Ultramarines Omnibus (warhammer 40000: ultramarines)

by Graham McNeill

  Pressing on, Uriel and Pasanius climbed a jagged, saw-toothed ridge, its sides sheer and corrugated, as though gouged by some gargantuan bulldozer blade. A blackened depression of splintered stone and iron, thousands of metres in diameter, fell away from them on the other side, crags of iron columns and twisted girders protruding from the mountain like clawed fingers. The depression appeared to be perfectly circular, though it was difficult to tell, whipping particles of sand and iron filings filling the air and lashing round the circular valley in spiteful, howling vortices. A narrow sliver of white sky was just visible on the far side of the depression, but all Uriel's attention was fixed on the sight that filled the centre of the depression.

  'In the name of the Emperor…' breathed Uriel in disgust.

  A huge grilled platform filled the centre of the depression. Agglomerated layers of dust coated its every surface and its perforated floor dripped and dogged with jelly-like runnels of fat and viscera. Tall poles jutted from the platform, held in place by quivering steel guys that sang as the unnatural wind whistled through them. Hooked between the poles were billowing sails of flesh, stretched across timber frames that the scouring, wind-borne particles might strip them of the leavings of their former owners.

  Monstrous, debased creatures in vulcanised rubber masks with rounded glass eye sockets and ribbed piping running into tanks carried on their backs scraped at the stretched skins with long, bladed polearms. They lurched across the platform with a twisted, mutated gait and gurgled monotone commands to one another.

  'What are they doing?' said Pasanius, horrified at the sight before him.

  'It looks like they're curing the hides, scraping them clean,' said Uriel.

  'But the hides of what?' said Pasanius. 'They can't be human, they're too large.'

  'I don't care what they are,' snarled Uriel, setting off down the treacherous slope towards the platform and drawing his golden-hilted sword. 'This ends now.'

  Pasanius set off after Uriel, unlimbering his flamer and checking its fuel load.

  If the mutant creatures were aware of them they gave no sign, the howling wind and rumble of distant artillery masking the sounds of their approach. But whatever they lacked for in awareness, they made up for in thorough diligence, dragging their bladed polearms up and down the length of the billowing skins to clear them of whatever the lashing winds left behind. Uriel saw a carven set of stone stairs leading to the platform and took them two at a time as his anger continued to build.

  The first of the mutants died with a strangled screech on the point of Uriel's sword, the second fell without a sound as Uriel hacked its head from its body with one blow. Now aware of the killers in their midst, the remainder scattered in terror. A sheet of flame incinerated more of the mutants, their screams ululating as their rubber bodysuits melted on their corrupted flesh.

  The slaughter was over in a matter of moments, the twisted mutants no match for the power and fury of the Adeptus Astartes. Most turned to flee, but there was nowhere to hide from Uriel's wrath. As the last mutated creature fell beneath his blade, Uriel took a deep breath, taking profound pleasure in the butchery of such worthless wretches. Whatever deviant beasts they had been in life, they were only so much dead flesh now.

  He turned as Pasanius said, 'Uriel, look…' and pointed at the nearest of the skins.

  Uriel felt his heart tighten in his chest as he saw the dead features of a man atop the huge expanse of skin. Stretched almost beyond recognition, but a man's nonetheless.

  'Holy blood. But how could a man become so vast?' said Pasanius.

  Uriel shook his head. 'Not by any natural means.'

  'But why?'

  'The ways of the Enemy are unknown,' said Uriel. 'Better that some remain so.'

  'What shall we do?'

  Uriel turned in a circle, seeing row upon row of faces in the skins circling the platform - dead, slack features of men and women staring down at him as though he were the subject in an anatomist's theatre.

  'Burn it,' he said. 'Burn it all.'

  CHAPTER SIX

  With the scorched reek of burning flesh still in their nostrils, Uriel and Pasanius left the depression in the rock, leaving the smouldering remains to the scouring wind and whatever passed for carrion on Medrengard. Invigorated and filled with purpose from the slaying of the mutant things, their step was quick and energised, but by the time they passed through the narrow slice in the rock face and began climbing worn steps carved into the rock, the leaden weight of the daemon world had settled upon them once more.

