Brothers of the Storm

by Chris Wraight

  I saw their tusked mouths open - they were shouting something at us. All I heard was the rattling roar of the jetbikes, the blast of the wind, the throaty growl of the xenos engines.

  Our jetbikes had spinal-mounted heavy bolters, but we kept them quiet. None of us fired - we swept in close, swerving away just before we came within range of the enemy guns, making our observations and plotting out our individual runs. We were searching for the weak links, the places we would start.

  Erdini got his angles wrong and shot in too close. I turned in the saddle to see him take a rocket right in the chest, burning out from a greenskin half-track and corkscrewing wildly before hitting him. He was hurled out of his saddle by the explosion. Before I surged out of range, I saw him crash into the ground, rebounding and rolling as his heavy armour dragged him along.

  I made a note then that, if he lived, Erdeni would pay penance.

  Then we got to work.

  Our bikes pounced, kicking in close, weaving and rolling through the hurricane of incoming fire. We opened up with our heavy bolters, a fractured, explosive roar that briefly drowned the thunder of the engines. We cut into the convoy, searing past tottering half-tracks, kindling devastation in our wake.

  I was at the head of the arrow, gunning my mount hard, yelling out my savage battle-fury, diving clear of energy bolts and rockets, feeling the percussive judder of my bolter laying waste to all before me.

  I was lost in the vitality of it. The suns were up, we were in close-packed, furious combat and the ice-clear air was racing over our armour plate. I have never wanted more than that.

  The convoy broke. Slower vehicles had their armour penetrated first, and they rocked and bucked with explosions. Monstrous engines took shots to tractor units and crashed, nose-first, into the earth. Trailers swung upwards, tumbling and rolling. Scrap fragments spun high with the force of internal explosions. Jetbikes streaked past, scything like thrown spears through the carnage.

  I closed on my chosen prey, standing in the saddle, guiding my speeding mount with my legs and pulling my glaive from its back strapping.

  My nineteen brothers of the minghan-keshig came in close alongside me, committed to the same trajectory. We spun and raced through the dense hail of bursting energy weapons and solid rounds. Jochi was there, as were Batu and Jamyang and the others, all crouched over the plunging chassis of their bikes with their blood up and rapture in their eyes.

  My prey was at the centre of the convoy - a huge eight-wheel crowned with an unruly spine of guns and swivelling grenade launchers. A platform had been mounted high on a shaky looking suspension array, around which hung thick plates of looted armour painted in splashes of red and green. Many dozens of orks jostled for position up there: some armed, some operating the vehicle's mounted weapons. Two massive smokestacks vomited fumes at the rear as the whole structure bounced and tilted, crashing along with the rest of the collapsing convoy.

  They were not stupid, nor were they slow. A storm of spitting beams streaked out at us, burning past our ears and ploughing up the earth beneath. I took a hit on my pauldron and slewed hard to my left; behind me another bike was downed in a careening, plummeting orgy of blurred flame and wreckage.

  At the last moment I jumped, propelled high by my power armour and thrown clear onto the platform itself. I crashed through the barrier and on to the tilting surface, swinging my guan dao round in a bloody arc as I landed. The disruptor blazed, leaving streaks of shimmering silver in the air as the blade whipped across.

  I gloried in the use of the glaive. It danced in my fists, spinning and punching, hurling ork bodies clear from the platform. I ploughed through them, breaking bone and shattering armour. Orks reeled away from me, staggering and yowling.

  I roared with pleasure, my limbs burning, my shoulders wreathed in a fountain of sun-glittered blood. My hearts pumped, my fists flew, my spirit soared.

  A big one got close, its left arm mangled by a bolt-detonation- It came right at me, head low, claws grasping. It carried a rusty cleaver; the blade swung round.

  The guan dao lashed out, taking the monster's arm off at the wrist. Then it switched back, so fast the blade-edge seemed to cut the air itself in a smear of crackling energy, bursting its head open in a cloud of blood and bone.

