by Dan Abnett
‘We’re moving for those hills,’ Daylight told Major Nyman.
‘I’ve activated a beacon, sir,’ said Nyman. His voice was a reedy croak issuing through the speaker grille of his orbital armour. Through the tint of the man’s visor, Daylight could see an abrasion head wound that was starting to clot.
‘Good. At least any who follow can trace our landing point.’
‘Will any follow?’ asked Nyman.
Daylight was turning away, but he stopped to look back down at the human soldier.
‘I told them not to, but Lord Commander Militant Heth will send others,’ he said. ‘He will not give up. I would not in his place.’
Nyman followed Daylight over to the Asmodai casualties.
‘Some of us will scout ahead,’ Daylight told him, ‘but even allowing for your rate of advance, we cannot be encumbered. You know what I have to do.’
Nyman’s mouth opened in horror, but he had no words.
‘They will all be dead in an hour, less perhaps,’ put in Tranquility, repeating the summation he’d made to Daylight. ‘Even with express evacuation to a medicae frigate, they probably wouldn’t make it.’
There was a moment’s pause. The sunlight blazed. Radiation made their built-in meters crackle like crickets at dusk. Thunder, wind and volcanics rumbled in the distance and made the ground fidget.
‘Is there going to be an issue here?’ Daylight asked Major Nyman.
‘No issue, sir,’ Nyman replied with great effort. He turned his back, and signalled his men to do the same. In slow realisation and horror, they stepped back and looked towards the bleak edges of the horizon bowl. One hesitated, a hand on the grip of his sidearm. Bastion looked at him, and that was enough.
Zarathustra came to stand with Nyman and his men, and gazed at the distant hills and the sky filled with smoke. He began to declare the Litany of the Fallen, as it was said in chapels and templums and sacristies across the loving Imperium, the words set down by Malcador himself during the bloodiest months of the Heresy. His voice was clear and strong, and carried from the speaker of his battle-helm. Bastion and Tranquility joined him in his declaration, a mark of honour to the fallen Guard and the sacrifice of the Asmodai. Nyman made the sign of the aquila.
The three wall-brothers boosted the amplification of their speakers as they intoned the Litany, partly to add power to their statement of respect, and partly to mask the sound of bones snapping.
Daylight drew a breath and then, quickly and gently, broke five human necks in quick succession.
Seventeen
Ardamantua
The sunlight seemed to be at odds with them. It followed them across the grassy plain, away from the crash site. From underfoot came the thump and shake of a planet in convulsion, and great sprays of burning ash lit up the sky far away, volcanic plumes thousands of kilometres wide.
The sunlight followed them still, as if their world were a tranquil place.
Daylight, Zarathustra and Bastion moved ahead, covering the grasses with clean, strong, bounding strides, outpacing the sturdy efforts of Nyman’s fighting pack. Daylight wondered if he ought to have finished the tech-adept too. The man had been cortex-plugged to the Stormbird’s cogitator system when they crashed. He had suffered neural feedback, and the impact had torn his plug out and mangled the primary socket in the back of his neck. He was stumbling along at the back of the secondary group, escorted by one of the Guardsmen. Daylight thought he would give him an hour or so to see if his head cleared and reset. If it did, the adept might usefully operate some of their portable equipment. If it didn’t, Daylight would revise his decision.
Plumes of ash smoke and white streamers of steam were borne across the plain on the wind, residue of distant cataclysms. They left the crash site far behind, the wreck and the heresy-scar of its death across a foreign field, and moved towards the nearest hills.
Noise bursts continued to beset them, coming from both near at hand and far away, as if wilderness spirits, the genius loci of Ardamantua, were howling at them and taunting them for their efforts. Daylight wished the tech-adept could set up and examine the audio patterns, but the man was incapable. The noise bursts, some of them long and tortured, were overwhelming their limited-range vox too, and causing discomfort to the Asmodai. Daylight instructed Nyman and his men to switch off their suit comms. Thus, the only communication between the two moving groups was the vox-link between Daylight’s party and Tranquility who was escorting the Guard. It was not ideal.
