Yarrick: The Wreckage

by David Annandale

  It ended. The thunder faded to the sullen crackling of flame and the groans of settling metal. After the blaze of the impact, night came back down, thicker and darker than before. It was difficult to breathe. I stood for a few moments, mind and body thrumming like a struck bell, trying to clear my head and understand where I was. The scrap heap that surrounded me was even more fragmentary than the hull we had sheltered in before. It was bits of framework and shards of bulkhead, piled every which way on top of each other. I felt as if I were viewing reality through a cracked lens.

  I found the direction of the slope, reoriented myself, and looked for other survivors. We came together bit by bit, moving slowly back towards the centre of the bombardment. What was left of Sixth Company on this side of the wreckage began to cohere. Our losses were great. We were down by well over half our strength. I hoped, but didn’t dare expect, that there were some survivors on the other side of where the path had been.

  We approached a transformed landscape. The closer we came to the point of impact, the more the wreckage lost all semblance of form. It was just vague shapes and angles now. There were still some big fragments, but for the most part we were moving between and over hills of scrap.

  I found Marsec. At first he just followed me like a servitor. Gradually, he became functional again. He was a long way from leading, but he remembered his role well enough to be the visible centre around which the company could reform. There were a few dozen of us when we neared the crater. The soldiers had donned their rebreathers to better deal with the clogged air. I kept coughing up black phlegm.

  ‘They took the ship,’ Marsec was saying. His voice was hoarse. His eyes were full of a horror that was greater than the tactical disaster. He seemed to be trying to focus on something concrete. But his gaze flicked and flinched over every burned, mutilated corpse we passed. ‘They took the ship. How is that possible? We saw their fleet. They couldn’t take a frigate.’

  ‘They’ve been taking ships for centuries,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Civilian vessels. I haven’t seen any Imperial Navy wreckage here, have you?’

  None that was recent, true.

  Marsec didn’t wait for my answer. ‘How did they do it? They couldn’t have. But they did. How–’

  He stopped as we passed a wide pool of congealing metal. Its heat baked our exposed skin. Heads and limbs of men and women poked up from the surface, silvery-grey statues of agony. There must have been at least fifteen dead in this location alone. Marsec’s face twisted. I saw a man who was experiencing guilt as a physical blow. He looked at me as if he would say something, but his personal horror was beyond his ability to communicate. I had no forgiveness to offer, and he didn’t seek it. His decision had brought this fate to the troops he loved, and he knew it. I nodded that I understood, and we moved on.

  I wasn’t sure where we were going. It made a kind of sense to attempt to regroup close the point where we had been scattered. Beyond that, I had no ideas. I didn’t know where the enemy was.

  The entire top half of the ridge had vanished. The barrage bombs had left two gigantic craters. Our initial charge had been to the north, and we now stopped at the edge of the western crater. It was deep, wide and unnatural. Something massive poked up from the bowl. It had been untouched by the explosions, which had simply brushed away the centuries of soil. It was the tip of a pyramid. The stone was black, with a green tinge. Its designs were complex, alien and completely unfamiliar to me. They were not Chaotic, that much I could tell. They were too regular. If anything, they spoke of a deathly, soulless order. Part of the formation of a commissar at the schola progenium was necessarily instruction in the enemies of the Imperium, their nature and kind. This was something new. It looked like a tomb. And if, as seemed to be the case, this was just the peak of the structure, and its lines continued underground, it was a tomb the size of a city.

  One of the survivors was Versten, and he had been trying the vox every few seconds as we reassembled what we could of the company. We were down to not much more than platoon strength, almost all regular infantry. We had lost all of our heavy weapons, and had precious few grenade launchers and flamers remaining.

  Perhaps because we were on higher ground now, or perhaps because the air was beginning to clear, he finally made contact with another operator. The sliver of good news shook Marsec out of his lethargy. There were other survivors, led by Hanoszek, and they had reached the lip of the other crater.

  ‘What are you seeing there?’ Marsec asked the sergeant.

