by Rob Sanders
‘Micah!’ Kersh called, grabbing one of the Scout’s outstretched hands. Cutting through the long neck of an oncoming freak thing with a bolter blast, Micah rested the weapon in one arm and took the Scout’s other bloodied palm with his free gauntlet.
‘We’ve got to go – now!’ Micah roared. A sudden tremor beneath the corpus-captain’s boots convinced him not to question the champion’s wisdom. It was followed by a second, third and fourth. As the two Excoriators ran, dragging the moaning Scout behind them through the morass of bodies, Kersh got the impression of something above them. Something unnatural in form and colossal in size was striding towards the city on impossibly spindly legs. Every time one of the behemoth’s cloven feet hit cemetery world soil, the ground beneath the Excoriators bounced and quaked.
‘Go-go-go!’ Micah urged as the Space Marines stormed across the carnage of the necroplex and up the scree-slope of the rubble battlement. About them enemies closed in and dropped, heads and bodies lanced through with sniping las-bolts. Those monstrosities making it through had an introductory blast from Micah’s boltgun or a flesh-shearing swipe of the corpus-captain’s chainsword to greet them.
Kersh heard the staccato of gunfire. Squinting up through the ethereal mist, the corpus-captain saw the twin twinkles of heavy bolters in the sky. Their sound was drowned out by the air-shuddering moan of the gargantuan entity above them.
‘It’s the Gauntlet,’ Micah called between strides and bolt-blasts, indicating that he had called the Thunderhawk in. The Space Marines ran on, dragging the wounded Scout. Kersh heard the familiar crash of the Thunderhawk’s battlecannon. Both the Scourge and his champion involuntarily ducked their helmets as the gunship swept in low and over their heads. Peering up Kersh could see the after-inferno of the explosive shell that had ripped into the flank of the beast above. Watching the Gauntlet’s engine triplex blaze away, Kersh felt the heavens rumble with otherworldly agony. The colossal aberrant had taken the shot like some megafaunic giant of the plains, only to totter on its willowy legs and fall similarly so to the side. As the mist began to churn and rush about them, the Scourge slowed and slid down onto his knee, prompting Micah to do the same. The mist suddenly changed direction and came back at them as the monster’s dimensions pounded into the necroplex. Kersh was almost knocked from his crouch by the impact as a sea of bestial screams erupted and were suddenly silenced by the pulverising weight of the colossus. The etherquake was palpable, the hideous wash of unreality rolling about them as so many creatures died.
Kersh and Micah were back on their feet, hauling the Scout up and over the battlement. Above them the abomination’s spindly leg quivered. It terminated in a webbed hoof that seemed to point to the dome of the Memorial Mausoleum like an instruction to its warp spawn kindred. On the parapet the Excoriators could see that the freakish invaders had taken the perimeter as their own. Only a rent-armoured Kale stood at the entrance to the rat-run, his flamer blazing billows of promethium about the approach – roasting anything that made a scuttle or arachnoid stride for the bolt-hole.
Along the palisade Kersh could see the indescribable horror of the behemoth’s head. Its malformed skull had hit the battlement and pounded straight through the masonry and shattered rockcrete. As Kersh and Micah closed on the flame-streaming Kale, he heard the bark of Oren’s autocannon reassume its flesh-mangling orison. The serfs had successfully fallen back to the second perimeter and the heavy weapon was even joined by the optimistic flash of the occasional lasfusil, fired blindly from the parapet. Kersh was glad of the autocannon’s accompaniment. Below the second concentric battlement the Scout sniper cover fire couldn’t reach them. The gibbering hordes had made effective use of the dying behemoth’s fall, however, crawling up behind and over their warped cousin and giving the heavy weapon little open ground to acquire the advancing insanity.
