The scarabs, most no larger than the palm of a hand, some so small as to be almost invisible, skittered across every surface of the Stormbird’s interior, their tiny silver legs and mandibles clicking. They flowed like a tide up the legs of the Word Bearers locked into the harnesses nearest the doorway and burrowed into their thick ceramite plates. One warrior screamed as he was covered from head to toe, the mechanical insects crawling up over the lip of his breastplate and down the inside of his armour, tunnelling into his flesh. The Word Bearer threw his restraint harness clear and rose to his feet, slapping and scratching at his armour. Marduk saw a bulge of scarabs beneath the skin of the warrior’s face. He saw one of the tiny creatures emerge, its silver carapace slick with blood, burrowing out through his left eye socket.
The warrior turned around on the spot, grimacing, slapping and tearing at his own skin. As the Stormbird’s angle of ascent steepened, he lost his footing and was sucked out of the gaping hole in the shuttle’s hull.
‘Flamers!’ roared Kol Badar, and controlled bursts of promethium bathed the interior of the Stormbird. Scarabs squealed as they were consumed, and within a minute, the majority of the tiny constructs were gone.
The Stormbird continued to rise, leaving the chittering cloud behind.
Gripping onto guide rails tightly, Marduk moved to the gaping hole where the assault ramp had been torn away and leant out into the deafening wind, studying the lay of the land below. The full spectacle of the xenos’ arrival could be seen as the Stormbird rose above the city.
Thousands of skeletal warriors were marching through the streets below, moving in perfect phalanxes. Tens of thousands of Guardsmen flooded the streets, fleeing before them. As the Stormbird pulled higher, Marduk could see hundreds of the black-sided prisms dotted all over the city, and even more xenos constructs were marching from them onto the streets with every passing minute.
As the Stormbird gained altitude, he saw a Reaver Titan of Legio Vulturus surrounded by six of the monoliths. The fire-blackened forms of two Warhounds lay twitching in smoking heaps nearby, buildings crushed beneath their carcasses. Arcs of energy struck the Reaver repeatedly. It brought one of the pyramids down with a concentrated burst of missiles launched from the pod upon its shoulders. Another was swatted aside by the Reaver’s immense chainfist, the blow tearing the alien prism in half and sending it smashing into a fortified tower, bringing it crashing down. But even the mighty Reaver could not last against the monoliths, and one by one its flickering void shields were brought down by the relentless barrage it was sustaining from all sides. Like a cornered beast, it turned one way and another, seeking escape. It howled its fury as it came under direct assault again, arcs of green electricity ripping one arm away and tearing into its black carapace. It was finally brought down, and its ululating death cry rang out across the city.
Marduk whistled through his teeth as he witnessed the death of the ancient engine.
Reports flooded in. All across Boros Prime, the xenos were making their presence known. Ekodas’s order came through, ordering all Hosts to evacuate immediately.
The planet belonged to the xenos.
In the centre of the square below, unseen by mortal eyes, the thick cloud of metal scarabs was swarming into an ever denser, impenetrable cloud, hovering just metres above the scorched stonework. Robotic warriors formed up in precise ranks around this violently writhing shoal of mechanised insects. These warriors were larger and more heavily armoured than the other deathly automatons, and they clutched glaive-like weapons in their skeletal hands, their blades formed of flickering green light
The scarabs started to latch onto each other, barbed legs and mandibles locking together, and a vaguely humanoid shape began to take form. Insectoid bodies seemed to melt as if under an intense heat, their bodies turning to molten metal as they blurred together, sacrificing their individual forms to create something altogether more terrible.
Ghostly green light began to burn within hollow eyes sockets. Coldly, the ancient being known as the Undying One turned to watch the Word Bearers retreat before it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘Look at the size of it,’ exclaimed Sabtec. The champion of the exalted 13th Coterie stood next to Marduk, peering out of the port-side window of the Stormbird’s cockpit.
The surface of Boros Prime was receding away below them as the heavy assault shuttle hurtled up through the tortured planet’s atmosphere, angling towards the Infidus Diabolus, which was on an intercept path with them in orbit above. They were three thousand kilometres from the ground and rising steadily, and from their vantage point they were afforded a view across the immense, crescent-shaped vessel of the enemy xenos-constructs.
