by Nick Kyme
But Iulus Fennion would always know the full truth of it.
He regarded the bedraggled remnants of the Ark Guard that had fought and died in the ‘wastes’ alongside the Ultramarines and felt… surprise.
Ever since Ghospora City back on Black Reach, over a century ago, he had known humans had mettle. To fight greenskins from behind barricades and fortified battlements was one thing; to charge headlong into hand-to-hand combat with necrons was something else. Perhaps these hundred or so soldiers before him were suicidal.
They were mainly miners, he decided, Damnosian labourers pressed into service as a last act of a desperate world to shore up its decimated armies. They’d just returned from the capitolis administratum bastion with the acting lord governor. With the Deathwinds’ payload depleted, it was no longer safe and he was to be secured within Kellenport.
Word had come through Daceus from the front. Sicarius was pressing on into enemy-held territory, to Arcona City and the Zephyr Monastery. He’d requisitioned forces from the rearguard, both squads of Devastators and Brother Ultracius. Kellenport was won, but he wanted to keep it that way.
According to Tactica briefings, Commander Sonne had over fifty thousand Ark Guard at his disposal; a large part of the planet’s remaining population. Iulus was given the unenviable job of galvanising them and ensuring they held the line and the ground already won.
Agnathio could not make the long walk. The damage done to his motive functions had reduced the mighty warrior to an undignified shuffle and until a Techmarine could be tasked with conducting the correct rituals and rites to effect repairs, he would remain so. The Dreadnought joined Iulus’s command and the brother-sergeant was glad of his presence and his wisdom.
Presently, he had one ear to the recently restored long-range comm-feed.
‘Brother.’ The return was crackly and broken, but Iulus recognised the voice of Praxor. ‘I’m sorry that you’ve been left behind.’
‘It is no matter,’ Iulus replied. ‘My duty is to the captain and the Emperor whatever form it takes. How goes the battle farther out?’
‘Tough.’ It was rare for Praxor to be so upfront and honest about the severity of the fight ahead. He was usually possessed of the same vainglory as their captain.
Iulus wondered what had changed.
‘You lost battle-brothers?’
The voice that came back over the feed was quieter, almost hushed, ‘More than I’m comfortable with. The Shieldbearers are at barely half-strength.’
‘We always knew this war would be arduous. Galvia and Urnos were wounded but we are inviolable still.’ He was referring to the fact that ever since they’d been formed, the Immortals had yet to sustain a casualty. That feat might be put sorely to the test on Damnos.
‘I only wish you were fighting by my side, Iulus,’ said Praxor, his mood oddly candid. ‘I have need of your counsel and temperance.’
‘Guilliman willing, we will all survive this campaign to fight another in the primarch’s name.’
‘Or die in the prosecution of it.’
Iulus nodded without trace of regret or denial. ‘If that is his will, then yes.’
Praxor left a pause as if agreeing with his fellow sergeant then asked, ‘Any word from Scipio?’
The activation runes on the portable hololith projector were flashing. Iulus needed to cut this short. ‘None, but there is another comm shroud over the Thanatos Hills.’
‘May Guilliman watch over him.’
‘And all of us. Courage and honour, brother.’
‘Courage and honour.’
Iulus cut the feed. Troopers were filing in from the western gate, more Ark Guard. There were twenty thousand men with heavy cannon and servitors. The majority looked like the conscripts arrayed before Iulus in the reclaimed ‘wasteland’ in front of the first defensive wall.
The hololith unit flickered to life, a grainy blue three-dimensional image suspended in mid-air through a projector node, and Iulus looked away from the marching men.
‘Lord Fennion.’ It was Commander Sonne, from somewhere within the Kellenport city-bastion. He gave a crisp salute but his eyes appeared haggard, his face drawn and his uniform bedraggled.
‘I am a Space Marine sergeant,’ Iulus corrected him, nodding in recognition of the salute, ‘so you may refer to me as such. I am no one’s lord.’
‘Duly noted, sergeant. I want to convey my deepest appreciation for your efforts in liberating Kellenport. You have saved many lives with your actions and all of Damnos expresses its gratitude to you, our saviours.’
