelmed sergeant as the Thunderhawk’s fuel tanks erupted in a conflagration of molten metal and oily smoke. The force of the explosion threw the Ultramarine out of the cargo bay, flinging him right across the clearing. Rius’s body slammed into a thick tree trunk. The unconscious Terminator slumped to the ground, the weight of his heavy armour embedding his body in the soft ground. Flames engulfed the wreckage of the gunship.
RIUS OPENED HIS eyes slowly, his vision taking a few seconds to focus. Above him were wooden beams and the underside of a thatched roof. Cautiously he tilted his head to one side.
‘Hello.’ said a small voice. Sitting only a few feet from him was a human child. Her keen blue eyes regarded him with intense fascination. She wore a simple smock and her waist-length auburn hair hung in a plait over one shoulder.
‘H- hello.’ Rius mumbled in reply. His tongue felt thick and there was the taste of stale saliva in his mouth.
‘My name’s Melina.’ the girl-child said. ‘What’s yours?’
Still only half-conscious, Rius tried to focus on the girl’s question so that he could provide an answer, but he couldn’t. A nebulous fog obscured that part of his memory from him.
‘I don’t know.’ he muttered, bewildered. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re at home, in our house. Why don’t you know your name?’
Ignoring the girl’s question, Rius scanned the room from where he lay. It was small and spartan. The only other furniture in it apart from the bed was a chair and a small table on which rested a wash basin. Lying on his back in a rough wooden bed, he could feel the straw mattress beneath him.
‘You do have a name, don’t you?’ the girl persisted.
‘Come away now, Melina. Let our visitor rest.’
Rius swivelled to find the source of this second voice. A man had entered the room. He also wore plain peasant clothes and although only in his thirties, Rius judged, he had already begun to lose his hair.
‘You must be tired.’ the man added, addressing Rius himself now. ‘We will leave you in peace.’
‘No!’ Rius found himself demanding, something of the old authority in his voice returning. ‘What happened to me?’
‘You do not know?’ the man asked, incredulously. ‘Are you not a warrior of the Emperor himself, fallen from the stars?’
Rius stared at the man with incomprehension. ‘Am I? How did I get here?’
‘We saw the stars falling to the earth and knew that it was an omen. The menfolk set off into the untamed lands as our elders instructed. We found you in the forest. You were unconscious and badly injured.’ the man explained patiently. ‘We brought you back to my farm and did what we could for you. At first we were not sure if you would survive but your holy armour had helped to keep you alive. You have been asleep for almost a week.’
Desperately, Rius tried to clear the fog from his mind and piece together his shattered memories. He could remember nothing clearly from before the moment when he had awoken. There were only trace images of terrible, unreal monsters and the distant sounds of battle, like the last lingering fragments of a nightmare that are forgotten with the coming of dawn.
‘Who am I? What am I?’ Rius’s voice was no longer aggressive and demanding, more like that of a pitiful child.
The man and his daughter looked at him sadly. ‘I am sorry.’ the man spoke wistfully. ‘We can heal your body, as best we can, but we cannot minister to your mind. We cannot help you to remember. That is something that you will have to do yourself, given time.’
A sorrowful silence descended over the room for several minutes. Nobody moved. ‘You saved me.’ Rius finally said, humbly. The man smiled. ‘Then I know what I must do.’ Rius continued. ‘I owe you my life so now I must repay the debt. I pledge myself to your service. I will do whatever you wish.’
Rius tried to sit up and immediately white-hot daggers of pain shot through his body. His face a mask of agony, he collapsed back onto the bed.
‘You must rest.’ the man chided, gently. ‘Tomorrow is a another day. Then we will see.’
EVERY DAY JEREN the farmer and his family tended to Rius’s needs, bringing him his meals and seeing to his injuries
. The little girl, Melina, was a constant companion. The time Rius spent with the child, hearing of her youthful adventures or helping her with her letters, filled him with joy and gave him new strength to face the long haul to recovery ahead.
But it was not to be a long recovery. Within days his wounds had healed as if they had never been. He was able to leave his bed and walk again. He began helping out around the farmhouse where he could. Jeren and his family, along with the other villagers, were in awe of Rius’s restorative powers. The injuries he had suffered would have taken a mortal man months to recover from, if he did at all.
‘Truly he is a warrior from the stars.’ the people said and heaped blessings upon the Emperor for sending them a saviour. Yet each day Rius still came no closer to resolving his own internal struggles, no nearer to remembering who he was or where he came from.
Only a fortnight after his arrival at the farm, Rius was able to set to work in the fields. Jeren and his family were the owners of a few tidy acres at the edge of a village which consisted of nothing more than a collection of farms, a mill and the local tavern. During the following months he learnt much about the people of the village and their customs. They spent most of their days toiling in the fields in order to raise crops from the unforgiving land. It appeared that the humans fought a constant battle with the surrounding jungle, the ‘untamed lands’, as the farmers called them. Wherever trees were cleared to provide more land for growing cereal crops or to graze animals, the primeval forest reclaimed an acre left fallow on the farm’s boundary. Weeds seemed to grow more readily than wheat and much of the villagers’ time was spent clearing them from their fields. It seemed like the forest didn’t want the humans there and was trying to evict its unwelcome tenants.
Rius joined Jeren and his family in their own battle with the jungle. He would be the first up at dawn, taking a mighty axe to die twisted trunks, and the last to return to the farmhouse at dusk. The other villagers marvelled at the star-man, as they called him, for his strength was many times that of the other humans. Soon he was also helping the other farmers, single-handedly repairing broken wagons and erecting barns for the grain harvest. There was not one person among the villagers who did not welcome Rius’s assistance.