by Various
Rerouting her power to normal hazard settings, Commander Shadowsun flickered and disappeared. As the battered Thunderhawk disappeared from sight behind the hive spires, the collared necks of the two largest postern statues blazed white in a wide garrotting loop.
The solemn, sacred heads of the stone saints nodded as if falling asleep and toppled over, tumbling down into the underhive to claim yet more human lives.
Chapter Four
HIVE AGRELLAN PRIME
ACACIAN BASIN
AGRELLAN, 743.999.M41
The White Scars had regrouped in the triumphal boulevard that led to Agrellan Prime’s monolithic Gate Victorius. Their battle-scarred Thunderhawks had set down amidst the sprawling Victorius skyshields and were already being attended to by their Techmarines, each glad of their narrow escape during the battle in the Acacian Basin.
Mechanicus-grade incense wafted around the stricken gunships as the repairs began in earnest. White-armoured tactical squads marched out from their bellies ten by ten, each group descending the ramps that led to the boulevard and curving off towards the Rhinos and Razorbacks waiting nearby. To a man they had their helmets mag-clamped to their waists, the warm column of pollution that whistled down the boulevard pulling at their topknots and ruffling the fur worn by their sergeants. It had no true soul to it, Agrellan’s air, a toxic hivewind that an unaugmented human could not breath without risking severe damage. But to the enhanced warriors of the White Scars it was still better than nothing. The baring of heads in a warzone was a lapse of protocol that the khan was apt to forgive, especially after being trapped for hours in the dimly-lit womb of a Thunderhawk.
Three groups of heavily-built, squat-bodied Space Marine bikes growled in readiness nearby, prime examples of the mechanical steeds so beloved by the sons of Chogoris. Several attack bikes were being tended nearby, their suspension blocks cleaned with psalms of purity and jets of compressed air. Their riders tested the throttles, as much for the love of the noise as for any real assessment of the engine.
Emerging from the gun district to the west were loose, skirmishing mobs of Catachans, rebreather masks covering their mouths and lasguns held loosely at their sides. Rugged tanks fanned out in their wake.
To the khan, these were Imperial Guardsman only in the loosest sense. The planet Catachan was a violent mother, and she raised a different breed of man. No pomp and circumstance here, no ranks, no fanfares. Some said no discipline, either. Just hard-bitten, physically powerful men raised on a jungle world so deadly that even a White Scar would struggle to survive there for long.
The khan strode towards the bikes, sketching a loose salute towards Veteran Sergeant Djubali as he closed in. The sergeant saluted back, an easy grin spreading across his hairy face.
‘Straken’s taking his own good time getting into position,’ muttered the khan.
‘At least Terryn has deployed,’ Djubali replied. ‘Slow but sure, I suppose.’
The khan looked over to the war machines of House Terryn standing stock still at the end of the boulevard. To a casual glance they looked like the last six statues in a procession of armoured Imperial heroes that led from Gate Victorius to the slums of the hive’s core.
‘Straken’s Catachans are worth the wait, I hear,’ said Djubali. ‘Redstone’s too. Even if they are, you know. Human.’
The steedmaster shook his thick mane of hair as if shivering, brushing it from his face with a practiced sweep of his hand. It didn’t make much difference. The man had a beard that crept up almost to his eyelids.
‘I’m not certain the jungle fighters will be in position when the tau arrive, horseborn,’ said Kor’sarro. ‘Come to that, I’m not convinced Tybalt’s Knights will be, either.’
‘When the eagle carries the tortoise,’ said Djubali dolefully, ‘both go hungry.’
The khan nodded sagely. There was a shout from behind, and the clank of power-armoured feet on rockcrete. The khan frowned, turning in his tracks to see Sudabeh striding up to them.
‘My khan,’ the Stormseer began, consternation scored upon his weather-beaten features. ‘Hive command’s astropathic choir has received a message-psalm intended for the Third Company. It is a psychic communion, from Chogoris.’
‘Speak on,’ said the khan, his brow furrowed.
‘We are needed elsewhere, captain,’ breathed Sudabeh. ‘The message-psalm says that a heretic fleet, red as blood, has translated from the warp above Chogoris. It isn’t alone. The battlefleet is…’ The Stormseer shook his head as if trying to dislodge a painful memory. ‘We must return to Quan Zhou at the first opportunity.’
