Blades of Damocles

by Phil Kelly

  ‘It’ll heal,’ said Sicarius. ‘Just get on with it.’

  Denturis had laid aside his weapons to saw a lower leg from one of the fallen Space Marines with his combat knife. Chainswords were incredibly destructive weapons, designed to chew through flesh and bone in the blink of an eye. They were devised to mutilate and butcher, and made poor surgeon’s tools even in the hands of a skilled bladesman.

  ‘Colnid,’ said Denturis, wiping the worst of the black gunk from the salvaged leg’s knee joint and offering it to his squad mate. ‘It’s the right shape, at least. Maybe bind it on? It might take some of the weight.’

  Colnid smiled up at his battle-brother’s optimism. ‘Thank you, Denturis. I’ll splint it on. And use this as a walking stick if I have to,’ he said, motioning to his chainsword. ‘Better the cane than the crutch, remember? If it’s good enough for old Uncle Rytricus…’

  ‘…then it’s a rare thing indeed,’ finished Denturis with a chuckle. He offered Colnid a hand up, pulling his brother upright. ‘Airborne, the leg won’t matter so much,’ he continued, ‘though the landing is going to hurt.’

  ‘But we can’t get airborne,’ said Ionsian, stern and statue-like as he stood on guard, eyes fixed on the horizon. ‘We couldn’t fill an altar chalice with our fuel reserves, even if we pooled everything we have left.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Kaetoros. He was prising armour plates from the jump packs of the facsimile Assault Marines, laying them around himself in a neat circle. Veletan was examining each in turn, hurling some away, but leaving the rest in place. Kaetoros dipped a blackened finger into a jump pack’s fuel reservoir and took it back out, sniffing the droplet of liquid that clung to his finger and even putting a tiny amount on his tongue. His face, already taut and disfigured, twisted further.

  ‘Promethium. Or close enough. Tastes… a little cleaner, in fact.’

  ‘We cannot use the wargear of the enemy!’ protested Magros. ‘It’s heresy. Out of the question. In all my twenty-eight years as an Ultramarine I’ve never…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Sicarius. ‘Laudable xenophobia, Magros. And quite correct. We will not be using tainted alien technology as a substitute for the wargear blessed by our own Techmarines.’

  There was an awkward silence. Many of the Ultramarines were running on fumes, their battleplate severely compromised and their ammunition stores all but dry after the intensity of the invasion thus far. Golotan and Kaetoros were especially in dire need of re-supply. The former had taken a pulse bomb explosion to the chest, his plate shot through with a tracery of cracks that would betray him at the first true impact, whilst the latter was scorched to the point that most of his armour’s outer layer had charred away.

  ‘Actually,’ said Veletan, ‘I’m running some tests, and… well, it appears that this is Imperial wargear. Specifically, the battleplate of the Third and Sixth companies. It’s been tampered with, but it’s still functional. Better than functional. Much of it is in prime condition.’

  ‘Third and Sixth,’ said Numitor. ‘We fought alongside them on Vespertine, on the other side of the Damocles Gulf. Could the tau have stripped those we left behind in order to make their simulations as realistic as possible?’

  ‘Theoretically,’ said Veletan. ‘Likely, in fact. In an active war zone our Apothecaries would have recovered the fallen’s progenoid glands and little else. There’s every reason why the tau would seek to understand and even replicate Imperial war materiel.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ said Magros. ‘To defile our sacred wargear, using it to armour some vat-grown approximation of an Adeptus Astartes, that’s bad enough. But then to set them against us? It beggars belief.’

  ‘From a certain scientific point of view,’ said Veletan, ‘it makes a lot of sense. Know thine enemy.’

  Magros strode up to Veletan and grabbed him by the gorget, yanking him to his feet. ‘I cannot believe you said that, Veletan,’ he said. ‘You who claim to understand the Codex inside and out. Explain to me how defiling the dead makes a lot of sense.’

  Veletan broke Magros’ grip with a quick shrug of his forearms. ‘You are a slave to sentiment as ever,’ he said, his tone flat. ‘The Codex is based on logic, not emotion. Maybe you can train with the Scouts for another twenty-eight years, if they’ll let you back in.’

  Magros bared his teeth in a grimace at Veletan’s self-righteous tone. Numitor stepped forward and interceded, placing his powered gauntlet on the warrior’s pauldron with a loud clang.

