Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ said Rae, ducking beneath the smoking embrasure of his loophole. Barely pausing for breath, Rae expertly switched out the powercell of his rifle.

  ‘Do you know where we are, sergeant?’

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, is that a trick question?’ asked Rae, wiping smears of blood and sweat from his forehead.

  ‘Come on, Rae,’ said Hawkins, pointing into the plaza. ‘Look!’

  ‘What am I looking at, sir?’

  ‘That statue. Who is it?’

  Rae’s uncomprehending look made Hawkins grin. ‘Come on, a giant Space Marine with wings? How many of them are there?’

  ‘The Lord of the Angels?’ ventured Rae at last. ‘Sanguinius?’

  ‘And look at the building behind it.’

  ‘The Palace of Peace!’ exclaimed Rae, and Hawkins saw his mind shift up a gear as an innate understanding of Cadian military history kicked in. ‘Khai-Zhan! This is bloody Vogen, sir! That’s Angel Square.’

  ‘Dahan must have had the servitors set it up like this the moment the ship was boarded,’ said Hawkins. ‘He knew a Cadian regiment would know how to fight in Vogen.’

  ‘Maybe he does know us after all,’ said Rae, returning to his makeshift firestep.

  Like every Cadian officer, Hawkins knew the Battle for Vogen inside out. He’d learned the city’s every secret from the detailed accounts of soldiers who’d fought for Khai-Zhan’s capital. That gave them an edge.

  ‘Incoming!’ shouted Rae. ‘Displace!’

  Hawkins didn’t second guess the order and took off running. Rae was already ahead of him, the big man’s arms pumping like a sprinter’s. Hawkins ran towards a bombed-out ruin he now recognised as a recreation of Transformer Hub Zeta-Lambda.

  Where Sergeant Oliphant retook the Company Colours from a pack of mutants single-handed on day two hundred and ten of the battle.

  A flash of brilliant light threw Hawkins’s shadow out in front of him. Then he was flying as the hammerblow of a pressure wave slammed into his back. The noise and shock of the explosion engulfed him as he hit a prefabbed wall hard.

  The impact punched the air from his lungs. He fought to draw a breath as a seething column of green light mushroomed from the modular structure. Its corner collapsed and took half the roof with it in a thunderous avalanche of debris.

  ‘Good warning, sergeant,’ shouted Hawkins over the ringing echoes of detonation. His spine felt like it had been stepped on by a Dreadnought as he pushed himself to his knees.

  ‘They’re bringing up the heavy ones now!’ returned Rae, chivvying soldiers into the transformer hub’s cover.

  Hawkins scrambled behind a smoking stub of pressed concrete with rebars poking out like a crustacean’s limbs. Through the twitching smoke and guttering green fires, he saw heavier crystalline creatures entering the deck. Lumbering crab-like things, more of the centipede monsters and hulking brutes as tall as ogryns that were hard edged and non-reflective.

  These last creatures carried glossy shields, wide enough to be siege mantlets. Others extruded lightning-wreathed spikes from multi-faceted hides, energy weapons as big as anything mounted on a superheavy.

  ‘Going to need some bigger guns,’ said Rae.

  Hawkins nodded, scanning the ruins of the transformer hub.

  ‘Where’s Leth?’ he shouted. ‘Where’s my vox-man?’

  ‘Dead, sir,’ said Rae, his back pressed against a slope of brick rubble. ‘Him and his vox are in pieces.’

  Hawkins cursed and looked towards where Creed company were repelling a flanking thrust of crystalline attackers. Even through the smoke it was hard to miss the whip-antenna of Creed’s vox-man.

  ‘Cover me, sergeant!’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I need a vox and Creed’s got a vox,’ said Hawkins, slinging his rifle and crouching at the edge of the ruins.

  ‘It’s fifty metres, sir!’ said Rae.

  ‘I know, hardly any distance at all,’ said Hawkins, breaking from cover and sprinting for all he was worth. Blitzing fire streaked across the deck nearby. Was it aimed at him? He couldn’t tell. Hawkins kept low, cutting a path from cover to cover, diving, rolling and pausing just long enough to catch his breath.

  He heard shouts ahead, soldiers urging him on. Zipping spirals of covering fire drilled the smoke around him. Hawkins fell the last two metres, rolling to an ungainly halt behind the scorched and pitted flanks of a hull-down Chimera.

