by Ben Counter
Antinas lunged, driving the heel of a hand forwards, hard enough to shatter a jawbone. Gethor dropped onto his back, locked his feet around Antinas’s leg and tripped the bigger man up. Antinas landed heavily and Gethor was on him, locking one arm behind his back, forcing a knee into his spine and wrenching his head back.
‘Your neck is broken,’ gasped Gethor.
‘So it is,’ said Antinas, breathing heavily.
Gethor stood unsteadily, backing off as if uncertain how Antinas would react. The onlookers were quiet, for they were not used to seeing Antinas losing either. Gethor had got him in a simple neck lock that, had Gethor’s intentions been lethal, would have let him twist Antinas’s head around and back so the vertebrae of the neck separated. It was a good way to kill someone. Even a Space Marine needed his brain attached to the rest of his body.
Antinas laughed. He jumped to his feet and grabbed Gethor in a bear hug. He hoisted him up off the ground and onto his shoulder, parading him like a conqueror’s trophy.
‘See!’ cried Antinas. ‘That’s how you kick an old dog!’ he pointed at the Land Speeders where the bodies of the fallen were stowed. ‘Despair not, brothers!’ he called to them. ‘You leave your Chapter in good hands!’
The Imperial Fists cheered. They patted Gethor on the back as Antinas carried him around.
The final bout saw Gethor facing Kaderic. It was quick. Kaderic forced Gethor into a test of strength, and Kaderic had more. He wrapped his arms around Gethor’s waist, lifted him up and threw him down. Gethor struggled with skill and determination on the ground but Kaderic had the better of him from the moment the bout had started. When they were done and the winner was certain, with Gethor’s arm locked behind him in such a way that Kaderic could have broken it at will, the two dusted themselves off and shook hands. Kaderic, as champion, dedicated his victory to the fallen and thanked them for looking on, as was the right and proper form.
‘Brothers!’ ordered Lycaon. ‘Our fallen are honoured. Kho, take the point. I will ride with you. March out!’
Once there had been so much life in those broken lands that it had bubbled up from the ground, reaching up towards the skies in a soaring canopy. That jungle had been dead for an aeon but it had been stubborn enough to leave its mark, and while the leaves had withered in a past age the skeletons of the trees remained. The petrified forest stretched across a great swathe adjoining the north of the rocky broken desert. It was dense and pathless, and the sun’s discoloured light struggled to make it through the jumble of stone branches overhead.
Roosts of hardy, leathery creatures clung to the branches in their thousands, scouring the forest for the tough life forms that found a way to survive there. What life there was served only to accentuate the death that had fallen on the jungle in a distant catastrophe, one of the many that had punctuated Malodrax’s history.
Kho’s Land Speeders flew at canopy level, weaving between the splintered boughs, relaying their position to the sergeants of the squads marching through the petrified jungle below. They made slow progress by their standards, for underfoot the ground was tangled with stony roots and the terrain rose and fell as if something had heaved it up from beneath. Deep caves yawed in hillsides and choked valleys dropped down to pitch-darkness. Raptors circled overhead, used to treating anything that walked into the jungle as a meal in waiting.
‘I do not like the smell of this place,’ said Lysander as he picked his way through the roots alongside Kaderic.
‘This whole planet is hardly pleasing to the nose,’ replied Kaderic. The bruise on the side of his face, inflicted by Gethor in the wrestling bout, had already turned a purple-black and begun receding.
‘It smells of ash,’ said Lysander. ‘As if it were burned yesterday, not thousands of years ago.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ said Kaderic. ‘They say a world held by daemons may not even obey the rules of time. Would that we had a battlefleet and the Exterminatus to be deployed. All of Malodrax would stink of ash then.’ Kaderic paused and looked at Lysander. ‘Has it changed?’
A thousand years had passed in real space since Lysander had come to Malodrax. He had no way of knowing how much time had passed down there since he had travelled to the Phalanx and returned with the strike force. ‘It looks the same,’ said Lysander. ‘But I cannot be certain. This world likes to deceive, I think.’
