by Nick Kyme
Uluvent spat into Honsou’s face. ‘Now you die!’
Honsou rammed his knee into Uluvent’s stomach, but the warrior’s grip was unbreakable. Again and again he slammed his knee upwards until at last he felt the grip on his throat loosen. He managed to free one arm and slammed the heel of his palm into Uluvent’s skull-faced helmet. Bone shattered and the bleeding wound in Uluvent’s neck was exposed, spattering Honsou’s helmet in blood.
Honsou slammed his fist into the wound, digging his fingers into Uluvent’s neck and tearing the cut wider. His foe bellowed in pain and rolled off Honsou, rising unsteadily to his feet and lurching over to his followers to retrieve another weapon with one hand pressed to the ruin of his neck.
Honsou stood, groggy and battered, and set off after Uluvent, snatching his axe up from the ground next to the groaning figure of Etassay. He ignored the Dark Prince’s champion, the warrior was beaten and probably in throes of ecstasy at the pain coursing along every nerve ending.
Honsou felt new strength in his limbs as he followed Uluvent. The warrior had torn off his shattered helmet and Honsou saw his face was hideously scarred and burned. Blood squirted from where Honsou had torn his neck wound further open, but the pain only seemed to galvanise Uluvent as he bellowed for a fresh blade.
Neck wound or no, Uluvent was still a fearsome opponent and armed with a fresh weapon, could still easily kill Honsou. Cadaras Grendel held a wide-bladed sword out towards Pashtoq Uluvent and Honsou held his breath…
Pashtoq Uluvent reached for the weapon, but at the last moment, Cadaras Grendel reversed his grip and rammed the blade into the champion’s chest. The tip of the weapon ripped out through the back of Uluvent’s armour and the mighty warrior staggered as Grendel twisted the blade deeper into his chest.
Uluvent roared in pain and spun away from Grendel, wrenching the sword from his grip and dropped to his knees. Honsou gave him no chance to recover from his shock and pain, and brought his axe down upon the warrior’s shoulder. The dark blade smashed Uluvent’s shoulder guard to splinters and clove the champion of the Blood God from collarbone to pelvis.
Stunned silence swept over the gathered crowds, for none had ever expected to see Pashtoq Uluvent brought low. Cadaras Grendel stepped from the ranks of the Blood God’s warriors to stand next to Honsou as the blazing fire of Pashtoq Uluvent’s eyes began to fade.
‘Sorry,’ said Grendel with a grin. ‘Honsou may be a mongrel half-breed, and even though I know you’ll lead me to a bloodier fight, I think he’ll lead me to one I’ll live through.’
Uluvent looked up at Honsou with hate and pain misting his vision. ‘Give… me… a blade.’
Honsou was loath to indulge the champion’s request, but knew he would need to if there were to be any shred of loyalty in the warriors he would win from Uluvent.
‘Give it to him,’ ordered Honsou.
Grendel nodded and reached down to drag the sword from the defeated champion’s chest in a froth of bright blood. He held the weapon towards Uluvent, who took the proffered sword in a slack grip.
‘And… my skull,’ gasped Uluvent with the last of his strength. ‘You… have… to take… it.’
‘My pleasure,’ said Honsou, raising his axe and honouring Pashtoq Uluvent’s last request.
WITH PASHTOQ ULUVENT’S head mounted on the spikes below Huron Blackheart’s throne, the Skull Harvest was over. Hundreds had died upon the sands of the Tyrant’s arena, but such deaths were meaningless in the grand scheme of things, serving only to feed Blackheart’s ego and amuse the Dark Gods of the warp.
At the final tally, Honsou left New Badab with close to seventeen thousand warriors sworn in blood to his cause. Pashtoq Uluvent’s warriors, and those he had won, were now Honsou’s, their banners now bearing the Iron Skull device.
Notha Etassay had survived the final battle and had willingly sworn allegiance to Honsou after hoarsely thanking him for the exquisite sensations of bone shards through the lungs.
Huron Blackheart had been true to his word, and the victor of the Skull Harvest had indeed benefited greatly from his patronage. As the Warbreed broke orbit, numerous other vessels accompanied it, gifts from the Tyrant of Badab to be used for the express purpose of dealing death to the forces of the Imperium. In addition to these vessels, the ships of the defeated champions formed up around Honsou’s flagship to form a ragtag, yet powerful, fleet of corsairs and renegades.
