Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

  ‘Nor are they attempting to descend towards Boros Prime,’ said Decimus.

  ‘They are not stupid,’ said Ostorius. ‘As soon as they attempted that, we would obliterate them. Nothing can descend on Boros Prime without coming into range of Kronos.’

  The Sword of Truth was looming ever larger, ploughing towards the star fort at speed. Explosions detonated upon her bow as the Word Bearers continued to direct their fire towards the ship.

  ‘Distance five hundred kilometres,’ came a servitor’s voice.

  ‘Get that link with the Sword of Truth back up,’ said Valens. ‘I want contact with 2nd Company.’

  ‘Trying, sir,’ came the reply. ‘We are having trouble establishing a link. There might be a communications malfunction at their end.’

  ‘Keep trying,’ said Valens.

  ‘She is not slowing down,’ warned Ostorius.

  ‘Order the flight wing to target her engines on my mark,’ ordered Titus Valens.

  ‘In doing so, my lord, we leave her at the mercy of the enemy,’ said Sulinus. ‘It’s as good as a death sentence.’

  ‘Two hundred kilometres.’

  ‘What is Augustus doing?’ said Chapter Master Valens. ‘Control malfunction?’

  ‘The Sword of Truth’s shields are still up.’

  ‘She is too close,’ said Valens. ‘Take out her engines.’

  ‘Sir! The enemy ships are accelerating en masse! They are within range and coming fast!’

  ‘Fire upon them,’ said Chapter Masters Titus Valens. ‘Bring them down. All guns.’

  ‘Torpedoes have been launched towards Kronos.’

  ‘They’ll not get anywhere near us,’ said Sulinus dismissively.

  ‘Sir, the flight wing is taking casualties. Do we continue to cripple the Sword of Truth?’

  ‘Keep at it,’ said Valens.

  ‘One hundred kilometres.’

  ‘Any readings of heat build-up in her weapons?’

  ‘No, sir,’ came the reply from an officer sat before one of the scanner arrays.

  ‘Another of our escorts is down! The Sword of Truth’s engines are at fifty per cent, but it will not be enough! Fifty kilometres, and closing! She is going to hit us!’

  Warning klaxons blared through the star fort, warning of immanent impact.

  ‘We have to take it down,’ said Ostorius, urgently. ‘It poses too much of a risk!’

  ‘No!’ shouted Captain Sulinus. ‘We cannot! Our brothers are aboard that ship!’

  ‘We cannot risk Kronos!’ said Captain Decimus.

  ‘Twenty seconds to impact!’

  ‘May the Emperor forgive us if we are wrong,’ said Chapter Master Valens. ‘Take it down.’

  Hundreds of cannon turrets, each the size of a Titan, rotated towards the incoming battle-barge, but the Chapter Master held off from giving the order. The utter wrongness of killing a brother Astartes was ingrained in them all.

  ‘Transmission! It’s the Sword of Truth!’

  ‘Hold your fire!’ shouted Valens as the blurred image of Captain Augustus of 2nd Company again flashed up.

  ‘…lacking reverse thrusters… malfunction… not fire, attempting emergency…’ the captain was saying.

  ‘Torpedoes closing. Commencing defensive barrage.’

  ‘Lance batteries locked and ready to fire upon encroaching enemy fleet, sir!’

  The dark void of space lit up as the first incandescent beams of energy stabbed towards the incoming Word Bearers ships.

  ‘Ten kilometres! Five!’

  Aquilius’s eyes widened as he stared out of the deck window, watching the rapidly approaching battle-barge.

  ‘Sir?’ called one of the deck officers suddenly.

  ‘What is it?’ said Ostorius.

  ‘Teleport signature!’

  ‘What? Where? Onto Kronos? Our jammers are operational, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not onto Kronos, sir! The signature is locking onto the Sword of Truth!’

  ‘What are they doing?’ asked Decimus, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ostorius. ‘Scan the Sword of Truth again, officer.’

  ‘In progress, sir!’

  ‘One kilometre!’

  ‘Sir! We are reading… Throne! Sir! Massive readings of atomic warheads aboard the Sword of Truth!’

