Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Tanna turned from the eldar.

  His own warriors stood before him.

  Proud and undefeated, they were heroes all.

  ‘My brothers, we come to it at last,’ he said. ‘The last battle of the Kotov Crusade.’

  ‘Will you lead us in our vows, brother-sergeant?’ asked Yael.

  ‘I will,’ said Tanna, knowing that what he had to say next would crush the young warrior. ‘But you will not take a vow with us.’

  ‘Brother-sergeant?’

  ‘Go through the gate,’ said Tanna. ‘If Telok is to be killed, it should be a Black Templar blade that cleaves his head from his shoulders.’

  ‘No! Please, Tanna,’ said Yael, forgetting himself in the heat of his despair. ‘Do not deny me this last fight.’

  Tanna shook his head.

  ‘Go back to the Speranza, fight with all your heart in that battle. Win glory and carry word of us back to the Chapter. Tell them what we did here, of our courage and sacrifice. Tell them that we died as heroes in the name of the Emperor.’

  ‘I want to stand and fight with you,’ pleaded Yael.

  ‘This is my last command. You will not disobey it.’

  Tanna ached for the young warrior, knowing full well the anguish he would be feeling at being denied a glorious death alongside his brothers.

  ‘No more words,’ said Tanna. ‘Go.’

  Yael rammed his sword back into its scabbard and without a backward glance turned and ran through the eldar gate.

  ‘Harsh,’ said Varda. ‘But it needed to be done, and it’s time for that vow.’

  Issur joined the Emperor’s Champion, his fingers twitching and his features dancing with involuntary muscle movements.

  Tanna nodded, and both warriors took a knee, leaving him standing over them as Kul Gilad had stood over them all on the Adytum. With the crystaliths pressing through the psychic barrier, Tanna knew there could be only one vow worthy of being made.

  Kul Gilad’s valediction.

  The words heard over the vox as the Reclusiarch died. Tanna raised his sword to his shoulder in salute of his warriors.

  ‘Lead us from death to victory, from falsehood to truth,’ he said, bringing the sword around.

  He touched the blade to Varda’s shoulder.

  ‘Lead us from despair to hope, from faith to slaughter.’

  Issur was next to receive the benediction.

  ‘Lead us to His strength and an eternity of war.’

  The two Black Templars rose, and each placed a fist upon their breastplate. Their voices joined with Tanna’s to complete the vow.

  ‘Let His wrath fill our hearts!’ they cried. ‘Death, war and blood – in vengeance serve the Emperor in the name of Dorn!’

  Issur and Varda stood side by side, blades bared and held out to the enemy.

  ‘This is what you saw, Varda,’ said Tanna as he took his place at the Emperor’s Champion’s side. ‘When we reforged the links binding you to your sword.’

  Varda nodded, but didn’t look up from his blade. Despite everything, it gleamed unblemished, without as much as a scratch on its obsidian surface. Varda scanned the ranks of crystaliths as the psychic barrier finally collapsed into scraps of fading light.

  The sound of crystal bodies grinding together as the monsters charged set Tanna’s teeth on edge.

  Fifty metres out, their heavy footfalls faster now.

  ‘You spoke of seeing yourself fighting alongside the eldar,’ said Tanna, rolling his shoulders to loosen the muscles. ‘You could not conceive of how such a thing might come to pass. Now we know.’

  ‘It pleases me to know I remained true to my oaths of loyalty,’ said Varda. ‘That I will die a true son of Sigismund.’

  ‘That was never in doubt,’ said Tanna.

  Thirty metres away. Contact imminent.

  ‘At l… least the el… eldar will die with us,’ said Issur, glancing over at the silent, unmoving aliens behind them. The muscles at his neck were taut, but his sword was unwavering.

  ‘This is our time to die,’ said Tanna. ‘Far from the Emperor’s light on a forsaken world. Savour this moment, for you will die only once. How you meet that end is as important as every moment before then.’

  Ten metres, translucent blades raised.

  Tanna tipped his head back and lifted his sword to salute his coming death, knowing it would be magnificent.

  Five metres.

  The last battle of the Kotov Crusade began to the sound of breaking glass and the name of Dorn shouted to the sky.

  ‘Ma-ta-leo! Ma-ta-leo!’