Battered warships, ugly bulk carriers, planetary gunboats, warp-capable system monitors and captured cruisers followed the Warbreed as it plotted a careful route through the Maelstrom, away from the domain of Huron Blackheart.
The sickly yellow orb of New Badab was swallowed in striated clouds of nebulous dust and polluted immaterial effluent vomited from the wound in real space as the fleet pulled away, and Honsou recalled the final words the mighty Tyrant had said to him. Blackheart had pointed his dark-bladed claw towards Ardaric Vaanes, Cadaras Grendel and the Newborn as they boarded the battered Stormbirds ahead of Honsou.
‘Kill them when they are of no more use to you,’ said the Tyrant. ‘Otherwise they will only betray you.’
‘They wouldn’t dare,’ Honsou had said, though a seed of doubt had been planted.
‘Always remember,’ said Huron Blackheart. ‘The strong are strongest alone.’
GAUNTLET RUN
Chris Roberson
THE RISING SUN was just cresting the mountaintops, barely visible on the eastern horizon, fat and red like an overripe fruit. The morning sunlight lanced across the alkaline flats, every stone and promontory casting long shadows that stretched over the bone-dry remains of an ancient seabed that had dried up long before man’s ancestors on Terra had first descended from the trees. Nothing lived in that dead and dry place, the only movement the dust devils kicked up by the hot winds that blew from north to south and back again. These tiny brief-lived tornadoes fed on the thin layer of dust atop the salt flats dried hard as rockcrete, with no sound to be heard but the plaintive whistle of the winds.
Then the Scout bike squadron thundered in from the west, their mighty engines deafening, the treads of their fat tyres tearing up the dry ground, sending up great plumes of dust churning in their wake.
The Imperial Fists had arrived.
The squad of bike Scouts raced east across the desert in a tight vanguard formation. At the forward point of their chevron was Veteran Sergeant Hilts, on his left flank Scouts Zatori and s’Tonan, on his right flank Scouts du Queste and Kelso.
Zatori continued to glance behind. As left flank outrider, it fell to him to watch their left rear, just as Kelso covered their right rear as right flank outrider, while s’Tonan and du Queste scanned the approaches before them, and Hilts set the pace and marked their course.
They had been running through the night, zigzagging north-east and south-east, but while they had yet to unsheathe their blades and the barrels of their bikes’ twin-linked bolters were idling and cool, this was no pleasure drive. The stakes for their current mission were dire, with the life of every human on Tunis in the balance. If they were not able to locate enemy forces – and enemy forces of a very particular kind – then they would fail in their duty, and millions would pay the price. But as the morning dawned, they had still found no sign of the enemy.
Until now.
‘Sergeant,’ Zatori voxed over the shared channel, for all the squad to hear, ‘we have picked up a tail.’
Zatori concentrated, employing the enhanced vision of the Astartes to peer farther than an unaugmented human would have dreamed possible.
‘It’s the greenskins,’ he added in confirmation. ‘And they’ve spotted us.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Veteran Sergeant Hilts voxed in reply, gunning his engine and putting on speed. He motioned forward with his massive power fist. ‘Throttle up, squad. The race is on.’
IT HAD BEEN only a few weeks since an ork space hulk had appeared in orbit above the planet Tunis without warning, spat out by a random rift in
the fabric of space itself.
The human inhabitants below had scarcely noticed the hulk overhead before countless landers began dropping from the skies, disgorging warriors and war-machines alike.
The first encounters between the human inhabitants and the ork invaders had been brutal and short. The easternmost settlements, ringing the western edge of the salt flats, had been obliterated by orks mounted on bikes, buggies, and battlewagons, gangs of greenskins addicted to movement and murder, ranging as outriders while the main force of the orks entrenched somewhere in the endless caverns and subterranean passages that burrowed under the mountains to the east. The Space Marines knew the orks had a hidden base somewhere beneath those peaks, and if the Fists were unable to locate it, they had little chance of preventing a full-scale invasion. It was only a matter of time before the main body of the ork invaders completed work on their siege-machines and attacked the human inhabitants en masse, but until that time the ork outriders would find their entertainment and excitement where they could.
