[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension

by C. S. Goto - (ebook by Undead)

  For a moment, Gabriel froze with his bolter aimed directly at the alien’s head. He fought against his instincts to pull the trigger, realising that there might still be more at stake on Rahe’s Paradise than the Imperium’s command to suffer not the alien to live. Glancing to the side, he was relieved to see that the Celestian Sisters had responded in exactly the same way.

  Pausing for a moment, as though merely to test Gabriel’s resolve, Flaetriu stepped forward and approached Macha, kneeling on the ground in front of her and speaking in a tongue that Gabriel could not understand. He could see that the farseer was pleased to see this ranger, and for some reason that made him a little uneasy.

  A small group of other rangers stepped out of their hiding places in the rocks, and presented themselves to the farseer, using low, sweeping bows.

  “Flaetriu is explaining that you treated him poorly,” whispered Ptolemea, pressing herself against Gabriel in order to talk without being overheard. “He said that he tried to warn us about the shield. The other rangers—one is called Aldryan, I think—they rescued him from the monastery while the battle raged in the desert.”

  Gabriel nodded his understanding but kept his gaze on Macha, watching the expression in her eyes change. He was fully aware that the mathematical advantage had now swayed away from him again, and that it would be hard to maintain this truce amidst charges of mistreatment and with a battle still raging between the two sides on the far side of the monastery.

  After a few seconds, Macha turned her gaze back on Gabriel, the emerald fires within burning with a different sort of passion.

  It seems that I have overestimated you again, Gabriel, but the battle is not your doing, just as it is not mine. The Reapers were destined to fight you, and thus you fight them. We must bring this to an end, now, before it gets even more out of hand—

  A piercing scream stabbed into Gabriel’s head, making him throw his hands up to his ears in an effort to shut out the agonising noise. His eyes closed in a reflex reaction as his mind strove to battle the intrusion, but he forced them open again in order to return the gaze of his attacker—he would not be cowed by the farseer, not after everything they had already been through.

  To his astonishment, he saw that the eldar were all in the same position, each clutching at their heads as though being tortured from within. Macha had slumped to the ground as her warlock had released his arm, clutching at his own head in obvious pain, and she was writhing.

  It was not her; something else was happening.

  At his side, Ptolemea was clearly suffering the same thing. Gabriel closed his eyes and concentrated on the scream. He let it echo and ricochet around his mind, trying to catch glimpses of it, but it was like nothing he had ever felt before. It was a death-knell of some kind, but in a language that was utterly alien to him, even the gentlest tones of which wracked him with pain. Then he saw it, just a couple of words flickering on the very edge of his comprehension: death my mistress.

  As suddenly as it had started, the psychic death cry ceased, leaving a backwash of silence flooding into their minds as everyone climbed back to their feet.

  But then a real explosion shook the amphitheatre, and the group turned to see one of the majestic towers of the Blood Ravens monastery explode into a rain of rubble, as though blasted by a constant tirade of rockets that had finally broken through the heavy stone armour.

  At the same time, high up in the atmosphere, another explosion flashed brilliantly, like a dying star. Tiny fragments of wreckage started falling through the stratosphere, streaking the sky with burning meteor trails. And then a wave of coruscating blue energy washed over the heavens, pulsing across from one side to the other, like a terrible aurora. Little flecks of the startling blue fell down into the atmosphere, sizzling and shrieking as they flashed and jigged like dying fairies. In the aftermath of the explosion, a hideous background of screaming voices whirled around the planet, as though the atmosphere had suddenly been riddled with tortured souls.

  As he looked down from the incredible sky, Gabriel saw Macha’s face only centimetres from his own, her eyes flaring with hatred and anger.

  What have you done, human!? What have you done? The souls of the Dark Reapers will damn us all, you fool. The only way to trust you is to kill you—something that I should have done on Tartarus.

  Macha lifted her hands and clasped them around Gabriel’s face, holding him as though about to kiss him, but wracking his head with agony as streams of sha’iel flooded through her arms into his brain.