  ‘Come on, brothers,’ he said. ‘You are both right. We resupply here, we claim that which is the Chapter’s property. Better we use this wargear than carry it, further harming our cause, or leave it here for xenos drones to pick over.’

  ‘We need the fuel, Magros,’ added Denturis.

  ‘Those with the wit to adapt soon take wing,’ continued Veletan. ‘As the Codex teaches us.’

  Numitor detached his own damaged pauldron and salvaged an intact equivalent, mag-clamps thunking as he broke it free from the rest of its battleplate. ‘Kaetoros, spare Magros the last of your flamer fuel if you think you can repurpose the promethium analogue. I could use a full tank and a field repair, and I’m not the only one. Golotan is about to fall apart entirely.’

  Golotan cocked his head but said nothing, wise enough to know that Numitor’s change of subject was intended to diffuse a dangerous situation.

  ‘Once we have completed our kill strike and returned to the heart of the operation,’ continued Numitor, ‘we’ll ensure the battleplate we take, the promethium we siphon, and even the bolt rounds left in our magazines are fully blessed and reconsecrated. Until then, Brother Magros, we do what we were born to do. Survive, and wage war. In the name of Macragge and the Emperor.’

  Magros stood silent for a moment before looking away and walking over to join Ionsian on watch. The rest of the Eighth began to quickly and efficiently strip away battleplate and siphon fuel from the jump packs of their simulacrum assailants.

  Within a few minutes both squads were refuelled, their armour mismatched but whole once more and their ammunition supplies full twice over.

  Numitor noticed that Kaetoros had not replaced a single plate of his scorched black ceramite. The flamer specialist was standing with arms crossed, scowling at his battle-brothers as they went about their work. Numitor caught Sicarius’ eye, making the question mark gesture of Talassarian sea-cant. Sicarius gave a curt nod and strode over to Kaetoros.

  ‘Well?’ asked Sicarius as the others completed their resupply one by one.

  ‘I’ll not join the corpse-harvest, if it’s all the same,’ came the reply. ‘I prefer to wear my scars with pride.’

  Swiftly, the Ultramarine turned to meet Sicarius’ gaze. There was a fire in his eyes that took even Numitor aback for a moment.

  ‘They help me remember,’ said Kaetoros darkly.

  Sicarius, Numitor and Antelion jogged at pace across the dunes of the fake Vespertine, their squads in close formation behind them. They moved with fluid grace despite their size, for the machine-spirits of their wargear had been appeased – shattered battleplate had been stripped away and replaced, fuel cells replenished and weapons reloaded. Even Sicarius had found a spoiled plasma cartridge that he had managed to coax back into life as a replacement for his near-spent original. Galvanised by their success, the Ultramarines were making good speed. Guns twitched upwards at every new shadow on the horizon.

  Sicarius was too stubborn to replace his helm, but Numitor, now constantly listening for the whoosh of incoming missiles, had donned his, the better to keep a vigil. He watched his visor’s readouts for the slightest ghost of an electronic signature. After the close encounter with the doppelganger Space Marines, he was not feeling quite as invulnerable as usual.

  A quick exchange between the sergeants had determined their best chance of making progress was to keep moving. With enemy weapons
scientists sending ever larger and deadlier warsuits their way, they had no real choice. They were trusting in Veletan’s auspex to keep them on course as they hustled from ruin to ruin.

  Before the hour was out Numitor’s visor started portraying anomalies at the edge of its scrying range. The readings up ahead fuzzed, crackling and shorting out whenever he looked directly into the distance.

  ‘Veletan, are you getting this?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant Numitor,’ replied the logistician. ‘Auspex anomalies, very much like those I detected in the jungle. It could be the perimeter of this testing zone, or simply interference from the electronic countermeasures of the stealth warsuit.’

  ‘It’s the perimeter,’ said Sicarius. He shot Numitor a black look before raising his plasma pistol and letting fly a shot, a sphere of incandescent light hurtling into the distance before detonating with a crack against nothing at all. The impact left a scorch mark hanging in the air, holographic projections shorting around its periphery where the electromagnetic charge of the plasma had burned out circuitry. ‘See? Antelion, get Natoros up here and take out the perimeter wall. The sooner we’re free of this place, the better. We should be back in the war effort proper by now, not skulking around like rats in some xenos laboratory.’