  ‘There’s a… captain, I’m not sure what it is.’

  ‘That’s all right. There’s one here too.’

  ‘What are your orders?’

  ‘Hook up with us here. We will hold our position until–’

  The las streak missed Marsec’s head by a hair’s breadth. We dropped to the ground. The single shot was joined by dozens. They were coming from the other side of the crater, and to our left. At the same moment, Hanoszek’s voice started yelling that they were taking fire.

  ‘Back down the slope.’ Marsec shouted into the vox unit. ‘Full retreat!’

  But as we turned to start down, that path was closed to us too. With a roar, something dropped down from the clouds, and landed at the base of the slope. It trapped us, and it revealed how the ship had been taken. It was a Thunderhawk.

  ‘We’re saved,’ a trooper gasped. His name was Rohm, and I made a mental note to terrorise him thoroughly, should we survive this day.

  ‘We are not,’ I hissed. ‘Look at the markings.’

  The air was still dusty, but even from several hundred metres away, the gunship’s livery was unmistakable: two scythes the colour of magma, crossed over a background of night, between them a cluster of burning skulls. I didn’t expect the trooper to know the beings who fought under that emblem. I did expect him to know that this design belonged on no flag of the Emperor’s Adeptus Astartes.

  The xenos who had built the pyramid in the crater were a mystery to me, but I knew of the Chaos Space Marines who descended from the Thunderhawk’s assault ramp. They were part of the store of dark knowledge that it had been my responsibility to learn. The need to punish ourselves with this dangerous lore had been impressed upon me and my fellow students in an address given by the Lord Commissar Simeon Rasp. ‘You are the guardians of the Guard,’ he had told us. ‘Vigilance requires knowledge. Some knowledge requires faith to be withstood. Hold fast to all three.’

  I did so now. ‘Those are Harkanor’s Reavers,’ I said.

  The squad of five massive figures began moving up the slope. Their armour was a deep black, broken up by lines that glowed like flame. As they drew nearer, it seemed to me that those lines were not markings. They were too irregular. And they seemed to be moving.

  ‘We cannot fight them,’ I said. Not so reduced in number, and under harrying fire.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ Marsec said.

  I waited for him to issue orders. He did not. If we paused much longer, we would be finished. I turned my head to look down into the crater. There was one route left to us. ‘Some of those doorways are open,’ I said, pointing at the pyramid.

  Marsec grunted in surprise. He hesitated. I gave him a second longer, thinking that even that might be a mistake. Then he called out, ‘We go down!’

  The fire from the heretics intensified as we descended the slope. We shot back, but they were still attacking us from behind strong shelter, and our only sense of where they were came from the flashes of las. We lost several more troopers on the way down. Not all of them died right away. But we could not stop.

  There was an open vault at the base of the pyramid. We made for it. As its bulk loomed over us, an ancient night made of stone, my instincts cried out to stop, to run another way, to try anything other than go inside. I didn’t listen. There was no choice. I forced myself to run even faster as I hit the threshold. If I displayed reluctance, my example would be ruinous. So I plunged in, calling out as I did, so all would know
that I was still alive. Marsec was right behind me, and once I was inside, he came too, bellowing something that wasn’t coherent but sounded enough like an order to get the company to follow.

  Once we were all inside, we paused. Our eyes adjusted to the darkness. It wasn’t total. The green designs in the smooth stone glowed like near-dormant lumen strips. They showed that we were in a corridor that carried on in a perfectly straight line for some distance. We could see just enough to advance, if that was what we had to do. Marsec posted a watch at the door while Versten and I contacted Hanoszek’s contingent. I had to warn him about the Traitor Space Marines.

  ‘We saw them,’ he replied. They had taken refuge in the other pyramid. ‘What are the orders?’ he asked.

  A good question. I suspected that Hanoszek knew that it was. ‘Stand by,’ I told him, and had Versten fetch Marsec. When the captain arrived, I filled him in. ‘The sergeant wants to know what action he should take,’ I said, and offered the handset.

