‘Break through,’ he shouted. ‘No mercy, no prisoners and no stopping!’
The heavy sponson guns of the Land Raider spoke with a blazing voice, and a hastily constructed redoubt vanished in a searing sheet of fire and smoke. Streaming shots rippled from ruins either side of the building, pattering from the heavy armour of the Land Raider. Honsou slewed the heavy bolter around and racked the slide before pumping a constant stream of shells from the gun.
Detonations tore through the ruins, the explosive shells punching through the stonework and killing the soldiers sheltering behind it. He worked his fire over the soldiers, making them dance like grotesque puppets in a hail of shells. A volley of missiles arced up from behind a barricade ahead, sweeping up into the air before slashing downwards towards the wedge of tanks.
None came near Honsou’s Land Raider, but a trio of flatbeds exploded as the warheads punched through the engine blocks and drivers’ cabs. Others exploded amongst the troopers running alongside the armoured charge. Rattling blasts of gunfire scythed through these unprotected troops, but Honsou cared nothing for their losses; it was the armour that would win this fight.
Lines of fire filled the air between the two forces, but the majority of it came from the Iron Warriors. The defenders had been badly shaken by the destruction of the Gauntlet Bastions and the fall of the Tower of the First. Hundreds, if not thousands, of their comrades were dead, and Honsou laughed at what notions of friendship and camaraderie led to. A warrior who cared nothing for the men he fought beside could not be undone by their deaths.
The Land Raider roared over a makeshift barricade, crushing a handful of soldiers in uniforms of blue and gold. A surviving soldier let off a burst of las-fire, and his rounds sparked off Honsou’s shoulder guards. He sprayed the man with bolter shells and cut him in two. The defence was crumbling. Honsou’s armoured wedge simply rolling over the defenders with its sheer mass and momentum.
One by one, the hurriedly deployed barricades were crushed, shelled by mobile artillery units or isolated and overwhelmed by the following troops. Though the discipline of these men was nigh unshakable, it was not unbreakable. As the noose of blazing tanks closed upon the defenders, they finally gave way to the inevitable.
Scores of the ogre creatures gleefully tore mortal soldiers limb from limb as they fought to escape, dragging the bodies behind them on their chain grapples like trophies. Votheer Tark’s battle-engines revelled in the slaughter, multi-limbed stalk tanks scuttling over the ruins and cutting their way through the defenders with lashing tails or clawed pincers.
Tark’s hybrid creation of meat and metal coughed dozens of shells at the enemy from its racks of mortars, his ruined flesh swirling in the amniotic suspension on the belly of the spider machine. Kaarja Salombar rode with her corsairs in gaudily embellished skiffs, cutting through the ranks of the defenders as they fled towards the basilica. Honsou watched as her skiff darted in and its crew slashed open blue environment suits with crackling sabres and deadly accurate pistol shots.
The corsairs’ way of war was not his, too flamboyant by half, but he admired their malice and made a mental note to congratulate the Corsair Queen on her cruelties.
The Land Raider crushed the bodies of fallen soldiers and Honsou worked the fire of his heavy bolter over the fleeing enemy, revelling in the visceral feel of the bucking weapon and the scale of this fight.
When the Thrice Born was his to command, it would be but a taster of what was to come.
Chapter Six
Despite the warning klaxons and alarm bells filling the command chapel of the Basilica Dominastus, Olantor felt utter calm and stillness. The scenes of carnage on the Via Rex playing out on the picter displays were plucked directly from his worst nightmares, a massacre undertaken with such zeal and glee that he found it hard to imagine.
The Gauntlet Bastions had fallen, smashed asunder in one blow of such infamy that he could scarce recall its equal. Decimus and Sabatina were surely dead, as were the warriors of the 5th he had tasked with bolstering the defences. But for his summons to the command chapel, he would be too.
‘Emperor save us, they’re all dead,’ wept Pater Monna, his disaffected air quite vanished in the face of the enemy. ‘They’re going to kill us all…’
‘Be quiet,’ snapped Sibiya. ‘You are a servant of the Emperor. Give into despair and you are no better than a worm.’
Pater Monna looked at her with his bulging eyes, as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Are you insane? Look what’s happening out there! Everyone’s dead, or they will be soon! And we’re next!’
The Navigator bondsman turned angrily on Olantor. ‘I thought you were supposed to protect us? So much for the vaunted Ultramarines, eh? Fat lot of good you did us!’
Olantor lifted Pater Monna from the deck by the front of his scarlet and gold tunic.
‘While an Ultramarine lives, there is hope.’
Olantor dropped Pater Monna, who fell into a vacant seat and buried his head in his hands. He rocked back and forth. ‘The Emperor protects, the Emperor protects, the Emperor protects…’
Olantor ignored the broken man and addressed the remainder of the command chapel.
‘Yes, our enemies are through the Gauntlets, but they cannot hope to take the Basilica,’ he said, his voice cutting through the babble of voices and clattering servitors. The panicked hubbub ceased at his booming voice, and all eyes turned to face the Ultramarines warrior.
