by Ben Counter
A brutish cohort, scarred and tarnished like an engine ganger, came at Antiges with an axe blade. The Ultramarine met the ganger’s roar with the screech of his chainsword, plunging it into the man’s chest. The cohort fell, wrenching the weapon from Antiges’s hand. The Astartes didn’t pause and threw the wretch aside with such force that the corpse spun in the air before crashing into its debased brethren. The Ultramarine drew his short-blade, duelling shield already in hand and cut down a second assailant with a low, arcing sweep.
Rorgath, a World Eater sergeant, came alongside Antiges and forged into the melee with brutal abandon. Limbs fell like rain as he churned through his enemies, his face a grisly mask of wrath without his helmet.
Out of the corner of his eye, Antiges saw another of Rorgath’s kin decapitate a cohort officer trying to ram home the charge and extol his warriors to greater fervour. Others disappeared in clouds of red mist and the dreadful din of chainaxes rending bone. Yet, despite the relentless carnage wreaked upon them, the lowly cohorts refused to break, and the killing ground became mired in blood.
‘They’re fanatics,’ grumbled Rorgath, burying his blade in the face on an oncoming cohort.
‘Drive them back,’ snarled Antiges through gritted teeth, smashing an enemy with the blunt force of his duelling shield. About to redouble his efforts, the Ultramarine fell back, as two or three bodies flew at him. In the madness, he dropped his short-blade, but as he foraged for it in the sea of pressing bodies, he found the hilt of his chainsword. Tearing the weapon loose, Antiges cut a path through bone and flesh to free himself. Hands were grabbing at him to drag the Astartes down, and even as he tried to emerge, bullets rang off his armour. One of the World Eaters yelled in anger and pain. The Furious Abyss disappeared from view as more enemy crewmen threw themselves forward.
This was not how men fought. Very few xenos were content to simply die, even when there was something to be gained by it. That was why the Astartes were such lethal warriors; they were the ultimate weapon against any enemy tainted by natural cowardice, since a Space Marine could control and banish his own fear. The Word Bearers had created another kind of enemy, one that even Space Marines could not break.
‘Damn you,’ hissed Antiges as he threw another man off him, and was sprayed by a shower of blood as Rorgath disembowelled yet another. ‘Now we have to kill them all.’
Driving on, pain burst against Antiges’s side as a blade or a bullet found its way through his armour. He staggered and it gave the enemy the opening they needed. A sudden flurry of cohorts sprang on the stricken Astartes. Then the weight of the attacks was dragging him down, their death-cries and the smell of their sundered bodies fuddling his senses.
BRYNNGAR HEFTED HIS last belt of frag grenades at the observation platform. A cluster of explosions rippled over the pitted surface, hewing off chunks of ferrocrete and scorching metal. The assault had achieved its desired effect, forcing the ambushers above Antiges’s position back for a few moments, who were unseen from the channel the Space Wolf and his Blood Claws charged down, and switching their attention.
Fire erupted again from the platform before the last of the grenades had even detonated, but this time their focus was upon the Wolf Guard and his squad. Brynngar’s highly attuned animal senses picked up on the stink of cordite and blood, and the sporadic clatter of weapon’s fire, and he assumed that his brother Ultramarine was otherwise occupied, hence their popularity.
Rujveld slid into cover beside his venerable leader as he appraised the disposition of the ambushers strafing them. Fire streaked down from the observation gallery and prevented them joining the fight beyond.
‘They knew we were coming,’ Brynngar growled to the stony-faced Blood Claw.
‘What are your orders, Wolf Guard?’
Brynngar turned his feral gaze onto his pack brother.
‘We bring them down,’ he grinned, displaying his fangs. ‘Yorl, Borund,’ bellowed the Space Wolf captain, and two of his charges abandoned their ready positions to approach their leader.
‘Melta bombs,’ snarled Brynngar. ‘One of those struts.’ He pointed to the source of the platform’s elevation.
Yorl and Borund nodded as one, priming their melta charges before heading across a gauntlet of open ground that led to the structure. Withering fire struck the first Blood Claw before he ventured more than a few feet, the impacts kicking him off his feet and spinning him around before he fell in a bloody heap.