  Lieutenant Karha Creed was waiting for him by the Chimera’s rear track-guard. She had a thin hatchet-face, with the same high cheekbones and thunderous brow as her illustrious uncle.

  ‘You pair are the luckiest sons of bitches I ever saw,’ she said.

  ‘Duly noted, lieutenant,’ said Hawkins. ‘Wait, pair?’

  ‘You remember what I asked you about putting us in harm’s way, sir?’ said Rae, chest heaving and the cut on his forehead bleeding beneath the rim of his helmet.

  ‘I took it under advisement and decided not to implement your proposal,’ he said, glad Rae was here with him despite the risk he’d taken. Hawkins slapped a hand on his sergeant’s shoulder and turned to address Creed.

  ‘I need your vox, Karha. I need to speak with Jahn Callins in Turentek’s forges,’ said Hawkins. ‘We need the tanks here.’

  Creed nodded and ran to get her vox-man. Hawkins took a moment to cast an eye over the men and women occupying this position. His eyes narrowed at the sight of two particular fighters.

  ‘What the hell are you two doing here?’

  Gunnar Vintras turned from his firing step, a lasrifle cocked on his hip like some kind of Catachan glory-hound.

  ‘After all the training Sergeant Rae here has put me through, I thought it only proper I slum it with the footsloggers for a time,’ said Vintras with that insufferable pearl-white grin. ‘You know, see what all this talk of duty and honour is all about.’

  Hawkins resisted the urge to punch him and turned to Sylkwood.

  ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be on the Renard?’

  ‘Emil doesn’t need my help to fly the shuttle,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m Cadian. This is where I’m meant to be.’

  Hawkins nodded in understanding as the vox-man arrived. The patch on his shoulder named him as Guardsman Westin. Heat bleed from the bulky, canvas-wrapped unit in his pack hazed the air. Like most vox-men, Westin was skinny and wiry with hunched shoulders and a constantly harried look to him.

  Hawkins spun him around and pumped the crank on the side of the pack. He held the vox-horn to one ear, pressing his palm against the other.

  ‘Call Sign Kasr Secundus, come in,’ he said. ‘Damn it, Callins, are you there? Where are the tanks you promised me?’

  After a second or two of static, the regiment’s logistics officer came over the earpiece, sounding as put-upon as always.

  ‘Working as fast as we can, sir,’ said Callins.

  Hawkins flinched as a bolt of green light punched into the Chimera’s glacis, rocking it back on its tracks. A fine mist of choking ash-like matter billowed like granular smoke. He heard screams from farther down the line.

  ‘Work faster, Jahn,’ he said. ‘I need those tanks. And Titans too, if you’ve any to spare this millennium.’

  ‘The Sirius engines haven’t moved since I got here, sir,’ grunted Callins in disgust. ‘Lot of crap about rites of awakening and proper observances of blah, blah, blah. They’re choking up the muster routes. I can’t get anything out in numbers that’ll make a damn bit of difference.’

  Hawkins let out an exasperated breath and said, ‘Understood. Do what you can, I’m sending help.’

  ‘Help? What? I don’t–’ said Callins, but Hawkins slammed the horn onto its cradle on Westin’s vox-caster.

  ‘You two, get over here,’ he said, beckoning Sylkwood and Vintras to him. ‘Sylkwood, I assume you can drive this Chimera.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good, I want you down in Turentek’s
prow forges. You know tanks, so help Callins to get them moving faster. Vintras, give your brothers a kick up the arse and beg them to take you back. I want Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica walking right beside my tanks. And I want you in Amarok again. Understand?’

  ‘I don’t beg,’ said Vintras.

  ‘Today you do,’ said Hawkins, and the look in his eye killed the Skinwalker’s caustic response stone dead. The Warhound princeps nodded and slung his rifle.

  ‘I want to stay here,’ protested Sylkwood. ‘I want to fight.’

  ‘You’re a daughter of Cadia,’ snapped Hawkins. ‘Follow your damn orders and get the hell out of here!’

  Prior to Bielanna’s journey on the Path of the Seer, she too had experienced the visceral joy of a war-mask on Khaine’s Path. She barely remembered that part of her life, the bloody horror of what she’d seen and done locked away in an unvisited prison of dark memory.

