Legion of the Damned

by Rob Sanders

  Kersh stood atop the rubble with his bolt pistol clutched in both gauntlets. Those cultist minions who did stumble successfully through the leadstorm to start crunching up the scree-side of the battlement were introduced to the corpus-captain’s merciless marksmanship. One by one, Kersh dropped oncoming Guardsmen, self-mutilated acolytes and hideous mutants. They all hungered for his end, but instead had to settle for a bolt-round to the head.

  As the Scourge plugged away, with the blood-crazed masses a wall of feverish flesh pushing ever closer through the blizzard of suppression fire, he felt a gauntlet on his pauldron. It was Brother Micah, the company champion’s combat shield and boltgun combination resting on his armoured hip.

  ‘Down!’ was all Kersh heard.

  Micah pushed him to one side with savage insistence. Off balance, the corpus-captain fell faceplate-first into the rubble, turning behind him just in time to see an unfolding disaster. It was the Impunitas.

  The Thunderhawk had fallen from the sky. It clipped the spiretops of several steeples before ploughing straight through a tower-monolith and cleaving the tiered minaret roof from a pilgrim almshouse. The gunship was swarming with daemonic furies, and its cockpit canopy was splattered with gore. For a moment everything became a maelstrom as the Impunitas struck the ground with her blunt nose, bulldozed through the perimeter defences and smashed through the improvised battlement. Reeling from the force of the impact still quaking through the ground and his plate, Kersh felt the slipstream of a wing pass over the back of his pack.

  Scrambling to his feet in the unfolding aftermath of the crash, Kersh watched the shattered Thunderhawk plunge straight through the ranks of the lost, smearing cultists into the sacred Certusian earth. The gunship listed and its smashed tail began to skid around, shearing gravestones off at their foundations. The Impunitas finally came to rest in the burial ground, leaning the fractured edge of its surviving wing against a single-storey sepulchre. Her graceful form was a crash-mangled mess and her thick plate buckled and rent. Smoke poured from her smashed-open troop compartment, and a single engine still raged in futile determination.

  The corpus-captain’s raw frustration and anger could not find expression in words. Throwing a clenched fist out at the floor he snarled within his helmet. Beyond the catastrophic loss of the Thunderhawk, his section of the perimeter had been reduced to ruins. Gun emplacements lay toppled and silent; Excoriators and Sisters of Battle were missing; Charnel Guardsmen lay broken and screaming; and there was a gaping hole knocked clean through at least two of the concentric battlements.

  As Kersh stomped through the obliteration, hands reached out for him. Certusian fighters and Guardsmen had been crushed and rolled beneath the Thunderhawk’s hull. Nearby, the Scourge saw the half-sheared corpse of Old Enoch, his seneschal – his fragile body crumpled like an insect by the falling gunship. Mumbling a blessing, Kersh took the coiled length of ‘the purge’ from the serf’s belt and dropped the looped lash over the hilts of his swords. Bethesda and Oren he found dazed but alive a little way distant. The absterge had been fortunate, bearing only cuts and savage bruises from head to foot. The lictor had broken his ritual arm and winced as Kersh got him to his feet.

  ‘Get on the cannon,’ the Scourge ordered, indicating the languishing autocannon and the boxes of ammunition strewn across the pulverised rubble. As surviving Charnel Guardsmen emerged from the gaps and crevices into which they had pressed themselves, they began to search for their abandoned lasfusils. As Sister Casiope and Battle-Brother Nebuzar of Squad Castigir ran down the perimeter towards him, Kersh bawled, ‘Regroup and hold the line!’

  The pair nodded, which was Kersh’s sign to bolt off along the ugly scar the Thunderhawk had carved into the battlement. ‘Micah!’ Kersh called, ‘Micah!’, but the champion answered neither across the vox nor in person. There were bodies everywhere, Certusians and Guardsmen who could have little imagined that their deaths would have stalked up behind them. Brothers Salamis and Benzoheth were with them also, their ancient plate crushed like ration cans. Benzoheth’s boltgun was buckled and smashed, but his brother’s had escaped the worst of the Thunderhawk’s attentions. Scooping up the weapon, Kersh let it dangle in his hand. As he came across the broken bodies of furies still trying to flap their useless wings, the Scourge stamped down on their daemon spines or put single bolts through the skulls of the hellish monstrosities. The corpus-captain strode on with the etherquakes of the fiends’ bodies detonating behind him. Twisters of flame raged for the heavens as their daemon-essence returned to the warp.

