The Flight of the Eisenstein

by James Swallow

  ‘No one will, Pyr,’ answered Hakur, shaking his head. ‘We’re all tired of your trivial gambling.’ He threw a glance back to the arming pit where Garro’s housecarl was hard at work.

  ‘What currency is there to wager between us, anyway?’ added Voyen, joining Hakur at the blade racks. The two veterans were quite unalike in physical aspect, Voyen ample in frame where Hakur was wiry, and yet they were together on most things that affected the squad. ‘We’re not swabs or soldiers grabbing over scrip and coinage!’

  Rahl frowned. ‘It’s not a game of money, Apothecary, nothing as crude as that. Those things are just a way to keep score. We play for the right to be right.’

  Solun Decius, the youngest member of the command squad, came closer, rubbing a towel over his face to wipe away the sweat from his exertions in the sparring cages. He had a hard look to him that seemed out of place on a youth of his age. His eyes were alight with energy barely held in check, enthused by the sudden possibilities of glory that the arrival of the primarch had brought. ‘I’ll take your wager, if it will quiet you.’ Decius glanced at Hakur and Voyen, but his elders gave him no support. ‘I’ll say red, like the orks.’

  Rahl sniffed. ‘White as milk, like the megarachnid.’

  ‘You are both wrong.’ From behind Rahl, his face buried in a data-slate festooned with tactical maps, Tollen Sendek’s flat monotone issued out. ‘The blood of the jorgall is a dark crimson.’ The warrior had a heavy brow and hooded eyes that gave him a permanently sleepy expression.

  ‘And this knowledge is yours how?’ demanded Decius.

  Sendek waved the data-slate in the air. ‘I am well-read, Solun. While you batter your chainsword’s teeth blunt in the cages, I study the foe. These dissection texts of the Magos Biologis are fascinating.’

  Decius snorted. ‘All I need to know is how to kill them. Does your text tell you that, Tollen?’

  Sendek gave a heavy nod. ‘It does.’

  ‘Well, come, come.’ Voyen beckoned the dour Astartes to his feet. ‘Don’t keep such information to yourself.’

  Sendek sighed and stood, his perpetually morose features lit by the glow of the data-slate’s display. He tapped his chest. ‘The jorgall favour mechanical enhancements to improve their physical form. They have some humanoid traits – a head, neck, eyes and mouth – but it appears their brains and central nervous systems are situated not here,’ and he tapped his brow, ‘but here.’ Tollen’s hand lay flat on his chest.

  ‘To kill would need a heart shot, then?’ Rahl noted, accepting a nod in return.

  ‘Ah,’ said Decius, ‘like this?’ In a flash, the Astartes had spun in place and drawn his bolter. A single round exploded from the muzzle and ripped into the torso of a dormant practice dummy less than a few metres from Garro’s arming pit. The captain’s housecarl flinched at the sound of the shot, drawing a tut from Hakur.

  Decius turned away, amused with himself. Meric Voyen threw Hakur a look. ‘Arrogant whelp. I don’t understand what the captain sees in him.’

  ‘I once said the same thing about you, Meric.’

  ‘Speed and skill are nothing without control,’ the Apothecary retorted tersely. ‘Displays like that are better suited to fops like the Emperor’s Children.’

  The other man’s words drew a thin smile from Hakur. ‘We’re all Astartes under the skin, brothers and kindred all.’

  Voyen’s humour dropped away suddenly. ‘That, my brother, is as much a lie as it is the truth.’

  IN THE HOLOLITH cube, the shape of the jorgalli construct became visible. It was a fat cylinder several kilometres long, bulbous at one end with drive clusters, thinning at the other to a stubby prow. Huge petal-shaped vanes coated with shimmering panels emerged from the stern of the thing, catching sunlight and bouncing it through massive windows as big as inland seas.

  Mortarion gestured with a finger. ‘A cylinder world. This one has twice the mass of the similar constructs found and eliminated in orbits around the planets Tasak Beta and Fallon, but unlike those, our target is the first jorgall craft to be found under power in deep space.’ One of the adepts tickled switches with his worm-like mechadendrites and the image receded, revealing a halo of teardrop-shaped ships in close formation nearby.

  ‘A substantial picket fleet travels ahead of the craft. Captain Temeter will lead the engagement to disrupt these ships and break their lines of communication.’