Something Brother Micah assumed to be dead suddenly erupted in tentacles. The champion sidestepped the elastic reach of the first few, but dragging the injured Scout gave little room for manoeuvre and one of the thin appendages wound itself viciously around his leg. Pulling away from the horror, Micah plugged at it with single shots from his bolter, but a second grappler wrapped itself around the weapon. The tentacle around the champion’s leg bled some kind of caustic revenge from the feeler’s hook-suckers and the ceramite began to sizzle and smoulder. Micah yelled out in frustration and it took the gnashing teeth of Kersh’s chainsword to slice the tentacles from their beast-host. As Micah ripped the remainder of the appendage from his leg and bolter, the Scourge buried the tip of his sword in the creature’s thorax, gunning the barbed chain to full shredding majesty and despatching the monster.
The Excoriators ran. The horde closed.
Bolting down through the rat-run, the steep sides of the second battlement threatening to cascade down upon them, Kersh and Micah pounded on – the Scout Marine’s blood-drenched and ragdoll body pulled behind them. Kale backed into the gap after them, the flamer’s incessant inferno even more devastating and concentrated within the rat-run’s narrow dimensions. Charred skeletal obscenities propelled themselves through the wall of flame only to end up on the carpet of scorched and sky-streaming remains that other freak creatures sprang through to get to the Space Marines.
The Excoriator’s flamer chugged dry, and Kale threw the deadweight of the weapon at the nearest rawbone ganglefiend. The Excoriator’s bolt pistol cleared his belt holster. Still backing away, Brother Kale blasted furiously at the onrushing abominations. An absorber gushed its gelatinous way up the rat-run – it too enhanced by the bolt-hole’s funnelling narrowness. The amorphous spume-form soaked up the pistol’s defiance before swallowing Brother Kale whole.
Kersh and Micah ran on, forcing their armour’s spirits to greater feats of fibre-bundled athleticism. The rat-run exit beckoned. Kersh saw Bethesda at the opening, the screw-handle detonator in her slender hands. The Excoriators heard an appalling roar of agony but could not stop. As the Adeptus Astartes exploded out of the rat-run, the Scourge’s absterge twisted the detonator. Strategically planted demolition charges along the length of the bolt-hole fired, demolishing the gap and collapsing the run. Tonnes of rubble and fragmented masonry cascaded down, blocking off the escape route and burying the freakish abominations chasing the Excoriators.
As the dust cloud settled, with the autocannon hammering above them, Kersh surveyed the scene. Everyone, from the limping Micah to Bethesda to the Charnel Guardsman hiding down behind the remnant of a shattered spire, looked aghast. Turning, Kersh looked down on the miserable Scout he’d pulled out of the horror of the necroplex. He was glaze-eyed, twitching and mumbling to himself. Also, half of him was missing.
The absorber’s clotted immateriality had gushed up behind them and had swamped the Space Marine Scout’s legs and abdomen. Digesting them like it had Kale, the creature had left half an Excoriator. For a few moments that seemed like an eternity, nobody spoke.
‘Find something you can use as a stretcher,’ the Scourge said to Bethesda, ‘then have a team of runners take him up to his Tenth Company brothers.’
The absterge bolted off to carry out her master’s orders. Kersh’s eyes fell on the terrified Guardsman. ‘You,’ the Scourge said in a tone that blistered with fury and disappointment. ‘Get on that perimeter, now…’
The Charnel Guardsman snatched up his lasfusil in numb dread and ran back up the palisade to take his position on the battlement.
Hobbling around whilst slapping a chunky magazine into his boltgun, Brother Micah turned to the Scourge. The company champion kissed his fist in honour of Dorn.
‘You ready?’
‘No,’ Kersh answered honestly, but followed the Excoriator up towards the autocannon emplacement, leaving behind the neophyte in his pain, shock and mumbling torment.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SYZYGY
I wish this were a dream.
The horror of the warp was visited upon Certus-Minor. The cemetery world was flash-frie
d in the insanity of battle as the planet’s unfortunate orbit passed through the tail of the Keeler Comet. The unfiltered dross of Chaos – gathered like scum at stagnant borders between our reality and its own – pouring through the rift and raining down on this tiny part of the Imperium.
