by Various
Not since Ullanor…
And back then the spears of fire had been his allies, in days of glorious war when purpose was just and the enemy clear. Jealously and betrayal, the canker of deep-seated fraternal rivalry, had muddied all that.
Pain flashed again, but this was a relic, a phantom dredged from memory. Acutely, he was reminded of the crude bionics that supported over half his body.
‘Lord-captain,’ uttered Lieutenant, standing ramrod straight to the immediate right of Arcadese’s command throne as he pointed with a gauntleted finger.
Arcadese followed and, as if it was being revealed to him for the first time, he noticed the bank of viewscreens around the vertical slit.
On several of the display screens he saw the blue-green orb of Terra and knew then how close the war had come. They stood at the last gate.
‘The Warmaster’s vanguard has breached the outer Imperial cordon,’ Lieutenant concluded.
Events were moving swiftly, far quicker than Arcadese could comprehend at first. Gaps interrupted his sense of continuity, like he was part of the edited précis of a mission briefing – only, he was living the mission in that moment and had no recollection of the omissions.
Head wound must be retarding my cognition.
Mentally, he shook it off.
A fleet of starships crept onto the viewscreen. Vast behemoths, swathed in metres-thick armour and cocooned by flickering void shields, they shrugged off the ineffectual enemy flak batteries with disdain. They moved slowly but relentlessly, as if snagged on the darkness of real space, but knifing through the void with keen inexorability. Weapon arrays flashed across their flanks, and forward-arc lances spat long beams of destructive fury.
‘All weapons, focus fire on the lead vessel,’ said Arcadese, voice grating but mind sharpening with the immediacy of a threat. ‘Gunners one through four, alter trajectories…’ he checked the atmospheric position of the lead ship using the instrumentation at his disposal – like the viewscreens, he had only just noticed the control console, ‘to marked coordinates.’
Shrieking servos presaged the movement of the guns. Ammo-hoppers cycled furiously, pouring a ready supply of super-heavy shells into their vast mags.
A quartet of ranging targeting locks combined into a single reticule.
Despite his injuries, Arcadese braced his hands upon the command console and stood up, disengaging the control jacks in the process. Green monochrome shed from the bank of viewscreens underlit his war-ravaged face.
‘Fire!’
A dense wave of noise and the actinic stench of expelled munitions accompanied the cannonade.
Multiple hits registered against the front-arc shields of the lead cruiser. Voids already under assault from a shoal of allied frigates on intercept courses shimmered, flickered once and crumpled.
Sustained barrage from the macro-cannons ripped a line of explosions across the nose and underbelly of the cruiser, which yawed badly like a jackknifed freighter on an oil slick. Slipping out of formation, it slewed across the other enemy vessels in the line. Unable to halt their brutal momentum, the other cruisers collided with the stunned body of the stricken lead ship. Silent fire roared through real space, lighting a beacon that was devoured in seconds.
A moment later and the lead ship’s reactor went critical, unleashing a nuclear flare as bright as star-death, consuming the vessels surrounding it.
It was the mortal spark of a flotilla, and brought a savage smile to Arcadese’s features as he shielded his eyes against the flash.
Magnesium white was fading when a vox-unit built into the command console crackled and the voice of a warrior-king issued forth, cutting short the Ultramarines’ shouts of victory.
‘Warriors of the Ardent Reef, this is Rogal Dorn. The Warmaster comes, knocking at our gates. You are the vanguard, your body its bricks, your blood its mortar. Hold fast for as long as you can. I honour you, each and every one, for your sacrifice. Praetorians all, your names shall live on into eternity. Man the last gate and do it with defiance in your hearts and a clenched fist. Give the Arch-traitor nothing. Make him pay for every metre with blood. We stand as one, unified in purpose. In the Emperor’s name and for the survival of Terra, hold.’
Lord Dorn himself was watching, and Arcadese would follow his order as if it had been given by his own primarch.