  The primarch accepted a salute from Temeter. ‘Elements of the First, Second and Seventh Great Companies will stand with me as I take the spear tip into the bottle itself. This battleground is suited to our unique talents. The jorgall breathe a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen with heavy concentrations of chlorine, a weak poison that our lungs will resist with little effort.’

  As if to underline the point, Mortarion sniffed at a puff of gas from his half-mask. ‘First Captain Typhon will be my support. Commander Grulgor will penetrate the drive cluster and take control of the cylinder’s motive power centre. Battle-Captain Garro will neutralize the construct’s hatcheries.’

  Garro saluted firmly mirroring Grulgor and Typhon’s gestures. He held off his disappointment at his assigned target, far down the cylinder from the primarch’s attack point, and instead began to consider the first elements of his battle plan.

  Mortarion hesitated a moment, and Garro could swear he heard the hint of a smile in the primarch’s voice. ‘As some of you have deduced, this fight will not be the Death Guard’s alone. I have, on the request of Malcador the Sigillite, brought a cadre of investigators from the Divisio Astra Telepathica here, led by the Oblivion Knight Sister Amendera.’ The primarch inclined his head and Garro saw the Sister of Silence bow low in return. She gestured in sign language, quick little motions of finger and wrist.

  ‘The honoured Sisters will join us to seek out a psyker trace that has led to this bottle-world.’

  Garro stiffened. Psykers? This was the first he had heard of such a threat on the jorgalli ship, and he noted that only Typhon did not seem surprised at such news.

  ‘I trust that the full importance of this endeavor is impressed upon each of you,’ continued the Death Lord, his low tones strong. ‘These jorgall repeatedly enter our space in their generation ships, intent on spawning over worlds that belong to the Emperor. They must not be allowed to gain a foothold.’ He turned away, his face disappearing into his cloak. ‘In time, the Astartes will erase these creatures from humanity’s skies, and today will be a step along that path.’

  Garro and his battle-brothers saluted once more as Mortarion turned his back on them and moved away towards the welcoming shadows. They did not chorus in a battle cry or mark the moment with raised pronouncements. The primarch had spoken, and his was voice enough.

  TWO

  Assault

  Brothers and Sisters

  Message in a Bottle

  THE THRUST OF the heavy assault boat’s engines was a hammer to their bones, pressing the Astartes into the acceleration racks. Garro held his muscles tense against the powerful g-forces and let his gaze wander over the interior of the clamshell doors that formed the bow of the boarding ship. Intricate scrollwork spread across the inner face of the doors, charting the countless actions the craft had been involved in.

  It was one of hundreds hurtling through the void at this moment, packed with men primed for war, each of them targeted on the jorgall world-ship with the unerring single-mindedness of a guided missile.

  Through the pict-circuits laced into the lenses of his armour, Garro rapidly blink-clicked through the data available to him via his command level vox-net. There were feeds from the eye cameras of the squad leaders, quick scripts of telemetry from Voyen’s medicae auspex and there, for a moment, a grainy, low resolution image from outside across the boat’s serrated prow.

  Garro dallied on that for a few seconds, watching the motion of the vast cylinder as they approached it. The hull wall of pearlescent metal grew larger. It was so huge that the curvature of it was hardly noticeable
, and the only sign that they were actually closing on it was the slow crawl of detail as surface features became clearer: here, a cluster of spikes that might be antennae, there a bulbous turret spitting yellow tracer fire.

  The captain felt no fear at the jorgall guns. The assault was moving at punishing speed beneath a cloak of electronic countermeasures, heat-baffle flare bursts and glittering clouds of metal chaff that would render sensors unintelligible. He was confident in Temeter’s skills, certain that the captain of the Fourth had sent the picket fleet into disarray and robbed the xenos of any usable warning.

  The wall was very close, the distance vanishing in moments. Garro was aware of other boats converging at the edges of the grayed-out image. Long-range sensors had determined that this portion of the cylinder’s hull was thin, and so it would be here, some half a kilometre from the cylinder’s mid-line, that the Death Guard would make their ingress. Garro let the link fade and gathered himself, switching over to the general vox channel. His voice echoed in the helms of every Astartes on the boat.

