The closest of the tyranids leapt from the ground onto a statue toppled on its side, scaling it swiftly. It clashed its bone blades together in what might have been a challenge as it dived from its perch to meet Karlaen. Four deadly lengths of sharpened bone swept down towards him. He twisted aside, letting the edges glance off his armour with a sound like a scream. He jabbed his hammer forward like a spear, catching the creature in its segmented gut. It bent double with a coughing roar, and he smoothly altered the hammer’s course to meet its descending skull.
There was a crackle of energy, and the tyranid warrior staggered back, jaw burned and broken. Its blades scissored for him wildly. He stepped back and smashed the bone swords aside, before striking his opponent in the chest. Chitin cracked and burst, and a thick ichor ran down the armour plates as the thing screeched. Before it could attack again, he shoved the barrel of his storm bolter against the shattered area of its thorax and pulled the trigger. The creature jerked wildly and toppled towards him, its swords and claws seeking to pull him down into the darkness with it even as it died. He forced it away, wincing as the tip of a bone sword skidded off his cheek. It hit the ground and lay still.
With the higher castes of tyranid warrior-beasts, it was best to kill them as quickly as possible. They could fight on despite incredible wounds, easily withstanding the sort of damage which would test even an ork’s vigour. Luckily, Karlaen had more than a century of experience in killing such creatures, whether on the battlefield or in the close confines of a space hulk.
He turned, narrowly avoiding the stinging lash of a bio-whip. The second beast was duelling with Damaris and Leonos, keeping their power fists at bay with wide sweeps of its bone sword and a snap of the other bio-whip it wielded.
Karlaen fired his storm bolter, distracting the beast. It twisted towards him instinctively and opened itself up for Leonos, who clamped one arm around two of its own, pinning blade and whip. The tyranid shrilled in rage and tried to fling the Terminator off. Its strength was so great that it jerked Leonos from his feet and swung him about as easily as it did its whips. Damaris rushed in and caught one of its two remaining free hands in his power fist. He shoved his storm bolter against the spot where the limb met its body and fired.
The limb, and the bio-whip it clutched, came free with a wet, tearing sound, as acidic ichor spattered the floor. Its remaining bone sword flashed out and caught Damaris on the side, carving a long gouge in his armour. He staggered, and Karlaen stepped past him, hammer descending on the side of the tyranid’s skull. Chitin crumpled and the xenos sank to one knee. Karlaen struck it again, with more force this time, and his blow crushed its skull. Even so, it continued to struggle. Leonos set himself and lifted a boot to brace against the uncrushed side of the alien warrior’s skull. With a grunt, he tore its arms free of their sockets. The tyranid made a wailing squeal and flopped onto the ground. Damaris finished it off quickly, crushing what was left of its head beneath his boot.
Even as the creature writhed in its death throes, Karlaen was striding past, towards where Alphaeus sought to haul Bartelo to his feet, while fending off the remaining tyranid’s blistering fury of attacks. Alphaeus parried blow after blow, wielding his power sword with an elegance and speed befitting one of the Chapter’s foremost swordsmen.
The tyranid slammed its four blades down on the length of Alphaeus’s one and loomed over him, trying to drive him to his knees. It threw back its head and a powerful scream ripped from its throat sacs, nearly deafening Karlaen. The scream echoed, redoubling in strength, and Karlaen winced as he felt something scrabble along the underside of his mind. The creature’s scream had not been merely a cry of frustration, but a summons to war.
As the echoes faded, a new sound took their place – claws, scrabbling on stone and steel. Karlaen staggered as the ground beneath him shifted and then erupted in a tangled thicket of flailing claws and snapping jaws. Momentarily off balance, he swung his storm bolter down and fired until it was dry. He fell heavily, but managed to drag himself forwards, away from the growing hole. Through the smoke and dust, genestealers clambered after him. He rolled onto his back and lashed out with his hammer, pulverising the first to leap. Damaris and Leonos moved to his aid.
He heard a shrill cry, and saw a flood of xenos squirming through the shattered portcullis. The twins turned their weapons on these new foes, but not for long. As their weapons stuttered to silence, they were forced to defend themselves without the benefit of bolter fire. Karlaen pushed himself awkwardly to his feet, backhanding a genestealer with his storm bolter in the process. There was no time to reload. He laid about him with the ancient relic of his Chapter, splitting skulls and cracking carapaces.
