by Paul Kearney
‘They will strike this episode from all Imperial records,’ Drake said, as though catching the current of his thoughts. ‘You know that, don’t you, my lord?’
‘Defeats must be bloody and glorious to be remembered. Throne knows I have lived through enough of them, along with the victories. I have no doubt, Drake, that your Order will lobby hard to have this affair expunged from every history slate yet to be written.’
‘I will not forget,’ Drake said gravely.
‘Nor will the Ultramarines, I can promise you that, inquisitor.’
‘If ever Fury comes to light again, and you track it down, Chapter Master, I would count it a kindness, nonetheless, if you were to let me know.’
‘I will. We will hunt it down together.’
‘There is a ship coming up on augur,’ Captain Galenus said as the cracked pict screen lit up before him. ‘A long-range patrol frigate, Dauntless class. The Imperial Navy, from the Cadia yards.’
‘Signal it,’ Calgar told him. ‘Give them our current code.’
‘That will make them think,’ Drake said. ‘An Ultramarines code, out on the edge of Cadia.’
‘I have little doubt they will investigate,’ Galenus said dryly.
Inquisitor Drake looked up at the closed, scarred face of Marneus Calgar. ‘I wonder if they picked up some hint of the hulk’s translation.’
‘Or perhaps the tech-priest did as he said he would, and sent them a vox,’ Galenus suggested.
‘My lord?’
But Calgar was not listening to them. He was thinking of the great pyre they had made, going up with a yellow roar on the battlefield, five days ago now, burning high and clean. The pyre had taken the survivors of Fifth a long time to build, and they would accept no help from the tech-priests and servitors that had flooded into the Skull Chamber in the wake of Hagnon-Cro’s victory.
The Ultramarines had gathered up the bodies of all the Viridian Consuls as well as those of their own slain, bearing them as brothers should, and had burned them together. Calgar himself had intoned the funeral rites, wishing all his brethren well on their dark road into the Emperor’s Peace.
That journey, at least, still lay ahead of him.
About the Author
Paul Kearney’s Warhammer 40,000 work comprises the short story ‘The Last Detail’ from Legends of the Space Marines and the Space Marine Battles novel Calgar‘s Siege. He studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, and has been widely published, as well as being longlisted for the British Fantasy Award. He lives and works in Port Glenone, Northern Ireland.
An extract from Slaughter at Giant’s Coffin.
From out of the darkness, they came.
The blunted prow of the battle-barge Heart of Cronus split the veil of reality first, the strange angle of her re-entry a testament to the haste with which she had been hurled into the warp. The great ship juddered and pitched to starboard with the sudden deceleration, even as her escort frigates began to emerge about her. Strike cruisers and destroyers all jostled for the clear void as they tumbled from the empyrean, proximity alarms wailing and countless helmsmen fighting to bring their vessels back under control.
It was shambolic. Frantic.
Mortal voices, strained by emotion, echoed back and forth across the open vox; each shipmaster cursed the apparent ineptitude of his peers as the fleet spread out into what might pass for an operational grouping.
Nonetheless, in the fierce light of the Miral star, their transhuman masters tried to carry themselves with as much dignity as they could muster. To anyone who might have been watching, it was a most unusual sight – that of a mighty Space Marine Chapter humbled and brought low by its foes, its brothers resisting the urge to lash out at one another in despair.
Though there had been many amongst them who had truly believed that such a day would never come, the gaze of the Great Devourer had settled upon the galaxy once more. A new wave of trannied hive fleets had crept into the Eastern Fringe under the cover of unprecedented human unrest, and with the return of the xenos had come the horrifying realisation that in fact mankind might never truly be rid of them.
And now, Sotha was no more.
Great and noble Sotha. The fortress-monastery at Mount Pharos. All gone – consumed by the foul, living tide of Hive Fleet Kraken.
But, like little more than ghostly shadows of their former selves, the Scythes of the Emperor lived on. They reeled from the death of their home world in a way that few beyond the Adeptus Astartes could ever truly appreciate.
The loss was shameful. It was inexcusable.
It had wounded them more deeply than anything else ever could.
The alert klaxons on the bridge were finally silenced as the Heart of Cronus swung into its high anchor approach. The acrid tang of burned-out circuits hung in the stagnant air, the main filtration system having been one of the many lost to the fire, and the deck plates around the command throne were sticky with retardant foam residue. Ragged and scorched crewmen, most still wearing their emergency breath-masks, blearily clung to their duties.
With a tortured grind of gears, the central blast doors slid open to reveal the strobing darkness of the corridors beyond, and Captain Thracian limped through. His proud, transhuman features were marred by an expression of utter defeat.
‘Fleet Master Zebulon is dead,’ he announced, coldly. ‘My brother-captain’s injuries were too severe. There was nothing they could do.’