The three men stood facing each other, their eyes sharing unspoken thoughts.
The khan was the first to speak. ‘We can’t,’ he said.
‘Our Chapter is in danger,’ said Sudabeh, ‘I consulted the Tarot as soon as I received the astropathic psalm. It indicates the Heretic Ascendant over the Brotherhood of the Storm.’
‘Not good news, I’ll wager,’ said Kor’sarro, grimly.
‘No, my khan. It… it shows the Tor Mortalis as the sole majoris. Destruction incumbent.’
‘Emperor’s bones,’ grimaced Kor’sarro. ‘So we’ll make it quick here, and translate back into the warp as soon as possible. The tau are all over this planet like flies on a carcass, but we can’t leave Agrellan’s people to die – or worse, to be turned against the Imperium by snake-tongued xenos.’
‘Besides, we’ve barely given them a bloody nose,’ said Djubali. ‘I say we close them down with blades and bolts, fight them face to face.’
‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your counsel as objective, horseborn,’ said the Stormseer, lips curled. ‘I can smell your anticipation from here.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Djubali, his eyes twinkling behind the curtain of his hair. ‘My khan? What does your instinct tell you?’
‘We stay,’ said Kor’sarro. ‘And we hit the tau so hard they never come back.’
Circled by Drai’s stealth team, Shadowsun and her drones touched down in the white forest that girdled the peak south of Agrellan Prime. With her suit’s self-healing resins already hardening, she had left the repair protocols to themselves and funnelled power back to her suit functions. In the process she had announced her arrival at the muster point and called the coalition’s heavy elements to blip their position. A constellation of symbols pulsed gold amongst the swathe of desiccated woodland that spread across her topographical display. At its heart was the symbol denoting the metropolis the humans called Agrellan Prime. Over five kilometres in height, the spear-tipped triangle was so tall its spires were lost to the clouds of pollution fanning out from the innumerable chimneys studding its thick bulk.
Shadowsun took stock of her situation, linking into Oe-ken-yon’s datacompile as her underclaw punch-cylinders took stratified samples of the ground beneath. Less than a second later new information spooled across her sensor suite.
The soil was completely sterile. There were no life forms at all within the forest’s borders.
She reached out to touch a jagged stump, and it crumbled under her fingers, leaving a fine white powder. Whatever had killed this planet prior to its resettlement had done a terrifyingly thorough job.
The glitches whispered in, louder in the forest than out on the scorched earth of the plain. Some of the sound waves looked a lot like words. Shadowsun’s right eye hovered over the autotrans field, its fat golden bar awaiting her blink.
She thought of Traitor Shoh looking down at her, his face a blur in the darkness, gently admonishing her for talking of ghosts in the night.
She knelt, muted all audio save emergency channels, and blink-pushed the autotrans.
The words hissed and crackled as if coming from a very great distance, but they were words, there was no doubt. They had meaning. The autotrans ran its conclusions underneath each sound wave, the fragment
s that it could isolate and decipher causing Shadowsun to frown in confusion.
‘- - - DEATH - - - ONLY DEATH - - - SHOULD NOT HAVE COME HERE - - - YOU WILL FAIL - - - YOU SHALL FALL - - - JOIN US - - - JOIN WITH THE DUST - - - KEEP YOU IN THE NOTHINGNESS - - -’
Shadowsun blipped off the audiostream, cancelled the autotrans and stood up straight. The urge to fight, to kill, rose in her chest.
‘All forward teams to begin bombardment immediately,’ she transmitted across the cadre.
A series of icons blipped gold in readiness, though a few still bore the dull silver of incompletion.
‘Commander, this is Tank Veteran Shas’ui Lir, we are six minutes from the nearest gold zone.’ Another voice was queued close behind. ‘Commander Shadowsun, Shas’ui Domor reporting, gold in eight minutes estimate.’
‘Begin bombardment as soon as you reach range, Shas’ui Lir,’ she transmitted, sketching a direct line of approach on the shared command grid. ‘Domor, stand by in silver zone with the rapid insertion forces and await further commands. The Imperials have as yet undefined assets of their own behind those walls.’