The words were there, but the belief was not. Sonne did not think his life or the lives of his people were saved, nor did he regard the Ultramarines as saviours. Iulus saw a broken man before him, one that was going through the motions and had all but given in to fatalism.
‘Further hard work is needed, commander. We have only stalled the necron advance, not stymied it completely.’
‘I am at your disposal, as are my men. I’ve already sent the twenty thousand requested to the wastes.’
‘You might want to reconsider naming that zone,’ Iulus advised.
Sonne nodded, mildly chastened. ‘Of course… Yes. It was the Courtyard of Chronus before the desolation. So it shall be again.’
‘Chronus it is,’ said Iulus. ‘Our tank commander will be pleased.’
Sonne didn’t understand the reference, but acknowledged the remark with another nod anyway.
Iulus went on. ‘Your thirty thousand will defend the city-bastion whilst the other twenty will be split evenly garrisoning the defensive walls. The third wall we mine and give up to the enemy.’
Sonne went to object but Iulus cut him off. ‘We’re already stretched and defending three walls will spread us too thinly. Our focus shall be on the first two walls, the first as a fall-back point for the second and then Kellenport city-bastion as our last redoubt.’
Sonne looked ashen at that last remark. If they lost Kellenport then it was over. For everyone.
‘You push on for the outer territories?’ he asked, a rare glimmer of hope in his tired eyes.
‘Captain Sicarius is driving the spearhead purposefully, yes.’
As Iulus understood it, the ‘spearhead’ was actually a series of daring raids. The necron vanguard had been beaten, a tiny respite bought for the Kellenport defenders, but the mechanoids would return as soon as they’d calibrated for fighting against the Ultramarines. Iulus nearly said as much to Sonne but chose to stay his tongue. Perhaps some of Scipio’s old empathy was rubbing off on him. But that had been a different version of his friend. Something, the death of Orad he suspected, had hollowed out that optimism and replaced it with a core of ice. He’d half heard of an altercation with Praxor in the past, something prior to Damnos, but had no wish to pry. The business of others was precisely that. Iulus knew his duty and how to do it to the best of his ability. He had gifts, the legacy of his Chapter brothers flowing in his veins, and he meant to honour that with each and every one of his actions.
Iulus only half-watched Commander Sonne’s salute, his mind on other things as the hololith shrank back into the projector node.
‘Don’t let it consume you, Scipio,’ he said to the wind, shifting his gaze to the Thanatos Hills where the necron barrage continued unabated. ‘Don’t give in to reckless hate, brother.’
Aristaeus loomed behind him; Iulus could hear the warrior’s careful tread.
‘Break up the squad,’ said the sergeant, ‘and distribute it around the separate battalions.’ He regarded the one hundred survivors from the battle for the plaza, the renamed Courtyard of Chronus. Falka Kolpeck was standing in the middle, their de facto leader. ‘These ones are with me.’
It had been so long since he had hunted.
For a moment he was skin and bone again and it was blood, not oil and circuitry, that flowed th
rough him. The wild lands of his birth stretched as far as he could see and the hooting of cattle and herd-beasts called into the umber evening. The sun was dipping and he felt its warmth fading on his cheek. The coarse grain of his antique phase-rifle was a reassuring presence in his hand. The wind, ghosting through the hills and across the plain, touched his exposed skin with chilling tendrils.
As quickly as they came, the sensations bled away again and left numbness and sorrow in their wake. The sun did not warm him, the wind was as dead as the bloodless arteries of his mechanised body. No rifle identified him as a noble plains hunter, instead a pair of gruesome talons betrayed him for what he was – a monster.
Sahtah the Enfleshed groaned inwardly. Even as the tundra rushed by in a blur of greyish white, as his slaves followed his lead, he was not placated. Funnelling into a deep gorge, he paused before the carcass of a dead herd-animal. Its flesh steamed with recently exposed entrails. Sahtah plunged his talons inside, turning them incarnadine with the beast’s spilled viscera, hoping…
‘Why can’t I feel it?’
