Warhammer 40,000 - Anthology 13

by The Book of Blood (Christian Dunn)

  And faced his foe.

  “You should have fled while you had the chance.” Indus’ voice had taken on a fly-swarm buzz. “We will take you now.”

  Flanked by mammoth thorn-backed beasts, the hive tyrant bowed, as if mocking him, allowing Indus to dangle before Nord upon his tendrils. More tentacles snaked forwards, questing and probing.

  The aliens waited to taste the stink of his fear, savouring the moment; Nord gave them nothing, instead bending to recover his axe where it had fallen.

  “This will be your end, adept,” he said. “If only you could see what you have become.”

  “We are the superior!” came the roar in return. “We will devour all! You are the prey! You are the beasts!”

  Nord took a breath and let the dark clouds come. “Yes,” he admitted, “perhaps we are.”

  The Black Rage and the Red Thirst, the curses that he had fought against for so long, the twin madness at the core of his being… The psyker let his defences fall before them. He gave himself fully to the heart of the rage, let it fill him.

  Power, burning nova-bright, swept away every doubt, every question in his mind. Suddenly it was so very clear to him; there was only the weapon and the target. The killer and the killed.

  The aliens charged, and Nord ripped open the gear pack at his belt, drawing the weapon within, running to meet them, racing towards the hive tyrant.

  Indus saw the lethal burden in the Blood Angel’s hand and felt a cold blade of fear lance through him; the tyrant shook in sympathetic panic. “No—” he whispered.

  “In the name of Sanguinius and the God-Emperor,” the Codicier snarled, baring his fangs. “I will end you all!”

  Captain Gorolev jerked up from the console, his expression set in fear. “The cogitators register an energy increase aboard the hive ship!”

  Xeren’s head turned to face him atop his snake-like neck. “I am aware.”

  Gorolev took a step towards the Mechanicus magi. “That ship is a threat!” he snapped. “We have completed recovery of the boarding torpedo, and your scouts are lost! We should destroy the xenos! There is no reason to let them live a moment longer!”

  “There is every reason!” Xeren’s manner of cold, silky dismissal suddenly broke. He rounded on the frigate’s commander, his mechadendrites and cyber-limbs rising up behind him in a fan, angry serpents hissing and snapping at the air. All trace of his false politeness faded. “You test me and test me, ship-master, and I will hear no more! You will do as I say, or your life will be forfeit!”

  “You have no right—” Gorolev was cut off as Xeren reached out a hand, showing brass micro-lasers where fingers should have been.

  “I have the authority to do anything,” he grated. “That hive is worth more than your life, captain. More than the lives of your worthless crew, more than the lives of Kale and his Space Marines! I will sacrifice every single one of you, if that is what it will cost!”

  A silence fell across the bridge; Gorolev’s eyes widened, but not in fear of Xeren. He and his officers stared beyond the tech-priest, to the open hatchway behind him.

  There, filling the doorway, was a figure clad in blood-red. Xeren spun, his limbs, flesh and steel, coming up before him in a gesture of self-protection.

  Brother-Sergeant Kale entered, carrying himself with a limp, his pale face stained with spilled vitae and smoke. His eyes were black with an anger as cold and vast as space.

  Armour scarred from tyranid venom and claw, blemished with bitter fluids, he took heavy, purposeful steps towards the tech-priest. “My brothers lie dead,” he intoned. “The blame is yours.”

  “I… I was not…” Xeren’s cool reserve crumbled.

  “Do not cheapen their sacrifice with lies, priest,” growled Kale, his ire building ever higher as he came closer. “You sent us to our deaths, and you smiled as you did it.”

  Xeren stiffened, drawing himself up. “I only did what was needed! I did what was expected of me!”

  “Yes,” Kale gave a slow nod, and reached up to his chest, where the hilt of a combat knife protruded from a scabbed wound. “Now I do the same.”

  With a shout of rage and pain, Kale tore the knife free and swept it around in a fluid arc. The blade’s mirror-bright edge found the tech-priest’s throat and cut deep, severing veins and wires, bone and metal. The Blood Angel leaned into the attack and took Xeren’s head from his neck. The cyborg’s body danced and fell, crashing to the deck in a puddle of oil.