  Antelion motioned his meltagunner forward, and Natoros aimed his weapon at the weakness in the wall that Sicarius had made with his plasma pistol. The meltagun hissed as it sent a column of superheated air to burn a hole through the hyperdense plastic of the periphery wall. The stink of burning polymers and bubbling circuitry filling the air once more.

  A thick shaft of light streamed through. Numitor stepped forwards into the unknown, photolenses dimming to dark crimson.

  A vast swathe of wasteland stretched out around Gel’bryn City. It was majestic, thought Numitor – for an alien world, at least.

  The edge of the earth caste complex was a sloping lip running around the circumference of the testing facility. Beyond it was a sharp cliff of ivory plummeting down to a sea of indigo wilderness. The middle distance was dotted with sparkling lakes and the swells of small mountains. On the horizon was a vast, snow-capped peak with a series of sheer faces that looked all but impossible to climb, even for a Space Marine. Perhaps their quarry would flee there, thought the sergeant, and give him a chance to find out.

  Numitor shook his head. No doubt they would find the xenos commander they sought languishing in a med-bay rather than ready for war in his crimson warsuit, and the glorious duel he hoped for would be disappointingly brief. Right now, however, he would settle for a victory of any kind. The sting of failure, of the loss of his brethren, still lingered. This was not the Ultramarines’ way of war. The Eighth were far from the teachings of the Codex Astartes, and getting further away with every passing hour.

  At maximum zoom, he could see the target they were heading for – a cluster of tall hexagonal buildings, the vague heat-haze shimmer of energy discharge blurring around them. The out-city command headquarters, with any luck. It correlated with their headings, despite looking much like a dozen smaller xenos structures dotted around Gel’bryn’s outskirts.

  The magnitude of the journey ahead through enemy territory was daunting, even to one of the Eighth Company. They had lost too many battle-brothers already. But Captain Atheus had made his feelings more than clear. Only by killing the red-suited xenos warlord and bringing back his head could they make amends for their earlier mistakes.

  ‘I note we’re still more than a hundred miles from our destination,’ said Kaetoros dully.

  ‘We’ve refuelled, haven’t we?’ replied Numitor, a shade too fast. ‘Why, are you tiring?’

  ‘Tiring of unnecessary risks, perhaps. We’re out on a limb here, with no armoured support or air cover to back us up. We’ve lost Austos, Dalaton and Endrion, good men all. Warriors I fought with, trained with…’ he paused, head bowed, ‘…considered friends for over twelve years. As for your squad? Halved in the space of a day.’ Kaetoros swept an arm back at the Ultramarines emerging from the complex behind. ‘Antelion’s? Shattered by that cursed artillery machine in the jungle. Until we can get our machine-spirits exorcised and our vox restored, the chances of their gene-seed being recovered are slim to none. Face it, Numitor. They are lost to us, and likely lost to the Chapter.’

  Numitor said nothing, silenced by the brutal honesty of Kaetoros’ summation.

  ‘Such is the nature of war,’ said Sicarius, his tone sepulchral. ‘Such is the fate of us all, sooner or later.’

  Distant explosions thumped, way back in the heart of the city. There was a faint scream of tortured metal on the edge of hearing, the last protestation of a collapsing building. Gel’bryn was taking a hammering from Imperial and tau alike.

  Numitor’s great pauldron-clad shoulders slumped. Kaetoros had a point. The idea of fighting in a purely reactive fashion still made him cringe, but it galled him to think of the lives he had lost in so short a space of time. Other companies, other Chapters, were still back there, fighting to the death whilst Squads Numitor and Sicarius got further and further away from the front.

  ‘And what have we gained in exchange for these grievous losses, sergeant?’ continued Kaetoros. ‘A few dozen miles made towards an uncertain objective? A few gallons of xenos-tainted promethium?’

  ‘We have knowledge,’ said Veletan.

  ‘Priceless, if put to good use,’ said Duolor.

  ‘But they have knowledge of us in turn,’ countered Kaetoros. ‘Far more detailed and comprehensive than ours, if that was truly a wartech facility – technical data likely to be broadcast across the entire tau empire.’

  ‘A distinct possibility,’ muttered Magros, ‘And with the Hammers of Dorn employing the same manoeuvres they always use, they’ll be learning our tactics fast.’

