The beast would have finished him then and there if Veristan hadn’t unloaded half a magazine into it from behind. Corella struggled to his feet, cursing and raging at himself so hard that he forgot to thank his saviour. Veristan didn’t take it personally. They had saved each other a dozen times or more in the last year. Neither was keeping count anymore.
Grimm was hauling broken beams and rubble off Mandell. When the latter was able to scramble to his feet, he loosed a loud string of curses.
There was barely time to draw breath, however, before the warning came from Riallo that others were converging on their position.
‘Cover that damned door,’ barked Grimm. Three boltgun muzzles and a flamer’s hissing maw snapped into position.
The first ork through the door met a wall of bright white flame before being ripped to pieces by the storm of rounds that followed. The second leapt over the burning remnants of its former comrade, but the moment its boots hit the floor, it too was gunned down. The third and fourth knew better than to follow. They crouched just outside and lobbed large wooden-handled grenades in through two of the shattered windows.
It was the ancient techno-sorcery of the Space Marines battle-helms that saved them from death. Projected directly onto their retinas, the four squad members all saw glowing telemetry lines tracing and predicting the trajectory of the explosives as they sailed into the room. Grimm and Veristan lunged forward. The grenades hit the floor and rolled, but only for an instant before they were snatched up and hurled back towards their points of origin.
‘Down,’ shouted Grimm. The grenades disappeared beyond the sills of the windows.
There was a grunt and a sudden flurry of movement from outside. Two deafening booms sounded just a half-second apart. Chunks of the farmhouse wall were blown inward. The armour of the crouching Space Marines rattled with a hail of plaster and stone.
Then everything was still and silent apart from the veils of dust slowly settling back to the ground.
The squad moved outside, bolters still raised, to find the ground littered with scraps of ork flesh and shards of shattered bone.
‘Is it over?’ asked Veristan.
Grimm didn’t answer for a moment. He stood listening to the silence. A new sound imposed itself on him. Footsteps. Someone or something moving at a run.
The others heard it, too, and turned with bolters raised just in time to see Riallo sprint around the corner of the farmhouse with his bolt pistol in hand.
‘It’s over,’ said Grimm. He opened a new channel on the link, and said, ‘Squad Leader to Thunderhawk Aetherius. Respond.’
There was a crackle of static. A deep voice replied, ‘Aetherius hears, brother. Go ahead.’
‘Squad Grimm is ready for pick-up. Lock on to my beacon. You can land in the valley. We’ll be waiting about two hundred metres south of our current position.’
‘Do you have need of an Apothecary, brother?’
‘Negative, Aetherius. We do not. See you at the extraction point. Grimm, out.’
‘So…’ said Veristan after the sergeant had closed the link. ‘Another island cleared of the filthy kine.’
‘Leaving just short of eight hundred more to go,’ replied Mandell. ‘Not to mention the mountains and the cave systems.’
‘It that a complaint?’ asked Grimm.
‘Hardly,’ chuckled the big Space Marine. ‘I live for these purges, though I shall be more wary of falling ceilings.’
At that moment, Riallo’s eyes locked onto something above them and went wide. Grimm turned just in time to see a badly injured ork rise up to its full height on the roof of the farmhouse. Its skin was drenched in blood and one arm ended in a tattered stump that was still dripping, but it had enough life left in it to raise a huge axe, bellow at the sky and leap.
Grimm saw it coming straight towards him. He heard someone shout, ‘Sergeant!’ There was a single gunshot and the beast’s head snapped backwards as it dropped.
The sergeant stepped back just in time. The body of the monster struck the ground a metre in front of him and flopped lifelessly to its side. He turned to see Riallo standing there, bolt pistol raised, smoke drifting from its barrel.
They all looked at Riallo for a moment, saying nothing until he lowered and holstered his weapon.
‘Good shot, Scout,’ said Grimm at last.
‘Thank you, brother-sergeant.’
‘How many kills did you make this day, brother?’ asked Veristan
‘Four,’ said Riallo. If he felt pride, he managed to keep it from his voice.