It was truly massive, larger than any ship that Marduk had ever laid eyes on. It rivalled the bulk of a Darkstar fortress. Having witnessed the effectiveness of the enemy’s weapons upon the ground, the thought of what this titanic vessel might be capable of was horrifying. Marduk prayed to the Weaver of the Fates that they were out of range of whatever weapon systems it might have at its disposal.
Blinding pillars of light beamed from the ship’s underside down onto the city below, deploying its inhuman armies across the city in a spread of more than fifteen kilometres. Marduk shook his head in wonder. Less than ten minutes after first appearing in the upper atmosphere, the enemy had deployed tens of thousands of its troops and established complete dominion within the city below. Not even Astartes were able to deploy in such force at a speed to match that feat.
‘How did they make translocation?’ growled Kol Badar, removing his heavy, quad-tusked helmet. ‘Has your precious Nexus Arrangement failed? Are the gates to the warp open?’
Marduk’s eyelids flickered as he reached out with his soul-spirit. His entire body jolted a moment later as he slammed back into his body.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The device remains effective. Nothing could have entered the system through the æther.’
‘Well, it came from somewhere,’ said Kol Badar.
‘Perhaps it does not need the warp at all,’ commented Sabtec.
Marduk shrugged.
The Word Bearers continued to study the enemy ship, their silence broken only by the crackling hiss of scanners, and the guttural growls and mechanical wheezing of the piloting servitors hardwired into the controls of the shuttle.
They were almost on a level with the xenos vessel, separated now by the three hundred kilometres of curved space. From this angle they could see three black-sided pyramids rising from the rear of the ship’s crescent shape. Marduk judged them to be its command decks, and it was the largest of these that attracted his interest. He narrowed his eyes, and nodded his head slowly.
‘I have seen this ship before,’ said Marduk.
‘What? Where?’ said Kol Badar.
‘On Tanakreg,’ said Marduk.
‘I do not recall seeing any such thing,’ said the Coryphaus.
‘That pyramid,’ said Marduk, stabbing a finger onto the transparent, ice-cold surface of the port window. ‘We have been inside it, Kol Badar.’
The Coryphaus nodded slowly, realisation dawning.
‘Only its tip was exposed,’ said Kol Badar. ‘The rest of the ship was hidden beneath the ocean floor.’
‘The gods alone know how long it was buried there,’ said Marduk. The roar of the main drive engines subsided marginally, and stabilising jets kicked in, adjusting the Stormbird’s angle of ascent.
‘We’ve broken atmosphere,’ confirmed Sabtec with a glance at the hissing display screens. As the shuttle came to a new heading, and the crescent shape of the xenos ship disappeared from view behind them. Ahead of them, just appearing over the red-tinged curvature of the world, they could make out the dark shape of the Infidus Diabolus, ploughing to meet them.
A veined blister in the ceiling began to blink.
‘Transmission,’ said Kol Badar, keying a sequence of buttons with the bladed tips of his power talons, his touch surprisingly delicate. ‘It is
from the Crucius Maledictus.’
‘Ekodas,’ said Marduk. ‘Ignore it.’
‘How many of our brothers made it off the ground?’ asked Sabtec.
‘Not enough,’ said Marduk.
Half a dozen assault shuttles had already docked as Marduk’s Stormbird passed through the shimmering integrity field and entered one of the lower launch bays of the Infidus Diabolus. The deck was a hive of activity, with black-clad overseers and slave-gangs hurrying to attend to the newly arrived craft. Tracked crawlers ground across the floor, loaded high with fresh ammunition and fuel cells. Limping mecha-organics shrouded in black robes wafted incense, and hunched chirumeks attended to the wounded.
As the landing gear of the Stormbird touched down, Marduk marched from the shuttle, attended by his Coryphaus and a bodyguard of Anointed. He saw the burly figure of First Acolyte Ashkanez emerging from a nearby smoking Thunderhawk, Burias and Khalaxis flanking him. Marduk sneered, shaking his head.
Seeing him, the First Acolyte angled his march to meet him.