  Immediately, the Celestian Sisters opened up with their bolters, snapping off shells at the rangers that quickly scattered back into the cover of the fallen rocks. Jonas lashed out with his staff, sending gouts of burning energy crashing into the remaining warlocks.

  Ptolemea stood for a moment, watching the short-lived alliance collapse around her. She saw the alien farseer and Gabriel locked in a lethal embrace and she realised that she could not let the captain die. She may have come to Rahe’s Paradise to investigate allegations of his taint, but now she felt as though the fate of her own soul was tied inextricably to his. She could not let him die like this; it would be like condemning herself to a life of deceit and dishonesty.

  Diving forward, Ptolemea crashed into Macha and pushed her away from the stunned figure of Gabriel, letting her momentum carry them both down into a heap on the ground. Landing on top of the farseer, Ptolemea whipped a slender dagger out of a holster along her shoulder-blade and plunged it down into the alien’s chest. It sunk in down to its hilt, and Macha screamed with the shock. Her reflex reaction was to fire out her hand into the other woman’s face, planting her open palm over her beautiful, porcelain features.

  Muttering something inaudible, Macha’s eyes squinted and a pulse of emerald fire flashed up through her arm, smashing Ptolemea in the face and throwing her up into the air. Continuing to mutter her words of power, Macha remained laying on the ground and the dagger slowly withdrew out of her flesh. In less than a second, the blade flipped round and shot upwards, plunging deeply into Ptolemea’s heart as she fell back down towards the ground. Her dark eyes bulged and her mouth opened as she slumped down on top of the farseer once again, dead.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: PYROCLASM

  As the chaos of battle persisted in the desert in front of the crumbling Blood Ravens monastery, a deep rumbling sound pulsed through the ground and the mountainous form of Krax-7 behind the edifice trembled visibly. The sand in the desert started to shift and the dunes began to collapse. The mica glass that still sheened under much of the battlefield cracked and splintered, unable to shift with the waves of subterranean movement that shunted under the ground.

  Corallis turned from his vantage point on the roof of his Land Raider and glanced at the unstable volcano behind the monastery. He could see rocks and boulders cascading down its sides, and avalanches beginning to grip the lower reaches of the great mountain. He had seen enough volcanoes on Rahe’s Paradise to know what was about to happen.

  Turning back to the battlefield, he could see the distant figure of Tanthius struggling to his feet. The huge Terminator sergeant was limping slightly as he started to make his way back towards the main battle; he had overshot the centre of the conflict during his pursuit of the magnificent, plumed eldar warrior, which now lay dead on the ground behind the hulking figure of Tanthius.

  The other eldar fighting in the field seemed to have fallen into a slump following Tanthius’ victory, and their numbers were beginning to dwindle as the Blood Ravens rallied, capitalising on the opportunity. Even the destruction of one of the monastery towers did not seem to raise the aliens’ spirits. Corallis had heard that they were an emotional species, and this behaviour seemed to confirm the rumours.

  Only a couple of minutes earlier, Corallis had seen strange streaks of blue light flash through the upper atmosphere, and he wondered whether Kohath was engaged in a fight that mirrored this one on the ground. He smiled slightly at the thought of the sergeant cursing t
he serfs on the command deck and wishing that he was down on the planet’s surface with a bolter in his hand. Despite his protestations, however, Kohath was a fine ship’s commander, and Gabriel had left him in charge of the Ravenous Spirit for a reason. Corallis had faith that the Spirit would put up a valiant fight, no matter what the odds.

  Finally, Krax-7 convulsed and blew its top, spitting great chunks of rock up into the sky, splintering hundreds of tonnes of mountain-top as effortlessly as casting grains of sand. The huge tumbling boulders flew out in all directions, some of them looping out over the monastery and smashing down into the field of battle, as though the planet itself were launching ordnance in retaliation to the violence being done to it. The stone ballistics crunched down against the mica glass, pounding out craters and spraying the battlefield with lethal, black shards of glass, shredding the armour of Blood Ravens and eldar alike—the volcano showed no discrimination.