Taking his attention away from the debris of the sundered vessels above, his gaze alighted on the battlefield below.
Infantry cohorts, each hundreds strong, had engaged the first wave of landed warriors. Even supported by a host of battle tanks, the traitor legionaries were tearing them apart. An arterial flash of crimson against white-and-blue battleplate revealed the allegiance of the warriors battering at their doors, and Arcadese fought down a cold chill of despair at that knowledge.
‘Berserkers let slip their leash…’ he muttered.
Lieutenant seemed not to hear or care. Possessed of no anima, he was like a suit of armour.
A retinal display flicked down over Arcadese’s eye from a command circlet he only just realised he was wearing, and he brought up the armoured face of each of the Ultramarines leading one of the Army cohorts.
Names eluded him; they were merely ‘brother-veteran’ defined by suffix, Alpha through Kappa.
‘Withdraw and consolidate,’ he barked into the feed, before distributing specific orders to each brother-veteran in turn. By degrees, the combined defenders began a fighting retreat, tightening their formation around the strongest remaining cohorts and allowing the others to form the rearguard. Tank battalions were sacrificed valiantly to stall the advance of the enemy warriors, ripped to armoured husks in a cascade of incendiaries and sawed metal.
‘Intensify fire by ranks,’ Arcadese continued, assessing and reassessing the conflict through the vertical slit and viewscreens. ‘Do not engage directly.’
Against the berserk warriors, keeping them at arm’s length was the only hope of forestalling a massacre.
Hold fast for as long as you can, the words came back to him.
Casting his eye skywards for a moment, Arcadese saw a flotilla of Imperial ships commanding the scrap of real space above. He turned to his gunners.
‘Bring ordnance down on the rear ranks, thin their numbers, and we’ll roll over what’s left.’
The macro-cannons altered alignment again and a series of pulsing reports rang throughout the fortress.
Through the vertical slit, Arcadese witnessed the hammering of the first enemy wave. It was split apart by the barrage, fading dust and smoke revealing the heaped corpses of warriors he had once called ally. Their deaths did little to salve the pain in his heart, but they bolstered the Army cohorts who massively outnumbered the attackers now. The ground battle turned into a stalemate.
‘Finely done, my lord,’ said Lieutenant. ‘The enemy are contained.’
His tone lacked personality, as if the response was merely programmed.
‘For now, brother,’ Arcadese replied.
The vox-unit crackled again before anything further could be said, warning of approaching vessels in the region of space over which they stood sentinel.
A glance at the viewscreen revealed a much larger fleet. One vessel in particular stood out from the rest, leading the line.
Vengeful Spirit…
Horus’ flagship was immense, a jagged spike of black against black, bristling with guns and growling with the sentience of a barely caged beast. A host of other cruisers and monstrous capital ships surrounded it, but all were dwarfed by the Warmaster’s battle-barge.
This was the instrument of Horus’ will in the void, the darkling vessel that embodied his graven pact with Chaos and the promise of omnipotence should he deliver this last bastion of mankind to its Ruinous gods.
When it spoke, it did so in a roar with the sound of an array of guns powerful enough
to kill worlds. The Vengeful Spirit issued a single word from the mouths of its many cannons, and that word was ‘doom’.
The Imperial intercept flotilla vanished in a hot storm of fire and silence, blown away like ash on the solar wind. Real space throbbed with the violence of their destruction, sore and hurting with the wound inflicted upon it by Horus’ flagship.
For once, Arcadese hesitated.
How can we prevail against such unbounded fury?
But he was an Ultramarine, and if he knew anything it was duty. He had a line to hold, for the Emperor, for Terra and all the many souls of mankind that would be sacrificed to thirsting gods should he fail.
‘Cycle guns up. Rake the escorts, pick them apart. We’ll snarl up the flagship in the dead hulks of its own fleet.’