Thracian’s black-and-gold power armour was scorched, and his cloak hung in tatters behind him. Each laboured stride sent dull pain shooting up his right side. As he passed the empty throne, he spared it only a single reluctant glance.
‘Shipmaster Devanti’s condition is critical, but he lives.’
The news brought a stunned silence to the human crew. It was not unexpected, but the reality of hearing it from a senior Chapter officer took it from a fearful rumour to stark, inescapable fact. Thracian wondered how many more truths would make that transition in the minutes, hours and days to come, under the circumstances.
He halted before the cracked, static-laced screens of the forward oculus. The left-hand pane was dead. So were the hololithic overlay projectors. ‘Tactical report,’ he called out to no one in particular, tying back the lank strands of his hair. ‘This is not my ship, but I would have a full appraisal of our location and disposition.’
A female serf-lieutenant with a hastily bandaged gash across her forehead stepped forwards, a data-slate in hand. Before the armoured Space Marine, she looked even more fragile and haggard, but her manner was firm.
‘We have arrived at the Miral System, my lord, as per Captain Zebulon’s original order. Seems we gave the local monitor patrols quite a scare – they weren’t expecting us, and our dispersal pattern was… a little sloppy. As a formality, they’re relaying our ident-codes to the Militarum outpost on the second planet now, for verification. We’re updating our horologs to the local mean time, although that loses us something like nine weeks, even after relativity adjustment.’
‘And how many ships made the jump with us?’
‘Information is still sketchy. We estimate no more than twenty-five vessels, based on the faint carrier signal transmissions from beyond the system-edge. About a third of them are apparently drifting without power, or have zero vox-capability after making the translation.’
Thracian furrowed his brow, prickling the superficial burns on the side of his face. ‘Only twenty-five. Less than a quarter of the Chapter fleet.’
The lieutenant nodded wearily, scrolling through the numbers. ‘Aye, lord. We had visual contact with at least another twelve before we entered the warp, but they are presently unaccounted for. It’s possible that…’ She sniffed, wiping dried blood from her top lip. ‘It’s possible that some may yet find their way here, but without long-range comms we’ll never know where the rest might end up.’
Glancing up at the crazed oculus, Thracian lowered his voice a little. ‘And what of the xenos hive ships? Could they have followed us?’
‘Highly unlikely, my lord, although we do have reports from the Dromea Bathos, the Pale Rider and the strike cruiser Atreides of continued action against trannied boarders.’ The lieutenant paused for a moment, then continued. ‘Forgive my boldness, but Brother-Codicier Spiridonas might be better able to advise you on the matter of further pursuit.’
‘Aye. Perhaps.’
A few muted cries of alarm went up across the bridge. Out beyond the viewports, two of the stricken Chapter vessels – by their markings, the Ionia and the listing, battle-scarred destroyer Light of the Pharos – had drifted too close together. Thracian watched as the Pharos collided with the other ship, its dorsal ridge tearing a hole in her flank and spilling debris and flash-frozen atmosphere into the void. Other vessels close to the impact began to pull away, their shipmasters wary of being drawn into a cascading wreckage storm.
Cursing, he returned his attention to the fragile-looking lieutenant.
‘What is your name and rank designation?’
She straightened a little, although Thracian noted that she stopped short of actually standing to attention.
‘Hannelore, my lord. Serf-lieutenant, second class.’
‘You know this ship, Lieutenant Hannelore. Take me to the Navigator chambers.’
The undercroft spaces of the Pale Rider had become a charnel house. The stench of slaughter was heavy in the air, carrying with it the acidic reek of xenos bio-weapon discharge and other, even less wholesome smells. The ship had suffered badly at the teeth and claws of the invaders, though her crew were exceedingly lucky to be counted among those who had managed to flee the death of Sotha.
It was not clean fighting. It was cramped, and chaotic, and far too many had died, for so little gain. Fatigue dragging at his limbs, Culmonios shook the blood and ragged flesh from the teeth of his chainsword before whirling around to hack into another of the scuttling beasts as it leapt for him.
‘Brother,’ came a heaving, breathless voice over the short-range vox, ‘this is Nimeon. We have them contained. Port side, compartment nine.’
Culmonios battered the creature down, wrenching the gun-analogue from its forelimbs and ramming it over and over into the thing’s screeching face. His own pistol had long since run dry. There had, simply, been too many of them.
He threw the bio-weapon aside and grabbed the trannied creature by the throat. It thrashed and snapped at him, until he broke its spine over his knee.
