by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
Averamus struck first. He went straight through the framework in the centre of the room, scattering its rusted beams. Gydrael met him with a counter-stroke, aiming a sideways swipe at the Fallen’s torso. Averamus dropped and rolled under the blow but Gydrael had read the move, and aimed a kick that snapped Averamus’ head back.
The Fallen rolled with the blow, hooking an arm around Gydrael’s leg and throwing him across the floor. Gydrael sprawled and the Fallen was upon him, the two wrestling now, too close to bring their swords to bear.
‘You cannot kill me,’ snarled Gydrael as the two grappled face to face. ‘Not while my duty is yet undone.’
‘I don’t have to kill you,’ said Averamus. He smiled again. The Mark of Scorn was livid red against his pallid face. ‘He will.’
Something huge slammed against the other side of the chamber wall. Stones dislodged and a clatter of rubble fell. Gydrael let go of Averamus and rolled away, bringing his sword up to ward off the opportunistic slash that Averamus aimed at his neck. Gydrael jumped to his feet and put two long strides between himself and his enemy, ready to face the second threat.
The wall of the chamber collapsed, spilling a drift of broken stone into the chamber. A massive, blocky shape stepped through, and Gydrael registered the purple colours of the armour plating, the gilded eagle’s wing worn in mockery of Imperial heraldry.
It was a Dreadnought of the Emperor’s Children.
It was easily twice Gydrael’s height. Both its arms ended in massive fists and the armoured sarcophagus was as impenetrable as a tank. The Dreadnought’s heraldry was of a quartered human body, depicted with loving skill on the frontal armour. The quartered corpse was rendered in sculpted gold on one leg plate, and again on the left shoulder unit. Through a vision slit in the middle of the sarcophagus came a sickly green glow, and those parts of the Dreadnought not covered in gold plate were painted in an obscenely sumptuous purple.
It looked as much a monument to excess as a war machine. The images of a profane feast were worked into the golden sculptures – plates heaped with human heads, chalices filled from the slit bellies of spitted bodies, bunches of severed hands and torsos hung like sides of cattle.
Gydrael’s mind dissected and filed away every detail as he sized up this new and enormous threat. Most men would only see the Dreadnought’s huge size and brutal crushing fists, but Gydrael saw it all.
The detail you miss will kill you.
Therefore, miss nothing.
‘Ancient Xezukoth,’ exclaimed Averamus. ‘I promised you a new plaything! And this one will take some real punishment before it breaks!’
‘Are you Ferrus Manus?’ said the Dreadnought, its voice a bass rumble blaring from the vox-casters mounted on its hull. Its power fists clenched and unclenched as its visual sensors focused on Gydrael. ‘No, I saw him beheaded by the Perfected One. Are you Guilliman? No, I saw his throat slit. But you are close enough.’
The Dreadnought advanced on Gydrael. It swung a power fist and Gydrael ducked it. The air was seared by the power field crackling above him. The second fist surged down and Gydrael rolled out of the way.
A dark chuckling came from the vox-casters. ‘Run!’ said Xezukoth. ‘Dance for me!’
‘Good luck, little brother!’ called out Averamus as he retreated from the chamber, leaving Gydrael facing the Dreadnought alone.
Gydrael could have pursued him, but he would not have made it halfway across the room with the Dreadnought at his back. He crushed down his fury, denying it full run of his mind. He would find Averamus and kill him. That duty had not disappeared – it still burned as bright and weighed as heavy.
But to fulfil it, he had to get past Ancient Xezukoth.
The Dreadnought wheeled and crunched through the rubble, seeking to run Gydrael down and crush him underfoot. Gydrael ducked back through the hole through which he and the Fallen had entered, back into the hatchery. Eggs crunched messily under his feet. The nidus was full of sslyth wailing.
‘I taste the fires of Isstvan!’ cried Ancient Xezukoth. ‘I know the colours you wear. You are the Emperor’s vermin! You are he who would deny the galaxy its perfection! Do you see my Lord Fulgrim watching? I shall make of you a work of art worthy of his notice.’