  Out beyond the battlement it was pure carnage. Cultists had miserably lost their argument with the Impunitas and had been compacted into the floor and each other.

  Kersh found Brother Micah near the tail of the Thunderhawk. Above, a single gunship engine continued to cycle, firing up with blazing brilliance and roasting the air before dying down to an idle chug – then building up once again to fruitless ignition. The champion’s distinctive boltgun lay abandoned nearby, pointing towards the armoured boots of a body blanketed in the caped wings of a daemon fury. As the corpus-captain watched the sharp vertebrae and shoulder blades of the thing move beneath its infernal flesh with sickening fascination, he shattered its outstretched wing with a burst of fire from the bolter. The beast turned with spite and snapped like a crocodilian as it crawled across the bodies towards the Scourge. A soul-hunger raged in its horrid eyes.

  ‘Back, warp-sired thing!’ Kersh roared, blowing a ragged hole in the other wing before plucking at the monster’s daemonhide with single rounds. The creature backed away, hissing and sniping. The corpus-captain stepped forwards to where the beast had been, hovering over Micah like a vampiric bat. Kersh’s lip wrinkled. The champion’s earnest features had gone – along with most of the contents of his skull. Kersh turned on the creature that had been feeding on him. It had used the moments the Scourge had chosen to look upon the fallen champion well, creeping swiftly up through the crash wreckage. By the time he had set his eye upon it again the monster was almost upon him. Blasting through the beast’s ribcage and up into its repugnant head, the Scourge pivoted and put the remaining rounds of the magazine into further winged monstrosities that were slipping out from the Thunderhawk’s interior through great gashes in the Impunitas’s hull. With every infernal ending, a corkscrew of hate-spitting flame wound its way towards the stars. Kersh could only imagine what the furies had done to the gunship’s crew.

  The devastation caused by the crash had only momentarily pushed back the enemy ranks. Already the cult armies of the Cholercaust were swallowing up the vacuum, stamping the unfortunates that had been ahead of them into the dirt and running down on the perimeter’s weakened defences with hellish glee – hatefully delighted to get an opportunity to honour their bloody master. Looking back at his section of the line, where the Thunderhawk had demolished its way through his forces and the battlements upon which they were standing, Kersh found only the barest indication of a defence in evidence. The blood cultists were closing, and would march straight through the opening and into the city.

  Tossing the empty boltgun away, Kersh slipped his Scourge’s gladius from its sheath on his belt. He moved out towards the Thunderhawk’s creaking wing, which was balanced upon the roof of a single-storey sepulchre. Cultist warriors were already there with him, the nearest, fastest and most desperate of their kind. Kersh had never seen such fearlessness in mere mortals before. They came at him – an Adeptus Astartes – without dread or doubt. A Krugarian Turncoat jumped down from the wing, his bald head gore-spattered and his filthy trench coat flapping behind him. He dappled Kersh’s chestplate with rapid fire from his lascarbine before the Excoriator batted the weapon to the floor with the flat of his blade and gutted the traitor. Incredibly, a Vessorine Janissary came at him with a knife, and even more incredibly got it to the Scourge’s plate. Watching the puny blade score paint, Kersh seized the clansman by his carapace and flung him into the Impunitas’s side, shattering every bone i
n his body.

  A butcher-priest of the Frater Vulgariate came next with a bellow and a rusty chainsword. Knocking the blur of brain-speckled teeth aside with his cross guard, Kersh turned his power armoured bulk into the priest’s reach. Slipping the gladius between his arms, the Scourge cut through the dark ecclesiarch’s wrists. The chainsword dropped and died. The frater fell back, waving his gore-spouting stumps. Two slave converts died swiftly on the tip of Kersh’s blade, as he slammed it through the both of them. The mongrel-faced mutant that came up behind as he administered such mercy had to settle for the blade’s aquila pommel, caving its way through his snaggle-toothed face.