Then came a roar of heat and incandescent light as Bartelo, still on one knee, fired his heavy flamer, consuming the whole, scrabbling pack of creatures climbing through the portcullis. ‘Step aside, captain. Let me light their way to the Emperor’s judgement,’ Bartelo rasped.
Karlaen fought his way clear of his enemies as Bartelo directed his flames towards the hole in the floor. Genestealers screamed as they burned, their screams echoed by the final tyranid warrior. Too late, Karlaen saw that Alphaeus had been sent sprawling by the beast. It lunged over the sergeant, and its blades smashed home, erupting from Bartelo’s chest in a gory spray. Bartelo slid off the blades and smashed to the ground, unmoving.
Alphaeus was on his feet a moment later, his face contorted in an expression that Karlaen recognised all too well. His power sword hummed as it caught the tyranid in the neck, beheading it as it turned to confront him. It fell and Alphaeus drove his blade down into its body again and again, until Karlaen’s hand on his shoulder shook him from his rage.
Karlaen looked at Leonos, who crouched beside Bartelo. ‘Status?’ he asked softly, even though he knew. There was too much blood, and Bartelo was too still.
Leonos stood. That was answer enough. Karlaen closed his eyes. The inside of his head itched with red, creeping thoughts that he pushed aside with difficulty. Twice they had made contact with the enemy, and twice they had lost a brother. There would be no third time, not if he could help it. But he could see their situation plainly: if they stayed where they were, or tried to press forward, they would be overwhelmed. Already, the proximity sensors in his armour were alerting him to movement in the corridors beyond them. And without Bartelo’s heavy flamer, they would be at even more of a disadvantage than before.
‘Adapt and persevere,’ he muttered, eyeing the chamber walls. His bionic eye clicked and whirred as he scanned through settings and lenses until he came to the geo-imager. Before his eyes, a holographic grid map of the palace formed. Outside the chamber, the sound of clattering claws grew louder. Alphaeus fired his storm bolter down into the hole in the floor. Bartelo had only given the horde outside momentary pause.
‘Orders, captain?’ Alphaeus asked. He sounded deceptively calm, and his face might as well have belonged to one of the toppled statues.
‘How much promethium is left in Bartelo’s tanks?’ Karlaen said, studying the grid.
‘Not much,’ Leonos said. ‘A single, concentrated burst.’
‘Enough to clear the passage,’ Damaris added.
‘Pierce them,’ Karlaen said. ‘And get ready to move.’
He plotted the quickest alternate route to the Plaza of the Emperor Ascendant. While part of him was disgusted with the idea of retreat so soon after making contact, this mission was not about battle. They had a duty, and it was up to him to see that it was fulfilled. If that meant swallowing a bit of pride and falling back to a position where they could make more effective use of their remaining firepower, so be it. Also, it was possible that once clear of the palace walls, his vox signals would reach Zachreal and the others. Reinforced, they could make a concentrated push.
‘What? But–’ Alphaeus began. Then, remembering his place, he nodded crisply. He looked at the twins. ‘Do it. His armour will survive the fire, but whatever is coming for us won’t.’ He loo
ked at Karlaen. ‘Whatever you’re planning, brother, I’d make it quick – I’m picking up massed bio-readings in all directions. They’re closing in on us.’
‘That’s the idea, Alphaeus,’ Karlaen said. He strode towards the closest wall. ‘I want as many of them in here as possible, before we leave.’
‘What are you thinking?’ Alphaeus said, following him.
‘Do you remember that time aboard the Seraglio of Abomination?’ Karlaen said. He raised his hammer. ‘They’re expecting us to press forwards, or try and escape back the way we came. So let’s surprise them, eh?’ He took a leisurely practice swing, his bionic eye gauging the wall’s weakest point.
‘If you’re thinking of doing what I think, I feel it is my duty to remind you that it didn’t work as well as you hoped that time,’ Alphaeus said.