  ‘Those warsuits we fought, in the jungle,’ said Aordus, ‘the big ones. They weren’t detailed in the vox-brief, but we took them down nonetheless. There’s every chance we’ve figured out how to beat their cutting edge war machines, their secret weapons, before they were even sanctioned for deployment.’

  ‘What if they aren’t deployed at all? If they were just prototypes?’ said Kaetoros. ‘The tau are cunning. They’re no Hammers, they won’t play the same trick twice. If they practice puppet wars even against their allies, Emperor only knows how much veritas they hold on their foes.’

  ‘A good idea to head for their command posts, then,’ said Glavius. ‘We’d be wasted in a block-by-block war of attrition anyway. Leave that sort of warfare to the Astra Militarum. We take out their high command, and all their precious knowledge isn’t nearly so useful.’

  ‘My thanks, Glavius,’ said Numitor. ‘That was my reasoning.’

  ‘Let us make a start, then,’ said Colnid, tightening the bolter straps that held his prosthetic leg in place. ‘The xenos war leaders won’t remain wrong-footed for long.’

  Denturis gave a snort, glancing at his squad-mate’s prosthesis. Colnid bared his teeth in a smile that was as much threat as it was camaraderie.

  ‘Aye,’ said Numitor. ‘You are right, Colnid.’ He turned to see the rest of their composite group gathered around him, several of Sicarius’ squad standing with the tips of their boots over the ledge. The sheer drop below would have been dizzying to lesser warriors. With their jump packs replenished, the Assault Marines could make a controlled descent just fine, but there was no way that Antelion’s squad could make it.

  ‘Sergeant Antelion…’

  ‘I know. We must part here. Thanks to that xenos ghost-machine, we will have to send a flakk missile up as a signal the next time an Imperial gunship squadron passes close by. With luck they will retrieve us.’

  Antelion slung his bolter, motioning to his heavy weapons trooper to cover the skies. ‘Yours is a worthy cause, Sergeant Numitor. I shall put in a good word for you to Captain Atheus. Assuming our request for transpo
rt is granted, we shall rejoin you as soon as possible.’

  He came to stand on the cliff’s edge, standing bolt upright in front of Numitor and making the sign of the aquila.

  ‘Until then. Emperor be with you, Jorus Numitor.’

  ‘And with you, sergeant. Farewell.’

  Nearby, Sicarius blasted from the edge of the drop without a word, his squad close behind. Diplomatic as ever, thought Numitor. The backwash of heat buffeted Numitor and Antelion, but the sergeants held their ground, watching the assault squad descend. Its passage was marked by a twin trail of foul-smelling smoke from Magros’ flamer-fuelled jump pack. Easy enough to follow.

  ‘Never mind Sicarius,’ said Numitor. ‘He more than makes up for it with raw talent.’

  ‘That is one way of looking at it,’ said Antelion.

  ‘Ha. Onward, then,’ said Numitor, turning to his squad. ‘Same heading. We have work to do, and I’m damned if I will let Sicarius get there first.’

  The Dal’ythan gas cloud bathed the ruins of Gel’bryn City in wan blue light. It swirled and sparkled in the night sky – beauty incarnate to a poet, and a source of boundless energy to a pioneer. To the hunters of the Ultramarines Tenth Company, it was a nuisance that could get them all killed.

  Five strong-limbed Scouts swung from hand-hold to hand-hold under the elegant arch of a transmotive sweep, huffs of exertion the only noise as they slowly made their way over the shattered warscape below. Six and a half miles they had come from the dropsite, all without touching the ground. To make their way across open terrain would mean being spotted by a patrol drone, or worse, a pilot caste squadron on the prowl. Death would follow soon after, merciless and sudden.

  Three nights they had searched. Whenever the low purr of engines or the flicker of a multi-spectral scanner alerted them to an airborne tau patrol, they had hung still, muscles burning to the point of numbness, and waited for the danger to pass. Chameleoline fatigues blurred their outlines, baffling the visual spectrum, and the machine-spirits of their wargear were rendered dormant so as not to betray their presence to enemy auspexes. The Scouts in turn had scanned the rubble for the blue armour of their fallen brothers. They had found no few corpses, and they had marked every one for later recovery by the Chapter’s Apothecaries. Thus far, none of them had been the cadaver they searched for, the find that would allow them to turn back for the dropsite, exhausted but successful.