Corella blew out a breath. ‘Almost half the total kill-count. You’re making us look bad, brother.’
‘It was the ork that laid you out which made you look bad,’ Veristan laughed. ‘He put you on your back like a helpless turtle.’
‘Mandell,’ said Grimm, ‘you know what to do. Burn the ork bodies. Aetherius will do a promethium bombing run once we’re up, but I’d rather not take any chances with spores drifting on the wind. Riallo, scour the place one last time to be sure we got them all. If there are ork tracks leading away…’
‘Understood, brother-sergeant.’
‘Veristan and Corella, follow me. We’ll await them at the rendezvous.’
As Mandell went back inside the farmhouse with his flamer, Riallo mentally quartered the area and began scanning the ground for tracks leading off the property. It was dark. Stars blanketed the sky, their cold light adequate for a Space Marine’s gene-boosted vision. His search eventually brought him near the ruptured grain silos. By the hills of spilled corn, he found two hastily abandoned breathing tubes that the orks had used to stay hidden.
They were cunning, these ones, the thought. They knew we were in pursuit and laid a fine trap. I must not think of the orks as mere savages any longer. Some of them, it is clear, are not. They surprised us here today. It could have gone ill for us. Our training, our discipline and our reflexes were what saved us.
He found no evidence that any orks had escaped. As he ended his search and turned back towards the farmhouse, he saw Veristan emerge from the main doorway. The hungry flames were already high behind him, feeding on the dead orks and the debris.
Riallo walked over and, for a moment, the two Crimson Fists stood watching the blaze intensify. Firelight danced on the golden iconography that graced Mandell’s ceramite plates. Mandell had earned his fair share of honours defending New Rynn City during the war.
Riallo broke the silence between them. ‘This is why it never truly feels like a victory to me, brother. We kill them, but even when dead, the ork spores force us to burn the very things we’re fighting for – the people’s homes, the fields, the pastures, all the things that support life here. We burn Rynn’s World herself.’
Mandell stared into the flames.
‘It is from fire that things are born anew,’ he rumbled gently. ‘Keep your eyes on the future, my brother. The world will heal in time, but only if this accursed infestation is properly ended. What we do now lays the foundations for a return to better days. Be patient and see it thr–’
A shrill scream from inside the farmhouse cut him off. For an instant, they stood stunned. Then there was another.
Riallo bolted forward, sprinting straight for the farmhouse. At the door, he didn’t stop. He raced straight into the flaming interior.
‘Damn it,’ spat Mandell, then he marched off after him.
The Thunderhawk had already touched down when Riallo and Mandell finally rejoined the rest of the squad. Brother Garreon, Aetherius’s pilot, kept the turbines spinning. Grimm was on the verge of demanding a status report over the link when the two missing Space Marines emerged out of the night.
On seeing them, Grimm understood at once.
Cradled in the thick arms of the Scout were two tiny, soot-covered girls with straw-coloured hair. Their bright eyes were wide with fear as they peered back at the massive Space Marines standing at the bottom of the gunship’s ramp.
The family, thought
Grimm. That’s why they didn’t run. That’s why they stood and fought. I should have seen it.
The children looked so fragile, pressed up against the Scout’s armoured chest like that.
Too fragile, too innocent, to survive in a galaxy consumed by endless war. But then again, even we five began this life so small and powerless. Beginnings do not always dictate the nature of endings.
Not for the first time, he gave silent thanks to Emperor and the Primarch that fate had made him a Space Marine. He did not think he could have faced the reality of these times as a mortal man with all of the terrible weaknesses that entailed.
‘Where were they?’ he asked.
‘There was a trapdoor set in the floor,’ answered Mandell as he moved past his sergeant and up the ramp. ‘Their parents must have hidden them from the orks just in time, perhaps alerted by the screams of the farmhands.’
Grimm nodded. ‘Time to pull out. Everyone aboard now.’
As the Space Marines marched up into the belly of the gunship, Grimm spoke to Riallo. As he did, the girls turned and hid their frightened faces against the Scout’s chest.