  ‘Guilliman’s blood, they’ve teleported them across,’ said Ostorius, the colour draining from his face.

  ‘Is such a thing even possible?’

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘Five hundred metres and closing!

  ‘Bring it down!’ shouted the Chapter Master.

  Aquilius looked out of the observation window towards the battle-barge, looming large and coming in fast. Turrets began to fire upon it, but it was already too close…

  ‘Throne above,’ he breathed.

  Half torn apart from close-range cannon fire, but still coming, the Sword of Truth ploughed into the side of the Kronos star fort. The timed warheads that had been teleported across into her holds detonated and the battle-barge’s plasma core exploded in a blinding corona.

  Marduk smiled from within the dead flesh of the White Consuls captain. As the Sword of Truth ploughed into the side of the immense orbital bastion, mere seconds before the atomic warheads that had been teleported across were detonated, Marduk retreated from the corpse. Without his spirit animating it, the dead body collapsed to the floor moments before being consumed in the immense explosion.

  The Dark Apostle slammed back into his body aboard the Infidus Diabolus, and he felt a moment of dislocation before full control and feeling returned. He stood, and moved forward to observe the destruction.

  Through the forward bridge observation portal he witnessed the massive explosion upon the enemy star fort, engulfing several enemy battleships that had been sluggish in disengaging from their docked positions. Secondary detonations rippled outwards from the point of impact, rolling flames bursting into space briefly as oxygen vented before being sucked inwards, hungering for more air to feed upon. Bulkheads would be crashing down within that massive orbital fortress, isolating shattered decks.

  The weight of incoming fire directed towards the Word Bearers ships dropped markedly, the overwhelming destructive barrage reduced to a trickle of sporadic fire as explosions continued to ripple along cannon arrays and laser batteries.

  Marduk narrowed his eyes against the brightness as another detonation exploded in the heart of the star fort, larger than any other so far.

  ‘Plasma reactor,’ said Kol Badar.

  When the flame cleared, Marduk could see a massive gaping wound in the flank of the mighty star fort, exposing a mess of twisted metal and exposed sub-decks. A thick cloud of debris and wreckage spiralled outwards from the blast, and Marduk saw with amusement the tiny figures of people blasting out into the emptiness of space alongside twisted metal scrap and ruptured gun turrets. The orbital bastion was still operational, but it had been dealt a terrible, near fatal blow, and it would be long minutes before it would be able to rotate to bring its undamaged weapons to bear on the advancing Chaos fleet.

  ‘Commence planetfall,’ said Marduk, savouring the words.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Aquilius picked himself up from the deck floor, using the command podium to haul himself back to his feet. The air was thick with smoke, and flames were all around. His white armour was scorched and peppered with shards of scrap metal. He was bleeding from the temple, but the blood flow halted within seconds thanks to the hyper-coagulants in his bloodstream.

  The Coadjutor’s eyes were watering from the smoke, but he could see the carnage around him well enough. White Consuls were picking themselves up from the floor, surrounded by flames and twisted girders. He saw Chapter Master Valens still standing, scowling darkly as he hauled Captain Decimus to his feet.

  Aquilius’s augmented senses picked up the unmistakeable odours of blood and burnt flesh before he saw the bodies or registered the agonised screams. The
officers of the Kronos star fort who had been within the room were scattered across the deck floor, their flesh torn to bloody ribbons. Protected by their battle plate, the White Consuls had merely suffered scratches and abrasions, but these men and women had no such aegis. The Coadjutor began moving around the room, checking for life-signs. Three of the seven officers were still alive, at least for now, and he echoed Ostorius’s cry. One of them had, miraculously, escaped all but unscathed. Dutiful even in the face of such destruction, the man climbed unsteadily to his feet and moved back to the consoles, checking to see if any of them were still operational.

  ‘Apothecary!’ Aquilius shouted, doing what he could to staunch the bleeding of one officer, a woman in her middling years.

  A still form, garbed in white power armour caught his attention, and Aquilius rose to his feet, moving swiftly towards the sprawled figure and dropping to his knees beside him.

  A heavy girder had fallen atop the figure, pinning the warrior brother to the ground. He saw it was the captain of 3rd Company.