‘The enemy have breached the outer bastions,’ continued Olantor, ‘but they will find us ready for them. The gun towers of the basilica will sweep through them like a hurricane through wheat. Our walls are high and thick, and they will not catch us the same way twice.’
Olantor thought of correcting the venerable brother, but no good could come of it. Altarion was lost in the memories of a long ago battle, and he would fight just as hard believing he fought the beasts of the Great Devourer as he would the forces of the Ruinous Powers.
He saw Sibiya understood, and gave her a brief nod of thanks.
‘Hestian, shut this place down,’ he ordered. ‘All guns open fire on the Via Rex.’
The Techmarine did not reply and Olantor turned to repeat his order, but his mouth dropped open in surprise and horror.
Hestian’s head was thrown back, his mouth pulled wide in a jaw-cracking scream of agony. Blazing electrical fire burned behind his eyes and poured from his mouth with streaming emerald light. As Olantor watched, the fire erupted from every point of Hestian’s body connected to the command station, bathing the interior of the enclosure in baleful green light. Hestian howled, the sound of a soul in the vilest torment imaginable, and the fire poured from him in leaping, electrical arcs.
Bolts of green lightning flew across the command chapel, tearing into the cogitators and logic engines of the basilica. Rippling fire spread like a gleeful virus into the heart of the machines and jade sparks frothed from output sockets. Pict screens blew out and brass dials popped and melted in an instant.
Techs screamed as they were burned alive at their stations, too wired in and restrained to escape the flames. Servitors burned where they sat, unmoving and uncaring as the flesh peeled from their bones. Extinguisher sprays blasted into the command chapel, dousing the flames, but filling the air with choking, acrid fumes. Sparks flew in waterfalls from ruptured systems and the alarm klaxons diminished as emergency lights faded up with a dim, orange glow.
Olantor stalked the ruined command chapel towards Hestian, the Techmarine’s body little more than a husk of blackened flesh within his scorched armour. Seared flesh still clung to his skull, and the green wychfires still burned in the sockets. A burbling laugh issued from his ruined throat, and the augmitters placed around the command station hissed and spat static.
++This place is mine now.++ hissed a loat
hsome voice, mechanical and soulless.
Olantor shot Hestian’s corpse, but the malevolent laugh continued unabated, its substance now infecting the systems of the star fort. His worst suspicions were confirmed when he heard Brother Altarion call his name from the plotter table.
Olantor ran to join the Dreadnought, scanning through the readouts before him and taking in the scale of the disaster with a heavy heart. Bulkheads were sealing off desperately needed reinforcements, techs and adepts were shut out of their systems, launch bays were powered down, armouries locked and internal defences taken offline. Anything that might have given them a chance to resist the invaders was now beyond their reach.
‘This place is lost,’ said Sibiya, reaching the same conclusion.
Olantor looked up at Altarion’s gloriously carved sarcophagus. The solid slab of granite taken from the Castra Magna depicted the final battle that had all but taken the Old One’s life. The legends of Altarion’s last battle were legion, and if this was indeed their ending, there were no better heroes of the Chapter to fight alongside.
‘Aye, brother,’ he said, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘We shall raise arms together and spit in their eyes at Konor’s Gate.’
agreed the Dreadnought, lost in the mists of time.
Olantor turned to Interrogator Sibiya and said, ‘That last resort you showed me…’
‘It has already been moved,’ she said. ‘It is where it needs to be.’
‘And where is that?’ asked Olantor.
‘Protecting something very valuable that cannot be allowed to fall into enemy hands.’
‘Are you going to tell me what that is?’ said Olantor. ‘All along I have known that there is more to the Inquisition’s presence on this star fort than watching for any lingering taint from the daemons who once captured it. Tell me why you are here, and tell me now.’
At first he thought she was going to refuse, but Sibiya looked down at the plotting table and the scenes of slaughter on the Via Rex.
‘Very well, I will tell you,’ she said, ‘but it will be hard for you to hear.’
Honsou dropped from the back of the Land Raider, sweeping up his bolter and joining the race to the vast gateway of the basilica. Green fire crackled around the mighty fortress’s embrasures and gun ports, rippling like liquid over the statues and gargoyles peering down at him. Lines of electrical discharge streamed over the building, as though its very structure was under attack.
The enormous gateway barring entry into the basilica was wide open, the few soldiers gathered in the tapering narthex staring in horror at doors that stubbornly refused to close. Bolter shells burst amongst them, and a roaring battle tank with bloodstained sides and a series of flame lances mounted on its upper carapace swept inside, setting alight the wooden panelling on the walls and silken banners hanging from the ceiling.
Kaarja Salombar leapt nimbly from her skiff, her curved blades cutting a path through the ragged defenders as they scrambled to escape the wrath of the flame tank. Hulking ogres smashed ornamentation from the walls and pulled down columns with their chain grapples.
Cadaras Grendel and Notha Etassay joined him at the entrance of the basilica.
‘Adept Cycerin has done his work well,’ said Etassay, flourishing a bloody sword.
‘Damn good job,’ commented Grendel. ‘Else we’d be out here with our necks on the block.’
‘Grendel is right,’ said Etassay. ‘Had your pet magos failed…’
‘But he didn’t,’ snapped Honsou. ‘And we are inside.’