‘You honoured the Chapter with your deeds today, brother,’ said Grimm. ‘When we arrive back at the Cassar, I shall be petitioning for your advancement to full battle-brother status.’
Riallo blinked in surprise. ‘Then it is I who am honoured, brother-sergeant. Thank you.’
Grimm waved that aside.
‘The Chapter needs you, brother. And many more like you if the Crimson Fists are to once again be a mighty force in this Imperium.’
He strapped himself into his flight harness and settled back. The gunship’s turbines whined louder, raising in pitch to a scream. Aetherius lifted her bulk up into the air.
‘On that day,’ Grimm continued, ‘no muck-eating greenskin in Imperial space will be safe from our wrath. In Dorn’s name, I tell you, the very thought of us will strike terror into their filthy xenos hearts.’
The others had removed their battle helms. On hearing their sergeant’s words, they turned to face him as one. Eyes hard with rage and righteous zeal, they echoed him.
‘In Dorn’s name,’ they swore, ‘it will be so.’
THE FEW
by Mike Lee
The dust storm blotted out the feeble light of Parthus IV’s distant sun, leaving the ruined city in darkness. Veteran Sergeant Sandor Galleas could feel the hissing breath of the wind against the battered surface of his armour, eating away at the dark blue enamel and driving sand deep into every joint and crevice. Just ahead, the vast bulk of the alien temple loomed out of the whirling haze, and there – just where Magos Ukrhart said it would be – was the jagged fissure in the building’s curved outer wall.
‘This is your worst idea yet, brother,’ Olivar grumbled over the vox. ‘I mean it. The Chapter Master won’t countenance this.’
Galleas edged closer to the opening, his drum-fed Phobos-pattern boltgun at the ready. The wall to either side of the fissure was pitted in dozens of places by the action of wind and sand. The texture bore a disquieting resemblance to weathered bone.
The fissure itself had been widened over the centuries by the elements and looked large enough for the Space Marines to squeeze themselves through. Darkness filled the space beyond. Galleas’s autosenses revealed a narrow stretch of empty floor, thick with the dust of ages.
Galleas worked his way through the opening, boltgun extended. His right knee was heavy and stiff. The sergeant’s war-plate was a grim testament to the savagery of war, marked from head to toe by the bite of axe, sword and shell during the terrible invasion of Rynn’s World just a few months before. The actuator had been damaged by an ork blade, and despite his best efforts to placate the machine’s spirit, the component had continued to degrade.
‘The Codex forbids this,’ Olivar stressed. ‘Without Arbiter, we have no support.’
The eldar incursion into the Hebrides sub-sector had reached as far as Hadrian Secundus and the vital shipping lanes beyond. Arbiter, the Gladius-class frigate that had borne them to the sub-sector capital, had been called away to help fight xenos raiders striking from the Serpentis Gulf. One ship against dozens, it would be a long time before Arbiter returned, if it returned at all.
Galleas forced himself the rest of the way through the gap, hampered slightly by the bolt pistol and sheathed power sword at his hip. The sound of ceramite scraping against the bone-like material of the wall echoed sharply in the vaulted chamber beyond, leaving fresh scratches across the skull-faced emblem of the Deathwatch that adorned the sergeant’s left pauldron. The Crimson Fist swept the room with his bolter, but the space was empty save for a few drifting clouds of dust.
‘We have all the support we need,’ the sergeant replied coolly. ‘It’s a simple hit-and-run. By the time the eldar in the city know what’s happened, we’ll be breaking orbit and heading back to Stylos.’
Olivar was next through the fissure. Like Galleas, the veteran’s armour was battered and worn. A quartet of purity seals hung in tattered threads from red stubs of wax affixed to his right pauldron, while a curled scrap of scorched parchment bearing extracts from the Imperial Creed was affixed to the left. In a Chapter that did not especially revere the Imperial Cult, Yezim Olivar’s devotion was extraordinary.
