by Various
‘But what of the other twenty-five per cent?’ Jarold enquired.
‘There is a possibility that it is a signal from a dormant power source. But it is unlikely.’
‘What sort of power source?’ Jarold pressed.
‘Like that of a dying power cell.’
‘As might be found inside a Deathwind automated weapons system. Or a Dreadnought.’
‘It is increasingly unlikely but still a slim possibility,’ Isendur persisted, not prepared to have his logic refuted. ‘If our mission is to find the source of the teleport signal I would recommend that we move on that target forthwith and ignore this weaker signum reading.’
The knowledge that there was a possibility – no matter how slim – that the signal was the last sign of a lost brother Dreadnought, whether Templar or otherwise, played on Jarold’s mind. Dreadnoughts were potent weapons of the Astartes Chapters and revered relics. An entire battleforce would willingly fight to reclaim a fallen Dreadnought brother. Only in the direst circumstances would a Space Marine commander abandon such a sacred relic to the field of battle.
To recover such a potent treasure, whatever Chapter it might belong to, would be of incalculable value to the war effort. Just one Dreadnought could help bolster the Astartes forces on one of Armageddon’s numerous war-fronts, and who knew what impact that could have in the long term on the struggle for the contested planet.
‘I respect your opinion, Brother-Techmarine, you know that. You and your brethren of the Forge have tended to me on numerous occasions, but you see only the logic of variables and algorithms. I have the benefit of experience and the wisdom of years and I disagree. We shall investigate the source of this other signal and then, when we have resolved what it is, we will press on towards our primary objective.’
‘Very well, brother,’ Isendur conceded. ‘As you wish.’
The Dreadnought turned to survey the re-ordered ranks of the Black Templars’ strike force.
‘Brothers,’ he declaimed, his voice booming over the burning battlefield, flurries of snow hissing as they melted in the licking flames of the promethium fires. ‘The word is given. In the name of the Emperor, Primarch Dorn and Lord Sigismund, move out.’
‘Is this the place?’ Jarold asked, scanning the blizzard-scoured ice valley. The ice sheet rose up before them to meet the frozen slopes of a ridge of razor-edged peaks beyond which curious green corposant flickered and danced across the sky.
‘Affirmative,’ Techmarine Isendur replied, consulting the signum in his hand once more.
The hulking black Dreadnought and the crimson-armoured Techmarine stood before a wall of blue ice as solid and as impenetrable as rockcrete.
‘So where, precisely, is the source of the signal?’
‘Six point eight-nine metres downwards. If we are to discover the source of the signal we are going to have to dig.’
‘Then we dig,’ Jarold stated bluntly.
‘Leave it to me, brother,’ Isendur said. The Techmarine signalled the waiting column. ‘Brothers Larce and Nyle,’ he said, summoning those two crusaders. Jarold understood what it was he had in mind.
Larce, flamer in hand, and Nyle, bearing his thrice-blessed meltagun, joined them before the wall of blue ice.
‘Brothers,’ Jarold said, ‘let the Emperor’s holy fire cleanse these xenos-blighted lands.’
Techmarine Isendur directing their fire, Larce and Nyle hit the glacier with everything their weapons could muster.
Initiate Tobrecan brought his bike up to join them and directed a series of searing blasts from the plasma gun mounted on the front of his machine at the glacier. When the steam and mist cleared, Brothers Larce and Nyle stepped up again, while Initiate Isen drove his attack bike forwards, Gunner Leax turning his multi-melta on the metres thick ice.
The Space Marines’ flamers and plasma weapons swiftly melted a shaft through the ice to the source of the signal Isendur had located via his signum. Steaming geysers of cloud rose from the hole in the glacier as the boiling water bubbling at the bottom of the pit re-condensed as it came into contact with the cold air.
‘Now then, Brother-Techmarine,’ Jarold said, standing at the edge of the cone-shaped shaft, ‘let us see what lies buried here.’
Using his servo-arm to assist him in his descent, Techmarine Isendur clambered into the steaming shadows of the ice pit. The rest of the strike force waited in tense anticipation to see which would be proved right; the Techmarine or the Dreadnought.
Bracing himself within the shaft Isendur looked down at the shadow still locked beneath one last remaining layer of ice.
‘You were right,’ his voice rose from the bottom of the pit. There was no hint of annoyance or praise in its tone.
‘I was right,’ the Dreadnought rumbled with righteous satisfaction.
‘Do we wake him?’ the Techmarine asked, something like awe tingeing his words, as he stared down at the statuesque creation of frost-rimed adamantium beneath him. A faint red glow pulsed weakly behind the ice, and yet as regular as a heartbeat.
‘He is a brother Space Marine.’
‘He is a Crimson Fist,’ the Techmarine testified.
‘But our brother nonetheless. So we wake him.’
He remembered…
Thunder rumbled over the ice fields and frozen, broken peaks of the Dead Lands. It was the crack and boom of heavy artillery fire. The iron-hard ground shook with the force of an earthquake, more so than it did at his own wrathful steps.
He remembered…
Rank upon rank of Space Marines, squad after squad of his fellow battle-brothers, marching against the enemy, their Chapter banners flying proudly above them. Magnificent in their regal blue power armour, their left hands blood-red – recalling the ceremony conducted at the initiation of new Chapter Masters in the former Imperial Fists Legion – their battle-consecrated boltguns cinched tight to their chest plates ready to deliver the Emperor’s ultimate justice to the enemy.
And he remembered…
The war machine. A stompa, the rank and file troops of the Armageddon PDF had called it. A mobile war-altar dedicated to the hated greenskins’ brutal heathen gods. An icon to thoughtless bloodshed and mindless destruction.