  Uriel glanced back down at the blazing sheets of skin, feeling his hate at what had been done to these people burn as brightly. He knew that the image of the skinned man's features would haunt him forever, and was reminded of the horror of the disassembled flesh sculpture created by the loathsome xeno surgeon beneath the estate of Kasimir de Valtos on Pavonis.

  Just by being here he felt polluted, as though his very soul was becoming hardened or being drained from his body to nourish the dead rock underfoot, and he was becoming less himself. The emptiness of Medren-gard was leaving him hollowed out, a shell of his former self.

  'What will be left,' he whispered, 'when this world takes the last of me?'

  He could tell Pasanius was feeling the same way, his cheeks hollow and his eyes glazed as he trudged up the winding stairs. Even as he watched, Pasanius stumbled, his silver arm reaching out to arrest his fall, but at the last minute his friend snatched his arm back and he fell to his knees instead.

  'Are you all right?' asked Uriel.

  'Aye,' nodded Pasanius. 'Just hard to keep focussed without an enemy to fight.'

  'Fear not, my friend,' said Uriel. 'Once we reach this fortress, I am sure we will have enemies aplenty. If what the Omphalos Daemonium has told us is true, then we will have a surfeit of them.'

  'Do you think a daemon of the Skull Lord is capable of telling the truth?'

  'I do not know for sure,' said Uriel honestly, 'but I believe daemons only cloak what they need to in lies, wrapping kernels of truth in shrouds of deceit. Part of what it told us is true, I am sure, but which part… well, who knows?'

  'So what do we do?' asked Pasanius, trudging after Uriel.

  'Whatever we can, my friend,' said Uriel. 'We will act with courage and honour and hope that that is enough.'

  'It will need to be,' said Pasanius. 'It is all we have left.'

  The hike through the mountains seemed never-ending, their path through the blackened, rocky desolation draining their spirits with every step they took. They saw more of the steam-venting grilles and the acidic reek of the great smoke stacks was their constant companion as they neared the summit of yet another toothed crag of rock.

  The further they travelled, the more signs of death they saw. Bleached bones lay strewn all about in the rocks, but Uriel could not discern how they had come to be here. Not a scrap of meat remained on the bones, but it was impossible to tell whether they had been picked clean by scavengers or boiled free of flesh. Toxic clouds of smog and ash hugged the ground: noxious and polluted, lurking in cracks in the rock like predators with coiling tendrils of fog questing through the air like undersea fronds.

  Uriel briefly removed his helmet to cough up a mouthful of brackish phlegm, its substance black and stringy. His enhanced metabolism enabled him to survive such pollutants in the air, but didn't make them any less unpleasant.

  Several times they had been forced to traverse hissing rivers of molten metal as they flowed along great basalt culverts towards the smelteries and forges on the plains below. The heat of the mountains was growing and great geysers of scalding steam and hot ash spewed from vents and cracks in the rock. Were it not for their blessed power armour and bioengineered physiology, neither Uriel nor Pasanius could possibly have survived the journey.

  Again, Uriel thought he caught sight of the reddish things Pasanius believed were following them, but each time they would vanish into the rocks and remain unseen. Flocks of the delirium spect
res wheeled far overhead, but Uriel suspected that only the heat of the lava-hot rivers of metal and spouting plumes of boiling water kept them at bay.

  As he passed near a zigzagging crack in the ground, a whooshing tower of boiling liquid suddenly erupted from it. Steam billowed around him, blinding him, and he stumbled away as a rain of objects began clattering around him, falling from somewhere above. Coughing and spluttering, feeling the heat scorch his oesophagus, he wiped moisture from his visor and watched a rain of bones fall upon the mountain, ejected from somewhere deep below the earth by the spouting geysers.

  'Well, at least we know where the bones are coming from,' said Pasanius.