  There could be beauty as well as terror in battle, a fluidly balletic poetry in the dance of combatants.

  The fight against the Tindalosi had none of that.

  Bielanna’s mind recoiled from the distilled hate weeping from their every metallic pore. Oceans of blood clung to them, a shroud of a hundred lifetimes of murder.

  The Tindalosi were too fast, too deadly and too ruthless to allow for any poetry. Their deaths demanded hard, quick stanzas, not the epic languor of laments.

  And what better warriors than Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees for such a fight? This dance had no grace, just sublimely swift slashes of claw and sword. Teeth snapped and mandiblasters spat. Shuriken discs shattered on impact and the train sang with the howls of Morai-Heg’s favoured daughters.

  They matched the speed of the Tindalosi, hook-bladed horrors of spinning chrome and emerald fire. Crackling mandiblasters scorched the unnatural metal of their hides, and wraithbone blades were blurs of cleaving ivory.

  But as fast and hard as the eldar fought, every wound was undone moments later.

  ‘Not anymore,’ whispered Bielanna, drawing the power of the skein to her. It filled her with a strength she hadn’t felt in what seemed like a lifetime. The constricting metal walls of the Speranza had smothered her connection to the skein and Exnihlio had kept her from any anchor in the present.

  All such distractions fell away from her now.

  Bielanna hunted the beast upon the skein, sifting a thousand possible futures in the blink of an eye until she found its grubby thread of murder, reaching back into a long dead aeon.

  ‘The fate of Eldanesh be upon you,’ she said, pulling the weave of futures and cutting the beast’s thread with a snap of her fingers.

  And in that instant, every blade and every blast of killing energy found a way inside its armour, a confluence of fates willed into existence by Bielanna’s power. The regenerative heart of the monster was cloven into shards, destroyed so thoroughly that no power in the universe could remake it.

  Bielanna spun in with her runesword aimed at the Tindalosi’s head and drove the blade through its jaws. The beast’s skull was split in two and the dead light in its eyes was extinguished forever. It fell to the deck, an inanimate mass of metal and machinery.

  She turned on her heel as the press of futures poured into her.

  A thousand times a thousand duels played out before her, eldar and Space Marines moving to the future’s song, a hundred possibilities spawning a million possible outcomes, each in turn growing the web of futures at a geometric rate.

  Bielanna saw it all.

  The train’s fuselage buckled as the Tindalosi slammed Tanna against it. Its claws dug through his armour. Blood ran down the bodyglove within. Tanna drove his knee into its belly. Metal deformed, its grip released. He dropped and ducked a clawed swipe that tore parallel gouges in the metal skin behind him.

  It shoulder barged him, knocking him down.

  A clawed foot slammed. He rolled. Sword up, block and move.

  Don’t let it back him against the wall again.

  Tanna got his sword up, angling himself obliquely.

  His gaze met that of the beast. Empty of anything except the desire to see him dead. In that, at least, they were evenly matched.

  ‘Come on then,’ he snarled.

  The Tindalosi flew at him. He sidestepped, exhaling with a roar. The sword came down in a hard, economical arc. Its claws punched air. His blade took it high on the shoulder. Teeth tore into metal, spraying glittering slivers. Two-handed now, saw downwards.

  A hooked elbow slashed back. Rubberised seals at Tanna’s hip tore and he grunted as the blade scraped bone. He tore his sword free and brought it around in a recklessly wide stroke.

  It took the beast high on the neck. A decapitating strike.

  Notched teeth ripped through metal, cable and bio-organic polymers. Viscous black fluid gushed. Its howl triggered the cut-off on Tanna’s auto-senses. The Tindalosi’s head hung slack, not severed cleanly, but ruined nonetheless. Tanna’s heart sank as he saw a web of red and green wychfire crackling around the awful wound.

  He took the fractional pause to update his situational awareness. One Tindalosi was attacking Yael while Varda and Issur duelled with the pack leader. The eldar farseer stood over a fallen beast as her remaining warriors fought a second. Surcouf and Pavelka had withdrawn to the driver’s compartment with the Cadians, Kotov and his two skitarii.

  This wasn’t a fight that could be won by mortals.