Hauling himself back to his feet with a wordless cry of exertion, took a splattering hit to the breastplate as he charged the last of their numbers, though the corrosive, organic projectile – whatever it was – did not pierce the ceramite. The pair of skulking creatures hissed at him as he closed the distance, trying to scramble away over the mounds of their dead kin, but Culmonios would not be denied. He slammed bodily into the first, sending it sprawling to the deck where he shattered its chitin-crested skull beneath his armoured heel.
With a bestial shriek the last creature tried to raise its weapon, but Culmonios grabbed its open jaw and sheathed his chainsword in its gullet with one savage thrust. The trannied twitched as it died, gagging on the razor-sharp teeth of the blade.
‘Culmonios, are you receiving? Unknown hostiles were reported mass–’
‘Hunter-slayers,’ he growled. His twin heartbeats thundered in his ears. ‘Forty-plus confirmed kills. This deck is cleansed.’
‘Deck seventeen cleansed, aye. Heading to your position now. Are the others still with you?’
‘Negative. They are all gone.’
He ripped the chainsword free, and let the alien corpse crash to the deck. The blade rattled disappointingly, the mechanism evidently fouled by overuse in the past few hours, but Culmonios could only stare down at the steaming bone-case of the trannied’s fallen weapon.
The damned thing had an eye. It stared back at him, the slit-pupil responding reflexively to the erratic flicker of the lumens overhead.
Disgust rose in his gorge. Disgust, and rage, and sorrow.
‘You vile, unworthy abominations,’ he muttered behind his helm visor. ‘How did your misbegotten kind ever take the home world?’
There was something in that vacant, alien gaze. Something that was not merely a weapon, not merely a tool. Culmonios gritted his teeth and, with one thumb, gouged out the eye and crushed it in the palm of his gauntlet.
He came up slowly, his hands trembling. Casting about the compartment, he took in the nightmarish scene that lay all around. A tableau of dead faces and spilled blood. Here and there, the bulky silhouette of a fallen Chapter brother. Spent bolter casings. Arcs of red splattered across the bulkheads, in some places right up to the vaulted ceiling. The deck plates were slick with gore, the remains of human and xenos alike hopelessly mingled.
It would all have to be disposed of. Ejected into the void, most likely, or scoured with flame. It was an undignified end for those Imperial citizens who had already died such a poor death.
The ventral hull zones were where the fighting had been thickest, but the short-range vox was filled with reports from his surviving battle-brothers and the frigate’s serf security teams as they drove the last xenos creatures back to the outer compartments. Culmonios gathered that the fleet – if it could be considered such – had made the jump back to real space, but the translation had not even registered upon his weary senses. For him, the past hours had been filled with naught but slaughter, and the frenzied cries of the alien attackers.
He trudged back to his most prized kill, letting his chainsword clatter to the deck as he went.
The hulking corpse of a full-grown trannied warrior lay crumpled over a handful of its lesser cousins, its spilled innards cooling, its eyes glassy and black. The beast had claimed three of his battle-brothers before he had struck it down; Gordani’s empty helm was still gripped in its claws. Culmonios knelt beside the fallen monstrosity, which in life had stood easily half as tall again as an armoured Space Marine.
‘They don’t look so big when they’re on their backs,’ came Brother Nimeon’s voice from across the compartment. Culmonios had not heard him forcing his way through the barricaded entrance, though the warrior now picked gingerly through the carnage, sweeping the lamp of his bolter left and right. ‘Oh, Holy Terra – this was another one of the refugee holds.’
Culmonios nodded solemnly. The xenos boarding parties seemed to have been drawn to the least-protected parts of the ship, like predators seeking out the weakest members of the herd.
And they had fed well. The Scythes had arrived too late.
Drawing his combat blade, Culmonios wrenched the trannied’s head up and began to saw at the corded sinews of its neck.
‘Brother, what are you doing?’ asked Nimeon.
Culmonios did not look up. A righteous fury burned in his hearts. ‘This was the greatest of them,’ he muttered. ‘It shall serve as a warning to those that follow.’
‘I do not think the xenos can be cowed by a gibbet.’
‘Who said anything about a gibbet? This is a trophy.’
With a meaty snap, he twisted the beast’s crested skull free and let the body fall away. As he rose, he hefted the crest like a shield, testing its weight. Bloody ropes of drool still hung from the creature’s slack jaws.
Nimeon removed his helm, repulsion written clearly upon his face, but Culmonios met his gaze unwaveringly.
‘They have taken everything from us, brother, and so shall I take from them as I damn well please.’ He did not bother to clean the blood from his knife, and it slid wetly back into the sheath at his hip. ‘We will have our vengeance upon the Kraken, one foul beast at a time.’
Click here to buy Slaughter at Giant’s Coffin.
For Liam Arbuthnot.
First published in Great Britain in 2017.
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jaime Martinez.
Calgar’s Fury © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Calgar’s Fury, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-646-0
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