Soul Drinkers 06 - Phalanx

by Ben Counter

  dreadnought chassis now.

  Sarpedon tried to take cover again but Daenyathos’s aim was too

  good. The first volley of bolter fire shredded the step in front of him,

  gold plate and granite dissolving under his hands. The second

  slammed two shots into his torso, the bolter shells penetrating the

  ceramite and bursting against Sarpedon’s breastplate of fused ribs.

  He felt the bone breaking. The sensation was clear among the

  shock that hammered through him. Twin craters were blown open in

  his chest and the air touched the mass of his lungs, the pulsing

  surface of his heart. Sarpedon fell onto the steps and rolled onto his

  back, gasping as his body recoiled.

  He was a Space Marine. He would survive this. He could survive

  anything. Before, he had doubted. But now, so close to death, his

  certainty was complete. He would survive this. He was Sarpedon,

  Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers, a man the galaxy had sought to

  kill, yet who had survived long enough to breathe the same air as the

  only enemy he had ever really had.

  Sarpedon planted a hand on the step in front of him and turned

  himself over. His remaining legs fought to push him up onto his talons.

  He looked up, blood running down his face, thick gobbets of it pumping

  from the wounds in his chest. The Axe of Mercaeno was still in his

  hand.

  ‘There is no future,’ he said through blood-spittled lips. ‘There will be

  others like us. They will break out of this cage of a galaxy, they will

  bypass everything you have engineered to stop you. Human beings

  cannot be kept caged by fate. Not all of them. Someone will remember

  us, and someone will follow.’

  Daenyathos took careful aim and blasted another storm bolter volley

  into Sarpedon. This one hit the wrist and elbow of his right hand, the

  one in which he was carrying the Axe of Mercaeno. The bones of

  Sarpedon’s forearm shattered and his arm fell useless, the Axe of

  Mercaeno clattering down the steps.

  The pain did not come. Sarpedon did not let it. He forged forwards a

  few steps more, so the massive armoured legs of Daenyathos’s

  dreadnought were just a couple of metres from his face.

  Daenyathos’s power fist reached down and snatched Sarpedon up

  off the floor, the articulated fingers closing around his shoulders and

  waist. Sarpedon’s head lolled like that of a rag doll, his legs dangling

  uselessly under him, as he was held immobile up in front of

  Daenyathos.

  Sarpedon could see, through the eyepieces of Daenyathos’s

  armoured helm, the eyes of the man inside. They were full of

  amusement, as if Sarpedon was an animal or a child playing at being

  a soldier, something to be pitied and taught its place, something to be

  mocked.

  ‘Did you truly think something like you,’ mocked Daenyathos, ‘could

  kill me?’

  ‘I didn’t have to kill you,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I just had to get you

  close.’

  Sarpedon’s one good hand reached into the ammo pouch at his

  waist. Daenyathos registered what Sarpedon was doing and the servos

  in his power first whined.

  The massive fingers of the fist closed. Sarpedon could feel the

  ceramite around his torso tensing and buckling, massive pressure

  crushing down. The seconds stretched out and he imagined, in precise

  detail, how his organs would look being forced out of his chest under

  the pressure, hearts bursting, tatters of lungs oozing out, entrails

  following, the awful wrongness of his distorted body filling him in the

  moments before death.

  It seemed an age before his fingers closed around the haft of the

  Soulspear.

  The artefact’s twin blades speared outwards, caged vortex fields

  consisting of anti-space where no material substance could exist.

  The pressure forced Sarpedon’s right arm out of place. His shoulder

  blade split and the joint crumbled. Each segment of the destruction

  registered like stages in a scientific experiment, observed with calm

  and detachment in those moments before the pain receptors fired and

  reached Sarpedon’s brain.

  Sarpedon whipped the Soulspear up, one blade swinging up through

  the sarcophagus that made up the armoured centre of the

  dreadnought. Sarpedon’s wrist flicked and the other blade arced up to

  complete the cut, two slashes of blackness that between them formed

  a plane separating the front of the sarcophagus from the body of the

  dreadnought.

  The pressure relented. The power fist fell inactive, the energy no

  longer focused through its servos to crush Sarpedon’s torso.

  The energy finally went out of Sarpedon. The weight of the

  Soulspear, negligible as it was compared to a boltgun or the Axe of

  Mercaeno, was too much. The weapon fell from his fingers. The blades

  disappeared and the short metal length of its haft tumbled down the

  steps before the throne.

  The front of Daenyathos’s sarcophagus followed. It clanged as it fell

  end over end down the steps, the sound echoing off the walls of the

  bridge, the final sound as it hit the floor like the tolling of a bell.

  Sarpedon’s breaths were shallow. The ruination of his shoulder hit

  him and the pain was like a sun burning where his shoulder had once

  been, a ball of fire surrounding the mass of ripped muscle and cracked

  bone.

  He forced the pain down. He had suffered before. It meant nothing.

  His eyes focused, and he was looking into the face of Daenyathos.