He rounded on his slaves in a sudden fury. ‘There is no heat from the blood, no kill-stench. Where is it?’
Powerless to answer his demands even if they wanted to, the flayed ones merely stared and waited. Their flesh-cowls were rank with putrefaction but stirred a pang of jealousy in their lord.
‘I want my robes!’ Sahtah raged. His synthetic voice could only simulate his anger. In a quieter voice, he added: ‘I want my body.’
His instincts told him the genebred humans were close.
‘Soon I will have it,’ he promised. ‘Soon I will be enfleshed again.’
Chapter Nine
Brakkius led Retiarii up the slope. Brothers Renatus and Herdantes kept low behind their squad leader, weapons up. As soon as they were spotted a strobe of emerald gauss-fire lit up the snow and ice. It was answered by bolter fire that incapacitated one of the raiders but didn’t render it inoperative. Before Brakkius and his troops were retreating the downed necron had already begun to self-repair.
Despite the lack of lasting damage, their attack provoked the reaction Scipio was hoping for. Three of the six raiders left the obelisk and went after Brakkius.
Two hard bangs from Ortus took one of the mechanoids in the side of the skull. It crumpled into a heap, shuddered and phased out. Another shot exploded a raider’s shoulder and left it unable to shoot.
The crossfire was working. It drew the other three necrons out. Scipio and Largo had already sneaked into position before Brakkius’s attack and were about to flank them when the sniper fire stopped. Scipio was about to give the attack order when he hesitated and looked over to Ortus’s vantage point, wondering why he’d stopped firing.
‘Brother, report,’ he snapped into the comm-feed. Then came the screaming from back down the slope. It sounded like Renatus.
‘Brakkius!’
The reply was frantic. ‘Under attack, sergeant…’
Scipio had moved out of the gorge and couldn’t see back down the path because of the slope’s sharp incline. He caught muzzle flashes, though, and knew the weapons that made them were turned away from the obelisk.
‘In the ice. Beneath us!’
Largo was ready to move. ‘What do we do?’
The raiders were laying down a thickening curtain of fire. Their slow, methodical advance would get them to the edge of the path and looking down on the gorge in a few minutes. Then Brakkius would face enemies to the front and rear. Scipio swore loudly. He still had no sense of what was attacking Brakkius in the gorge but he suspected it was the same foe that had neutralised Ortus.
‘We fight!’ Scipio came up off his haunches like a jackhammer and thundered half a clip into the nearest raider. Battered, the necron turned and unleashed a swathe of gauss-beams. Scipio took one in the leg that staggered him, but he kept on running. Just behind him, Largo provided support fire and tore the raider’s chest open with a series of precise shots. It phased out, leaving four and whatever was in the gorge.
A claw broke through the ice at Scipio’s feet, answering that question, and locked onto the sergeant’s ankle. Instinctively he shot downwards at his assailant, carving up the ground into jagged chips. Pitiless eyes glowed emerald through the glossy filter of the ice before dying into embers and then voids as he creature phased out.
It was not alone.
Scipio cursed again, realising there had been faces beneath their feet but not of Damnosian natives, not any more – they were necrons, flesh-wrapped nightmares that tunnelled and burrowed like mechanical insects. Brakkius fought the same foes. Ortus had been claimed by them. This was a trap, but one of the necrons’ making, and Scipio had blundered right into it.
‘Sergeant Vorolanus!’
The ice broke apart at Scipio’s feet and he was dragged downwards, Largo’s warning echoing behind him. He kicked out and made a solid connection, ceramite hitting necron metal. For want of a better strategy, he jabbed his chainsword into the ice-slush where the half-fleshed horrors were slowly emerging. Sparks fizzed and died as they hit the ground, cascading off whatever Scipio’s blade was locked against.
Talons. The creatures had long, curved talons just like the ambushers they’d met and destroyed at the Thanatos Refinery. Scipio cursed himself for a fool. He had rushed to engage without properly gauging the lie of the land, but he was an Ultramarine with his brothers beside him – all was not lost. He swung his bolt pistol around, sending two shells into the ice just as a lance of pain shot up his leg where the flayed one had impaled him.