  ‘Steel in your bones, brothers. Impact is imminent. I want a clean and fast deployment. I want it so sharp the Emperor himself would applaud its perfection!’ He took a breath as the standby alert began to wail. ‘Today the primarch leads us, and we will make him proud to do so! For Mortarion and Terra!’

  ‘Mortarion and Terra!’ Garro heard Hakur’s rough baritone through the chorus of assent.

  Decius’s voice cut across the channel, brimming with zeal. ‘Count the Seven!’ he cried, yelling out the company’s call to rally. ‘Count the Seven!’

  Garro joined in, but his words were abruptly shaken out of him as the assault boat’s thick bow rammed into the hull of the jorgall cylinder. Piercing shrieks of rendered metal and escaping atmosphere thundered around the boat’s thick fuselage as it drove itself deep, clawed tracks across its flanks biting and sparking to pull it through metres of chitinous armour plate. Turning and shifting, the boat’s autonomic pilot brain deployed hydraulic barbs to stop the outgassing of air from blowing back into the void.

  The juddering, screeching, ear-splitting ride seemed to go on forever then abruptly it stopped. The assault ship listed. Garro heard metal scrape on metal and then the trigger rune before him on the clamshell hatch flashed on. ‘Ready on release!’ he snapped.

  The hatch blew open on explosive bolts and Garro had his bolter loose and in his hands, ready to kill anything that dared to come in, but it was a sudden flood of brackish blue water that smashed down into the boat, not an enemy defender. The liquid was icy, swirling rapidly around his legs and up to his stomach.

  ‘Go!’ Garro roared. The battle-captain was aware of his men moving behind him as he launched himself out of the assault craft. He plunged into the cobalt murk and burst back through the surface, turning around, getting his bearings.

  It was a hundred-to-one chance. The assault had penetrated through the bottom of a shallow chemical lake and the dark hulls of the boats protruded from the sluggish liquid like the tips of jagged armoured fingers. Already the waters were icing over and freezing into blue-white halos where the cold kiss of space had followed the invaders in. Through his helmet’s breath screen Garro drew a rough inhalation that tasted of metallic salts. Nearby, he saw Grulgor kick angrily away from his lander and snarl out a command.

  There on the shore, pointing with his manreaper, was Mortarion. The sight of the primarch was enough to send Garro’s blood racing, and he stormed forward through the shallows, his bolter held high. ‘Count the Seven!’ called the captain, and he did not need to look behind him to see the elements of his company follow in formation.

  Garro advanced from the deployment point with Hakur’s veteran squad at his side, joined by Decius and Sendek for support. Around them, the chaotic crash of gunfire and blades on blades rippled over the gentle landscape of the lakeshore. Hordes of Astartes met the xenos in deadly, furious conflict.

  The alien force was quickly in disarray. Even in non-humans, Garro could sense the motion and shift in the character of a battalion when they lost their nerve. Groups broke apart and reformed, milling and confused, instead of drawing out and away in any semblance of order. Butchering them would not take too much of the Death Guard’s energy.

  It was clear the jorgalli had understood too late that the objects on a course towards their world-ship were not massive munitions but actually manned craft. The near-suicidal manner of such a boarding operation had shocked them and they were unprepared for the brutal fury of the Death Guard incursion. Their mistake had been compounded by errors in the deployment of their combatant enhancives. The jorgall cyborgs standing on the banks of the chlorine lagoon were massacred, their keening cries echoing over the shallow, sandy dunes surrounding the landing zone.

  In the back of his mind, the battle-captain was already thinking ahead, considering how they would secure the breach point before the companies split to attend their individual objectives. Garro led his men in a thrust through a nest of spindly, whirling dervishes, fighting past sweeps of dull steel glaives and placing double-tap bolt shots through the ribs of every jorgall they saw. The Astartes expanded outward from the lake in a ring of off-white armour, the advance rolling over the defenders.

  Moving and firing, Garro’s troop crested a dune of crystalline granules that crunched loudly beneath their boots and found some close combat kills. A phalanx of jorgall swept and turned to them, caught in mid-flight, daring to stop and engage the Astartes. Weapons barked on both sides of the fight, the heavy roar of bolters drowning out the hissing clatter of electrostatic arc-fire from the implanted projectors of the enemy.