  “Energy surge at criticality…” Gorolev reported, as alert chimes sounded from the cogitator console.

  Kale said nothing, only nodded. He stepped up to the viewport, over Xeren’s headless corpse, and watched the hive ship. His hands drew up to his chest in salute, taking on the shape of the Imperial aquila.

  “In His name, brother,” he whispered.

  He was falling.

  Somewhere, far beyond his thoughts in the world of meat and bone, he was dying. Claws tearing at him, serpentine tendrils cutting into him, cilia probing to find grey matter and absorb it.

  Nord fell into the cascade of sensation. The blood roaring through him. The flawless, diamond-hard perfection of his anger driving him on, into the arms of the enemy.

  He had never feared death; he had only feared that when the moment came, he would be found wanting.

  That time was here, and he was more certain of his Tightness than ever before.

  The clouds of billowing crimson, the swelling mist of deep, deep night; they came and took him, and he embraced it.

  Somewhere, far beyond his thoughts, a bloody, near-crippled hand curled about the grip of a weapon, tight upon a trigger. And with a breath, a slow and steady breath, that hand released. Let go. Gave freedom to the tiny star building and churning inside.

  The fusion detonator Nord had recovered from the weapons locker, the secret burden he had carried back into the heart of the hive ship. Now revealed, now empowered and unleashed.

  The new sun grew, flesh and bone crisping, becoming pale sketches and then vapour; and in that moment, as the light became all, in its heart Brother Nord saw an angel, golden and magnificent. Reaching for him. Offering his hand.

  Beckoning him towards honour, and a death most worthy.

  AT GAIUS POINT

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I

  THE MEMORY OF fire. Fire and falling, incineration and annihilation. Then darkness.

  Absolute silence. Absolute nothing.

  II

  I OPEN MY eyes.

  There before me, outlined by scrolling white text across my targeting display, is a shattered metal wall. Its architecture is gothic in nature - a skeletal wall, with black steel girders like ribs helping form the wall's curvature. It is mangled and bent. Crushed, even.

  I do not know where I am, but my senses are awash with perception. I hear the crackle of fire eating metal, and the angry hum of live battle armour. The sound is distorted, a hitch or a burr in the usually steady thrum. Damage has been sustained. My armour is compromised. A glance at the bio-feed displays shows minor damage to the armour plating of my wrist and shin. Nothing serious.

  I smell the flames nearby, and the bitter rancidity of melting steel. I smell my own body; the sweat, the chemicals injecting into my flesh by my armour, and the intoxicatingly rich scent of my own blood.

  A god's blood.

  Refined and thinned for use in mortal veins, but a god's blood nevertheless. A dead god. A slain angel.

  The thought brings my teeth together in a grunted curse, my fangs scraping the teeth below. Enough of this weakness.

  I rise, muscles of aching flesh bunching in unison with the fibre-bundle false muscles of my armour. It is a sensation I am familiar with, yet it feels somehow flawed. I should be stronger. I should exult in my strength, the ultimate fusion of biological potency and machine power.

  I do not feel strong. I feel nothing but pain and a momentary disorientation. The pain is centralised in my spinal column and shoulder blades,
turning my back into a pillar of dull, aching heat. Nothing is broken - bio-feeds have already confirmed that. The soreness of muscle and nerve would have killed a human, but we are gene-forged into greater beings.

  Already, the weakness fades. My blood stings with the flood of adrenal stimulants and kinetic enhancement narcotics rushing through my veins.

  My movement is unimpeded. I rise to my feet, slow not from weakness now, but from caution.

  With my vision stained a cooling emerald shade by my helm's green eye lenses, I take in the wreckage around me.

  This chamber is ruined, half-crushed with its walls distorted. Restraint thrones lie broken, torn from the floor. The two bulkheads leading from the chamber are both wrenched from their hinges, hanging at warped angles.

  The impact must have been savage.

  The… impact?