The Vengeful Spirit was still too distant to fire on. At such extreme range, a ship that size with its armour and shields would shrug off the cannonade like an insect sting. Its outriding vessels were a different prospect. They had burned engines to sweep in front of the goliath flagship, like lesser predator-fish swarming around a leviathan of the deep. Arcadese wanted to create a graveyard of broken vessels for the Vengeful Spirit to wade through. Even if they could slow the flagship down that would be a victory of sorts.
‘Sustained and heavy barrage,’ he ordered. ‘Do not cease fire until you run empty.’
The fusillade had lasted less than a minute when the fortress was hit by one of Horus’ larger retinue ships. Arcadese was lifted off his feet in the resulting blast wave. Chips of rockcrete stung his face where they pierced skin and flesh. One embedded itself in his jaw but he ignored it. He rolled, vertiginously, failing to grip the edge of the command throne as he was smashed over it. Fire, smoke and noise filled his senses. Somewhere, he heard a choked scream.
Gunner is dead.
Up on his feet faster this time, Arcadese shook off the disorientation and peered through fading smoke to see his worst fears realised. A broken puppet of a warrior slumped half-out of his weapon harness, his body bifurcated along the waist. Most of the left side of his skull was crushed. His remaining eye stared from a bloodied face that had once been noble but was now horrific.
Lieutenant had vanished from sight in the hellstorm. Arcadese didn’t know if the Ultramarine was alive or dead. Debris lay everywhere, wreathed with choking dust.
A chunk of fortress wall had collapsed inwards and the roar of battle outside grew louder with its absence. Charred-flesh stink and the acerbic tang of incendiary heat bled in on a turbulent wind.
After a brief cessation, the other guns resumed their barrage. On a cracked viewscreen, its image intermittent and crazed with static, the vessel responsible for wounding the fortress was broken apart.
A fourth gun, still operational, lay silent.
The Vengeful Spirit drew closer, battering the shattered vessels aside without slowing. They’d have to target it soon, attempt the impossible and bring down or at least slow a ship that could rip apart their fortress and the asteroid into which it was hewn with a single, desultory burst of its guns.
Arcadese staggered over to the stalled cannon, hauled out the dead gunner and climbed into the firing harness.
A targeting crosshair overlaid his vision, its macro-zoom enabling him to pick out specific vessels powering through the void. Through the azure glow of the targeting matrix’s filter, he saw a furious space battle unfolding. A number of immense Imperial Emperor-class ships had moved to blockade the route of the Vengeful Spirit and its personal vanguard. Star flashes, smudges of ultra-light, signalled the unleashing of their forward lances.
A large frigate was transfixed by several beams concurrently and exploded into a supernova, radiating heat-death in an invisible fog from its burned reactors.
Lining up a cruiser wallowing in the sundered vessel’s wake on his reticule, subconsciously aware of the ammo count to the extreme right of his screen, Arcadese gripped the firing triggers.
A steady staccato drummed through his body as the harness failed to fully dampen the recoil from the massive gun. No mortal could have used the macro-cannons; their bones would be reduced to splinters, their innards rendered to soup in a single salvo.
Arcadese endured it, revelled in the cathartic satisfaction of seeing a tear open up in the cruiser’s aft. Drooling men and fuel, it slowed and fought for retaliatory firing solutions. Three more macro-cannons stitched lines of super-heavy shells into its flanks, burst open entire decks, collapsed towers and ripped open full sections of armour plating as the voids capitulated utterly.
‘Bring it down!’
Arcadese was bellowing now, venting his frustration at the certainty that this was but a forestalling of all their deaths.
A rippling chain reaction broke the cruiser into several pieces, now little more than flotsam awash on a dark and uncaring ocean, a tomb of flash-frozen heretics cast to oblivion.
Tracking that sea of utter black, Arcadese found and locked on to another ship. A snap-fired salvo collapsed a few shields, broke up some comms towers before a heavy grip on his shoulder pulled him away from the myopic universe to which he was a willing prisoner.
‘Our ground forces are failing, my lord.’