  Before the body had crashed to the deck I was moving again, cutting, whirling, leaping, swaying. My brothers joined me, throwing themselves from their bikes and onto the platform. There was barely room for us all; we had to kill quickly.

  Jochi took out one of the gun operators, driving his blade into the creature's spine and ripping out the chain of bones with a flourish. Batu got into trouble taking on two at once, and was punched heavily in the face for his error. His bloodied chin snapped back, and he staggered to the edge of the platform. Projectiles hammered into his breastplate, but they failed to knock him off.

  I didn't see how his fight ended - by then I was closing in on the warlord. It lumbered towards me, shoving its own kind out of the way in its eagerness to get into combat. I laughed to see that; not from mockery, but from approval and delight.

  Its skin was dark and puckered with greying scars. It swung a huge, iron-headed hammer in two hands, and the weapon growled with moving blades.

  I swerved away, missing the grinding teeth by a finger's width. Then I span back in close, my guan dao shivering with angry energy as it worked. I hit it twice, taking chunks of its heavy plate armour, but it didn't fall.

  It swung again, hurling the hammerhead in a bludgeoning arc. I ducked sharply using the pitch of the Platform, veering away and down, with the back-sweep of the glaive to balance me. We were like dancers at a death ceremony, weaving back and forth, our movements fast, close, heavy.

  It lashed out again, its face contorted with frothy rage, piling its immense strength into a shuddering, whistling transverse sweep. If that strike had connected I would have died on Chondax, thrown from the moving platform and driven into the dust with my back snapped and my armour shattered.

  But I had seen it coming. That was the way of war for us - to feint, to entice, to enrage, to provoke the slip that left the defence open. When the hammer moved, I knew where it was going and just how long I had to get around it.

  I leapt. The glaive glittered as it cartwheeled, the blade turning in my hands and around my twisting body. I soared over the ork's clumsy lunge, up-ending the shaft of the guan dao and pointing it down, seizing it two-handed.

  The beast looked up groggily, just in time to see my sun-flashed blade plunge through its skull. I felt the carve and slap of its flesh and skull giving way, gouged into a bloody foam by the plummeting energy field.

  I clanged back to the deck, wrenching the glaive free and swinging it around me in a gore-flinging flourish. The ravaged remains of the warlord slumped before me. I stood over it for a single heartbeat, the guan dao humming in my hand. All around me I could hear the battle-cries of my brothers and the agony of our prey.

  The air was filled with screams, with roaring, with the grind and crack of weapons, with the swelling clouds of ignited promethium, with the hard burn of jetbike thrusters.

  I knew the end would come quickly. I didn't want it to end. I wanted to keep fighting, to feel the power of my primarch burn through my muscles.

  'For the Great Khan!' I thundered, breaking back into movement, shaking the blood from my weapon and searching for more. 'For the Khagan!'

  And all around me, my brothers, my beloved brothers of the minghan, echoed the call, lost in their pristinely savage world of rage and joy and speed.

  * * *

  WE DID NOT move on until all of them were dead. When the last of the fighting was over, we stalked through the wreckage with short blades in our hands, finishing off any xenos who still breathed. When that was done, we doused the vehicles in their own fuel and set them alight. When that fire died down, we went back over the remnants with flamers of our own and plasma weapons, atomising anything bigger than a man's fist.

  You co
uld not be too careful. They were good at coming back, the greenskins, even after you thought you had killed them about as completely as you imagined possible.

  Sometimes, in the past, we had not been careful. Being careful was not in our blood, and it had cost us. We had tried to learn, to better ourselves, to remember that warfare was not always a matter of glorious pursuits.

  By the time we left, heading back north, the mounds of charred metal were already being eroded and smothered by wind-carried earth. Nothing remained, nothing endured. It was like a dream. Or perhaps we were the dreams, sliding across the blank surface of an indifferent world.