Daylight also possessed enough imagination to know that it was not ideal for the individual Guardsmen either. Each one of them was alone in his stifling and cumbersome orbital drop-suit, the armour heavy and rubbing, with fear and disorientation in his heart, and trauma and grief in his bones. They were trudging along in the strange and sickly sunlight, hearing the distant roar of the noise bursts as contact vibrations transmitted by their atmospheric armour-helms, with no voices and no vox-chatter, only the inexorable sound of their own breathing inside their suits for company.
The three Space Marines, advancing away from the beleaguered troopers, were approaching the foothill slopes of the ragged outcrops that edged the plain. Now the sun was going in and out as clouds gathered and spilled across the sky. Something had detonated on the horizon and the sky was filling up with blackness, the smoke trying to erase every corner of light.
Zarathustra led the way, using the haft of his war-spear as a climbing staff, leaping up slumped boulders and ridges of displaced stone. Bastion and Daylight followed, almost amused by the old veteran’s vitality.
They reached the peak. Beyond them, a thousand kilometres away, the next ridge of mountains was on fire, a ring of active volcanos. Darkness seemed to have gathered above the next rift valley like a threat. Jagged and almost magical explosions rippled across the valley floor as spontaneous and random gravitational anomalies, like the one that had downed the Stormbirds, chewed up the ground and blew sub-crust magma into the air. Impact patterns of disruption on a seismic level travelled through the ground away from the explosions. At this sight, Daylight’s mind turned to other images stored in the books and paintings of the Imperial Palace: visions of the apocalypse, of the circles of the Inferno described by Dantey, of the imagined hell once thought to exist beneath the Earth.
The rift valley was a vast plain of smouldering rubble that shifted and flexed, exploded and shivered. Mountains had both been raised and had fallen, overnight. Valleys had uplifted into hills, fracturing the surface, and summits had plunged like avalanches into the bowels of the ground. Flames leapt up from the mangled earth in burning geysers, like signs or portents. Flammable noxious gases released from deep in the planet were burning with strange colours: purple, blue, green, yellow, as varied as the magnetic auroras that had wreathed their wings on their descent.
In places, the flames were black, and a mile high.
‘Has the Archenemy touched this place?’ asked Bastion Ledge cautiously. ‘Is that warpcraft?’
‘No,’ said Daylight. ‘This is just a planet dying. Strange phenomena manifest when a planet dies.’
Four or five kilometres from them, beyond the initial spill of rubble and rocks, there was a broad lake, silty and muddy, its surface stirred and chopped by wind and vibration. Daylight selected data from his helm memory and began to patch and re-patch quick overlays.
‘That’s the river,’ he said.
‘The river?’ asked Bastion Ledge.
‘The blisternest was sited beside a large river. The geography has been traumatically altered, but that is the river, I’m sure of it. There are just enough comparatives to make the connection. The river has broken its banks and overspilled, and then been dammed into the lake formation by the collapsing outcrops here and here. The blisternest will be partly submerged and, I think, partly covered by geological debris, but it should be in this position.’
He marked the proposed site on his optics and then copy-bursted the overlay to the visor displays of his two wall-brothers.
‘An objective, then?’ asked Bastion Ledge.
‘The blisternest was the last reported location of our shield-corps ground forces,’ said Daylight.
‘Ardamantua was the last reported location,’ growled Zarathustra. ‘I don’t think we can say anything more specific than that.’
‘We’ll head for it anyway,’ said Daylight. ‘It’s a place to start.’
He clambered back across the ragged top of the peak to vox-link to Tranquility and inform the secondary group what the new intention was.
Below, he saw the flash of lasweapons discharging. In the sunlit grassland, under an alien storm of ash, Tranquility and Nyman’s Asmodai Guardsmen were under attack.
Eighteen
Ardamantua
It was a Chrome. Major Nyman knew this because he’d thoroughly reviewed the briefing packet that had been circulated among the officers of the reinforcement taskforce, and the packet had included helm pict-captures of the Chromes in action.