  The skitarii chanted the name as they charged alongside his new Iron Fist. Dahan’s awareness of every squad and pack’s position was total and even in the heat of the charge he corrected vectors of attack through the noospheric link.

  ‘Ma-ta-leo! Ma-ta-leo!’

  Weapons fire blazed between the skitarii and the crystalline attackers. Intersecting collimations of las and solid rounds, plasma and gatling fire. Explosions ripped through the ranks of his warriors. Scores of bodies were trampled underfoot. Dahan plugged the gaps, moving squads into each ragged hole.

  ‘Ma-ta-leo! Ma-ta-leo!’

  Connected to the replacement Iron Fist’s logic engine, his mind was ablaze with accumulated combat-memes. Threat optics measured the alpha-beast before him in every conceivable dimension. The heavy bolter quads chugged a constant stream of mass-reactives into the enemy host. Blasts of energy from the blade of his Cebrenian halberd killed those closest to the Iron Fist. Enemy bodies came apart in explosive bursts of broken glass.

  ‘Ma-ta-leo! Ma-ta-leo!’

  Hearing his Catachan war-name again made Dahan nostalgic for his days on the death world. The wealth of combat data available there was greater than on any other planet he had known. Every species of flora and fauna was deadly, and his database of warfare and close-combat predictors had expanded geometrically.

  The closest analogue to the alpha-beast was the Catachan leonax den-mother he and Harker’s platoon had encountered on a slash and burn mission against a surge of hyper-aggressive jungle growth.

  They had encountered the lair by accident when a point Chimera crashed through the jungle floor into its moist, wriggling depths. The den-mother’s hundreds of young erupted from pupal trap-lairs and attacked the Guardsmen and skitarii with a ferocity Dahan had previously only encountered in certain tyrannic blitzkrieg genera.

  Dahan had killed the den-mother, a monstrous, clawed beast with a mutant mane of poisonous spines at its neck, the presence of which prompted Harker to bestow the war-name upon him.

  He replayed that fight, dispensing the precise combination of combat-stimms, muscle enhancers and synaptic boosters into his system to replicate that state of being. The alpha-creature loomed ahead of him, bigger than the beast he had killed on Catachan. And attended by hulking shield-bearers.

  Orders passed between him and his skitarii escort and a precise sequence of fire blazed from the Destroyer cadres. So precise was it that not a shot or iota of power was wasted. Four of the shield-bearers were instantly obliterated, their mantlets cracked with high-powered gatling cannons and blown apart by precisely timed grenade barrages. Volleys of plasma followed by pinpoint melta missiles finished the job, leaving a path open for Dahan’s Iron Fist.

  The alpha-beast squatted in the shadow of the sagging iron carving of Sanguinius. Dahan’s vehicle crushed the splintered remains of the guard beasts under its tracks as the skitarii and crystal host came together with battering force in a storm of gunfire and blades. War cries both organic and binary echoed through the deck.

  The alpha-beast reared up before him and a searing blast of green fire spat from a spinning nexus of reforming glass in its toothed underside. It struck the Iron Fist at a downward angle, cutting through its glacis like a plasma-torch. The impact was stunning. It smashed the tank’s prow down into the deck. The quad guns blew out as the frontal section crumpled like foil paper. Its ammo hoppers detonated as the fir
e blew back inside.

  Dahan thrust himself from the tank’s open top. Emergency disconnect, trailing whipping cables from his spinal plugs. The Iron Fist lifted off the deck, its forward momentum flipping it up and over the alpha-beast.

  Dahan landed with a screech of metal, the claws of all three legs digging into the deck.

  The Iron Fist came down moments later, flat on its back, tracks churning air and spewing flames. Black smoke billowed from its ruptured hull.

  Dahan’s halberd came up in time to deflect a pair of clawed blade-arms extruding with obscene speed from the beast’s underbelly. Scorpion claws snapped for him. He planted the oval base of his halberd and flipped around the glassy blades.

  He rammed his crackling tine-bladed scarifiers into its flank. His internal capacitors discharged, sending forking bolts of purple energy through its body that left vitrified trails of opaque crystal in their wake.