The sarcophagus was armoured too thickly for the plasma pistol to penetrate. The eye slit looked like a weak spot but Gydrael knew something of how the Dark Angels’ own Dreadnoughts were constructed, and the slit was no more than a decoration to hint at the human being interred inside the machine. Ancient Xezukoth, the crippled and evidently insane III Legion traitor inside the Dreadnought, was well protected and without an obvious weak spot to reach him.
Miss nothing.
The Dreadnought slammed a fist down, shuddering the floor. Gydrael barely kept his footing, and had he fallen the other fist would have pounded down and flattened him. He could not fight like this forever, circling the crazed machine, giving and taking ground. It was piloted by a Space Marine, but it was still a machine. He would falter before it did. And he might cut at it a thousand times before it felt any ill effects – Xezukoth, on the other hand, only needed to land one blow to end the fight.
It charged at Gydrael, who was a split second too slow to get out of its way. It hit him at full speed and he held on to its sarcophagus as it barrelled forwards. Gydrael slammed into the wall of the hatchery and kept going as the encrustations shattered against him. The stone wall gave way in turn as the Dreadnought crashed through.
Gydrael rocked from a blow to the back of his head. He lost his grip and fell, tumbling beneath the Dreadnought, barely avoiding the machine’s enormous feet. He forced himself upright, aware that his plasma pistol was gone – he still had his sword, but the pistol was somewhere in the wreckage of the fallen wall.
The sky was open above him. The Dreadnought had smashed through the hatchery and out onto the slopes of Phoenicus Peak. The tips of the mountain range rose all around like the spires of vast stone crown, spinning wispy clouds between them under an ice-blue sky.
Gydrael had emerged on a scarp above the tree line. Below, the lower slopes were covered with dense jungle. A host of birds had taken flight at the sudden noise and disturbance, and were wheeling in dark clouds overhead. Each valley between the mountains was a dark green abyss of choked and tangled vegetation through which the sslyth could slither and writhe, but which was near-impassable for a human soldier. The xenos had chosen their nesting place well.
The Dreadnought turned around, the stamping of its feet against the rock echoing around the mountain peaks. Gydrael could feel the injuries he had sustained – the salves dispensed by his armour had dulled them, but now they were catching up with him. A fractured skull. A wrenched shoulder. Cracked ribcage where the breastplate of his armour had buckled. He could still fight, but not for much longer. He would slow down and become less coordinated, but the Dreadnought would not.
He would not defeat the Dreadnought, not like this. The cut and thrust of combat would favour the war machine over time.
There had to be another way.
The Dreadnought’s decoration was covered in the imagery of debauchery. It was suggestive of a foul ritual of consumption. Before he had been interred in the Dreadnought, Xezukoth must have partaken of such feasting. The Emperor’s Children were seekers of new and obscene experiences, as demanded of them by the worship of Slaanesh. It was through the profane feast that this one had found such experience.
And he still did.
Gydrael glanced at the front of the sarcophagus even as he ducked another blow and leapt back from another. Would this traitor forgo the ritual of the feast, just because he was locked inside a ceramite-plated war machine? Of course not. Nothing would stop him from slaking his foul desires. And outside the Dreadnought his nervous system would not function – he would be blind and deaf, and stripped of all sense of touch and taste. There was a way in. Xezukoth had to be fed.
He saw it then – a hairline seam in the gilding aroun
d the front of the sarcophagus. It described a square below the false vision slit, almost invisible among the sculpted visions of dismemberment.
‘You are not Ferrus Manus,’ growled the Dreadnought. ‘You are not Guilliman. I know the winged dagger on your shoulder. You are the Lion! You are the shadowed one! Oh what joy, for I shall feast upon the flesh of the Angel!’
Gydrael would have one shot before the Dreadnought realised what was happening. As insane as he was, Xezukoth was still a Space Marine and he would still know when an enemy sensed a weakness. Gydrael put his head down and ran at Xezukoth, leaping up onto the front of the sarcophagus.
He wielded his sword one-handed, finding a handhold among the carvings with his other hand. He drew his sword back. It would be easier with a short blade, one designed to stab and punch, but his broadsword would have to do.
All the lumbering Xezukoth had to do was reach up and grab Gydrael with his great power fist, ripping him off and crushing him. Gydrael had only seconds at most.