Lieutenant was still alive. Bloody-faced with a jagged line of crimson across his cheek that was bleeding onto his neck and rimming the edge of his gorget, but alive.
‘I can take the gun, sir,’ he added.
Arcadese nodded, yanked up the firing harness to let Lieutenant in, and went to the command console.
‘How?’
Where only moments ago the battle was bogged down in a time-eating stalemate, now the traitors had regrouped, their forces inexplicably replenished. They were losing again. More than that, something else moved amongst the warring throngs. Red-fleshed with eyes black like darkest flint, a baleful aura exuding off their brawny bodies in a visceral steam, Arcadese had no words to describe these… monsters.
Entire phalanxes of men, those who had lost their legionary captains, fled in the face of the horrors. Bolter fire swept them up, tore them apart like threshed wheat. Those loyal warriors still fighting were hard-pressed to last much longer before a full-scale rout saw the end to their resistance.
Arcadese engaged the comm-bead in his ear.
‘How many men do we have as a garrison?’
Lieutenant answered perfunctorily.
‘Fifty Legiones Astartes and a hundred times that in Army auxiliaries. They await you in the lower deep, before the gate.’
‘I did not ask if…’ Arcadese let it go. Lieutenant wasn’t listening any more. His final words to Arcadese haunted him as he walked to the lifter plate that would convey him to the lower deep and the last defenders of the fortress.
‘It has been an honour to serve with you, my lord.’
The reply sounded hollow, even untruthful. ‘And you, Lieutenant.’
Shrouded in shadows, dust motes spiralling earthwards with the recoil from the macro-cannons, the lower deep was a vast and echoing space. In its centre, standing to attention in a pool of lambent light, was a square of over five thousand men.
Ultramarines officers stood head and shoulders above the Army soldiers, bolters locked across their chests. When the lifter plate touched down Arcadese realised he was wearing his full panoply of war, including cloak and laurel. He perceived the warriors he was about to command to their deaths through the red retinal lenses of a battle-helm. Clasped to his left thigh was an ornate scabbard; on the right, holstered and fully loaded, was a bolt pistol. The command circlet was gone. A servitor-armourer that hadn’t been with him when the lifter plate descended was by his side now and bowed humbly.
‘Serf, my blade,’ he said, holding out his hand for the servitor-armourer to place his sword in it.
The hilt felt strong, it lent strength to Arcadese’s arm as he touched it.
‘I know my purpose now,’ he muttered to the creature, which backed away as Arcadese stepped off the lifter plate and into the fortress’ lowest level. He didn’t question, for nothing he could have asked or had an answer to would matter in the moments to follow.
Instead, he merely asked, ‘Are you ready to make your sacrifice with me and die in the name of Terra?’
‘For Throne and Emperor!’ over five thousand voices replied in shouted unison.
Arcadese nodded and found steel in the eyes of every one of these warriors.
‘Open the last gate,’ he ordered, and the gates ground open noisily, letting in the light and the blood and the death…
Time… slipped. It had happened before, but this was the first occasion when Arcadese could remember it happening and notice it.
Five thousand had become five hundred, surrounded in the middle of the battlefield by a baying throng of beasts shaped like men and men shaping to become beasts.
Daemons all…
Such a curious, archaic word. Yet it felt apt.
In seconds, five hundred became fifty, so only Arcadese and his legionary brothers remained.
Wasn’t I supposed to be one of the last?
Aside from the Crusader Host, the rest of Guilliman’s Legion was last reported to be on Calth. The incongruity of his unknown company brothers, the faces without names, the warriors bereft of diversity or personality, only just struck Arcadese in those final moments.
The stench of burning flesh assaulted his nostrils even through the grille of his battle-helm as the power sword slid from a traitor’s chest; a second blow cut head from neck. A third blocked the thrust of another assailant. Churning teeth met superheated adamantium in a collision of sundered metal. A point-blank bolt pistol salvo took out part of the berserker’s face. He fell and behind him loomed a creature wrenched from hell.