  The strange objects Uriel had seen in the sky before they had discovered the scouring platform came into sight once more as they neared the summit, swollen leathery balloon-like objects with drooping cables that hovered in the sky over something beyond the ridge of black rock. Now that they were nearer, Uriel could see that his initial assumption that these were some form of crude barrage balloon looked to be accurate. Dozens of them floated ahead, their surfaces a patchwork of uneven fabric and, after what they had seen thus far on Medrengard, Uriel did not want to think too hard as to what they had been fashioned from.

  The sound of the siege was not so distant now, the rumble of artillery drawing closer with every step they took.

  'Whoever is attempting to take that fortress is determined indeed to keep up such a prodigious expenditure of ordnance,' said Uriel as he clambered up another sheer slab of rock. His gauntlets were battered and scarred, the razor-like rocks of Medrengard tearing at them with every handhold.

  Pasanius nodded, his breath heaving as he climbed to join Uriel. The massive sergeant removed his helmet and spat the taste of the world from his mouth. 'Yes, I don't think we're the only ones interested in this Heart of Blood.'

  'You think that's what the besieger is after?'

  'I don't know, but it's certainly one explanation. Like you said, he's determined.'

  'The forces of the Dark Powers make war upon one another for their own amusement. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.'

  'True, but all I have learned of the Iron Warriors from Librarian Tigurius leads me to believe that they are consumed by bitterness and malice, not given to capricious whims. Whoever is attacking this fortress is doing so for more than their amusement.'

  'You could be right,' agreed Uriel. 'Come on, there is only one way to find out. The summit is near.'

  Once again they set off, and after what could have been no more than another hour's climb through drifting banks of stinking steam and yet more piles of bones, they crested the summit before them. Uriel had expected the ground to drop away from them, descending to the plains below, but instead the ground flattened into a rubble-strewn plateau of jagged spikes of rock and snaking cracks that drooled a yellowish fog. One of the bloated balloons was almost directly overhead and Uriel now saw that the cables dangling from it were barbed and as thick as a man's thigh, scraping great furrows in the grey powder of the ground as it drifted.

  'Listen,' said Uriel, dropping to one knee.

  Pasanius was silent, cocking his head and listening for what Uriel had heard.

  Amid the bass rumble of artillery fire and the hammering of distant forges, there was a pulsing, mechanical sound, such as might be made by a host of generators. Though it was hard to pick out any one sound from the omnipresent background noise of Medrengard, Uriel was certain it was coming from up ahead and was near.

  'What do you think it is?' he asked.

  'Engines perhaps?' suggested Pasanius.

  'Maybe,' nodded Uriel.

  'Maybe something we can steal.'

  'My thoughts exactly,' grinned Uriel, pushing himself to his feet and moving cautiously through the rolling banks of stinking fog while hugging the tall pillars of rock. The noises grew louder as they approached, and as the clouds of smog parted, Uriel saw their source.

  A sprawling complex of corrugated metal buildings, each the size of a large warehouse, squatted atop the plateau, surrounded by a high fence of razorwire topped with forests of iron spikes. Bodies hung draped from thick lengths of timber along the fence, their flesh desiccated and their limbs twisted at unnatural angles around the spars. Pillars of ashen smoke curled from a building of black brick near the centre of the camp and a low moaning permeated the air. A greasy, fatty residue coated the rocks and Uriel smelled a loathsome stench that reminded him of spoiled meat.

  'This place reeks of death,' he whispered.

  In the centre of the camp, a tall, armoured tower reared into the sky, thick iron girders and cable stays supporting a monstrous assembly that resembled the head of some gargantuan daemonic creature. Flames spouted from its eyes and nostrils, and its gaping mouth was filled with long gun barrels. Two bunkers guarded the entrance to the camp, their roofs sloped and festooned with spikes. Uriel could see the glint of heavy guns through the firing slits and knew that to approach this death camp, they would need to cross the interlocking fields of fire of both bunkers.