Gydrael rammed the blade into the top of the section of armour. The blade slid into the seam, forcing it open with a burst of its power field. The hatch sprang open, creating a square black mouth in the centre of the Dreadnought’s front armour.
The opening was lined with metallic grinding blades, still stained and clotted with gore. A whole body could be forced into there, reduced to sludge by the grinders. It was through this that Xezukoth could be fed his ritual feasts, churned up and siphoned directly down his gullet. Gydrael drew back his arm again, and drove the whole blade into the opening.
He felt resistance as his sword stripped the teeth from the grinders. He rammed it home again and this time the blade slid all the way.
Gydrael knew well the feeling of muscle and bone giving way beneath his sword’s blade. He felt it then as the sword punctured the flesh concealed by the sarcophagus. He felt organic matter parting, before the tip of the broadsword lodged in the power plant at the back of the war machine.
A strangled, gurgling cry came from the vox-casters. Gydrael felt a wave of savage satisfaction as he twisted the blade.
The Dreadnought sank down, hydraulics hissing. One arm fell impotently to its side, cracking against the rock of the mountainside. The other waved aimlessly before Xezukoth lost control of it and it fell limp and useless too.
Gydrael pulled the blade out. He dropped to the ground and the Dreadnought slumped to one side. Blood trickled from the hatchway.
Warily, Gydrael glanced around and reopened the vox channel.
‘Once more – I am deploying the virus!’ came Thorne’s voice. ‘Then I am falling back! We cannot wait any longer!’
‘Deploying,’ Hasdrubal growled. ‘Taste this, xenos filth!’
Gydrael looked down at the virus canister hanging from his belt. A terrible howling was coming from the nidus, echoed from the other two nests around Phoenicus Peak. Every sslyth in the nest was awake, dragging itself out of the breeding pool or slithering from its burrow. Gydrael would not be able to re-enter and reach the nutrient nexus, and even if he did, there was little point. The virus had already been deployed elsewhere.
The cascade reaction could not be restarted.
‘I know you can hear me,’ said Gydrael, knowing that the dying Dreadnought’s own vox-feeds would be picking up his voice. ‘I will find you, Averamus. I have your trail now. I will find you.’
There was no answer.
A figure emerged from the tree line, in the black armour of the Deathwatch.
‘I saw you,’ said Brother Molgurr. He wore the skull emblem of the Mortifactors Chapter on his shoulder guard. ‘You brought the war machine down single-handed. A fine kill, brother.’
Gydrael remembered that Molgurr and Decurius had been watching the area as the rest of the kill team executed their mission. They had seen the fight with Ancient Xezukoth, but Gydrael wished they hadn’t.
‘I have a visual on you, Brother Gydrael,’ voxed Decurius. ‘Report. You have been silent for too long.’
‘The traitor Dreadnought waylaid me. I could not deploy the virus.’
‘Torment yourself later. Fall back to my position. Cover Thorne and Hasdrubal.’
Molgurr led the way. Overhead the birds were still wheeling, the ruby-feathered flocks that had given Phoenicus Peak its name. The jungle they inhabited served as the perfect cover for the sslyth broods that stalked the Imperial forces on Kolagar, and for now, it would continue to do so.
‘I will find you,’ Gydrael murmured to himself.
And somehow, he was sure that Averamus heard him.
Many thousands of sslyth died in the assault on Phoenicus Peak. The two virus bombs wiped out most of the hatcheries and devastated the warclade that was using the mountains as its breeding ground and base of operations.
The virus did not achieve the pandemic levels required to wipe out the sslyth population entirely. The sslyth in Nidus Tertiam escaped the worst of the infection and so a segment of the population remained uninfected before the fast-killing virus burned itself out. They fled into the jungle, and Imperial intelligence lost track of them among the river ways and swamps of the Blackwine Delta.
The Deathwatch kill team was withdrawn from Kolagar. The task of exterminating the sslyth was given to the hard-pressed squads of jungle fighters drawn from the Astra Militarum’s death world veterans. The intelligence that the sslyth were allies of the Emperor’s Children was passed up the Imperial chain of command.
Men continued to die.