  Hordes were already racing past the Excoriator, intent on flooding the gap in the line. With their backs to him were armoured Volscani Cataphracts, death cult assassins from ‘The Covenant’ and a cannibal ogryn from the Bad Moons of Goethe. Hanging from the ruined wing by a single hydraulic pintle and belt feed was one of the Impunitas’s twin-linked heavy bolters. Cutting through the gunship impulse cabling with his blade and shearing away the tensioned piston-trigger, Kersh sank his gauntlets into the firing mechanism, clutching at rods, pins and levers. Pulling at a robust lever, the Scourge was rewarded with a kick from the right-hand heavy bolter. The round blasted up into the wing’s armour plating. Angling the bolters around on their hydraulic pintle and clutching both levers like the brakes on a bike, Kersh unleashed the devastating weapon on the storming mob.

  The twin-linked heavy bolters bucked like beasts of burden reined in and under control. The barrels breathed flash-fires from their gaping muzzles, and two streams of blistering, brute-calibre firepower reached across the battlefield for the enemy. As Kersh angled the monstrous weapons around, lines of cultists disappeared in a bloodspittle haze of sweeping death. Assassins of ‘The Covenant’, so lithe and barbarically graceful, were mercilessly turned to chum before the gunship-mounted weapon. The Volscani Cataphracts’ armour was nothing to Kersh’s firepower and droves of the traitor Guardsmen were cut down in a furore of clot-splashing eruptions. The feral ogryn, Kersh simply cut down to size by scything straight through the thick muscle and bone of his legs and watching the limbless giant crash to the ground.

  Through gritted teeth the Scourge continued his diamantine-tipped decontamination of the necroplex. The heads of mutants and already mindless spawn were popped off like ripe pustules. The Deathfest lived up to their name as Kersh and his heavy bolters turned several of their foetid number into a celebratory display of gore-spritz and screams. The Regna-Rouge became a dying commemoration of their colours in the Excoriator’s leadstorm, their unblooded blades and torturer’s instruments falling uselessly from bolt-severed hands. It was carnage.

  The fallen Impunitas continued to feed ammunition. The weapon blazed with impunity. Kersh killed everything in his feverish fire-arc. Soon the area before his decimated section of the line was a twitching field of corpses and bloody smog. With satisfaction, he heard Oren and Bethesda’s autocannon strike up its murderous orison. He saw Brother Nebuzar standing on the battlement, directing hastily regrouped Charnel Guard and cemetery world volunteers to new hold points. Lasfusils had once again started to lance the burial ground with searing bolts of light, and the nozzles of Sister Casiope’s heavy flamer were turning the crash-dozed gap in the rubble battlement into a blazing inferno of light and flesh-melting heat.

  He heard him first. Fortunately for the Scourge, the Blood God’s disciples honoured their deity on the battlefield rather than in the temple, and with war cries rather than prayers. The deep boom of a boorish roar behind Kersh drowned out even the heavy bolters. The Scourge threw the twin-linked weapon around on its hydraulic mount. Before him was a Traitor Astartes, a rust-armoured warrior of the Goremongers renegade Chapter, with a crackling battleaxe swinging about his head.

  ‘Blood for the Blood Go–’

  Kersh yanked on the levers as the pintle completed its spasmodic rotation. The Goremonger disappeared in a blur of point-blank bolt fury. Through the miasma of shredded flesh and ceramite fragments, the corpus-captain turned the heavy bolters on the renegade Angel’s warband, a blood cult mob of degenerate killers and acolytes who had seen the Goremonger’s heresy and leadership as a divine expression of the Blood God’s power and legitimacy. How could an Angel of the Emperor be wrong? The warband found out as the Scourge mashed through them with his belt-fed monstrosity.

  Beyond, Kersh could see an ocean of human detritus. An unending army of ruthless killers. The Cholercaust’s slaughterkin, united in common purpose: to work through the private deviancy of their murderous inclination while simultaneously feeding their faith and daemon deity with acts of wanton annihilation. The cult invaders just kept coming, birthed by darkness, and beyond the gloom, Kersh could hear the savage howls of maniacs-in-waiting.

  Amongst the slave-soldiers, traitors and Chaos cultists, Kersh picked out increasing numbers of Adeptus Astartes, false prophets for the ravaging masses, and Ruinous warbands of blood-brothers who had embraced heresy together. Lost Angels who had fallen to the Blood God’s predatory temptations and indulged their base desire to kill over the Emperor’s need for them to do so. Space Marines who had forgotten themselves. Those who had regressed. Those who were now no more than agonising expressions of the savagery from which they were originally crafted. The Scourge favoured these with the Thunderhawk’s remaining wrath. With 1.00 calibre mercy, the Scourge ended their torment and that of their followers. The Goremongers. The Sanguine Sons. The mad Angels of the Thunder Barons. The renegade Red Heralds. The Cleaved. The Angels Apocrypha. The Brazen Guard. The bone-dusted Skulltakers.