We fought for twenty hours straight, knee-deep in abomination, holding our nerve and retaining our sanity amongst the madness of raw havoc taken form. The Fifth Company held its ground and earned great honour in the field of battle. If the shoreline of dead flesh is anything to go by, decorating the city perimeter, the odds were appalling. For twenty hours the heavenfallen swept down on us, drawn unthinking to Obsequa City like a lighthouse of soulfire, hungry for our humanity. We fought like we had never done before, our superhuman bodies pushed to their limit. Hearts thundered blood around our bodies. Reactions crackled like lightning. Eyes only saw enemies. Arms burned numb defiance – living extensions of our blessed blades and bolters. We took life without strategy. Technique and the art of battle were mere memories. We killed through necessity, for behind every enemy entity lay another and another, and it was all we could do to survive.
In the twentieth hour of bloodshed the aberrations stopped. Numbers of the warped began to dwindle. The masses thinned and our efforts became easier. We pushed the monsters back to the first perimeter, and on the lost battlement we decimated their remaining number. This was no battle tactic. The beasts had simply spent themselves in mindlessly assaulting the city. There were no more to kill because we had killed them all.
Although the Fifth Company has achieved a great victory over Chaos, it was not without cost. Brothers Ebenezar, Tycharias, Moliath, Ashkelon and Techmarine Dancred have lost their lives to the horde. Their bodies are laid out as custom dictates, with all the horror of their battle wounds on display. Tycharias particularly is a mess. Dancred is a butchered carcass of Adeptus Astartes flesh and twisted, claw-mauled hydraulics, electrical systems and bionic framing. The Techmarine fought bravely, but his position on the line was overrun and the abominations pushed on into the city. Members of Squad Contritus were instrumental in holding the invasion back – their sniping talents put to the test as the steep streets of the Saint Bartolomé-East district became wall-to-wall Chaotics. The Excoriators Scouts thinned out the misshapen mass with precision fire, giving Skase and several of his Squad Cicatrix brethren time to redeploy and push the monsters back. It took several bombing runs by the Thunderhawk Impunitas to fully sanitise the vicinity of hellspawn and their taint, however, leaving the district a derelict waste.
Whereas my Excoriators have upheld their proud tradition of attrition, I must accept responsibility for the failure of almost everyone else. I ask too much of the cemetery world’s common humanity. Without the weakness of Imperial citizenry there would be no need for the Adeptus Astartes, and nothing has made this clearer than the manner of the Certusian retreat. History records the accomplishments of all-too-ordinary men: the war for Armageddon, the Euphrassic Massacres and the numerous Black Crusade honours of battle-hardened Cadians. Our species can be strong and our spirit beyond measure. This is what is celebrated in the myth and legend of song and saga. But for every Imperial citizen who has ever held their ground in the face of the xenos invader, the heretical traitor or Chaos marauder, a thousand have fled. It is in the fear and dread of those thousand that the Imperium’s doom is written. Men, women and children in whose trembling hands weapons turn to water. The faint-hearted majority who run for their lives in the expectation that others will save them. Perhaps the Adeptus Astartes are to blame for this. The Imperium’s strength is its weakness. The existence of demigods turns common men into bystanders. They catch a glimpse of the divine and consider themselves beyond the calculus of fate. The Emperor’s Angels will save them. They are witnesses to the clash of good and evil in the galaxy, failing to recognise that it is upon their collective shoulders that the destiny of an empire resides.
For all my gene-bred superiority and Angel’s arrogance, I find it hard to blame them. I am more than human and yet, on the dark fringes of my understanding – lapping against the bedrock of my warrior heritage, my training and experience – I feel it too. The vertiginous, ice-water plunge of fear, simple and pure. The irrational and almost irresistible desire to run, to take oneself away from the source of danger and disgust. How common humanity manages to steel itself for such a storm of chemistry and emotion is an everyday miracle in itself. That most fly when I need them to fight is regrettable. Unlike Skase and Joachim, spitting their curses and bawling remonstration at fear-wrought statues of Certusian cowardice, I cannot find it in myself to hate these mortals. My sacrifice is my own. I do it for the Emperor and not for them. In truth, I feel nothing for their survival. We share nothing like a brotherly bond – although amongst the Fifth that too has been sadly lacking. Should they survive, neither they nor their progeny will go on to change the Imperium. Their continued existence means only one thing to me: the denial of enemy victory. I suspect that the gall-fever and the madness of an immaterial incursion are simply intended to soften us for the body blow. The Cholercaust is coming. The Ruinous Powers wish to take this world and its people from me. They will be denied. They will fail. I will ensure it.