  As the masonry rained down, a huge superheated mushroom of smoke, ash and debris plumed up from the peak, rapidly expanding to obscure the sky and blot out the light of the red sun. Even as he watched, Corallis could see the pyroclastic flow surging down the sides of the volcano, engulfing everything in its path. He could even hear it as it shunted the air along before it, driving it at speeds greater than sound. In a matter of seconds it rolled over the towering monastery, swamping it like a tsunami and then driving on into the desert beyond, blasting chunks of masonry off the once-impregnable towers and throwing them like primitive projectiles.

  There was nothing that he could do other than brace himself against the Land Raider as the supersonic surge of heat and ash ploughed on into the desert, rolling over the combatants and submerging them into volcanic darkness. The battlefield simply vanished from view, and even the keen eyes of Corallis could see little further than the end of his own arm. He couldn’t even see the great, burning rivers of lava that were streaming down the sides of Krax-7.

  The tunnel shook and debris fell from the ceiling, raining down onto the stooped figure of Caleb as he tried to keep pace with the local warriors that jogged along in front of him, their smaller bodies easily fitting through the confined and twisting spaces. They ran with practiced ease, always knowing the right turn when a junction was reached, always knowing where to put their feet when the ground grew treacherous.

  The thunderous impacts of combat above made the tunnels unstable, but something had changed. No longer were the passageways trembling with persistent dull shocks, but abrupt and powerfully violent movements wracked the ground, twisting it and running it through with giant fault lines, cracking the tunnels into fragments. Something other than war was threatening the integrity of the desert.

  A huge and sudden quake cracked through the ground, throwing the local warriors off their feet and causing Caleb to stumble. Cracks and faults appeared in the ceiling of the tunnel, small at first but rapidly expanding and dashing along its length.

  “Move!” yelled Caleb, reaching down and grasping hold of two fallen warriors, hefting them under his arms and charging along the passageway. “Cave-in!”

  The other warriors were back on their feet and running, this time chasing after the pounding shape of the Blood Ravens scout, who barrelled along through the confined space as it shook, debris crashing down against his armour in ever-increasing quantities.

  Another massive explosion rocked the tunnel and large sections of the roof collapsed all at once. Caleb took another couple of giant strides and then dived forward, launching himself headlong through the last few metres, tumbling out into a wider, rocky chamber at the end of the passage, throwing the two warriors out from under his arms as he flew.

  A suddenly muffled scream made Caleb turn as he pushed himself up off the ground in the cavern, showers of sand cascading down his armour. Looking back into the tunnel from which the group had just emerged, he could see the outstretched hand of one of the local warriors, reaching out of a wall of fallen sand and rock. The hand was tense and, for a couple of seconds, its fingers twitched. A few of the other locals ran back to the tunnel and started to scrape and scratch at the landslide that had swamped their comrade, but then the reaching fingers fell limp and they stopped digging, collapsing in exhaustion against the fatal wall of sand.

  The sound of falling rock and sand gradually subsided, leaving the group struggling for breath in the underground cavern.

  “What was that, Sky Angel?” asked Varjak, walking over to Caleb. “I’ve never seen the tunnels behave like that before.”

  “I’m not sure, Varjak. But I don’t think that it was a weapon. It might have been a volcanic eruption—perhaps even Krax-7 itself, judging by the proximity. We need to get above ground,” replied Caleb, his eyes already scanning the perimeter of the cave for exit tunnels.

  The fine, granular sound of falling debris was beginning to fade, and it seemed that whatever had caused the cave-in had subsided for the time being. But then a new sound started to hum through the subterranean network. At first it sounded like another rockslide, or perhaps a series of them in far-off tunnels, but then it grew louder, as though drawing closer. After a few seconds, it began to resolve itself from a dull clattering into a higher pitched hum, almost an insect-like buzz.