  They came at him undaunted. Furious at his mere existence. He was a warrior to be defeated. An Adeptus Astartes. A son of Dorn. One after another they tried to rush him, cleavering aside cultists, spawn and traitor soldiers to get to him. To earn his skull for the War-Given-Form. Kersh kept killing. The ivory of his armour became a blood-misted red. The heavy bolter muzzles glowed with the heat of incessant usage. A gene-bred monstrosity – some aborted, primogenerated abomination – charged at Kersh with self-loathing and fury. The bastard-breed wore scraps of armour and the colours of the Sanguine Sons, but was a half-botched attempt at demigodhood. Malformed, insane and unfeeling – the sorry creature soaked up the heavy bolters’ punishment and bounded on. The head shot that should have ended the beast was stopped by armour plating welded to its deformed skull, and it took everything the weapon had to punch through both metal and thick bone to reach what little brain the monster had.

  As the abominate dropped and skidded past Kersh, the Scourge realised that the distraction had cost him. Three Angels Apocrypha had worked their way around the crashed Thunderhawk to surprise him from the other side. Helmless and sporting long hair and rapier-like blades that crackled with a dark energy, the Chaos Space Marines looked identical. Their skin was deathly pale against the sable blood-filth of their patched and studded plate. The renegades hissed and swept in with vampiric speed and appetite. Kersh barely had time to release his finger-cramping grip on the heavy bolters and slap a palm on his gladius hilt.

  The first died without the blade having to clear its scabbard. There was a flash from the side of the first Angel’s head. He fell to one side and struck the gunship’s wing before falling and sitting in the grave dust. Half of his head had been burned out by a precision sniper shot. About the Scourge were the corpses of killers and cultists that Kersh couldn’t remember slaying. They too had the telltale head craters of Adeptus Astartes marksmanship. Up in the towers and steeples of the cemetery world city, a member of Squad Contritus had the Scourge in his sights and was watching his corpus-captain’s back.

  The Angels were so fast that Kersh’s blade was still not free of its sheath as the second sped past his falling compatriot. He was met with an ugly kick from the Scourge. Reeling from the Excoriator’s boot against his chestplate, the Traitor stumbled some distance back. Throughout the body-piling carnage of the Scourge’s resistance, th
e Impunitas’s remaining engine had gone through the wretched and repetitive cycle of firing up and dying down. As the heretic Angel stumbled back into the rocket’s wake, the intense heat of the rhythmic burn set alight his hair and scoured the paint from his ceramite. His pallid skin melted from his skull, and as the engine built up to full intensity, sending a tremble through the crashed Thunderhawk, the renegade was lost in the air-scorching heat of the afterburner.

  Kersh felt sudden and excruciating pain lance through his midriff. The third Angel Apocrypha had leant into a savage thrust, skewering his power blade through the Scourge’s stomach plate and though his side. As the Chaos Space Marine withdrew his rapier, Kersh let out a half-stifled howl of agony. The heretic seemed to enjoy the Excoriator’s suffering, until the Scourge drew his gladius out of its scabbard and the blade up across the Traitor’s face, wiping the spiteful satisfaction from it. With blood streaming into his eyes from the vicious gash, the Angel Apocrypha also failed to see the Scourge’s fist fly at him, the pommel of the sword held within it breaking the warrior’s jaw. The rapier vaulted for the Scourge again, but blood-blind the Angel struck wide.

  Grabbing the Chaos Space Marine by the wrist and holding the crackling blade away from him, Kersh twisted the gladius around in his other hand before plunging it down through a ceramite patch on the Blood Crusader’s chestplate. The blade squealed through the weak spot, punctured reinforced ribcage and slid down into the Chaos Space Marine’s chest. Squirming the hilt around like an aircraft joystick, Kersh watched the Angel Apocrypha experience the blade twisting through his innards. Black blood gushed up and out of the sides of the doomed warrior’s mouth. Releasing him, Kersh allowed the weight of the warrior’s plate to carry him to a gasping death on the cemetery world earth and free his blade.