With Brother Novah I stalk the smouldering ruins of Saint Bartolomé-East. A crater and fireball-ravaged remnants are all that remain. With the Fifth Company battle standard held high, Novah crunches through the scorched rubble. He scans the battered landscape for any signs of corruption with his boltgun while relaying orders back and forth over the vox-channels.
‘Second Whip Scarioch has been confirmed as missing.’
I nod. Novah continues. ‘Second Whip Etham repeats his request to go out and search for Brother Ishmael.’
‘Denied,’ I snap back. ‘Ishmael is lost. Tell Etham that Squad Castigir is his responsibility now and he needs to start acting like it.’
‘Brother Simeon is up at the Memorial Mausoleum as instructed. He reports burning bodies in the plaza. It looks like the Sisters opened fire on the crowd.’
‘The Sisters?’
I stop and consider Palatine Sapphira. It would be hard to imagine the stoic Sister succumbing to the frenzy and torching Certusians for sport.
‘They claim they were attacked.’
‘By ether-filth?’ It seemed unlikely that rift forms had penetrated that far into the city, even from Saint Bartolomé-East.
‘Cemetery worlders,’ Novah replies.
The gall-fever. The city churning. I shake my head. The influence of Chaos within and without the perimeter. In the wake of the initial assault, abandoned by many of the cemetery worlders and up to my helmet in immaterial filth, I had little time to consider the consequence of mass desertion. While I was fighting for my life and the lives of others, hundreds upon hundreds of wild-eyed Certusians were running uphill towards the spiritual safety of the Memorial Mausoleum. Out of their minds with fear, militiamen, members of ammunition supply chains and terrified Charnel Guardsmen fled screaming from the unleashed horror of the warp and the desperate gunfire barely keeping it at bay. For some – their minds broken – the screams would have turned to howls and anguish, and then anger. The line between fear and fury is one easy to cross in the fragile, erratic mind of a mere mortal. With the gall-fever firmly taken root, the cemetery worlders would have torn into the thousands at prayer about the walls of the great Mausoleum, some deserters still with weapons in hand.
Faced with unreasoning mobs of murderers – men intent on slaughtering all, even their own friends and families – I can imagine that Palatine Sapphira had little choice but to order her flamer-wielding Sisters to torch the rabid interlopers.
‘Have Brother Simeon set his serfs to organising labour parties from the cemetery worlders,’ I order Novah. ‘I need them to move bodies – they should be good at that.’
As we search through the charred remains of cloisters and chapels, I outline to the standard bearer how I want the bodies of dead defenders a
nd penetrating spawn moved from the battlements and dumped outside the perimeter. I order the last of the city’s promethium barrels tipped out across the cadaver mounds of the fallen – a fuel-soaked hillock of flesh, both Certusian and immaterial – surrounding the perimeter.
The orders keep coming. Command structure and a sense of purpose nourish the aftermath of battle. Having stood amongst the killing fields of innumerable conflicts, I know that disbelief, shock and a sense of fatalism are soon to set in, combated only by leadership and labour. Without hard work the mind is allowed to dwell – on horrors experienced, the odds of survival and the futility of resistance.
I instruct Lord Lieutenant Laszlongia to reorganise his Charnel Guardsmen. I am now only interested in men who have proved their worth. Men of strong mind and spirit who held the line. Men who now know what they are facing and have the resolve to kill it. I order Laszlongia to recover weapons and ammunition and, with my Excoriators, re-establish themselves on the exterior perimeter. The blood-splattered battlements are ours again. For how long I cannot know.
The Impunitas hovers above the desolation and I feel the sights of her heavy bolters watching over me and the company standard. The Gauntlet I have despatched off across the necroplex to ensure that deadly pockets of auspex-defying entities do not haunt the mist. A second wave of abominations at this point would be tactically unlikely, based upon their presented behaviour, but prematurely devastating to corpse trains and combat-unprepared perimeters.