  The train lurched on the maglev as it turned in a tight arc. Its precisely designed form had been ruined by the Tindalosi attack, and travelling at such enormous speeds, even the slightest deviation in aerodynamic profile could be disastrous. The turbulent air slamming through the train was hurricane-force and Tanna held to a taut cable as the wind direction changed with the train’s turn.

  The metalled floor of the train carriage buckled upwards, the sheet panelling of the walls billowing like sailcloth. In moments the magnetic connection between the train and track would be broken.

  Crackling webs of frost formed on the few remaining shards of glass in the frames and Tanna felt a bitter flavour fill his mouth. Part blood, part witchery.

  He saw Bielanna’s helm wreathed in shimmering flames of white fire, a pellucid halo of psychic energy. He had no idea what she was doing.

  The Tindalosi came at him again. Tanna swung his sword up. The beast’s head still lolled at its shoulder. The green light fizzed and spat at the wound, as if fighting to restore the damage his blade had wrought.

  But it wasn’t working.

  Sudden certainty filled Tanna.

  He saw the exact place his blade should strike, knew the precise power to deliver. The angle of his blade shifted a hair’s breadth. He drew in a full lungful of air and leapt to meet the Tindalosi. The chainsword swung in the arc he had already pictured. The sense of déjà vu was potent.

  The chainsword struck the Tindalosi just where he expected.

  The teeth sheared through the bio-mechanical meat and metal of its neck, cleaving down into its chest cavity. The beast’s arms spasmed and Tanna tore the sword loose, ripping out a vast swathe of ticking, whirring, crackling machinery. The green light veining its mechanical organs was now a deep red.

  The Tindalosi crumpled, the static of its eyes burning out as it died.

  ‘Thank you, Magos Pavelka,’ said Tanna.

  Yael put his sword through the heart of the beast before him. His blow struck precisely, as though guided by the hand of Dorn himself. The beast came apart as though a demo charge had been set off in its chest, screaming and howling as the torments of the damned destroyed it from the inside.

  Likewise the eldar fought with every blow landing at the perfect point to do the maximum damage. The Tindalosi were doomed, the techno-enchantments of Pavelka’s code taking away their regenerative abilities and the eldar’s psychic witchery clouding their speed and skill.

  Only Varda and Issur’s beast still fought. The swordsmen had landed numerous blows upon the pack-master,
but the hideous power at its heart was orders of magnitude greater than that empowering the others. It backed away from them and the eldar as they came together.

  ‘We’ll take it en masse,’ said Varda, standing at Tanna’s side.

  ‘Thr… thr… three to one,’ said Issur through clenched teeth.

  ‘No,’ said Tanna as the train lurched once again. The last portion of the roof ripped clear, flying away with the force of the wind. The train was curving along the track again, harder this time, leaning into the turn. Tanna saw the length of the train begin to come loose from the tracks.

  First the rearmost carriage tore clear, falling from the rails in a haze of squalling magnetics and dragging the next with it. Both came apart in explosions of aluminium. Sheet metal tore like paper. Another carriage followed, dragging the next from the rails with its weight.

  ‘Everyone out!’ shouted Tanna. ‘Get into the driver’s compartment. Now!’

  Yael pushed into the link doorway towards the driver’s compartment. Bielanna and her surviving warriors slipped effortlessly through as the last Tindalosi turned its vast, serrated skull and saw what Tanna had seen.

  It bounded along the bucking carriage towards them.

  ‘Go!’ shouted Tanna, bracing himself. One leg squared off, the other bent forwards. Varda and Issur knew better than to argue. They followed their brother and the eldar.

  ‘Just me and thee,’ said Tanna.

  The Tindalosi leapt and Tanna went low. His sword swung in a tight arc, hewing its belly. Glittering shards of cut metal and oily liquid sprayed. Red-green light filled the wound. It turned back to him and its claws cut into his plastron. Tanna felt his feet leave the deck plates. He struggled like bait on a hook. He swung his blade. The beast’s jaws fastened on his sword arm and bit down hard.

  Fangs like daggers punched through ceramite and meat.

  Tanna roared in pain as the beast wrenched its head to the side and took his right hand with it. His sword went too, dangling from the monster’s teeth on snapped links of chain. The pack leader dropped him and Tanna rolled, clutching the stump of his arm to his chest. He pushed himself to his knees as the Tindalosi loomed over him, a gloating killer taking an instant to savour its kill.