  Green fire pulsed from the monster’s body, faster than Dahan could dodge. It struck him dead centre. His armour cracked and the impact jarred his floodstream pump offline for a few seconds.

  Dahan staggered, momentarily off-balance. The alpha-beast’s shape transformed, becoming taller, broader, growing more limbs. It slammed a vast, elephantine foot into his chest, hurling him back against the blazing wreck of the Iron Fist. It closed the gap between them, fast, and crab-like claws snapped shut on Dahan’s scarifiers. It tore them clean from his body. He loosed a binaric shout of pain, rolling aside from another stream of green bio-electricity. His cloak was ablaze, the steel-woven fabric burning magnesium bright.

  Dahan spun and rolled, rotating all three legs to avoid its attacks. It struck again and again, limbs like stingers slamming down with force enough to punch through the deck plates. Trailing scads of molten metal from his cloak, Dahan spun his halberd in a dizzyingly complex web of blocks, counters and thrusts. The speed of the beast was phenomenal. His every defence was made with only nano-seconds to spare. The entropic capacitor buzzed angrily as it built up charge for a strike.

  Sheared crystal and metal spun around them as they duelled in the shadow of the Blood Angels’ tragic primarch. Dahan was fully aware of the desperate fighting behind him as the crystal monsters swept past his own battle to engage the Cadians. In any normal engagement, Dahan would keep discrete partitions in his mind to keep track of every aspect of a battle, but this fight was requiring virtually all his processing power just to stay alive.

  The thing’s shape kept changing, almost as though it knew that to remain in one form would allow him an advantage. His wetware kept evolving, switching and resetting. He couldn’t get a fix on any one set of combat routines that would allow him to defeat the alpha-beast.

  Another thunderous blow sent Dahan flying backwards. He slammed into the ironwork pillar supporting Sanguinius, who finally toppled from his perch to land between the two combatants with a booming clang of iron. The alpha-beast took a crashing step towards him, the lower portions of its legs thickening as its upper body enlarged. Its mass was finite, and its limbs thinned in response, becoming whipping, lashing tendrils of razored glass.

  Combat-memes jostled for Dahan’s approval.

  Tyranicus chameleo.

  Teuthidian Myrmidrax.

  Cyberneticus Noctus (Kaban).

  Cephalaxia.

  Arachnismegana.

  The list went on, but in the split second it took him to scan through, Dahan understood nothing in his archives could match the alpha-beast’s ability to continuously evolve. He had nothing embedded that could counter the sheer variety of forms and combat strategies the alpha-beast could assume.

  Instead, he did the one thing that went against his every hard-wired logical instinct.

  He shut down his entire database of systemic combat routines.

  A void filled Dahan, a yawning abyss of uncertainty that felt hideously empty, yet strangely liberating. In this sublime instant, he had no idea what his opponent might do or what he should do to counter it. No idea how best to fight this foe, save the data presented in the very instant before attacking.

  The alpha-beast lumbered towards him, its razor whips cutting the air. Dahan took off towards it. He leapt onto the fallen statue of Sanguinius and pistoned all three of his legs out, launching himself through the air. Whip-thin razor arms slashed towards him. The Cebrenian halberd cut through the bulk of them, his rotating gimbal of a waist eluded others, but many more slashed deep into Dahan’s body.

  One of his legs fell from his body and the majority of one shoulder spun away. Another stroke opened the organic meat of his stomach as a rigid spine of crystal punched through his chest. Mechanisms failed and damage warnings flashed red in his vision.

  But his target was in sight.

  Dahan twisted as he fell, and the disruptor-sheathed blade of his Cebrenian halberd swept down. It clove through the alpha-beast’s leg at the joint between limb and pelvis.

  The alpha-beast staggered, its body shape rapidly fluctuating in a futile attempt to keep its balance. It crashed down, the shorn limb clouding and becoming opaque as the linked machines within died. Dahan hit hard, impaled through the shoulder where a rigid spine of glass was wedged. With his remaining two legs, he hauled himself upright, feeling every aspect of bio-mechanical efficiency degrade as chemicals, blood and charged ionic fluids poured from him.

  The alpha-beast was drawing its matter into itself, sluggish now that so great a number of its self-replicating machines were no longer a part of it. Its movements were awkward, like a newborn life form still unsure as to the correct means of standing upright.