Borund had greater fortune, a feral war cry on his lips as he reached the base of the platform. Clamping the charge onto one of the struts, he took a hit in the shoulder. Another struck him across the torso as Word Bearers positioned neared the building’s base realised what he was doing. Borund pressed the detonator before they could stop him. He roared in savage defiance as the melta bomb exploded, vaporising him in a flare of super-heated chemicals.
The platform held.
Brynngar was about to head into the gauntlet to finish the job when a second explosion erupted after the first. The Space Wolf captain turned away from the sudden blast, an actinic stench prickling his nostrils when he looked back. The sound of wrenching metal followed and the observation platform finally collapsed, kicking up clouds of dust and ferrocrete. The structure was robust and Astartes could withstand worse. There would be survivors.
Unconcerned where the secondary blast had come from, Brynngar got to his feet and howled in triumph. Running across the open to the ruined mass of crumpled metal and broken ferrocrete, he swung his rune axe in preparation for battle, knowing that his Blood Claws were right behind him.
ABOARD THE WRATHFUL, Cestus wore a pained expression as he reviewed the tactical display. Frantic vox chatter was coming in over the ship’s array, but it was indistinct and impossible to discern.
The three icons, representing the relative positions of his assault teams had stalled. A silver icon, indicating the Space Wolves and Brynngar’s warriors, was moving slowly towards an area obscured by a sudden belt of smoke and bright light, hazing the readout. Judging from the schematic, this was the observation platform.
Cestus assumed that the attack had been successful.
Elsewhere in a flanking channel close by, an azure icon represented Antiges and was shown embroiled in a brutal close-quarters fight against massed enemies. The dark slab of crimson that was the Furious Abyss was not far beyond the melee, but it didn’t appear as if the Ultramarine was making progress. All Cestus’s subsequent attempts to raise Antiges on the vox had thus far failed. A third icon, depicted in stark white, converged on Antiges’s position. To Cestus’s dismay, they were not alone.
TEN
Into the belly of the beast
Sacrifice
My future is written
THE SCREAM OF chainaxes brought Antiges to his senses. The whine of their spinning teeth turned to a crunching drone as they bit into flesh and bone.
Antiges saw white armour trimmed with blue, sprayed liberally with crimson and the Legion markings of a captain.
Skraal dragged the Ultramarine out of the mess of bodies. The Furious’s crewmen were being bludgeoned to the ground or thrown through the air, the World Eaters squad painting every surface with crescents of gore. Antiges took a moment to set himself, such was the impact of the second charge from Skraal’s World Eaters.
The captain of the XII Legion was butchering a man on the floor.
Such reckless murderous enthusiasm was alien to the Ultramarines and Antiges fought the urge to put a stop to it. The battlefield was no place for recrimination.
Instead, the Ultramarine looked across the dock, a brief lull in the fighting provided by the sudden appearance of Skraal’s forces allowing him to take stock. A clutter of crimson-armoured corpses lay at the end of the central channel, victims of the World Eaters’ ferocity. He also saw Brynngar leading his Blood Claws, tangled up in a short-range firestorm with a squad of Word Bearers emerging from the ruin of the collapsed observation platform. The fighting was fier
ce and it didn’t look like the sons of Russ would be able to bolster them.
Skraal heaved a dying man off the floor and cut him in two at the waist with a slash of his chainaxe. It got Antiges’s attention.
‘Captain,’ cried the Ultramarine, seeing a break in the cohort’s ranks for the first time, ‘drive on to the ship, now!’
Skraal looked back at him. For a split second there was nothing in the World Eater’s face but hatred, nothing to suggest that he saw Antiges as anything but another enemy.
The moment passed and the eyes that looked at the Ultramarine belonged to Skraal again. The World Eater picked up his shield from the ground, discarded in his lust for carnage, shook his head to get the worst of the blood out of his eyes, and called to his squad to follow.
‘Form up on me, and keep moving!’ shouted Antiges, pointing towards the Furious Abyss with his chainsword.
A WORD BEARER stumbled out of the wreckage of the platform, strafing wildly with his bolter. Brynngar stepped out of the kill-zone and beheaded the Astartes with a sweep of Felltooth. A second followed and the Space Wolf leapt forward, burying the blade in the Legionary’s cranium. A third was dragged from the collapsed building, half-dazed, by Rujveld who executed him with a burst from his bolt pistol.