  We left four brothers of the minghan behind us, including Erdeni, who had escaped penance by having his chest knocked inside out. We did not burn them. Sangjai, our emchi, extracted their seed and stripped the armour from their bodies. Then he laid them out, their bare skin open to the suns and the wind, and we took their bikes and equipment with us.

  On Chogoris we had observed such customs so that the beasts of the Altak had something to feed on when the moons were up. We had never been a wasteful people. No beasts lived on Chondax save us and the hain, but the custom had followed us out into the stars and we had never changed it.

  We had tried to learn, to better ourselves, but we did not change everything. The core of us, the things that set us apart and made us proud, those were the things we had carried from the home world and kept safe, guarded like a candle-flame cupped in a palm. I thought then that all of us in the Legion felt the same way about such things. Back then, though, I was blind to many truths.

  A DAY LATER, and we reached our resupply coordinates.

  Yes, we saw the bulk lifters from a long way out, descending and ascending in columns. They were huge: each one carried hundreds of tonnes of rations, ammunition, machine parts, medicae supplies; everything needed to sustain a mobile army in the hunt. In the years that the Chondax campaign had been fully underway they had been in ceaseless demand, plying their routes between the carriers hanging in orbit and the forward stations on the ground.

  'We will have no use for them soon,' I observed to Jochi as we passed a lifter coming down - a bulbous leviathan buoyed by shimmering heat-wash from its landing thrusters.

  'There will be other battlefields,' he said.

  'Not forever,' I replied.

  We swept past the landing sites. By the time we reached the main garrison complex only one sun still remained above the horizon, burning orange in a deep green sky. Shadows barred our path, warm against the pale earth.

  The supply station had always been temporary, built from prefabricated components that would be lifted back up to the fleet when no longer needed on Chondax. Only its defence towers, looming up from the outer walls and bursting with weaponry, looked like they would take any time at all to dismantle when the time came. White dust ran up against the walls in smooth dunes, wearing at the rockcrete and the metal. The planet hated the things we had built upon it. It eroded them, gnawed at them, trying to shake off the specks of permanence we had hammered into its perpetually shifting hide.

  Once the jetbikes were in the armoury hangars, I gave the order for my brothers to go to the garrison's hab units and make the most of their short rest period. They looked happy enough to do so; their endurance was immense but it was not infinite, and we had been on the hunt for a long time.

  I headed off to find the garrison commander. Even as night fell the dusty streets of the temporary settlement were thronged with activity - loaders moving between warehouses stacked with munitions and supply crates, servitors scuttling from workshops over to armoury bays, auxiliary troops in V Legion colours bowing respectfully as I passed them.

  I found the commander in a rockcrete bunker at the heart of the garrison complex. Like all the other mortals he wore protective clothing and a rebreather - Chondax's atmosphere was too thin and too cold for ordinary humans; only we and the orks tolerated it unaided.

  'Commander,' I said, ducking under the doorway as I entered his private chamber.

  He rose from his desk, bowing clumsily, hampered by his environment suit.

  'Khan,' he replied, speaking thickly through his helmet's mouthpiece.

  'New orders?' I asked.

  'Yes, lord,' he said, reaching for a data-slate and handing it to me. 'Assault plans have been accelerated.'

  I glanced at the data-slate he gave me. Text glowed on the screen, laid over a map of the warzone. The symbols indicating enemy formations had shrunk together, falling back toward a single point toward the north-east. Locator symbols of V Legion brotherhoods followed them, coming from all directions. I was pleased to see that my minghan was at the forefront of the encirclement.

  'Will he participate?' I asked.

  'Lord?'

  I gave the commander a hard look.

  'Ah,' he said, realising to whom I was referring. 'I don't know. I have no data on his whereabouts. The keshig keep it to themselves. '

  I nodded. That was to be expected. Only my burning desire see him in battle again - this time at close quarters - had made me ask.

  'We will leave as soon as we can,' I told him, affecting a smile in case my manner with him had been excessively brusque. 'Perhaps, if we make good progress, we will be the first at his side'

  'Perhaps you will,' he said. 'But not alone. You are to combine with another brotherhood.'