  Marsec stared at it, then took it. As he did, a call came from the entrance. ‘Enemies approaching!’

  That seemed to be the additional jolt Marsec needed. His voice was sharper, more in the present moment, when he spoke to Hanoszek. ‘Any sign of hostiles, sergeant?’

  ‘Yes, captain. They’re coming down the slope.’

  ‘Go deeper into the pyramid,’ Marsec said. ‘Use the space as best you can. So will we. When we make it out again, we’ll link up with you.’

  There was a pause. Then Hanoszek said, ‘Captain, there are lights in here. These structures might not be quite dead.’

  ‘They must have been buried for thousands of years. Whatever was in them most certainly is dead. We have no time to do anything else, sergeant. You have your orders. Go!’

  ‘Understood.’

  Marsec passed the handset back to Versten. He looked as if he wanted something from me. I nodded. That seemed to satisfy him. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  He led the way down the corridor. He sent no scouting party ahead. He was right. We had no other options. Our best hopes at this moment were speed and luck. And yet, I felt that he would have charged into the darkness even if there had been time to feel our way more carefully through possible enemy territory. I wondered if he really had learned anything from the disaster we had suffered.

  We moved down the corridor. After a hundred metres, it branched left and right, while straight ahead was a steep ramp. We went down. The ramp switchbacked a hundred and eighty degrees, and deposited us in another wide corridor. This one had many forks along its length.

  We could hear voice and the tread of many boots echoing down from above. The heretics had entered the pyramid.

  ‘I want an ambush point,’ Marsec said as we jogged down the corridor. Either our eyes were finding it easier to see in the ghostly green half-light, or it was growing stronger.

  ‘Plenty of intersections here,’ I pointed out.

  He shook his head. ‘Main tunnel’s too wide. After the surprise, they’ll still be able to use their numbers.’

  He was right. I didn’t bother to mention that it was not just the numbers we had to worry about. I was relieved to hear him thinking like a warrior again.

  We hurried down to the end of the corridor, and followed another ramp down to the next level. We were rushing to put more distance between us and our pursuers, to gain a little bit more time, but I was uneasy about venturing so far into the xenos construct. The risks behind us were bad enough. If we ran into something worse ahead, we could lose the entire company.

  The third level down had even more branching corridors. We were in a maze. Though we had to take a side passage, it would be very easy to get lost once we were off the main path. The thought must have crossed Marsec’s mind, too. He took in all the choices and hesitated. We didn’t have long. I could still hear the heretics coming. Our lead had only grown by a few seconds at most. Worse, I could distinguish, above the general echoes of the pursuit, the heavy tread of something very large. The Traitor Space Marines were in the pyramid.

  Trooper Lommell said, ‘With your permission, captain,’ and he barely nodded before she ran forward, ducking down one corridor, then another. The third seemed to offer what she wanted.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘We should set up an ambush down here.’

  ‘Why there?’ Marsec asked, but he brought the rest of the company forward.

  ‘It’s very tight, and it gives us a usable back exit. I ran with a gang in the underhive of Tartarus on Armageddon, sir.’ She carried the marks of her background. Her face was scarred with slashes in a cracked-glass pattern. When I had first seen her, I had assumed I was looking at an injury. It was not. It was a survival tactic in Tartarus. She had sliced her face herself, as a warning to her foes of how far she was willing to go. ‘This environment isn’t that different,’ she said. ‘It’s just cleaner.’

  ‘Good. Give us your expertise, trooper.’

  She took us a few twists deeper into the labyrinth. The passageways were all empty, silent. They were dead. Except for the light. Why was it present? Whose purpose did it serve? The pyramid felt like a tomb, yet we had seen nothing that looked like markers, and what need did a tomb have for illumination?

  I managed to keep track of our turns. Lommell set us up at a point where the narrow corridor we had taken had two intersections ten metres apart. Those branches, narrower still, fed on either side to other halls that would take us back to the main one. We had a perfect kill zone, and an easy retreat.