‘You act as if you didn’t enjoy seeing all those genestealers go spilling out into the void, sergeant.’
‘Given that we were spilling out into said void alongside them, you’ll forgive me for being somewhat distracted at the time,’ Alphaeus said. The sound of claws grew louder, filling the chamber with a relentless clicking of talons on metal.
‘Well, there’s no void to worry you this time,’ Karlaen said. The tang of promethium fumes reached him. He glanced back at the twins. ‘Status, brothers,’ he called out, over his shoulder.
‘Promethium tanks–’ Damaris began.
‘–punctured, captain,’ Leonos finished.
‘Good. Fall back, and take up flanking positions,’ Karlaen said. As he spoke, genestealers spilled into the chamber, heralded by a cacophony of screeching. As before, they charged with reckless abandon, driven berserk by whatever synaptic impulse commanded them. Alphaeus barked an order, and three storm bolters were readied to roar out in reply to the alien shrieking. But they would not fire yet. Not until the last possible moment.
Karlaen swung the Hammer of Baal in a wide arc. The wall burst outward at the point of impact, filling the promethium-laden air with dust. Karlaen bulled through, picking up speed as he raced through towards the next wall opposite him. Behind him, he heard the roar of storm bolters followed by a crackling thunder and then his armour’s sensors screamed at him as a wave of heat washed over him, flooding through the hole he had made.
He heard the heavy tread of the others following him and smiled in satisfaction as he tore through the next wall. The fumes from the spilled promethium had turned the security hub into an inferno, and whatever had been inside at the moment of the explosion was no longer something they had to worry about.
Room by room, corridor by corridor, the four Terminators smashed and fought their way through the ruins. Never stopping, pausing only to kill any tyranid unlucky enough to get in their way. The Blood Angels left behind them a trail of shattered wreckage and broken xenos bodies. Then, with one final blow of his hammer, Karlaen led his men out into the Plaza of the Emperor Ascendant.
As he stepped out into the red Asphodex light, his vox came alive, free of interference. He heard Zachreal’s voice, and Joses’s roar, as loudly and as clearly as if they had been beside him. He heard the bark of storm bolter fire, and alien screams as well, and knew then what he had only suspected before. The ambush had not been by random chance; rather it was the work of an overarching will. The others had not yet found any sign of Flax. Alphaeus met his gaze, and Karlaen knew he had heard the signals as well.
‘We’re on our own, brothers,’ Karlaen said. He turned and saw the fallen statue after which the plaza was named, depicting the Emperor in all of his glory, wings wide, face uplifted towards the boiling red sky. The statue had been seared by fire, burned by ichor and smothered in creeping strands of fleshy bio-matter, but there was no indication as to what had felled it in the end. Karlaen stared down into the marble face of the Master of Mankind and felt something stir within him. Not the hum this time, but a black, brooding anger that brought with it the images of Aphrae going down beneath the enemy, and Bartelo being ripped open, and others, from a greater distance – faces, names, dying screams from that one red moment.
The Sons of Sanguinius had always been better at dying than their brother Space Marines. Martyrdom was in their blood, and for a Blood Angel, there was no greater glory than death in a good cause. But that fierce sense of selflessness which sent them rushing headlong into the jaws of death all too often flowered into obsession. He could feel them pressing in from all around him, the ghosts of all of those who had followed him and died. For a moment, barely the blink of an eye, the plaza was full of pale, carmine shapes, facing the enemy, and he could hear a voice like fire and smooth stone and the crack of great wings as his Father spoke and then the genestealers were boiling out of the hole he had created in the wall like ants out of an anthill.
He tore his gaze from the statue and shoved down the tide of rage and black memories. He raised his storm bolter. ‘I want interlocking fields of fire. Go to pattern epsilon,’ he grated. ‘Combat protocol sigma.’ The others fanned out around him as the genestealers scuttled towards them through the ruins and debris that dotted the open plaza. Karlaen glanced at the statue one last time. Then, he turned to face the enemy. ‘The Emperor watches, brothers. Do not fail him.’
Then, with a roar of storm bolters, the battle commenced.