  The crash. Our Thunderhawk crashed. The clarity of recollection is sickening… the sense of falling from the sky, my senses drenched in the thunder of descent, the shaking of the ship in its entirety. Temperature gauges on my retinal display rose slowly when the engines died in exploding flares that scorched the hull, and my armour systems registered the gunship's fiery journey groundward.

  There was a final booming refrain, a roar like the carnosaurs of home - as loud and primal as their predator-king challenges - and the world shuddered beyond all sanity. The gunship ploughed into the ground.

  And then… Darkness.

  My eyes flicker to my retinal display's chronometer. I was unconscious for almost three minutes. I will do penance for such weakness, but that can come later.

  Now I breathe in deep, tasting the ashy smoke in the air but unaffected by it. The air filtration in my helm's grille renders me immune to such trivial concerns.

  'Zavien,' a voice crackles in my ears. A momentary confusion takes hold at the sound of the word. The vox-signal is either weak, or the sender's armour is badly damaged. With the ship in pieces, both could be true.

  'Zavien,' the voice says again.

  This time I turn at the name, realising it is my own.

  ZAVIEN STRODE INTO the cockpit, keeping his balance on the tilted floor through an effortless combination of natural grace and his armour's joint-stabilisers.

  The cockpit had suffered even more than the adjacent chamber. The view window, despite the thickness of the reinforced plastek, was shattered beyond simple repair. Diamond shards of the sundered false-glass twinkled on the twisted floor. The pilot thrones were wrenched from their support columns, cast aside like detritus in a storm.

  Through the windowless viewport there was nothing but mud and gnarled black roots, much of which had spilled over the lifeless control consoles. They'd come down hard enough to drive the gunship's nose into the earth.

  The pilot, Varlon, was a mangled wreck sprawled face-down over the control console. Zavien's targeting reticule locked onto his brother's battered armour, secondary cursors detailing the rents and wounds in the deactivated war plate. Blood, thick and dark, ran from rips in Varlon's throat and waist joints. It ran in slow trickles across the smashed console, dripping between buttons and levers.

  His power pack was inactive. Life signs were unreadable, but the evidence was clear enough. Zavien heard no heartbeat from the body, and had Varlon been alive, his gene-enhanced physiology would have clotted and sealed all but the most grievous wounds. He wouldn't still be bleeding slowly all over the controls of the downed gun-ship.

  'Zavien,' said a voice to the right, no longer over the vox.

  Zavien turned from Varlon, his armour snarling in a growl of joint-servos. There, pinned under wreckage from the collapsed wall, was Drayus. Zavien moved to the fallen warrior's side, seeing the truth. No, Drayus was not just pinned in place. He was impaled there.

  The sergeant's black helm was lowered, chin down on his collar, green eyes regarding the broken Imperial eagle on his chest jagged wreckage knifed into his dark armour, the ravaged steel spearing him through the shoulder guard, the arm, the thigh and the stomach. Blood leaked through his helm's speaker grille. The biometric displays that flashed up on Zavien's visor told an ugly story, and one with an end soon to come.

  'Report,' Sergeant Drayus said - the way he always said it - as if the scene around them were the most mundane situation imaginable.

  Zavien kneeled by the pinned warrior, fighting back the aching need in his throat and gums to taste the blood of the fallen. Irregular and weak, a single heartbeat rattled in Drayus's chest. One of his hearts had shut down, likely flooded by internal haemorrhaging or burst by the wreckage piercing his body. The other pounded gamely, utterly without rhythm.

  'Varlon is dead,' Zavien said.

  'I can see that, fool.' The sergeant reached up one hand, the one not half-severed at the forearm, and clawed with unmoving fingers at the collar joint beneath his helm. Zavien reached to help, unlocking the helmet's pressurised seals. With a reptilian hiss, the helmet came free in Zavien's hands.

  Drayus's craggy face, ruined by the pits and scars earned in two centuries of battle, was awash in spatters of blood. He grinned, showing blood-pinked teeth and split gums. 'My helm display is damaged. Tell me who is still alive.'