After the initial slaughter, though, the Word Bearers managed to put up more of a fight. Wreathed in superheated plasma, Elfyarl fell screaming and Vorik was dismembered by a fusillade of bolter fire.
Brynngar snarled at the losses, whipping another Word Bearer off his feet at the edge of the ruins before lunging down to tear out his throat with his teeth. Howling in fury, the Wolf Guard was about to press on when whickering bolter fire churned up the ferrocrete debris around him. Reeling against the sudden assault, the venerable wolf could only watch as a line of blood stitched up Svornfeld’s cuirass. He spun and fell in a lifeless heap.
A second squad of Word Bearers advanced on them, unseen from the original route of attack.
Brynngar unhitched his bolter in the face of this new threat and blew the faceplate off one Word Bearer’s helmet and smashed a chunk from the shoulder pad of another as they came on.
‘Into them!’ he raged, weapon blazing as he charged the enemy.
The howling reply of his remaining Blood Claws was a feral chorus to the brutal bolter din.
ANTIGES THRUST HIS chainsword through the Word Bearer’s chest.
As they’d closed on the Furious Abyss, the cohorts a bloody mess in their wake, another line of defenders had emerged: fellow Astartes, their erstwhile brothers the Word Bearers. Decked in crimson armour replete with debased scratchings and ragged scrolls of parchment, they were a dark shadow of the proud warriors Antiges remembered.
The Word Bearer jerked as he tried to wrench himself free of the churning blade that impaled him, but then it passed through his spine and all he could do was vomit a plume of blood.
Suddenly, it was real.
These Word Bearers, Astartes and brothers to all Space Marines, were the enemy. Antiges realised in that moment that he hadn’t really believed it before. There was no time to consider it further as a second Word Bearer came at him with a power maul. Antiges caught the weapon just before it cleaved through his face, and rammed his knee into the Astartes’s stomach, but his enemy stayed locked with him. Behind the lenses of the Word Bearer’s helmet the Ultramarine could just see an eye narrowed in anger. There was no brotherhood there.
In a sudden fury of churning steel and wrath, Skraal tore the Word Bearer off Antiges and ripped him apart with his chainaxe. Finishing the grisly work quickly, the World Eater glanced back at his battle-brother.
‘Too intense for you, Ultramarine?’
A WORD BEARER’S elbow caught Brynngar in the side of the head and the Space Wolf fell back. Rolling out of a second attack, he switched to his bolter and, one-handed, unloaded the magazine into his assailant’s stomach. The Word Bearer had life in him yet, though, and Rujveld stalked forward, drawing a knife from a scabbard at his waist. He jammed the point through the gap in the wounded traitor’s gorget.
Brynngar grunted thanks to the Blood Claw and moved on into the Word Bearer squad that had set upon them. Combined with the survivors from the platform’s destruction, the Space Wolves were hard-pressed. The Wolf Guard was determined to lead by example, however, and scythed through crimson ceramite, the bloody Felltooth clutched in his grasp.
Cutting down an enemy Astartes with a swift diagonal slice across the neck and chest, Brynngar kicked the Word Bearer aside to face a new opponent. Suddenly, the tempo of the battle changed. The fury and ferocity exploding around him dulled and slowed as he stood eye-to-eye with a fellow captain. This was clearly their leader, clearly a veteran if the ruin and subsequent reconstruction of his face was any measure. A two-handed power sword swung freely in his fists, which he wielded like a mace. A trio of Blood Claws lay at the warrior’s feet. They had died on that sword, their bodies split in two and spilling organs over the floor of the dock.
‘Now face me,’ snarled the Wolf Guard and hefted Felltooth in a feral challenge.
The Word Bearer captain drove at the Space Wolf using his body like a battering ram, the blade as its tip. The charge was fast, so fast that Brynngar didn’t get out of the way in time and took a glancing blow against his pauldron. White fire surged into his shoulder, but the Wolf Guard mastered the pain quickly and turned with the attack, using its momentum and raking Felltooth down his opponent’s back.