  The whole front of the sarcophagus was gone, and the life support

  cradle was revealed in which Daenyathos had spent the last six

  thousand years. It was a biomechanical tangle of cabling and artificial

  organs, pipes and valves hissing cold vapour, blinking readouts mottled

  with the patina of centuries.

  The Philosopher-Soldier hung among the cabling, restrains locking

  him in to the life support systems. He was pale and withered, his

  limbs atrophied, the skin shrunken around his skull and ribcage. Red

  welts had swollen up where pipes and wires pierced his skin, carrying

  the mental signals that moved the dreadnought body around him. His

  eyes were squinting in the sudden light, pupils shrunk to nothing.

  Sarpedon had never seen such a pathetic example of a Space

  Marine. The musculature was gone, the skin stretched around a body

  starved of movement for six millennia. Daenyathos gasped in shock,

  the feeling of outside air alien to him now.

  The grip of the power fist relaxed. Sarpedon clattered onto the steps

  of the throne mount. Daenyathos was in shock, unable to function, and

  for a few seconds he would be unable to know where – or even what –

  Sarpedon was.

  Sarpedon, one arm hanging limp and useless at his side, clambered

  up the front of the dreadnought until he was level with Daenyathos. He

  tore out handfuls of cabling, wires slithering out of Daenyathos’s stickthin

  limbs. Dribbles of watery blood spattered onto the gilded steps.

  Sarpedon grasped Daenyathos around the neck – his hand easily

  encircling the scrawny throat
– and pulled Daenyathos out of the

  sarcophagus.

  The Philosopher-Soldier’s body came away easily, Daenyathos

  unable to put up a fight. Sarpedon carried him down the steps to the

  deck of the bridge, his remaining talons kicking aside chunks of

  smouldering debris. The dreadnought chassis remained standing

  before the bridge captain’s throne, gutted of its occupant, silent and

  unmoving.

  ‘Wait,’ gasped Daenyathos in a voice that could barely struggle

  above a whisper. ‘You are a part of this. You can be something great.

  Imagine the role you could play in a galaxy remade by me. Imagine it.’

  ‘I have a better imagination than you realise,’ said Sarpedon,

  grimacing as he dragged himself towards the blast doors at the back

  of the bridge. ‘I have seen it, and it is no place for me.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ hissed Daenyathos, a desperation in his

  voice that had never been there before.

  Sarpedon did not answer. Daenyathos’s protests were lost in the

  sound of the flames licking up from the ruined bridge.

  ‘Forge on,’ cried Luko as he forced himself another pace through the

  sucking mire of gore. ‘Just a few paces more. Onwards, there he

  stands, our prey. Onwards!’

  The daemonic cyst had responded to the strike force like an organ

  threatened by infection. It had filled back up with blood, its fleshy walls

  erupting in tentacles to snare the intruders and drag them down into

  the gore. Attendant daemons had uncoiled from the filth and leapt to

  attack.

  Abraxes stood up from his throne of twisted corpses, the spectral

  image of the battle on the barracks deck fading around him as the

  newcomers grabbed his attention.

  ‘You are beneath my notice, and yet I must stoop to kill you,’ he

  said, his voice like a bass choir. ‘Your presence offends me.’

  The remnants of Squad Prexus crashed into the horrors forging

  through the lake of blood. The Imperial Fists wrestled with things that

  grew new limbs and fanged mouths at will. One Space Marine was

  dragged down into the blood and half a dozen horrors leapt on top of

  him. Spiny hands ripped him apart. An armoured leg was thrown

  between them, a trophy of the hunt, and the warrior’s head was

  pitched against the fleshy wall.

  Sister Aescarion and Graevus fought like one individual, the axe of

  one parrying while the other struck. The two whirled in a dance that

  took them through the assaulting daemons, cutting mutating bodies

  open and shattering horned skulls. Luko followed in their wake,

  stabbing the surviving daemons with both lightning claws, lifting them

  proud of the blood and thrashing them into shreds.

  Behind Abraxes burned the portal. It was a shimmering circle, edged

  in blue fire. Beyond it could be glimpsed something that resembled the

  void of space only in its darkness. The masses of power, like

  mountains of seething energy, loomed in that darkness, and carried

  with them a sense of appalling intelligence. They were watching, these

  powers of the warp, eager for the last obstacles to be removed so they

  could force the whole potential of their chaotic hatred through into

  realspace.

  The sight of them could drive men mad. The Astartes had to force

  their eyes away, for they could become lost in contemplation of that

  towering evil. Even this slight glimpse of the warp could corrode the

  mind. On the shore in front of the portal were still engraved, on the

  rotten remains of the cargo bay deck, the sigils that had called the

  portal into beings, and they burned blood red with anticipation.

  Abraxes strode into the gore. A blade appeared in his hand, a sword

  of frozen malice, and he cleaved it down into the battle around his feet.

  Luko felt his gut tighten as he saw Apothecary Pallas in the blade’s

  path. Pallas tried to yell something in defiance, but Abraxes was

  pitiless and did not grant him the chance. The blade carved down

  through Pallas’s shoulder and came out through his abdomen on the

  other side, slicing him in two across the torso.