‘Affirmed, commander.’
The forest filled with the whip-cracks of Hammerhead gunships opening fire as the tau began their persecution of the towering metropolis. Broadside battlesuits raised their own railguns in a rifleman’s stance, each giant ochre warrior tall enough to fire over the open canopies of the Piranha skimmers that hovered nearby.
As one the Broadsides locked, piston-sited, and fired. Streaking shafts of air connected them to the hive’s weakest points for a split second, the dull thwack of impact reaching Shadowsun a moment later. Seeker missiles zoomed out from the Skyrays behind her, flying parallel to the cylinder of displaced air left by each rail rifle shot. The missiles altered their trajectory at the last moment to hammer into fault lines, sending tumbling sheets of ornamental stone into the hivers scurrying below.
‘Repeat protocols,’ said Shadowsun. ‘Remain at full alert. I doubt it will take long for those gates to open.’
Less than a minute of punitive bombardment later, the blare of klaxons rang out into the gloom. Autolanterns bathed the superhighway with pools of light. The enormous wall of metal-ridged ferrocrete that guarded Agrellan Prime’s main entrance slid upwards, a portcullis clanking open to allow its castle’s defenders to sally forth.
Shadowsun’s gunships were already making their attack run. Sleek but wide in the manner of undersea glider-beasts, her Tigersharks had wingspans to rival those of the gue’ron’sha’s indomitable gunships. Their chin-mounted ion cannons spat pulses of bluish energy that hurtled under the opening gate, blasting low into whatever was waiting to emerge on the other side. Upon impact a great sheet of white light flashed out with a deafening clap of displaced air. A heartbeat later a cloud of dust was thrown up, confusing the vid-feeds of the tau waiting in the desiccated forest.
‘Reveal yourself,’ muttered Shadowsun. Preoccupied and more than a little disturbed by the autotrans spool, she had inadvertently transmitted her exhalation across the cadrenet’s open frequency. Next to her, Shas’vre Drai blipped the symbol of mild confusion to his teammates.
Shadowsun projected her sensor suite’s vid-feed through a gap in the white trunks of the forest, seeking to make out the wreckage of whatever her Tigershark squadron’s ion cannons had engaged under the gate. The markerlights of her ranged support cadre’s pathfinder teams flickered across her vid-feed, their ruby red lines seeking purchase in the billowing dust.
Increasing magnification once more, Shadowsun thought she could make out hunchbacked warriors moving in the dust. She zoomed back out again, thinking for a moment she had originally pushed the magnification too far.
In the lower quadrant of her sensor suite, the whisper-hiss changed shape, its wavelengths become less like words and more like laughter.
Then the gate slid up to reveal the metallic goliaths of House Terryn.
During the subtle conquest of the Damocles Gulf that had led to the war on Agrellan, the ambassadors of the water caste had found that there was one rock they could not erode. Many of the human worlds at the fringes of that impassable abyss had become bitter and disillusioned by the relentless grind of Imperial rule, and they were easily swayed by the promises of a better future. Even Agrellan had been infected by their insidious statecraft.
Yet the Knight world of Voltoris stood firm.
No matter how much the water caste bargained and explained and manoeuvred during their audience at Furion Peak, the seeds of their subtle conquests fell on barren ground. Patriarch Tybalt of House Terryn was too old, too mean and too suspicious to fall for the courting of xenos diplomats, and he told the tau ambassadors as much to their faces. Tybalt saw the offer of peaceful and mutually beneficial integration into the tau empire for what it was – a veiled choice between assimilation and destruction.
The patriarch banished the ambassadors from his keep on pain of death, roaring an oath to destroy the tau should they ever threaten a sovereign world of the Imperium.
And Tybalt, for all his many faults, was a man of his word.
The powerfully built walkers emerging from the hive gate were living monuments to the blunt power of mankind. Each was a colossus to rival the dreams of the most ambitious earth caste visionary, a stamping, killing relic that epitomised mankind’s unsubtle approach to war. Out from the dust surrounding Gate Victorius came six of the giant machines. They were resplendent in regal blue, a white horsehead icon glowing under the pooling light of the gate’s lanterns.