It came at him through the grass, claws raised and mouthparts snapping, making a most peculiar noise that he could only half-hear in the claustrophobic isolation of his atmospheric armour.
He shouted an order that he instantly realised no one except him could actually hear, brought his laspistol up and shot two bolts at the charging xenos.
It slowed it down, but didn’t kill it. Nyman had to snap off four more shots before it dropped a few metres short of where he was standing.
He looked around, having to turn his whole body to maximise the view through his narrow visor port. He could hear his own rapid respiration, as if he was in a box. He could smell the rancid bitterness of his sweat and breath, laced with adrenaline. Muffled noises came to him, as though through water. The dull bangs of weapons. Shouts. Sunlight shone into his visor. Glare.
There were Chromes all around them, most of them the glossy silver xenotype. He wasn’t sure where they had come from, but the odds were they were burrowers and had come up through the soil, clawing their way out. His men, without orders to give them structure, had nevertheless obeyed essential combat drill and were forming a box, firing out at the things rushing them from all sides. The Asmodai were fine soldiers, trained by the very best in the gun schools of the old Panpacific. Their proud boast to be the best in the Astra Militarum was not without merit.
Lasrifles flashed and snapped in disciplined volleys, the searing las-bolts ripping open organic armour and mutilating limbs. Puffs and squirts of ichor drizzled into the bright air.
One of the Chromes, a very large, dark variant form, survived the rifle-fire barrage and made it to their line. It got Corporal Vladen in its claws and tore him in half, the way a man would rip a sheet of paper when he was done reading the message written on it. Ribbons of bright red blood shivered into the air and covered the grass. Vladen’s armoured suborbital drop-suit split like overheated plastek wrapping.
Tranquility, the massive Imperial Fist, waded in, and drove the dark creature back, striking it twice with his power hammer. Leaking fluids through crush-splits in its shell, the Chrome reared back and launched itself at the Space Marine. There was no time or space for a defensive swing. Tranquility met the heavily built animal and grappled with it, gripping its chattering mouthparts with his left hand and tearing, while he tried to stave off its claws. As they broke again, Tranquility came away with part of a mandible in his hand. Ichor spurted down the Chrome’s throat and chest. Tranquility knocked it down with a hammerblow and then swung his power hammer down in both hands and finished it with a devastating overhead strike.
More Chromes tore up out of the ground, flinging soil and uprooted grasses in all directions. Some of them were big and dark like the thing that had murdered Vladen. The Asmodai redoubled their fire rate, snapping off shots to keep the creatures at maximum distance. Nyman kept shooting, directing fire by means of gestures.
There was no way of knowing how many more of the things lay under the ground.
Tranquility closed with another of the more massive forms, despatched it with two clean blows of his hammer, and then found himself beset by two more of the dark beasts. They clawed at him, fending off his attempts to swing at them. With a curse, he drew his boltgun and shot each one point-blank, exploding their carcasses in showers of meat, gristle and body fluid.
He’d cut them a path. Nyman could see that, and he could plainly see the Space Marine’s emphatic gestures. They had a path towards the hill slopes. In the distance, he could see the other Imperial Fists wall-brothers bounding down the hill to join them.
The hill slopes offered the protection of boulders and rocks for cover, and a small hope of staying alive until the other Space Marines reached them. Nyman knew his men would have to double time, and shoot as they ran.
He sent the signal, and most of them started to move, but visibility in the suits was so poor that some missed the gesture and found themselves caught out, alone. Nyman ran to them, grabbing them so he could look in through their visor plates and press his head against theirs, yelling so that the touching helms would transmit the sound.
‘Get moving! The hills! Move it, man!’
They started running. Nyman and Trooper Fernis scurried the poor tech-adept along. The damaged man had little clue what was going on. Trooper Galvet had been slow to recognise the intended effort, and once he did, ran the wrong way. Nyman, dismayed, believed that Galvet had suffered some concussion during the crash, and was not thinking clearly.