  ‘Help me,’ Aquilius shouted as he strained fruitlessly to budge the heavy weight.

  Chapter Master Valens was at his side a moment later. The Chapter Master grasped the girder one-handed and heaved it aside as if it were made of balsa.

  ‘God-Emperor, no,’ said Aquilius as he rolled the motionless figure of Captain Sulinus onto his back and looked into staring, dead eyes. A shard of metal thirty centimetres long was embedded deep in his left eye.

  ‘Damn,’ said Chapter Master Valens.

  Tracked servitors trundled into the room, bathing the flames with foam.

  ‘Status update!’ shouted Ostorius.

  ‘Aft shields at twenty-five per cent!’ shouted the sole standing officer on deck, having found a working cogitator unit. ‘Re-routing power from the subsidiary banks!’

  ‘Torpedoes incoming, contact in thirty seconds!’ called the captain of 5th Company, Decimus, having taken the place of one of the fallen officers.

  ‘Emperor damn them!’ said Chapter Master Titus Valens.

  ‘Kronos rotation underway. Sixteen per cent completion.’

  ‘Too slow!’ said Ostorius, standing and looking out through the cracked observation portal. ‘The traitors are already descending towards the surface.’

  Aquilius glanced out into space, and saw that several of the Word Bearers vessels had taken the opportunity in the sudden cessation of fire to cut away from the other incoming traitor vessels and drop towards Boros Prime.

  The coadjutor knew as well as any White Consul the procedure for an Astartes strike force launching an attack upon a hostile planet, and though the enemy were vile and corrupted, an abasement of the Adeptus Astartes, he suspected that their modus operandi would be sickeningly close to how such an engagement was dictated in the Codex Astartes.

  Within minutes, streaming fire would be launched from bombardment cannons, targeted at key lance batteries upon the planet’s surface, softening the way for the drop. On the back of this bombardment, the first wave of drop-pods would be launched, striking hard and fast, their mission to gain a foothold upon the surface and take out anti-air and flak emplacements. Further drop-pod waves would help establish this goal and eliminate prime enemy targets, before Thunderhawks descended towards designated landing zones, deploying more troops, support and armour in preparation for a counterattack.

  In all, a well-coordinated attack could be launched in minutes, giving the beleaguered ground forces little time to react. It was part of the reason why the Astartes were so devastating – they might be outnumbered a million to one, but the sheer force that could be brought to bear on one location, and the speed of its deployment, was almost impossible to counter. There was little in the universe that could resist against a determined Astartes spearhead. Still, if any world could hold, it was Boros Prime.

  Alarms sounded, preceding the stream of incoming enemy torpedoes. Unable to do anything, the White Consuls looked out over the star fort from their spire in horror as they struck home. Less than a third of the torpedoes were taken down by the severely depleted defensive fire, the rest slamming into already straining void shields, overwhelming and tearing rents through them. A score passed through and impacted upon the tiered, castellated sides of the Kronos star fort already ripped asunder by the explosion of the Sword of Truth.

  ‘Ground fire will not be enough to stop the Word Bearers drop,’ said Captain Decimus. ‘Not without the firepower of this installation.’

  ‘I want 5th Company down there on the ground, captain,’ said the Chapter Master. Decimus slammed his fist against his chest in salute.

  ‘I believe Pollo Dardanius is the most senior of 3rd Company’s sergeants?’ said the Chapter Master.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ replied Captain Decimus.

  ‘Inform him that he is now acting captain of 3rd Company. Get him here, now, for briefing.’

  ‘It will be done,’ said Decimus.

  ‘I want 3rd Company stationed here. The enemy will attempt to take Kronos. It is 3rd Company’s duty to ensure that does not happen. I will accompany 5th Company planetward.’

  ‘You will stay here as well,’ said Proconsul Ostorius, addressing his Coadjutor. Aquilius nodded his head solemnly. ‘You will be in charge of coordinating the station’s defence, deferring to brother Captain Sulinus’s original tactics.’

  ‘No,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘Aquilius will accompany us down onto the planet’s surface. You will remain here to oversee the Kronos’s defence, Proconsul.’

  ‘My lord?’ said Ostorius. His face remained stoic, but Aquilius could see the tension around his eyes.