  I raised an eyebrow. For the whole length of time we had been on Chondax, we had operated on our own. Sometimes we had gone without resupply or redirection for months at a time, out on the endless flats with nothing but our own resources to draw on. I had enjoyed that freedom; we all had.

  'You have full orders waiting for you, security-sealed,' said the commander. 'Many brotherhoods are being combined for the final attack runs.'

  'So who are we joining?' I asked.

  'I do not have that information. I have location coordinates. Forgive me; we have much to process, and some data from fleet command has been... lacking in detail.'

  I could believe that, and so did not blame the man before me. I must have let my smile broaden wryly, for he seemed to relax a little.

  We were not a careful people. We were bad with the details.

  'Then I hope their khan knows how to ride,' was all I said. He will have to, to keep up with us.'

  * * *

  IT WAS NOT long before we met.

  My refitted brotherhood powered smoothly north-east. Many of jetbikes had been replaced or repaired by the armoury servitors and the sound of their engines was cleaner than it had been. We had always taken pride in our appearance, but the short break in operations had allowed some of the grime to be scrubbed from our armour plates, making them dazzle under the triple sun.

  I knew my brothers were restless. As the long kilometres passed in a glare of white sand and pale emerald sky they became ever more impatient, ever more anxious to see signs of prey on the empty horizon.

  'What will we do when we have killed them all?' asked Jochi as we sped along. He was powering his jetbike casually, letting it slew and buck in the headwind as if it were a living thing. 'What is next?'

  I shrugged. For some reason, I was not much in the mood to talk about it.

  'We will never kill them all,' said Batu, his face still purple with bruising from his fight on the platform. 'If they run out, I will breed more myself.'

  Jochi laughed, but the sound had a faint edge to it, a faint note of trying too hard.

  They were skirting around the issue, but we all knew it was there, sliding under the surface of our jokes and speculations. We did not know what lay ahead for us once the Crusade was over.

  He had never told us what he had planned; perhaps, when alone with his own counsel, he shared the same quiet misgivings, though I found it hard to imagine him having misgivings, though I found it hard to imagine anything approaching uncertainty in his mind. Whatever the future held for us when the fighting was done, I knew he would find a place for us within it, just as he had always
done.

  Perhaps Chondax had got under our skin. It made us feel ephemeral and fleeting sometimes. It made us feel like we had no roots anymore, and that the old certainties had become strangely unreliable. ^^

  'I see it!' shouted Hasi, riding out ahead. He stood up in the saddle, his long hair streaming out behind him. 'There!'

  I saw it then myself - a puff of white against the sky, indicating vehicles travelling at speed. The trail was nothing like that produced by the greenskins - it was too clean, too clear, and moving too fast.

  I felt a tremor of unease, and quickly quelled it. I knew what drove it - pride, an unwillingness to share command, resentment that I was being ordered to.

  'Let us see who they are, then,' I said, adjusting course and making for the plume of dust ahead. I could see them slowing up, wheeling around to meet us. 'This brotherhood with no name.'

  I DISMOUNTED TO greet my opposite number. He did the same. Our warriors waited some distance behind us, facing one another, still perched on their idling mounts. His force looked to be the same size; five-hundred mounts, give or take.

  He was taller than me by a hand's width. The skin of his bare head was pale, his chin angular and his neck thickly corded. He wore his hair short, cropped close to the scalp. The long ritual scar across his left cheek was raised and vivid, indicating that the incision had been made in early adulthood. His features were blunt, not the sharp, dark ones I was used to.

  He was Terran, then. Most of us from Chogoris shared similar attributes: brown skin, oil-black hair worn long, wiry frames that bunched with muscle even before implantation boosted it further. That uniformity, so we had discovered, came from our lost origins as colonisers. The Terrans of the Legion, drawn from the cradle of our species long before the Crusade had come to us, were more diverse: some had flesh the colour of charred firewood, for others it was as pale as our armour.