Gydrael watched the servitors on board the Inquisitorial cutter buckling down the sarcophagus of Ancient Xezukoth. The Dreadnought had been salvaged from the mountainside as the cutter descended to pick up the kill team, after helping to cover Thorne and Hasdrubal’s exfiltration from the other two sslyth nests. The Ordos could have much to learn from the Dreadnought, and if nothing else, it denied the ancient war machine to the Emperor’s Children.
‘The crew say we’re heading for the next deployment already,’ said Brother Hasdrubal. The lightning bolt symbol of the Storm Lords was emblazoned across one shoulder pad, and Hadrubal’s flat, brutal face was topped by a single braid of oiled black hair. He indicated the Dreadnought. ‘Of all of us to claim such a kill, it had to be the Dark Angel. Your kind wouldn’t crack a smile if you had Abaddon’s own head on a plate. Me, I’d have this thing mounted over the gates of our fortress, after the Inquisition had finished their tinkering.’
‘They are welcome to it,’ said Gydrael. ‘My Chapter will know of what I have done. It is among them my deeds will be weighed.’
‘We left plenty of sslyth dead on Kolagar. If that doesn’t get you crowing, we’ll be after the greenskins on the Eastern Fringe next. Reap a tally of them, see how that loosens you up.’
‘I do not fight for glory,’ said Gydrael. ‘I do my duty. I seek nothing more.’
‘Everyone seeks something more than that,’ said Hasdrubal. ‘I can tell, Dark Angel. You’re not as mysterious as you like to think. Keep it to yourself if you must, but there’s something that drives you on. We all have it. Duty alone is never enough.’
‘The traitor’s corpse is stowed,’ said Gydrael. ‘I shall retire to my cell. I must meditate on the mission.’
Gydrael left the Storm Lord in the cutter’s hold. The ship was small by voidfaring standards, but it still had enough space to give each member of the kill team a cell insulated from the din of the engines and the hubbub of the crew. It was here that each Space Marine saw to his wargear rites, reviewed his mission archives, and prayed. Gydrael’s cell was simple and plain, as befitted a Dark Angel’s humility. A shelf of battle histories and war-prayers shared a wall with an icon of the Dark Angels Primarch, Lion El’Jonson, crushing the Void Meridian uprising during the Great Crusade. The opposite wall held dozens of weapons racked up, with combat knives of every size and type and three marks of bolter with maintenance and cleaning tools. A stand for Gydrael’s armour took up one corner.
Gydrael knelt on t
he floor and took down one of the books, a volume of prayers to banish doubt, alongside reflections on actions in combat. He opened the book, and from the hidden hollow cut into its pages he took out a slender dataslate. He thumbed the activation rune and the screen lit up. He felt his injuries now – the ship’s Apothecary had patched him up but his body would do the healing, knitting back together the torn muscles and bone during the voyage to the Eastern Fringe.
‘Brother Zameon Gydrael,’ he said into the device. ‘Recipient, Master Interrogator-Chaplain Asmodai. My search has borne fruit. I encountered Averamus on the planet Kolagar. He was as the histories described. The Mark of Scorn was upon him. He was in league with the Emperor’s Children, but they intervened before I could bring Averamus to justice.’
The dataslate would convert Gydrael’s words into a secure data packet. It would then be sent to a relay station and further translated into a symbol string to be transmitted astropathically to the Rock. The Dark Angels’ astropathic codes had never been breached. No one would know the message’s contents save Gydrael himself, and Lord Asmodai.
‘I broke my oaths to the Deathwatch,’ continued Gydrael. ‘The mission at Kolagar failed because of me. I pursued the Fallen instead of completing my objective. These are the duties I have to my Chapter and to my Imperium, and I was never in any doubt as to what path I would take if they came into conflict. But… I faltered. For a moment, when I saw I was facing one of the Fallen, I felt that shadow within me. I had to choose.
‘Many men will die because the sslyth were not wiped out on Kolagar. Men of the Astra Militarum, and others. I feel the guilt for those deaths within me, for it was within my power to stop them. But I shall crush that guilt down deep within me, and banish it. And instead, I choose to see their blood on Averamus’ hands.’
Gydrael turned his helmet over in his grip. It was still grimy from the fighting in the nidus. Sslyth blood and scales clung to the black-painted plating. He slid off a gauntlet and vambrace – they were similarly filthy from battle. The smell of the sslyth clung to him.