Movement caught Lysander’s attention. It was above them, among the branches of the stone trees. It scurried out of his sight a split second before he could focus on it, but he had an impression of claws and lizardlike hide – and worse, of familiarity.
‘What was it?’ said Kaderic.
‘Hold our position,’ said Lysander.
‘Hold!’ ordered Kaderic over the vox. ‘Captain, we may have enemies down here. We are drawing in and investigating.’
Lysander’s bolter was in his hands. He hopped up onto the stump of a shattered tree and peered through the stone trunks in the direction the creature had disappeared.
‘Antinas, Kollus, go with the captain,’ said Kaderic to the two closest Imperial Fists. ‘Lysander, could it be an animal?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Lysander. Antinas and Kollus were alongside him as he moved carefully through the jungle towards a rootbound gulley ahead. Antinas’s flamer was held in front of him, the flame flickering in its nozzle. Kollus trained his bolter across the jungle.
‘Watch overhead,’ said Lysander. ‘It could be above us.’
Kollus saw it next. He spun on the spot and loosed off a short burst, throwing shards from the tree trunks.
‘Did you hit it?’ said Lysander.
‘No,’ said Kollus.
Lysander took off between the trees. He had followed the movement, too, a scaly dash of motion down between the fork of a tree’s branches. He leapt the gulley, hitting the far edge chest-first and scrambling back to his feet.
It was ahead of him. It was almost the height of a man, squatting down on its haunches. Its body was fleshy and sagging, its belly pale and its hide scaly. Its silhouette was lumpy and malformed and its mouth was half insect and half reptile. It bared the nest of mandibles it had in place of teeth and hissed at him.
Lysander had seen something very like it before – this one was more mature, adapted to survive here on its own, but the resemblance was unmistakeable.
The creature darted at him. Lysander lunged right at it, spearing his chainsword forwards. It was used to forcing other predators to back down – perhaps here it was the top of the food chain. Lysander’s chainblade punched right through it, spraying green-black gore as its teeth chewed out through its back. The thing was spitted on the chainblade as neatly as a carcass turned over a fire.
Antinas reached him a moment later. ‘What is it?’ he said.
‘One of the brood,’ replied Lysander. He flicked his chainblade and the creature slid off the blade, a gory ruin bored right through it.
‘More of them,’ voxed Kollus. Lysander turned to see Kollus on the far side of the gulley. Movement was flickering around him as the brood-creatures scampered among the trees or between the roots at ground level. As if brought out by the smell of their fellow creature’s blood, they were suddenly infesting the jungle all around. Kollus snapped a couple of volleys, catching one of the creatures and bursting it in a shower of gore. ‘They’re just animals, captain. Are they of any concern?’
‘They are,’ replied Lysander. ‘It is not them that concern me. It is what might accompany them.’ He switched to the command vox-channel. ‘Chaplain Lycaon, we’re holding position. We have been found.’
Beneath the ground they had followed the Imperial Fists, a great host of them. The honeycomb of tunnels beneath the petrified forest had let them follow their footsteps – literally, for they were adapted in the darkness to sense the footfalls from the ground above, and thirty heavy armoured Space Marines did not move quietly.
They were members of a species that had lurked there for thousands of years, hunting in the darkness and emerging above ground when the pickings below were lean. They had evolved rapidly as Malodrax changed, their slovenly genetics easily slipping into new forms to let them survive extremes of heat, cold or seismic activity. The result was their sagging, bloated forms, the mishmash of lizard, insect and vermin that made up their features, and a crude but effective intellect. They were intelligent scavengers, predators of opportunity, and prey that could demonstrate an extreme of cowardly cunning.