  ‘Tartarus gave you a fine education,’ I whispered to her as we waited for our foe.

  ‘I didn’t think so at the time.’

  ‘We rarely do.’

  We made just enough noise to give away which branch we had taken. Marsec sent a few soldiers on to create the illusion that we were still on the move, further along this passageway. The renegades took the bait. They rushed into our trap, laughing at the sport they were having.

  This was my first look at them. In the dim green light of the pyramid, I couldn’t see many details, but I had a sense of degraded human beings, wearing patchwork uniforms, no doubt stolen from their multitude of victims over the years. Their corruption had a hundred shades, yet it also had a unity. Across all the faces were runic tattoos and scarification. All the designs, however varied and however hard to make out, were an affront to the soul. They were, in the end, a single thing: the brand of Chaos.

  The cultists were charging in without discipline or caution, which was madness, doubly so in a structure that must have been as alien to them as it was to us. I regarded them with contempt as they crossed the kill zone.

  Just before we opened fire, I saw one of the Harkanor’s Reavers loom out of the darkness. He brought with him his own terrible light. The designs on his armour that had puzzled me stood out clearly. They were cracks in the ceramite. Sorcerous heat spread fissures in the armour as if it were an eggshell. Baleful flame shone through. Then the cracks would seal, and new ones would appear. He was a mass of cooling lava given the shape of a man. That such a monster had once been human was beyond belief.

  There was little chance that our ambush would take him down. We had no choice but to try. Culling the numbers of his followers would be a meaningless gesture if he still came after us. I prayed that Marsec, positioned in the shadows opposite me, realised this truth and waited.

  He did. The forward elements of the cultists moved beyond the kill zone. The Reaver entered it. Marsec waited a few seconds more, letting another dozen renegades escape, waiting until the Traitor Space Marine was close to the centre of the trap. Then he gave the signal by firing his laspistol.

  We opened up. Enfilading fire filled the space of the corridor. The las was so bright, it was as if we had brought day to the tomb. The heretics caught in the web of energy beams went down in seconds. The concentrated fire was such that they didn’t have a chance to retaliate. Their comrades ahead doubled back. They tried to mount a counter-attack, but by staying out of our f
ield of fire, they had no angle on our positions in the side passageways. We had reversed the situation that we had faced outside. Now we were the ones under cover, ripping our foes apart.

  Then there was the Reaver. He stood in the middle of the barrage with no more concern than if it were a rain shower. He raised a flamer and launched a stream of burning promethium into the nearest passageway. Screams filled the corridors. A corner of our ambush failed.

  Lommell trained her fire on the Reaver’s flamer as he fired into the passageway one down from ours. The weapon exploded, drenching the Chaos Space Marine in liquid flame. From the grille of his helmet came an inhuman snarl. He staggered back a step. He wiped at the promethium. It seemed to annoy him rather than harm him, but he could not see with fire engulfing his head.

  From the other end of the ambush, Trooper Rohm fired his grenade launcher. The frag struck the Reaver full in the chest. It blew out the flames, but rocked the monster to the core. He roared in anger and pain even as he yanked a bolt pistol from his thigh and fired a wide barrage of shells. They didn’t need accuracy. Any that hit one of our positions killed the troopers in the front line.

  Where the grenade had hit, the Reaver’s armour was a molten mass. Instead of cracks, here was a wide gap, blazing with eldritch fire. The ceramite was slow to reform. I leapt out of the passageway in a forward roll, staying low, beneath the spray of bolter shells. I came out of the roll in a crouch. I was right at the Reaver’s feet. I aimed my bolt pistol at the roiling, burning chest, and shot the Traitor Space Marine point blank. Energies from the materium and the warp collided. The explosion knocked me flat. The Reaver stood there with a great void where his chest had been. His ribcage poked out, burned and broken. Where his hearts and lungs should have been there was now nothing. The fire went out. The monster’s arms hung limp, and then he toppled backward.