‘I have had contact from Grand Apostle Ekodas,’ said the First Acolyte by way of greeting. Marduk did not slow his pace, forcing Ashkanez to fall into step beside him. ‘Fresh orders. We are to form up with the rest of the fleet and fall back out of range of the xenos ship. If it is Boros Prime that they want, then let them have it.’
‘It is not the planet they want,’ said Marduk. ‘It is the Nexus.’
Six slab-sided necron monoliths had formed a perfectly equidistant perimeter around Victory Square. Thousands of gleaming, skeletal warriors stood in serried, outward-facing ranks between these structures, silent sentinels that guarded all routes leading to the square. They stood in perfect, deathly stillness. If it was their master’s wish, they would stand there for all eternity. They existed solely to serve, any semblance of will long having eroded to nothingness within the cold, lifeless shell of their bodies. Formations of destroyers patrolled the area, gliding soundlessly in perfectly coordinated patterns over the heads of the phalanxes below.
The being referred to in the ancient texts of the Word Bearers as the Undying One was positioned centrally within the square, the beaming light from its tomb ship overhead reflecting sharply off its gleaming, silver skeleton. Alone amongst its undying legions, it moved with grace and suppleness as it stretched its long, slender limbs. Alone amongst its kind, it retained some semblance of its former self, from a time long past, before the rise of man or eldar, when it had been a creature of flesh and blood.
From the waist up the ancient, hate-filled being was humanoid, a deathly parody of what it had resembled in life. From the waist down, however, its body was akin to one of the great tomb spyders that tended the undying legion across the emptiness of passing millennia. The Undying One’s curving spine ran along the top of its insectoid lower body, which was covered in a series of protective armour plates of gleaming black, their smooth surfaces inscribed with intricate geometry. A dozen slender, arachnoid legs hung beneath its bulky dark silver abdomen, the long, multi-jointed limbs narrowing to slender blade-points.
A reflective obsidian breastplate had formed across the Undying One’s thin, cadaverous chest. Upon this lustrous plate were fine, golden lines representing a sun and its life-giving rays. It wore a circlet of gold upon its silver skull, a regal crown of rulership that seemed to burn with the contained power of an enslaved sun. A death shroud billowed lazily around it, as if waving gently in an undersea current, the sheer material glistening with iridescence.
The ancient being’s limbs were inscribed with arcane geometry and hieroglyphs, and it stretched its arms upwards, long, skeletal fingers unfurling. In response, the Undying One’s immortal guardians began to emit a deep, reverberant note, a sound at once mournful and hollow.
A swirling wind picked up, and dust and ash eddied around the Undying One. Its death shroud was unaffected, wafting languidly in the air around it.
As the low bass note continued unabated, darkness descended over the square. The glowing eyes of the Undying One and its minions burned more fiercely in the deepening shadow. Green light spilled from the Undying One’s underbelly, throwing the ancient being’s body into silhouette.
Rolling its deathly head back, the terrifying being began to emit an unnatural shriek, making the air visibly vibrate. A shiver seemed to ripple out across the shadowed square, and filled with diabolic impulse, the wailing cry lifted up into the heavens, reaching out in all directions. Subtle vibrations were sent out like a fine mesh, and deep within the bowels of the Crucius Maledictus, the Nexus Arrangement responded to its master’s summons.
Grand Apostle Ekodas stood at the view portal, his expression unreadable.
‘Grand Apostle,’ said Kol Harekh, his Coryphaus.
‘What is it?’ Ekodas said over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off the xenos ship in the distance. Despite the distance, it still loomed impossibly large.
‘I think we may have a further problem.’
Ekodas turned towards his Coryphaus, who gestured at the Nexus Arrangement, positioned centrally within his circular throne room. The corrupted magos worked feverishly, babbling nonsensically in his monotone drone.
The Grand Apostle stepped over the brutalised body of the White Consuls fool that had somehow managed to penetrate his inner sanctum and moved towards the magos, frowning. There was something happening, but he was not immediately sure what it was.
‘The device, it looks unstable,’ said Kol Harekh.