The veteran Space Marine surveyed the empty room, his own bolter tucked tightly against his chest. The helm swung back to Galleas, one red lens glowing in the darkness. A small metal plate covered the ruin of the right lens, glinting from the crumpled cheek and scarred brow of the helmet’s right ocular. ‘The Codex–’
‘For a mission like this, the Codex calls for two Scout squads, two full tactical squads, and a Devastator squad for support,’ Galleas said, ‘with two Thunderhawks over the horizon to provide extraction and close support, if required.’ The sergeant stared back at Olivar. ‘But there are only three of us, and little more than a dozen Chapter serfs.’
‘As if that wasn’t shameful enough, arming serfs and sending them to war in our name,’ Olivar growled. ‘Now you’re putting all our lives in the hands of a so-called magos and that trader, Voss–’
‘The Chapter Master charged me with ending the xenos incursion by any means necessary,’ Galleas snapped, his voice as hard as ceramite. ‘So we will go where we must and make use of whatever tools there are at hand. Is that clear?’
Olivar stiffened at the rebuke. The veteran started to speak, but another voice cut across his over the vox.
‘Storm cell’s weakening. I reckon we’ve got ten minutes. Maybe less,’ said Titus Juno as he slipped through the fissure. The third member of Galleas’s team – he couldn’t think of them as a squad any more, not after all they’d lost on Rynn’s World – was, if anything, even more battle-worn than his companions. Juno cared little for medals and scraps of parchment – he lived for one thing alone, and that was the maelstrom of combat. Like Galleas, Juno wore the sigil of the Deathwatch on his left pauldron. Three human skulls – those of an adult and two small children – hung from his right pauldron, just below the red emblem of his Chapter.
‘We’re running out of time. Let’s move,’ Galleas ordered, leaving Olivar no further room for argument. Bolter ready, he advanced across the room and through the arched opening at the far side.
The sergeant switched channels on his vox. ‘Basta, do you read me?’
The reply came at once, badly attenuated by the haze of static particles kicked up by the storm. ‘I read you, lord,’ the senior armsman’s voice said faintly.
‘Status report.’
‘Stage one complete. Athos and his armsmen have planted their charges and are withdrawing to the pickup point.’
‘Do you have a fix on us?’
‘Yes, lord. According to the magos, you’re one hundred and fifty metres from the objective. Head north through a series of chambers until you come to a spiral staircase on your right.’
‘Understood.’
The Crimson Fists moved swiftly th
rough one room after another, their footfalls kicking up ghostly plumes of dust. Each chamber was as empty as the one before it, their purpose lost to the vagaries of time. After the fourth such room, the Space Marines came upon an antechamber of sorts and the staircase Basta had described. Galleas went first with bolter raised, his autosenses detecting the faint sound of voices drifting down from above.
The staircase led to a narrow, curved gallery that looked out upon a vast, high-ceilinged chamber. A cold blue light shone up from below, creating ribbon-like auroras in the dust-laden air. The voices Galleas heard, lilting and inhuman, echoed in the vaulted space.
The veteran sergeant left the staircase in a low crouch, edging up to the gallery’s curved parapet. Still deep in shadow, he rose slightly and peered over the lip.
A large gathering of eldar nine metres below stood in a broad semicircle facing an octagonal dais in the centre of the room. A flurry of targeting reticules pulsed in Galleas’s vision, highlighting multiple threats stretching in a wide arc to his left. Most of the xenos were warriors, clad in light armour and carrying rifles, though two small squads were armed with pistols and curved, diamond-toothed chainblades. Six eldar warlocks stood closest to the dais; they wore long robes over rune-marked armour, and each carried either a long staff or slender, fearsome-looking spear. It was they who chanted, their free hands lifted towards the dais in benediction.
Upon the dais was a rosette made of delicate crystal more than five metres across. A narrow set of steps led into the centre of the rosette, where a shimmering ribbon of blue light pulsed slowly in midair. The light from the display was reflected upward by curved petals, creating the shifting auroras overhead.
Juno and Olivar took position to either side of Galleas. Olivar glanced over the parapet. ‘Xenos witchcraft,’ he spat.
‘All the strange lights and chanting, and you’re just now working that out?’ Juno said.
The War for Rynn's World - Steve Parker & Mike Lee Page 48