Six
Plaza of the Emperor Ascendant, Flaxian Palace, Phodia
Interlocking fire patterns and close combat protocols were the mortar of victory, or so Karlaen’s teachers had always claimed. Now, several centuries on from his days as an aspirant, eager to sup on the accumulated knowledge of his masters, he was willing to admit that there was some truth to the saying.
The storm bolter bucked in his hand, the reverberation of its voice causing his exoskeleton to tremble slightly. The barrel glowed white-hot, and his head ached from the targeting information fed into it by his bionic eye. But pain was the price paid for victory.
The tyranids made assault after assault, coming in waves as they had before, but now they were charging directly into the teeth of an organised gun-line. Before, the Terminators had been scattered or cramped, unable to take full advantage of their firepower due to their surroundings and each other. Now, out in the open, the battle was theirs before the first genestealer darted from cover. That had ever been the way of it, in Karlaen’s experience. One of the more successful strategies the First Company had learned in centuries of gruelling warfare was that an enemy that relied on numbers could be drawn into a situation where those numbers rapidly became a disadvantage.
Such was the case now. Each assault was repelled, and at significant range. Only once did a tyranid warrior get close enough to engage the Terminators, and Alphaeus swiftly put it down with two hard sweeps of his power sword.
Finally, the attacks ebbed away, until there was only the soft ping of cooling gun barrels and the dripping of tyranid ichor to be heard in the plaza. A haze of smoke hung heavy in the air over the mounds of xenos corpses as an eerie quiet descended. Karlaen waited, counting moments in his head. Then, with a grunt of satisfaction, he lowered his storm bolter.
‘They’ve fallen back, likely to plan their next move,’ he said.
‘And like as not, we’re being watched,’ Alphaeus said, as he reloaded his storm bolter. ‘I can feel it, scurrying around in my head.’
‘Then we’d best take advantage of the time we’ve bought for ourselves,’ Karlaen said. He unhooked the head of the servitor from his belt and held it up. ‘We’ll start with this.’ Deftly, he extracted the contact nodes of several power cables from his armour and plugged them into the nodes hidden within the dripping stump of the head. Almost immediately, the servitor’s mouth opened, and its eyes widened as the influx of raw power jump-started its functions.
A deluge of meaningless code burst from the servitor’s bloody lips, followed by a hollow, mechanical voice. ‘Warning. Warning. Plaza defences compromised. Warning. Security hub J-7 compromised. Warning. Tribune Chamber compromised. Warning. Secur
ity hub J-8 compromised. Warning. Unit to report ongoing situation to Governor Flax. Warning.’ More warnings followed, a veritable roll call of failed defences and counter-attacks.
Connected to the servitor’s memory banks via his armour’s systems, he slowly peeled back the layers of its programming, and found that the drone had been heading to deliver its report to Flax in person when it had been caught in the rubble. He looked at Alphaeus. ‘It was Flax’s envoy. He sent it out to take stock of the palace defences and then report back to him, wherever he’s hiding.’
‘Do you think it can lead us to him?’ Alphaeus asked. He sat down on a toppled pillar and sank his sword into the ground, point first, before him.
Karlaen did not reply. Instead, he continued his exploration of the servitor’s memory banks, taking note of the various routes and passages it held maps of. The servitor had a signal-lock on Flax’s bio-signature, as well as all relevant security information – ID codes, crypto-keys and system overrides – to reach him. Karlaen blinked. He looked at Alphaeus. ‘There’s an undercity. That’s where Flax is.’
Alphaeus grimaced. ‘That means tunnels. And we’ve no heavy flamer to clean them out.’
‘According to our friend here, the tunnels are still sealed. The tyranids haven’t found them yet,’ Karlaen said. He frowned. ‘Or they hadn’t, according to the drone’s last sensor sweep.’ He unhooked the head from his armour, and its eyes glazed over as its mouth went slack. If it was attached to his armour’s power source for too long, there was a chance the fragile mechanisms in the head would burn out, and he still had use for it.
‘Was that before or after it was pinned under the rubble?’ Alphaeus asked. When Karlaen did not reply, he sighed and nodded. ‘It always comes back to the cramped and the dark, doesn’t it? What I wouldn’t give for another stand-up fight.’
Shield of Baal: Deathstorm Page 5