That day several of them, a scouting caste of unusual perceptiveness, had emerged into the wan sunlight to follow more closely the new arrivals in the petrified forest. Their generations passed by rapidly for their lives were short, and so the image of those enormous figures with their golden armour and the sigil of the clenched fist was by then a legend passed down by their forebears.
One day those warriors from another world would return, they had been told, and those warriors would have to die. Because the mother had told them so.
The strike force drew in tight, knocking down trees into makeshift barricades. The Land Speeders were landed in the centre, ready to hover up around canopy level and spray the surrounding forest with heavy bolter and assault cannon fire. The Imperial Fists manned their defences as the darkness drew in, making of their surroundings a fortress according to the principles of siege warfare.
The last two hours they had been followed. Hundreds of the predators had scurried through the trees watching them, corralling them, and the Land Speeders reported far greater concentrations following the strike force as if herding them towards a location where they could be trapped and killed.
It was the Imperial Fists way to take a stand at a time and place of their choosing. If an enemy desired a battle they would have it, but on Imperial Fists terms. And so Chaplain Lycaon had given the order that the Imperial Fists would dig in and face the enemy there, on a low rise that served as the most defensible position for miles around.
‘They are more organised than they appear,’ said Lycaon as he watched Squad Kaderic at the barricades. Kaderic’s men were the front line, with Gorvetz’s Devastator squad in the centre of the camp and Lycaon’s command squad ready to charge in where needed. ‘Malodrax does love its little games. It gives our fellow travellers the faces of animals so we will think them animals, but they are born soldiers. They have by their very nature the instinct of a soldier.’ He pointed to a rush of movement to the south, where a multitude of scurrying bodies glinted in the paltry moonlight. ‘They send their weakest forward, to test our guns. They learn there of our effective range and of the weight of our firepower. A classic tactic when one has numbers to spare.’ Lycaon switched to the vox. ‘Kaderic, let them get to half-range, then shoot them down.’
The creatures were permitted well within bolter range before Kaderic gave the order to fire. Standing beside Lycaon, Lysander could see the attackers were far larger than the scouting creatures the strike force had first encountered – they were the size of a man, hunched over as they ran rapidly on all fours through the broken ground and tangles of tree stumps. A volley of fire sliced through the first dozen or so and the others fell over their dead or turned aside in panic, making for all the better targets.
‘Single shots!’ ordered Kaderic. ‘Woe to the man who thinks these things are worth more than a bolter shell each!’
It was a swift and bloody business. The attack was cut down in a few moments, and a handful of surviving creatures limped off into the darkness.
‘I suggest,’ said Lysander, ‘we weather what they throw at us and break out after dawn, when they are drained and exhausted.’
‘You would not fight them here to the end?’
‘No, Chaplain. Every moment we delay gives Kulgarde more time to learn of our path and prepare for our arrival.’
‘Could these things answer to Kulgarde?’ asked Lycaon.
‘I can only say I hope not.’
From the forest to the north loped an alpha, just beyond bolter range. It was upright, taller than a Space Marine, its filthy, sagging body giving way to sinews around its shoulders powering its forelimbs, clad in chitin as if it had been fitted with a suit of armour. It shrieked and howled at the sky, and the forests around it seemed to seethe with movement. The weak light found wet mandibles and glossy scales everywhere in the shadows. The full part of the predators’ power was drawn up around the Space Marines’ encampment.
‘What sport this will be!’ voxed Kaderic from the barricades. ‘I would take my blade to them, Chaplain, if I could!’
‘Not unless they breach our line, First Sergeant,’ replied Lycaon.
‘Then I pray one of them does,’ said Kaderic. ‘Almost as much as I pray they all fall to our guns first.’
The alpha shrieked again, and this time the sound was echoed by the all the predators as one. The alpha dived out of cover and scampered across the no-man’s-land before the barricades, followed by the entire host of creatures.
Thousands of them charged as one. Lysander saw in that moment the great variety of their shapes – some bulky and apelike, others slithering like snakes or loping like attack dogs. They varied from rodent-sized to two or three times the size of a man, all armed with every natural weapon evolution could come up with – claws, clubbing tails, mandibles like mouthfuls of blades.