A second broke free of the ice and loomed over him. Scipio yanked his chainsword free and parried a blow that would have slashed open his neck.
‘Hell-kite!’ Two more shells put down the invisible aggressor still lodged below, trying to emerge; a swing of the chainblade ripped open the cabling and servos around the other necron’s torso. It fell back, stunned, but was self-repairing.
‘Brother!’
Largo had his own problems. Three more flayed ones had pulled themselves free of the ground, like corpses come back to life to revenge themselves on the living. Largo sent tightly controlled bolter bursts into their ranks in an attempt to slow them but ammo was low and any damage caused wasn’t severe enough to take out the necrons permanently.
The fight in the gorge was fading too. The intensity of fire from Retiarii was lessening, which Scipio took to be a bad sign. Brakkius could be dead. When the raiders reached the edge of the gorge, he surely would be.
Time was slowing. Fate had caught up with Scipio Vorolanus. It had witnessed his reckless abandon, his selfish fatalism that had grown like a cancer in the years since Orad’s death and decided to make him pay for it.
Scipio railed. ‘This is not the end!’
The flayed one he’d maimed was getting up. He swung the bolt pistol around to finish it but the trigger chanked empty. Powerless to intervene, still half buried under the ice where his spare clips were pinned against his belt, he watched.
Metal flowed like oil, running on the surface of the tundra. Wires and cables reattached themselves, weaving viperously across the ground, re-establishing function to vital systems. The spinal column severed by Scipio’s blow caterpillared towards the half-wrecked torso, dragging abdomen and legs with it. Metallic fusion occurred quickly and vigorously – only the necron’s cape of skin showed any lasting damage.
‘Breath of Guilliman,’ he spat through clenched teeth, looking heavenwards for divine intervention. ‘Can’t they just stay dead?’
Largo had run out of room and ammunition. He hauled Scipio from the ambush-pit and onto his feet. Back-to-back, they faced six flayed ones, a match for any warrior of the Second. The raiders had their own mission and closed on whatever was left of Brakkius and Retiarii.
Scipio slammed his last clip into his bolt pistol; Largo let his spent bolter sag on
its strap and drew a combat blade.
‘If I had known, Largo…’
‘We would have still followed you, brother-sergeant. Only in death.’
Scipio nodded grimly. ‘Only in death.’
A smoke contrail foomed across the Ultramarines’ eye-line, making them turn. It lit up the closest flayed one in an incendiary burst, tearing the creature into fragments. A pair of grenades followed in its wake. They emitted a low hum before attaching magnetically to a second necron. The explosion was hot and deafening. Frag showered the Space Marines’ armour. Disregarding this new element to the skirmish for now, Scipio and Largo broke apart and were about to engage the enemy when a bola whipped around a mechanoid’s neck and took off its head in the resulting firestorm.
Three necrons phased out in under a minute. The raiders were turning, reacting to the change in engagement dynamics. Three las-beams pinned one, shredding leg joints and the chamber on its gauss-flayer; a thrown axe embedded in a second. Laced with explosives, it was blasted apart like the flayed ones.
Sensing the swing in their favour, Scipio cut down another mechanoid with Largo applying the killing stroke with his combat blade. The two raiders and flayed ones that remained, their forces so brutally punished, phased out.
In their wake, Scipio observed their saviours. His enhanced eyesight picked out their shadows in the snow-kissed crags above. They wore ice camouflage and had powder beneath their eyes. Even their guns were swathed in bleached-white rags and painted to blend in with their surroundings.
‘Show yourselves,’ Scipio addressed the half-darkness. ‘In the name of the Emperor’s Adeptus Astartes.’
Slowly, the hunters, or whoever they were, came down from their vantage points. They were well-armed. Scipio saw a tube launcher, heavy-gauge lascarbines, grenade lanyards and several improvised explosives amongst their battlegear. Every one of them carried an ice-pick too. It was this, and not an axe, that been utilised earlier.