The Word Bearer roared and spun on his heel, driving the two-handed blade at him like a spear at first to pitch the Space Wolf off balance and then as a club to bludgeon him to death. A wild swipe slapped the flat edge of the weapon against Brynngar’s outstretched arm. His bolter fell from nerveless fingers as the blow struck a muscle cluster, numbed even through his power armour.
Brynngar smashed the brutal sword aside as it came for another slash, and used his forward momentum to get inside his attacker’s reach. Pressing a rune on Felltooth’s hilt, a long spike slid from the tip of the axe. Brynngar roared in savage exultation as he plunged it deep into one of the Word Bearer’s biceps and twisted. The Word Bearer’s arm was torn open revealing wet muscle and gore. No pain registered on his face as he leapt towards Brynngar in an attempt to throw him off-balance and bring his sword to bear again.
Using his opponent’s momentum, Brynngar lifted the Word Bearer off his feet and smashed him to the ground. He yanked the dazed enemy captain up again, gripping his gorget, and seized his head by the chin. Emitting a terrible roar that flung blood and spittle into his enemy’s face, Brynngar rammed the spike of Felltooth through his throat.
The Word Bearer’s good eye bulged out as it fought the wracking pain of his imminent death. He coughed up blood, and it sheeted down the front of his armour, covering it with a new wet shade of crimson.
Brynngar spat in his face and let the Word Bearer fall.
Bolter shells blistered the ground around him as yet more Word Bearers converged on them. Brynngar and what was left of his Blood Claws returned fire and sought cover even as they fell back. The attack was short-lived, the Astartes merely dragging away the body of their fallen captain before retreating too.
Indiscriminate and sporadic gunfire kept the Space Wolves at bay as the remaining Word Bearers fell back. Crouching behind the ruin of a disused fuel tanker Brynngar snatched a glance across the battlefield. Skraal and Antiges were advancing towards the Furious Abyss with a small combat squad of World Eaters, scattering crewmen from the battleship as they went.
Brynngar envied them. Even before the plasma drives of the Word Bearers’ mighty battleship started to power up, he knew that the enemy was leaving. The pinning fire from their retreating assailants was gradually diminishing, and all across the dockyard, enemy Astartes were heading back to embarkation ports in the hull of the vast vessel.
Like the orca, I would’ve gutted that beast inside out, he thought with dark regret and cried out his lament. Blood flecked
from his beard and hair as he threw back his head and the long, hollow note tore from his throat. Taking up the call, his Blood Claws arched their necks back as one and joined the chorus howl.
GUNFIRE SPATTERED DOWN at the Astartes, ricocheting off metal and kicking out sparks.
Together with the Ultramarine, Antiges, and three of his battle-brothers, the World Eater captain had gained the Furious Abyss, entering into the belly of the ship through one of the embarkation ports and heading down. Their progress had been arrested inevitably when the onboard patrols had caught up with them at the intersection of a coolant pipe. The fire was coming from one end of the corridor, distant, shadowy figures tramping urgently down the wide, curved diameter of the pipe. Metal instrumentation provided some cover, but the Astartes were as good as dead if they didn’t move on quickly.
Skraal took part of the fusillade on his storm shield, casings striking the grating at his feet like brass rain: bolter fire.
Shadows danced against the muzzle flashes. Huge armoured bodies, helmets and shoulder pads: Astartes. Word Bearers.
One of Skraal’s warriors, Orlak, cut through a hatch in the ceiling with his chainaxe. The slab of metal clanged down and he hauled himself up swiftly. Rorgath stood point as the Legionaries made their way further inwards. Having lost both his weapons in the brutal melee outside the ship, he slammed the bolter he had scavenged into rapid fire and hosed the conduit, punching ragged holes into the metal. The other World Eaters lent the fire of their bolt pistols, keeping their enemies at bay.
Half the World Eaters were through the hatch before the Word Bearers returned fire. Only Skraal and Antiges remained, the Ultramarine taking over from Rorgath as he undipped a brace of frag grenades from his belt and rolled them down the conduit. Skraal leapt up the hatch as return bolter fire blazed past him. Antiges followed, the World Eater captain hauling the Ultramarine up as the first of the explosions ripped down the conduit, shredding plating and buying time.