  The two halves of the Apothecary’s corpse flopped into the blood.

  Daemons pounced on them to tear the remains apart.

  Luko realised he was yelling, a cry of horror and anguish. Pallas

  was his friend, in a galaxy where friends were rare.

  Aescarion reached the shore where Abraxes’s throne stood.

  Graevus was still waist-deep in the blood, fending off the daemons that

  sought to drag them both down.

  ‘What means your strength?’ shouted Aescarion over the cackling of

  daemons and the thrumming of the gate. ‘That your arm can lay low a

  Space Marine? What does this mean laid against the might of the

  God-Emperor’s children?’

  Abraxes turned to look down at the Battle Sister. ‘It means that you

  die, whelpling girl,’ he replied, shaking Pallas’s blood from his sword.

  ‘Destroy my body if you will,’ shouted back Aescarion. ‘But you

  cannot break my spirit. A prince of daemons might claim the heads of

  every enemy he faces, but he will never count the soul of a Battle

  Sister as a trophy!’

  Abraxes raised a hand, and purple-black fire flickered between his

  talons. ‘You do not challenge the warp, child,’ he sneered. ‘I shall keep

  your mind as a pet, and you will worship me.’

  Fire lashed down at Aescarion. The Sister of Battle was driven back

  by the force that hammered into her, and a halo of flame played around

  her head as Abraxes’s magic tried to force open her mind.

  The Battle Sister screamed, but she did not fall.

  Luko realised what Sister Aescarion was trying to do. He threw

  aside the body of the daemon he had killed, and pushed on through

  the gore.

  Librarian Varnica reached the metallic shore. The portal howled above

  him, the winds of the warp tearing at him as he tried to keep his

  footing. He clambered out of the blood, kicking free of the sucking

  limbs that tried to ensnare his ankles.

  He had to force himself not to stare up through the portal. He could

  feel the vast intelligences beyond probing at his mind, pushing against

  the mental shield that every Librarian built up over years of psychic

  training. They were whispering to him, promising him power and

  lifetimes of pleasure, or threatening him with such horrors a human

  mind could not comprehend.

  Varnica snapped himself free of their influence. He could not let

  them trick him, not now, not when he was so close, when the means

  for closing the portal were right in front of him.

  He broke the fascination with the portal just in time to register the

  power hammer arcing towards him.

  Varnica brought up his force claw to turn the hammer aside. The

  hammer’s head slammed into the ground, throwing shards of metal

  everywhere. Varnica rolled back, shrapnel pinging off his armour.

  Reinez stood over him. The Crimson Fist was a hideous sight –

  scorched and battered, his helmetless skull little more that burns and

  new scars. The deep blue and crimson of his armour was almost lost


  under the grime of battle. Reinez pointed his hammer at Varnica.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘You spoke against them. Now you fight alongside

  them. You fight to take the gate for yourselves! You are one with them

  in perdition!’

  ‘Damn you, Reinez!’ retorted Varnica. ‘Have you become so blind?

  The warp has played us all; you, me, the Soul Drinkers, all of us, and

  we have to put it right!’

  ‘Lies!’ yelled Reinez.

  Anger made him careless. The hammer blow was a haymaker and

  Varnica dodged back from it easily, raising his claw ready to snap it

  forwards. But Reinez had strength on his side, born of a desperate

  hatred. If Varnica was caught, he would die.

  Varnica’s muscles tensed for the strike. But it felt like he had hit a

  wall, as if something invisible was holding him fast.

  His enemy was a Space Marine. Varnica had never raised arms

  against a brother of the Adeptus Astartes before. The wrongness of it

  stayed his hand. He could not shed a brother’s blood. Even now, with

  all hell erupting around him, he could not do it.

  Reinez jinked forwards and drove the butt of the hammer into

  Varnica’s midriff. Varnica stumbled back, almost pitching into the

  blood. Varnica kicked out at Reinez’s legs and the Crimson Fist was

  caught, stumbling a half-pace onto one knee. Varnica rolled out of his

  way and used the second he had bought to jump back to his feet.

  ‘Think, Reinez!’ said Varnica. ‘The warp has used your anger. It has

  turned you against your brothers! Join us and help end all this!’

  Reinez’s reply was a wild swing that almost took Varnica’s head off.

  Varnica forced his eyes away from the hellish vastness of the portal

  overhead, channelled a torrent of psychic power into his claw, and

  prepared to take a Space Marine’s life for the first time.

  Sister Aescarion felt her mind pried from her head and crushed in

  Abraxes’s claw.

  She fell to her knees. The screaming agony in her head blocked out

  everything save the shadowy image of Abraxes, edged in black fire,

  and the wicked bone-white slash of his grin.

  She felt a million vicious hands reaching through her soul and

  clawing at the inside of her head. She heard a million voices cackling

  about what they would do to her when she was broken. Place her in

  the body of a monster, rampaging through the warp’s enemies, fuelled