  Zavien could see why it was damaged - both eye lenses were cracked. He discarded the sergeant's helm, and blink-clicked the runic icon that brought up the rest of the squad's life signs on his own retinal display.

  Varlon was dead, his suit powered down. The evidence of that was right before Zavien's eyes.

  Garax was also gone, his suit transmitting a screed of flat-line charts. The rangefinder listed him as no more than twenty metres away, likely thrown clear in the crash and killed on impact.

  Drayus was dying, right here.

  Jarl was…

  'Where's Jarl?' Zavien asked, his voice harsh and guttural through his helm's vox speakers.

  'He's loose.' Drayus sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. His armour's failing systems were feeding anaesthetic narcotics into his blood, but the wounds were savage and fatal.

  'My rangefinder lists him as a kilometre distant.' Even with its unreliability compared to a tracking auspex, it was a decent enough figure to trust.

  The sergeant's good hand clenched Zavien's wrist, and he glared into his brother's eye lenses with a fierce, bloodshot stare. 'Find him. Whatever it takes, Zavien. Bring him in, even if you have to kill him.'

  'It will be done.'

  'After. You must come back, after.' Drayus spat onto his own chest, marking the broken Imperial eagle with his lifeblood. 'Come back for our gene-seed.'

  Zavien nodded, rising to his feet. Feeling his fingers curl in the need to draw weapons, he stalked from the cockpit without a backward glance at the sergeant he would never see alive again.

  Jarl had awoken first.

  In fact, it was truer to say that Jarl had simply not lost his grip on consciousness in the impact, for his restraints bound him with greater security than the standard troop-thrones.

  In the shaking thunder of the crash, he had seen Garax hurled through the torn space where a wall had been a moment before. He had heard the vicious, wet snap of destroyed vertebrae and ruined bone as Garax had crashed into the edge of the hole on the way out. And he had seen Zavien thrown from his restraint throne to smash sidelong into the cockpit bulkhead, sliding to the floor unconscious.

  Enveloped in a force cage around his own restraint throne, Jarl had seen these things occurring through the milky shimmer-screen of electrical force, yet had been protected against the worst of the crash.

  Ah, but that protection had not lasted for long. With the gunship motionless, with his brothers silent, with the Thunderhawk around him creaking and burning in the chasm it had carved in the ground, Jarl tore off the last buckles and scrambled over the wreckage of what had been his power-fielded throne. The machine itself, its generator smoking, reeked of captivity. Jarl wanted to be far from it.

  He glanced at Zavien, stole the closest weapons he could find in the chaos of
the crash site, and ran out into the jungle.

  He had a duty to fulfil. A duty to the Emperor. His father.

  ZAVIEN'S BLADE AND bolter were gone.

  Without compunction, he took Drayus's weapons from the small arming chamber behind the transport room, handling the relics with none of the care he would otherwise have used. Time was of the essence.

  The necessary theft complete, he climbed from the wreck of the gunship, vaulting down to the ground and leaving the broken hull behind. In one hand was an idling chainaxe, the motors within the haft chuckling darkly in readiness to be triggered into roaring life. In the other, a bolt pistol, its blackened surface detailed with the crude scratchings of a hundred and more kill-runes.

  Zavien didn't look at the smoking corpse of his gunship in some poignant reverie. He knew he would be back to gather the gene-seed of the fallen if he survived this hunt.

  There was no time for sentiment. Jarl was loose.

  Zavien broke into a run, his armour's joints growling at the rapid movement as he sprinted after his wayward brother, deep into the jungles of Armageddon.

  III

  THEY CALL IT Armageddon.

  Maybe so. There is nothing to love about this planet.

  Whatever savage beauty it once displayed is long dead now, choked under the relentless outflow of the sky-choking factories that vomit black smog into the heavens. The skies themselves are ugly enough - a greyish-yellow shroud of weak poison embracing the strangled world below. It does not rain water here. It rains acid, as thin, weak and strangely pungent as a reptile's piss.

  Who could dwell here? In such impurity? The air tastes of sulphur and machine oil. The sky is the colour of infection. The humans - the very souls we are fighting to save - are dead-eyed creatures without passion or life.