  ‘You will remain here, Proconsul.’

  ‘My lord, I must protest,’ said Ostorius. Aquilius could see that he was struggling to maintain his composure. ‘I am the Proconsul of Boros Prime. It is my place to fight on the front line, and to be seen doing so.’

  ‘How many soldiers of your world do you know by name, Proconsul?’ said the Chapter Master.

  ‘What?’ said Ostorius. ‘I do not see–’

  ‘How many?’

  Ostorius fell silent.

  ‘I have read the reports,’ said the Chapter Master, his voice softening. ‘The men of Boros know Aquilius. They will follow him. I am not saying that they would not follow you, but he knows them better. It will do the defenders of this world good to know that the star fort is being held by their Proconsul. As long as Kronos holds, so too will their morale. Your Coadjutor will descend to the surface, and will marshal the Imperial Guard and PDF regiments there. He will do you proud.’

  Ostorius was silent for a moment, glaring at the Chapter Master. Then, as if remembering himself, his lowered his gaze.

  ‘I am a soldier, not an administrator,’ he said at last. ‘I have never had any desire to be more than that. I understand Astartes, but of these unaugmented men of Boros, its Guardsmen, its officials, I know little. I cannot relate to their short lives, nor their fears and mundane concerns. I know that once I was the same as them, but I can remember little of that time. It is as if they are a breed apart.’ He snorted. ‘Whereas in truth it is we who are the breed apart, are we not?’

  ‘Did you never think that perhaps it was to learn empathy for these people that I posted you here? They share our blood,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘They are as important, nay, more important than we. We exist merely to protect them. They are our reason for being. We are warriors, yes, but we must be more than that, Ostorius.’

  The Proconsul hung his head.

  ‘Aquilius understands them better than I,’ he said, finally. ‘It is right for him to lead them upon Boros Prime. Forgive me, Chapter Master, I realise that I have performed my duties here poorly.’

  Aquilius stared at Ostorius in surprise. Never would he have expected the taciturn veteran to speak so openly of his own shortcomings, and despite himself he felt a sudden devotion to him.

  ‘There is nothing to forgive, Proconsul,’ said the Chapter Master.
‘Hold Kronos. Make the enemy bleed as they try to take it.’

  ‘On my honour, my lord,’ said Ostorius, dropping to one knee before his Chapter Master.

  ‘They’ve bypassed Kronos, and will be hitting the planet in minutes,’ said Chapter Master Valens. ‘Once they are established on the ground, we will not beat them. All we will be able to do is stall them.’

  ‘There are close to five billion trained Guardsmen on Boros Prime, my lord,’ said Aquilius. ‘We will grind them into the dust.’

  ‘They are Chaos Space Marines, Aquilius,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘And there might be as many as fifteen thousand of them. Even by conservative estimates, there will be at least five, six thousand. Imagine it. That is the same as five or six loyal Chapters descending in their entirety upon one world. Nothing could stand against that – not five billion Guardsmen, not even ten. We need Astartes to fight them, and we ourselves number less than three hundred.’

  Aquilius dropped his gaze, accepting the truth in the Chapter Master’s words.

  ‘Our only hope is in identifying and nullifying whatever it is that has shut down the Boros Gate,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘With that veil removed, the Adeptus Praeses could make transference instantly, and we would crush these traitors. Ensuring that comes to pass is our only hope here now. We hold until such a time as that goal is achieved.’

  ‘Are you any closer to identifying the source that shrouds the Boros Gate, Epistolary Liventius?’ said Ostorius.

  ‘My attempts are being thwarted, Proconsul,’ said Liventius, shaking his head. ‘There is a powerful warp presence working actively against me. One of the traitorous Apostates, I would presume. His psychic defences are staggeringly powerful.’

  ‘What help do you need?’ said Chapter Master Valens.

  ‘Were I to have a circle of psykers at my disposal, working together, it might help me breach the Apostate’s defences.’

  ‘Do it,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘Gather whoever you need – Navigators, astropaths, sanctioned psykers. Find the source, Liventius. The future of the Boros Gate depends upon it. Now come, my brothers. Let us take the fight to the enemy.’