A SPEED FREEK never stops, never sleeps, never hesitates. For him, there is only motion.
Rotgrim Skab knew that better than anyone. Since the moment the landers had touched down on the surface of this world, he and his crew had been up and running. As Nob of a speed freek warband of the Evil Sunz clan, it was Rotgrim’s responsibility to get the bikeboyz fired up and rolling, to pick a point on the horizon and head out, and then kill every living thing they encountered along the way.
He raced at the head of the pack, massive legs wrapped around the casing of his warbike’s supercharged engine, its throaty roar the only sound in his ears, exhaust and dust filling his flaring nostrils. Behind him ranged supercharged trucks and battlewagons, bikes and buggies, more than a dozen in all; bikeboyz of the Evil Sunz clan, decked out in leathers, chains and harnesses, with massive steel-toed boots on their feet and metal studs screwed directly into the bones of their foreheads. And all of them had red somewhere on them, whether cloth or stain, paint or spattered blood.
As leader of the warband, the Nob himself, Rotgrim was decked out in red from head to toe, with an axe in one hand and a dakkagun holstered at his side. His ride was painted blood red from grille to ground, as was only fitting – as the old ork adage went, the colour red makes things go faster. On a stanchion mounted behind him hung the banner of the Evil Sunz, a blood-red ork face grimacing from the heart of a starburst.
Rotgrim’s warband had been going on raiding forays ever since they touched down on this dry, dusty world, impatient with the preparations being carried out in the tunnels and caverns below the mountains to the east. When the word was given, the full body of the ork army would be unleashed on the humans cowering in their settlements across the desert, and when the army moved out, the Evil Sunz would be in the vanguard.
There’d be work enough for them all to do, when the word was given, but there was no point in sitting around on their thumbs, just waiting, while they could be out and moving.
When Rotgrim spotted the five humans tooling across the desert on their little bikes, he decided to have a little fun before taking them down. It had been too long since he and the rest of the boyz’d had moving targets to practice on.
IT HAD BEEN lucky for the locals that the Imperial Fists transport had been in the area at all, Scout Zatori knew. When the planetary governor of Tunis had sent out his distress call, just as the ork landers first started dropping from the sky on the far side of the planet, the Imperial Fists had been near the system, returning from a previous undertaking to the Phalanx, the Chapter’s fortress-monastery, currently at anchor at a few weeks’ distance.
Of course, the transport had been a Gladius-class frigate, carrying only a single squad of Veterans of the First Company, accompanied by a Scout squad of the Tenth. But the planetary governor had not been in any position to complain about the size of the force that responded to his desperate calls for aid.
Like the others in the bike squad commanded by Veteran Sergeant Hilts, Zatori was just a novice, not yet a full battle-brother of the Imperial Fists, lacking the black carapace that would allow him to wear and control the powered ceramite armour of a full-fledged Adeptus Astartes. But the years he had spent on the Phalanx being transformed from a boy into a post-human son of Dorn had already set him apart from the rank and file of humanity. When the landing party had quit their drop-pods and been received by the planetary governor, Zatori and his fellow Scouts had towered over the locals, who quavered in their shadows, nearly as frightened of the Astartes – Space Marine and Scout alike – as they were of the greenskins who threatened to overrun them from the east.
Aside from Chapter serfs, like those who crewed the Gladius frigate in orbit overhead, or those who served onboard the Phalanx, Zatori had had precious little dealing with normal humans these last few years. But looking into the faces of the planetary governor and those who sheltered with him in the strongholds to the west, Zatori could not help but be reminded of the first time he’d seen a Space Marine himself, on the battlefields of Eokaroe, on his far distant home of Triandr. They had seemed the legends of his ancestors given flesh, giant warrior-knights stepping from the realm of myths into the world of men.
Now, years later, Zatori was one of them, at least in the eyes of normal men and women. Though still only a Scout, he was a proud Son of Dorn all the same, an Imperial Fist. He would strike with the Emperor’s own righteous fury. That was his duty. That was his honour.