  Dahan didn’t give it the chance to learn.

  The beast had taken his lower arms, but the bulbous entropic capacitor of the Cebrenian halberd now arced and fizzed with coruscating energy.

  Dahan slammed the oval pommel down in the centre of what might have been its chest. An explosion of bio-electrical energy arced through the alpha-beast’s body, fusing the crystal and shattering the areas around its path.

  The beast lurched and spasmed like a flatlining patient being defibrillated. A patchwork head of clouded glass and crystal extruded from the lumpen mass of its chest, cracking and forming a vast crocodilian skull mass. Dahan swept the Cebrenian halberd around in a decapitating strike.

  Its blade had been fashioned by artificers trained in the techniques of the first tech-priest assassins.

  The alpha-beast’s head fell away from its body, and its nervous system shorted out in a blaze of overload. Green fire spurted from the stump of its neck, a catastrophic wound from which it could not recover.

  Every crystalline warrior in the training deck began glitching, internal structures momentarily shorted by the abrupt severing of the connection to their command and control nexus. Dahan wasn’t naïve enough to believe the effect would leave the host powerless for long, in the manner of a tyrannic praefactor-level creature’s death.

  But perhaps it would be long enough.

  The bray of war-horns filled the training deck, and Dahan wearily lifted the notched blade of his Cebrenian halberd in salute.

  Legio Sirius had come, and they had not come alone.

  Rumbling in the shadow of Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica were squadron after squadron of Imperial Guard superheavies.

  Baneblades, Stormhammers and Shadowswords.

  ‘Omnissiah bless you, Captain Hawkins,’ said Dahan, as squads of his suzerain rushed to his side.

  ‘Ma-ta-leo! Ma-ta-leo! Ma-ta-leo!’

  By the time Roboute and Ilanna stepped from the sunset gate and into his private staterooms, Kotov and his skitarii were already gone. He heard the voice of the archmagos through the open doorway to the bridge. Speaking on the vox, by the sounds of it.

  The glow of Bielanna’s gateway filled the stateroom with honey-gold light. It imparted a homely warmth to the wood of his desk, but still managed to make the rest of the room feel melancholy.

  Its surface was the mirror-smooth surface of a glacial lake b
athed in the last rays of autumn, but its edges were undulant, like the corona of a distant sun. Roboute looked away, discomfited by looking too long at its unnatural presence.

  ‘Here,’ he said, turning away and lowering Pavelka into the chair behind the desk. ‘Sit. Don’t try to move. Stay here on the Renard until this is all over, yes?’

  Ilanna nodded and Roboute sat at the corner of his desk. It felt unreal being here, with his commendations and rosettes on the wall. So normal after the insanity of Exnihlio. Roboute smiled as he saw the hololithic cameo of Katen, knowing on some gut level that she was at least part of what had allowed Bielanna to fix this location so precisely. He couldn’t quite bring himself to accept that it was all real, that they’d escaped certain death at the blades of the crystaliths.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ said Pavelka. ‘Go.’

  ‘Just give me a minute,’ said Roboute, still breathless from another journey that left a bilious taste in his mouth and a savage pounding at his temples. ‘At least until I’m sure I can walk without feeling like I’m about to throw up.’

  They sat in silence, Ilanna with her hands clasped in her lap, Roboute fixating on tiny details. As if by focusing on them he could force his mind to accept them as real. Gradually the sensation of the world being a veneer spread over a darker reality began to fade and his breathing began to even out.

  A sudden sense of premonition caused him to back away from the rippling outline of the sunset gate. Roboute’s breathing hiked sharply as Ven Anders emerged, still clutching his bloodied side. He gave the room a quick once over as three Cadian troopers came after him, making the room feel suddenly small.

  ‘Less ostentatious than I’d have expected,’ he said.

  ‘That’s Ultramar for you,’ answered Roboute.

  ‘Where’s Kotov?’

  ‘Already on the bridge. I’ll be with you shortly.’

  Anders nodded and led his men from Roboute’s stateroom.

  His timing was fortuitous, as the towering figure of a Black Templar emerged moments later, and the stateroom now felt positively cramped. Yael’s armour was limned in glittering motes of light. Behind him, the sunset gate faded like a dream.