It was barely perceptible at first, but as he narrowed his eyes, Ekodas could see what his Coryphaus meant. The Nexus Arrangement was vibrating, and that movement was becoming more violent with every passing second, as if it were fighting to free itself from the contraption the magos had used to ensnare and control it.
Ekodas felt an uncomfortable pressure tugging at his soul, and he redoubled his potent psychic defences.
The kathartes daemons crouching in the alcoves high overhead clearly felt something too, and they began screeching.
‘Are you doing this, magos?’ said Ekodas.
Darioq-Grendh’al was hissing in agitation, his mechanised limbs shuddering and his mechadendrites a blur of motion as they danced across keypads and control dials. Bloody organic data-spikes were thrust into the cognifiers. A torrent of data, both spoken and clicking binaric cant, spilled from the corrupted magos’s dead lips, a ceaseless flow of noise that Marduk found for the most part indecipherable.
‘Previously inert beta power levels surging beyond charted magnifiers, peaking at 99.224952 gamma-parsecs, expanding exponentially, outside source unknown, controlling mechanisms failing to compensate, capacitors levelling out, gone, failure, dead,’ blurted the magos, his agitated voice interspersed with frantic clicks and beeps.
‘Do something!’ Ekodas said. ‘You are losing it!’
Abruptly, one of the spinning rings that surrounded the Nexus seemed to wilt, the integrity of its shape compromised. Its rotation was thrown out as the ring became ovular in shape, and it began to list around unevenly. The light spilling from the Nexus Arrangement surged, becoming painfully bright, forcing Marduk to turn away.
A keening wail echoed through the room, making the walls and workbenches shudder and vibrate.
‘What in the gods?’ said Kol Harekh, backing away.
The rings spinning around the Nexus exploded, riven into a thousand shards that burst outwards, embedding themselves deep into the room’s walls, and into ceramite armour plates. Darioq-Grendh’al was thrown backwards, mechadendrites flailing. Two of his tentacles, still attached to control panels with umbilical data-spikes, were ripped from his spine as he was knocked backwards.
Ekodas hissed in pain as one of the shards impaled his thigh, the sliver of metal passing clean through his armour and flesh to protrude out the other side.
The housing that had been constructed to control and temper the alien device was a shattered ruin, electrical sparks leaping across its broken rings.
&nbs
p; The Nexus Arrangement hung in mid-air. It was still for a moment. It had reverted back to its seamless orb form, and its violent vibrations had died down, leaving it utterly motionless.
Then, moving at a speed that not even an Astartes could follow, it began to accelerate.
The silver orb punched its way clear of the Crucius Maledictus, moving at tremendous speed, tearing clean through metre-thick bulkheads and countless levels of decking. It ripped straight through everything in its path, causing untold damage. It rent a gaping hole through the engine decks, coming within scant centimetres of penetrating the plasma core. It cut straight through the cavernous expanse of the ship’s cavaedium, instantly killing a warrior brother of the 64th Coterie as he knelt in prayer. It ripped through the lower slave pens, killing dozens, before passing on through the sepulchres, filled with the raging screams of shackled daemon-engines. Down it plunged, until finally it tore out through the thick armour plates of the immense ship’s underhull. Over a hundred slave-proselytes were slain as they were sucked out the fist-sized hole before bulkheads slammed shut, isolating the integrity breach.
With a streaking tail of fire arcing out behind it, the silver sphere hurtled down through the atmosphere of Boros Prime like a shooting star.
Moving at such velocity, were it to strike the surface of Boros Prime it would cause a crater tens of kilometres wide, but before it struck it came to a sudden halt, its velocity arrested instantly.
Glowing with pale light, it hovered between the Undying One’s outstretched hands.
Darioq-Grendh’al went berserk, his body mutating wildly as his stress-levels increased exponentially.
‘It is mine!’ he bellowed. ‘Mine! Bring it back to me!’
New tentacles burst from his flesh, barbed and fleshy and dripping with blood. They flailed around him wildly as the corrupted magos railed against the loss of the Nexus Arrangement. Effortlessly, he flipped one of the workbenches bolted to the ground, tearing up sheets of the metal flooring in the process. He hurled it into a far wall, which collapsed beneath the sheer force.
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