  “What’s that noise?” asked Caleb, scanning the heavy shadows that riddled the various cave-mouths and tunnels that peppered the perimeter of the cavern. He dropped his eyes to meet the sparkling green of Varjak’s, hoping that the local boy would be familiar with the odd sound.

  “I don’t know, Sky Angel,” replied the youth, turning away from Caleb and trying to locate the direction from which the noise was emanating. The bizarre, metallic hum seemed to come from everywhere at once as it echoed and bounced around the complicated and restricted acoustic space. “I’ve never heard it before.”

  The scraping buzz grew louder and more intense, drawing in around them from the darkness of the surrounding tunnels. The dull, rattling hum started to develop a metallic edge, as though hundreds of delicate sheets of metal were rubbing against one another.

  A faint shimmer caught Caleb’s keen eyes and he strained his vision into the shadows beyond the mouth of one of the widest passageways. The darkness seemed to move, as though it were composed of thousands of tiny little flecks of shadow. But he couldn’t see anything decisive, even as the hum grew louder and began to make the unprotected ears of the locals ache.

  “We should leave,” said Caleb, still not understanding what was happening but deciding that ignorance and curiosity should not always be identical. “Varjak—which way to the surface?”

  The boy pointed to one of the smaller tunnels set into the far wall, and Caleb strode over towards it immediately. Peering up through the narrow, tubular passageway, he could see the faint red light of the local sun seeping down, and he nodded decisively. “Everyone out!”

  As he spoke, there was a sudden shift in the quality of the background noise, as though whatever was generating it had broken through a barrier and had emerged into an area with open acoustics. Turning on his heel, Caleb heard a scream and saw a roiling cloud of black flecks emerging out of the wide tunnel mouth on the other side of the chamber. The cloud was swarming around one of the locals, and he was screaming. Even as he watched, Caleb could see the boy’s flesh vanishing before his eyes: little spots of blood appeared on his skin, rapidly stretching out into cuts and gashes, then into open wounds. Eventually, parts of the screaming youth’s skull and skeleton became visible, glinting with specks of white in amongst the teeming and glittering shadows that swarmed around him. The other locals just stared in disbelief.

  Breaking the transfixed horror of the scene, Varjak dashed forward and took a swing with his long-bladed dagger, sweeping it through the cloud of little scarab beetles and driving into the neck of his doomed comrade. The insects parted around the plunging blade, letting it slip through between them as though offering no resistance at all. The screaming stopped instantly as the boy’s head crashed down into the
sand—his body slumping into a heap next to it.

  As the beetles swarmed around the fallen corpse and feasted on its flesh, consuming it in a matter of seconds, the warriors turned and dashed up into the exit tunnel. Caleb paused for a moment at the mouth of the passage, watching the little metallic insects work their way through the flesh of the fallen warrior. It was disgusting, but his mind was plagued by questions and doubts. What in the name of the Great Father was going on? He had never heard of anything like these shimmering, black beetle-like scarabs. They appeared to be made of metal, as though they were artificial constructions, like tiny insectoid robots, and there were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands in the swarm.

  As he watched, the rustle of carapace on carapace grew even louder as more of the beetles flooded into the cavern. They started to pour out of the tunnels all around, coating the walls, the ceiling and the floor, pluming out into the middle of the space as though riding the wave of an explosion further under the ground.

  Caleb had seen enough and he turned again, dashing up through the exit tunnel in pursuit of the local warriors, questing for the sun. Behind him, he could hear the deafening rattle and rustle of carapaces flooding into the narrow passageway.

  As Krax-7 blew, Tanthius looked back towards the magnificent black walls of the Blood Ravens’ monastery. One of its towers had been destroyed by the continuous fire from the Wave Serpents in the desert, but the eldar transports were now under siege from squads of Marines, and they no longer had any time for long range assaults on the huge edifice. Necho’s Assault squad was pestering one of them from the sky, dousing it with fire, and Topheth’s attack bikes were engaging the other, whilst fending off the counter-attacks of the alien jetbikes. The battle appeared to have swung in favour of the Blood Ravens since Tanthius himself had defeated the exarch.