  Decius, who favoured the blunt trauma of a power fist, slipped into the midst of the aliens and punched one to the powdery dirt, over and over, slamming its long neck and oval head into a ruin.

  ‘Has he forgotten what I said already? I told him to aim for the torso for a quick kill,’ said Sendek.

  ‘He hasn’t forgotten,’ said Hakur.

  With a peculiar, ululating cry, two of the larger xenos coiled and leapt directly at Garro. In mid-jump, they came open like spreading petals on a flower, their tri-fold legs and arms wide. He saw glitters where whole portions of limbs had been replaced with dull metal and black curves of carbon. In one swift motion, the captain let his bolter drop away on its sling and drew Libertas, a blue glow of power shimmering across the blade. In a wide, double-handed sweep Garro cut both the creatures in half, the sword whispering easily through their scaly tissue.

  Hakur grunted his approval. ‘Still sharp, then?’

  ‘Aye,’ Garro replied, shaking droplets of deep red from the blade. He paused momentarily to examine his work, viewing the severed limbs with the same dispassion he had the static intelligence images on Sendek’s data-slate.

  In their natural, fully fleshed state, a jorgalli adult was perhaps four and a half metres tall, moving on three legs with three joints that radiated from their lower torsos like the spokes on a wheel. Apart from the extensile neck, the upper body of the aliens resembled the lower, but here the three limbs ended in hands with six digits.

  The egg-shaped head had deep-set, rheumy eyes and fleshy notches for a nose and mouth. They had skin like Terran lizards, all scales and tiny horns of bone. However, there seemed to be no such thing as a ‘natural’ jorgall. Every single example of the xenos species yet encountered and terminated by servants of the Imperium, from immature cubs to infirm elders, was modified with implanted devices or cybernetic proxy mechanisms. The slate showed oddities such as spring piston legs, feet replaced with wheels and rollers, knife claws, sheets of subdermal armour plating, telecameras inside optic cavities and even ballistic needler weapons nestled within the hollows of bones.

  The similarity in intent between the alien implants and the engineered organs that he possessed as an Astartes was not lost on Garro, but these were xenos, and they were invaders. They were nothing like him and as the Emperor had decreed, they were to be chastised for daring t
o venture into human space.

  Near to the sluggish waterline, a horde of clawed jorgalli, most likely some kind of hand-to-hand variant, hacked at a dreadnought from the Second Company. The venerable warrior had become bogged down in the chemical slurry at the lake’s edge and Garro saw it spin on its torso axis, clubbing at them with a chainfist. A white flash fell from nowhere into the heart of the jorgall rippers and the captain heard Ignatius Grulgor bellow with wild laughter. Grulgor came to his feet surrounded by the xenos and threw back his head.

  The commander of the Second had gone barefaced; the foul air of the bottle-world did not concern him. In either hand he carried a regulation Mars-pattern bolter, and with delight, Grulgor unloaded them at point-blank range into the enemy.

  The sheer velocity of the shots chopped the jorgall into reeking gobbets of flesh, giving the dreadnought valuable seconds in which to extract itself. In moments, Grulgor stood at the centre of a circle of alien carcasses, vapor coiling from the barrels of his guns. The commander saluted the primarch, and flashed a sly, daring grin at Garro before moving on in search of new targets.

  ‘He’s so artless, don’t you think?’ murmured Hakur. ‘The esteemed Huron-Fal would have fought his own way out of that mess, but Grulgor wades in, more concerned about showing his mettle to the primarch than where best to spend his ammunition.’

  ‘We’re Death Guard. We’re not supposed to be artists,’ Garro retorted. ‘We are craftsmen in war, nothing more, direct and brutal. We don’t seek accolades and honours, only duty.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the veteran mildly.

  Decius came bounding up to Garro, kicking away the corpse parts from his kill. ‘Ugh. Do you smell that, sir? These things, their blood stinks.’

  The battle-captain didn’t answer. He hesitated, his attention drifting, watching Mortarion in the thick of his cold fury. At the primarch’s side, Typhon and the twin sentinels of the Deathshroud were whirling and culling, their manreapers moving unhindered through a milling, screaming pack of jorgall. The Death Lord himself had clearly deemed these inferior strains of xenos to be unworthy of his scythe, and instead was at work putting them to the light of his Lantern.