His fuzziness cost him his life. Two silver-shelled Chromes ran him down and fell upon him, shredding him with their claws.
Nyman didn’t watch. He ran, dragging the tech-adept by the arm with one hand, firing at the Chromes that menaced them with his weapon in the other.
As soon as the Asmodai were moving towards the hill slopes, Tranquility fell in behind them, his back to them, retreating and fending off the Chromes that gave chase. He whirled his hammer and struck them down as they came at him, knocking them over onto their backs, splitting their shells, breaking their limbs and their spines. His power hammer was a long-hafted, weaponised version of a stonemason’s mallet, the sort of tool that had been used to raise the bulwark walls and defences of the Palace of Terra. Its design was symbolic. Its effect was not.
Nyman, still moving with Trooper Fernis and their befuddled charge, was suddenly aware of yellow shapes racing past them from the direction of the slope. Daylight, Bastion Ledge and Zarathustra had joined the fight.
Daylight had his gladius raised. Zarathustra was lifting his war-spear. Bastion Ledge hefted a power mace. They reached the line where Tranquility was single-handedly stopping the Chromes and crashed into the mass of them, rending and slicing, smashing and tearing.
Nyman reached the lowest of the heaped boulders at the foot of the slope, and pushed the tech-adept into cover, with a gesture to Fernis to look after him. His men were taking up positions among the tufted rocks and outcrops, slithering up the scree and loose pebbles and sighting their rifles as they found good firing places.
They looked back at the fight.
Several hundred Chromes, most of them silver-shelled, had broken out of the soil of the plain and were assaulting the line. Dozens of them already lay dead, generally split or sliced open. Steam from hot fluids clouded the cool air of the grassy plain. Overhead, a looming volcanic darkness threatened to close down the light.
The four Imperial Fists, wall-brothers, battle-kin, shield-corps, fought side by side. It was diligent work, dutiful work, holding ground so that the Guardsmen could find cover and in turn support them with directed fire. It was a blocking action, it was a defensive stance, it was holding ground, it was everything that the Imperial Fists did best.
Daylight knew that none of them, none of the four of them, would or could eve
r admit that joy was filling them at that moment. Despite the crisis, the predicament, the threat, and the possibility that their Chapter was lost and dead, they secretly felt joy.
Their greatest and darkest prayer to the God-Emperor of Mankind, and to the Primarch-Progenitor who sired them, had been answered.
After years of silence, ritually patrolling the walls of the Imperial Palace, they had been granted the right to fight again, perhaps for one last time.
War, for which they had been wrought, had finally admitted them back into its secret, dark and savage mystery. They were whole again. They would make the most of it.
Nyman and his men watched in awe as the four wall-brothers fought back the tide. Imperial Fists chosen as wall-brothers were the greatest of their kind, and had excelled at feats of arms. It was for their very excellence that they were selected as the embodiment of the Chapter’s creed, and set to stand guard on the walls where they had mounted their greatest defence and paid in blood.
He could see why these men had been chosen.
He could also see how many more Chromes, hulking and dark-bodied, were splitting the soil of the plain and clawing their way into the sunlight.
Nineteen
Ardamantua – orbital
‘Any signal from the surface?’ asked Admiral Kiran.
The vox-officer shook his head.
Kiran slowly crossed the bridge of the Azimuth to meet Maskar and Lord Commander Militant Heth. Heth had joined them from his warship as the reinforcement fleet decelerated to the drop-point.
‘We’ve lost them, then,’ said Maskar. ‘Sheer madness going down into that murk and mayhem blind.’
Heth looked at him.
‘I suggest you get your men ready, Maskar, because you’ll be following soon enough. We’re not going to leave the Imperial Fists to rot down there.’
‘And what makes you suspect they are anything except dead already, sir?’ asked Maskar. ‘With respect, look at the screens. Look at the dataflow. This is a fool’s errand. Nothing has survived the fate that has befallen Ardamantua. Not even their damned fleet survived.’