Kaderic gave the order. A volley of bolter fire hammered into the horde. Countless fell. Bolter fire exploded among them, blasting off limbs and ripping bodies open. Lycaon gestured to the men of his squad and they joined Kaderic’s men at the barricades, lending their own bolter fire.
Gorvetz concentrated on the biggest. The plasma cannon, once held by the fallen Brother Kalanar, was now in Gorvetz’s own hands, blasting fat bolts of white-hot plasma that spitted right through the largest of the predators. Kho took Dorn’s Dagger a few metres above the ground and rattled off cannon fire into the thickest mass of the enemy.
Lysander felt almost detached, as if he was watching from far away. It was almost mesmerising to watch the tide of the enemy surge closer, and yet come no closer, because as soon as they reached bolter range they fell. Those behind them surged into the gap, were cut down, and were themselves replaced. It had an inevitability about it, as if he was watching the tides or the movement of the stars.
Lycaon took aim and stuttered off a volley from his own bolter. His crozius was slung on his back, as if he knew he would not have to use it here. His shots threw a couple more dead down into the mass, which was building up like a rampart of shredded corpses in a ring around the encampment. ‘There is no battle here,’ said Lycaon, with scorn in his voice as if he blamed the enemy for being too weak to be a worthy fight.
Lysander knew Malodrax better than the other Imperial Fists there. He may not have been an expert – not knowledgeable enough to write a book about the place as Inquisitor Golrukhan had done – but he had witnessed the cruel will of the planet and Lycaon’s comment stirred something in his memory.
Through the carnage the alpha lurched, shot through with a dozen bolt-rounds. It flopped to the ground in front of the corpse rampart, dragging itself along on shattered arms. A heavy bolter stuttered fire at it from Squad Gorvetz and it reared up as if in defiance, but instead of a letting out a final howl it fell back down silent and dead.
The alpha’s death was the signal. The ground shuddered and pitched to one side. Lysander fell to one knee, and saw Halaestus tumbling off his feet by the barricades. A sound like thunder rumbled up from beneath. Then the ground dropped away entirely, an avalanche of pulverised earth accompanying Lysander down into a deep pit beneath the encampment.
Everything was darkness and noise. An awful stench, again with that note of familiarity, hit Lysander in the face – rot, ashes and long-dried blood.
He came to rest buried, and pushed around to make enough
room to dig himself out. For a moment he was back in the heap of bodies in Shalhadar’s city the last time he had been on this damned planet, struggling to breathe.
He made enough room around himself to claw at the earth in front of his face. Half a minute later he had broken out of it and was unearthing himself. There was just enough moonlight struggling down from above to see by.
He was in the centre of a great crossroads of warrens, with tunnels leading off in all directions. Shed skins, effluent and trash were gathered around what part of the floor wasn’t buried by earth from the collapsed ceiling. Lysander hawked out a mouthful of spit and soil.
He still had his chainsword with him, but his bolter was buried somewhere. He aimed a mental curse at himself for being disarmed in the presence of the enemy. He would have to practice penance on the Phalanx for his sin, if he ever saw the corridors of that space station again.
He could see no other Imperial Fists but he could hear them, calling out to one another from elsewhere in the warren. Lysander forced himself all the way out of the drift of earth and tried to get his bearings. He could have tumbled down a sloping tunnel and come to rest a long way from the site of the Imperial Fists encampment.
He tried the vox. ‘Lysander here,’ he voxed on the command channel.
‘This is Lycaon,’ came the reply.
‘It was a trap,’ said Lysander. ‘They herded us into position and collapsed the tunnels underneath us.’
‘Dorn spoke no good of those who state the obvious, captain,’ came the reply. ‘What is your location?’
‘I don’t know, Chaplain. I’m on my own. I can hear others.’