‘Aye, that we are,’ said Grendel. ‘Now what? So where’s this daemon lord then?’
No sooner were the words out of Grendel’s mouth than a cascade of information flooded Honsou’s visor. Rippling lines of green text, overlaid with schematic diagrams of the basilica’s interior, streamed before his eyes. In an instant, the interior layout of the basilica was laid out before Honsou, as clearly and as indelibly as though he himself had been the architect.
Immediately, he saw what he was looking for, pulsing like a beating heart.
The warp core of the Indomitable.
‘It’s right below us,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
Olantor watched Sibiya’s techs and the adept with the furred robe as they attached cables to the iron box he had last seen in a refrigerated shipping container in the Interrogator’s ship. Vapour slithered over its surface and the few icicles left on its surface were melting in the heat of the cavernous chamber deep in the heart of the Indomitable.
Leaving token blocking forces in place throughout the compromised star fort, Olantor had followed Interrogator Sibiya’s Saurians down innumerable flights of steps carved into the basilica’s structure to the engineering decks, where they had passed through the treacherously opened door to the colossal fort’s warp core.
Olantor had never seen anything quite so incredible, and its scale took his breath away. A circular chamber the size of the largest parade ground on Macragge, with a fiery column of crackling, dancing light rising to the ceiling a thousand metres above the floor. Chains and pulleys were attached to a circular gantry surrounding the highest point of the column, hanging to the deck like dark strands of hair. The seething light was sheathed in inscribed plates of thick armoured glass and sheets of bronze, a harnessed thunderstorm of epic proportions.
Distant shapes swam in the light, twisted outlines that flickered and burned themselves on the retina like fading afterimages of snapshot memories.
Clawed hands, gaping maws and burning eyes.
Even beneath the plates of his armour, Olantor could feel the immense, impossible, energies bound within that central column of blinding light. His skin itched and his soul rebelled to see such power bound and shackled to human cause. He tried not to look at the warp core for fear of what he might see.
‘How much longer?’ he demanded.
‘Not long,’ said Sibiya. ‘Trust me, this isn’t the kind of thing you want to rush. One tiny mistake and it could just as easily turn on us.’
Olantor turned away, still trying to come to terms with what Sibiya had told him.
The Lord of Macragge, Marneus Calgar had lied to them all.
The daemon lord M’kar still lived.
Chapter legends proudly told how Marneus Calgar and Terminators from the First Company had boarded the Indomitable and defeated M’kar’s daemonic hordes. Pages were devoted to the battle between Lord Macragge and the upstart daemon, entire tracts describing the poetry of his every blow.
Varro Tigurius spoke of the righteous wrath by which the Chapter Master had struck the daemon down with the Gauntlets of Ultramar and torn it limb from limb.
It was all a lie.
He had not believed Sibiya, had raged at the dishonour she did to Lord Calgar with her baseless accusations. He threatened her life, but upon seeing the star fort’s warp core, he had known she spoke the truth.
One look into the raging fire of the core was enough to convince Olantor that something ancient and diabolical was chained within its molten depths. Hatred bled from the light and Olantor fought to maintain his composure in the face of the bound creature and the betrayal it represented. The scale of such untruth struck at Olantor’s core, his soul and faith in his Chapter shaken to their very foundations.
Under Brother Altarion’s directions, Sibiya’s Saurians and the surviving Ultramar Auxilia were forming barricades from overturned engineering benches, emptied barrels of machine ore and stacked crates of spare parts. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something to mount a defence of the warp core.
A hundred warriors was all they could muster now
, a hundred men and women to stand against a rampaging army intent on releasing a daemon lord upon Ultramar. And of those hundred warriors, only two were Ultramarines.
Admittedly, one was a Dreadnought, but still…
Their defences were as strong as they could make them, but with the mechanisms of the star fort turned against them, Olantor knew they could hold for moments at best.
But moments might be all they would need.
He turned and marched towards where a handful of techs and servitors were buried in the heart of the warp core controls. Pater Monna directed the work of half a dozen specialised Navigator-spliced servitors as they connected wires, welded portions of the plotting table and a host of other components together. Olantor didn’t even try to guess what they might be.
Pater Monna looked up from his work as Olantor approached.
‘You must hurry, Navigator,’ said Olantor.
‘I’m not a Navigator,’ said Pater Monna. ‘I just work for the Castanas. My family is bonded to them after the marriage of–’
Olantor waved his hand to stall Pater Monna’s full family history. He knew it was the man’s means of coping with the stress, but he had no time to indulge his panic.
‘How much longer until you are able to trigger a warp jump?’
Pater Monna shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘That is not good enough,’ warned Olantor. ‘Our enemies will be here soon. We cannot let them release the daemon. Do you understand what is at stake?’
‘Yes, of course I do. Better than you, probably.’
‘Then when will you be ready?’
‘A minute? Never?’ shouted Pater Monna, indicating the makeshift tools and mass of tangled wires, diodes and valves spilling from the core control panel. ‘It’s hopeless. I can’t work under these conditions.’
Iron Warrior Page 8