  Beyond the razorwire barrier, Uriel could see warriors in iron grey armour patrolling the interior of the camp, and felt his instinctual hatred rise to the surface.

  'Iron Warriors!' hissed Pasanius.

  'Iron Warriors,' repeated Uriel, gripping the hilt of his sword tightly.

  Traitors. Abominations. Chaos Space Marines… was there any other foe so vile?

  These warriors sought the ruination of everything Uriel believed in and the destruction of the Emperor's realm. Every aspect of his soul cried out for vengeance.

  'What is this place?' asked Pasanius as the shutter doors of one of the warehouse buildings screeched open and a host of the shambling mutant things they had killed earlier emerged. Behind them came a pathetic, shuffling mass of humanity, their heads cast down and their bodies swathed in baggy, flesh-coloured robes.

  'Some kind of prison?' ventured Uriel, as the mutants herded the prisoners towards the gates of the camp. Were all these buildings filled with prisoners? The great daemonic head on the tower turned on grinding cogs to face the hundreds-strong column, huge streams of flame belching from its eyes. A booming voice roared from its mouth, speaking a language Uriel did not understand, but which sent aching spasms through his joints and muscles, as though the sound resonated within the darkest recesses of his brain.

  The prisoners marched through the camp, the mutants stabbing at them with crackling prods and beating them with iron-tipped cudgels. The Iron Warriors marched ahead of the column, hideously perverted bolters carried across their breastplates. As they approached, the gate squealed open, the corpses hanging from it jittering in a grotesque imitation of life.

  'Where are they taking them?' wondered Uriel.

  'Oh, Emperor, no,' whispered Pasanius. 'They're taking them—'

  'To be skinned alive…' finished Uriel as he saw that the prisoners were not swathed in baggy robes at all, but were all completely naked to the elements. Their flesh hung in huge flaps from their bodies, stretched beyond all normal proportions by some unknown means. Encrusted dewlaps drooped from emaciated arms, chests, legs and buttocks. Men and women clutched fold upon fold of stretched skin to their bodies for fear it would trip them, sagging bellies and drained teats hanging like empty sacks of dried leather from their wasted frames.

  'They're taking them to the skinning platform. No, no…' said Uriel. 'But why?'

  'Does it matter?' snarled Pasanius, gripping his flamer tightly his silver finger hovering over the ignition key. 'We can't let this horror go unpunished!'

  Uriel nodded, feeling his hatred for the Iron Warriors reach new heights, but he forced himself to try and remain calm. To attack this column was suicide, they were directly in front of the bunkers and the gun tower, not to mention three Iron Warriors.

  But to let such an affront against humanity go unmolested? To allow these traitors to butcher these people as though they were no more than animals?

  Pasaniu
s was right, such evil would not stand.

  He could see righteous anger in Pasanius's eyes, but also something else, something darker. Uriel saw the light of a zealot in his battle-brother's eyes, the light of one who goes to battle with a death wish, where survival is irrelevant.

  Was there more to Pasanius's desire to fight than the obvious reasons of humanity?

  It seemed to Uriel that there was, but such were questions for when, or if, they lived through the next few minutes.

  Uriel drew his sword, his thumb hovering over the activation rune.

  He gripped Pasanius's shoulder guard and said, 'If we do not survive, then it has been an honour to call you my friend.'

  Pasanius nodded, but did not reply, his gaze never wavering from the approaching column of slaves, mutants and Iron Warriors.

  His eyes suddenly narrowed and he nodded at something over Uriel's shoulder. 'What in the name of the Emperor?'

  Uriel turned and saw a number of figures moving stealthily through the high crags that surrounded the camp.

  'Are these the things that have been tracking us through the mountains?'

  'No,' said Pasanius. 'I don't think so. They look like…'

  'Space Marines!' breathed Uriel as he saw two figures in green power armour rise from behind a cluster of boulders and aim missile launchers towards the camp. The Iron Warriors below had not noticed the figures moving above them and Uriel realised with wild enthusiasm that this must surely be an ambush!