THE FIVE IMPERIAL Fists thundered east across the desert, maintaining their vanguard formation with rigid discipline. The greenskins were closing fast, coming right up behind.
In contrast with the regimented formation of the Fists, the morning sun glinting on the golden yellow and jet-black of their armour and bikes, the greenskins were a ragtag assortment of monsters, their vehicles belching exhaust and rumbling like unending death-rattles. But they were no slower, for all of that, thundering after the Fists like a fast approaching storm front.
Glancing back, Scout Zatori steeled his nerves as he saw an ork warbike roaring up behind, tantalisingly close to his own back tyre. Bike and rider were both covered in red, the colour of new-spilt arterial blood, with a banner fluttering madly from a rear-mounted stanchion, marking the rider as the warband’s leader.
The ork leader waved an axe overhead, his wide-mouthed howls lost to the wind. Then he fired a prolonged burst from the twin-linked guns forward mounted before him. Zatori might have fallen there and then if not for the fact that the warbike bucked and spun wildly out of control as soon as the poorly balanced guns were fired, sending the shots wide of the mark. As it was, the explosive shells passed so near Zatori’s left shoulder as they flew by that the Scout fancied he could feel the heat of their passage. Zatori glanced to the right, and caught a glimpse of a pair of warbuggies approaching du Queste and Kelso’s flank. On the back of each of the two-man attack vehicles stood gunners on weapons platforms, and in the brief instant that Zatori’s gaze took in the scene, he saw one of the gunners fire off a pair of rockets. As the rockets dug into the ground only metres from Kelso’s back tyre, sending up a gout of dust and rock, Zatori turned his attention back to the ground before his own wheels.
Like the rest of the Scouts, Zatori was waiting for Veteran Sergeant Hilts to give the signal. Their orders called for them to maintain close formation after first enemy contact, right up until the sergeant gave the word, and then the next stage of their mission plan would be put into motion.
Zatori just hoped he survived long enough to follow the order.
‘Squad,’ Veteran Sergeant Hilts voxed at last, ‘evasive pattern alpha.’
‘Confirmed,’ Zatori chorused back with the others, and then as one they broke formation, the left flank jinking right and the right flank jinking left, their paths twisting like DNA helixes as they gunned forward, leaving the disorderly orks in pursuit to compensate.
Now the Scouts would have to remain mobile long enough to see how the greens
kins would respond.
DUST GRITTED IN Rotgrim’s eyes, the carcasses of countless insects entombed between his teeth. He whirled his axe overhead, urging the rest of the warband to greater speeds.
A dozen metres to his right, a skorcha let loose a gout of flame at the nearest of the humans, the huge vats of promethium mounted on the rear of the buggy fuelling the heavy-duty flamethrowers operated by a pair of Evil Sunz. The flame was all but spent by the time the last flickering tongues of the stream lapped the back of one of the human riders, doing little more than scorching his armour, but it was a start, at least.
Rotgrim fired off another round from the twin-linked dakkaguns on the front of his ride, the irregular percussive sound music in his ears. The shots went wide of the human he was tailing, and Rotgrim found little satisfaction in the puffs of dust and rock kicked up where the explosive shells finally struck the ground, far ahead.
A warbiker off to Rotgrim’s left kept firing off shots from his rifle, laying down cover to keep the humans off balance while Rotgrim and the others narrowed the distance. Another warbuggy fired off a few shots with a mega-blaster, and another loosed a pair of rockets from its launcher. None of the shots, large or small, did much more than kick up dust, like Rotgrim’s had done, but the humans were forced to jag back and forth to avoid the orks’ fire, which served to slow them down.
And then, seemingly all at once, the distance had shrunk to nothing. Instead of just pursuing the humans, Rotgrim’s crew was right in with them. Close enough for melee action, for close combat weapons rather than unreliable ranged fire.
This was where the fun really started. Not in lobbing shots at distant targets, hoping against hope that something hit home. But instead in taking the fight right to the enemy, dive-bombing them head on like a bomber coming in for the kill, speed against speed, motion against motion.
An evil grin curled Rotgrim’s rubbery lips, exposing vicious, yellowed teeth, dotted with insect carcasses like sunspots on a jaundiced star. This was going to be fun.