So impressive were they, so mighty in aspect, that not even Shadowsun noticed the white-armoured bikes roaring through the dust clouds between their legs.
Effigies of crude iron and grease-slicked pistons, the Knights’ riveted limbs were pillars of emblazoned alloy. They were constructed as bipeds, as if the dull machine-smiths of humanity had once witnessed the glory of a tau battlesuit and built flightless effigies in much the same fashion, but far, far larger. Their arms were massive weapon systems that swivelled beneath wide carapaces that were painted with heraldic designs. Yellow lenses glowed behind the eye-slits of featureless helms. As they came forward, long saw-toothed swords blurred through the air in slashing arcs. Each titanic blade looked more than capable of tearing a Hammerhead gunship to mangled scrap.
Shadowsun had no desire to see them put to use.
‘All units operative at current range, neutralise them immediately,’ she transmitted. ‘Closest targets first, sequential reach.’
Even before the commander had finished her orders, the Hammerhead gunships at the edge of the desiccated forest punched railgun fire into the leading walkers. Shadowsun had expected the hypervelocity ammunition to smash right through the ancient relics, but the volleys merely flared white a few metres before they struck their targets, atomised by convex shields of force.
As the red-dot markerlights of their diminutive pathfinder comrades picked out eye sockets and hip joints, the Broadside battlesuits of Shadowsun’s ranged support cadre added their own firepower. More railguns fired, and more solid shot ammunition was burnt to atoms before it could strike home.
On the Knights came, closing the distance with every swinging stride.
The Tigersharks had banked around for another attack, looping perpendicular to the ground before firing a stream of ionic energy spheres into the Knights. The blue-white bursts fizzled into nothingness upon each walker’s shields, strobing pulses that lit the night but nothing more.
Then, with a blare of war-klaxons loud enough to wake the damned, the Knights of House Terryn broke into a run.
Kor’sarro Khan’s lips drew back into a grinning snarl as Moondrakkan reached full throttle. The cursed xenos were so preoccupied by Tybalt’s stamping, blaring distractions that they had missed three whole squads of bikes roaring out into the gloom. They would live to regret their mistake. But not
for long.
The khan gunned the engines as he took the lead of the triple arrowhead of bikes. He could hear the throaty roar of Djubali’s customised steed, Vendrujin, not far behind. Kor’sarro’s blood pounded in his ears, the thrill of the chase filling him with electric energy. These xenos thought themselves so clever, skulking in that poor excuse for a forest. Yet every time the cylinder-shot of their heavy munitions hurtled across the plains, it left a brief trail in the air that led back to its source. They may be able to hide from Agrellan Prime’s guns, thought Kor’sarro, but he would be damned before they could hide from the wrath of the White Scars.
Behind them, House Terryn’s Knights had doubled their pace. Through the vibrations of Moondrakkan’s wheels, the khan could feel the hard-packed wastes shiver with their loping tread. He chuckled to himself inside his helmet at the thought of the xenos reaction to the monstrous Imperial Knights. They would not have been expecting their appearance, let alone their headlong charge. The Knights were smaller than the Titans of the Mechanicus, but by the Great Khan, they were a damn sight faster. He wouldn’t mind trying the helm of one of those things himself, one day.
As the White Scars arrowed around the tau’s flank one of the Knights went down, its knee buckling. With a protesting creak it crashed headlong into the dust. It had been sniped by a xenos battlesuit, by the look of the fire-trace. To its pilot’s credit, even when sprawled in the dust the Knight hammered shell after shell into the desiccated forest, stabbing blind at its persecutors out of spite. Its brother Knights opened up in support, laying down a fusillade of large-bore shells in a barrage that any tank company would be proud of.
Kor’sarro and his men hurtled around the thick waist of the desiccated forest, scanning for the foe and taking the measure of the battle as it unfolded. In their wake the foremost Knights levelled their thermal cannons. Each mighty gun’s barrels glowed cherry red, then amber, then unbearably bright white. As one the Knights unleashed six blinding spears of energy into the tau skimmer-tanks lurking in the forest. Everything the beams touched, everything even close by, was annihilated in a single searing moment. The tanks disappeared completely, simply erased from existence by the sheer power of the Knights’ weapons.