He remembered…
Marching to war across the bitter wastes, shoulder to shoulder with his battle-brothers, the ork host charging to meet them, the glacier’s surface fracturing beneath the greenskins’ advance, the freezing wind as sharp and as cold as a blade of ice slicing the air between them.
He remembered…
Faced with insurmountable odds, a new strategy had to be formed, shaped within the heat of battle.
He remembered volunteering, proud that he should be the one to bring an end to this conflict. He remembered sound and heat and light. He remembered dying a second time.
And then, amidst the clamour of battle and the cataclysmic roar of destruction, he heard a voice.
‘Brother,’ it said. ‘Awake.’
The dull red glow behind the visor of the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus helm pulsed more brightly with every word the Dreadnought spoke. Its voice was phlegmy and cracked from age and lack of use.
‘I am sorry, brother, but what did you say?’
A sound like vox-distorted coughing crackled from the ancient. Then the Dreadnought tried again.
‘You are on Armageddon, brother,’ Jarold replied. ‘You are here, within the Dead Lands.’
The coughing resumed, rose to a crescendo and then subsided at last.
‘No. When is it?’ the venerable asked. ‘My internal chronograph appears to be malfunctioning.’
Techmarine Isendur answered in terms precise to three decimal places.
The Crimson Fist was silent for several long moments.
‘How long have you been here, brother?’ Jarold dared to ask at last. ‘Since t
he conflict began?’
‘You mean to tell me that Armageddon has been a contested world all this time?’ the venerable said with something like disbelieving incomprehension.
‘Yes, since the abomination Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka fell upon this world for a second time.’
‘A second time?’
Jarold regarded the ancient suspiciously.
‘Tell me, brother, how long have you been trapped here, entombed within the ice?’
Several moments more passed before the venerable was able to speak again. ‘Fifty years, brother Templar. I have been trapped here, lost, for fifty years.’
The vehicles had been parked up and the massed force of Brother Jarold’s avenging angels had formed a circle of unbreakable armour. All were included, from the newest neophyte to the oldest initiate. The formation of the praying Space Marines served as a barricade against the biting winds that swept across the Dead Lands, stabbing at any exposed flesh with knives of ice. It affected the neophytes – Gervais, Feran, Eadig and Galan – worst, for they were yet to earn the right to wear the full power armour as worn by their brethren and their heads were exposed. But if the freezing wind caused them any discomfort they didn’t show it. Weakness of the flesh was not permitted of a Space Marine.
Brother Jarold stood on one side of the circle and opposite him loomed the Venerable Rhodomanus of the Crimson Fists.
The latter’s crimson and regal blue paintwork was in stark contrast to the predominantly black and white power armour of the Templars – although some of the older, more ornamented suits worn by those veterans among the battleforce were traced with gold and red as well.
The moaning wind whirled flurries of snow around them but over the voice of the blizzard, Brother Jarold’s booming prayers could be heard quite plainly.
‘We shall bring down His almighty wrath and fury upon the xenos and drive the greenskin from the face of this planet!’ Jarold bellowed. ‘For the Emperor and the primarch!’
‘For the Emperor and the primarch!’ his battle-brothers responded with fervent zeal.
‘For the Emperor and the primarch,’ Venerable Rhodomanus echoed.
Brother Jarold had not needed to ask the ancient whether he would deign to join the Templars on the continuation of their mission. To awaken to a world fifty years into his future and so unchanged despite the passage of time, and yet finding his brother Crimson Fists with whom he had fought shoulder to shoulder against the greenskins gone, the prospect of fighting alongside the Templars had given him a noble purpose. Here was a chance to finish what he and his brothers had started.
For what purpose could there be for a Space Marine, other than eternal service? If he were denied the right to serve Him Enthroned on Holy Terra, a Space Marine’s long life, and all the battles he had fought, everything he had achieved in His holy name would count as naught.
The Black Templars and Crimson Fists – two Chapters formed in the aftermath of the Heresy ten thousand years before – were both successor Chapters of the original Imperial Fists Legion, created from the very genetic material of the Primarch Rogal Dorn. Templar and Fist owed their very existence to the lauded Rogal Dorn, so there had never been any question as to whether Rhodomanus would join the Black Templars of the Solemnus Crusade. They were brothers-in-arms; that was all that mattered.
Brother Jarold surveyed the assembled Templars, the ancient Fist and the ice-clad vista beyond.
‘It is time,’ he said, scanning the ridge of sickle-shaped peaks on the horizon. ‘Whatever the source of the anomalous signals detected by the fleet, it lies beyond that ridge.
‘Today we show the greenskins why they should fear us. We let them see why we are fear incarnate. Today we take the fight to the enemy. Today we purge the Dead Lands of the xenos plague that blights this world.
‘Move out!’
Their act of worship concluded, with renewed steel in their hearts, shielded by the armour of their faith as much as by the ceramite of their power armour, the circle broke up as the Space Marines returned to their vehicles. With a roar of mighty engines, like the wrathful prayers of Brother Jarold himself, Ansgar’s Avengers moved out.
The force progressed slowly, so as to never leave the Dreadnoughts far behind. Brother Jarold had deployed into the heart of the Dead Lands by drop pod and the Templars had not anticipated having another ancient join them in their quest to find the source of the anomalous readings. There was no means of transporting them, other than for them to continue under their own propulsion.
But it still did not take them long to climb the icy slopes of a pass between the jagged obsidian-black peaks. Initiate-pilot Egeslic took his land speeder on ahead, to scout out what lay in wait for them on the other side of the ridge. He returned presently, guiding his speeder deftly over the ice, compensating for wind shear as he descended from the crest of the pass, and brought the vehicle to a hovering halt beside the clumping Dreadnought.
‘Brother Jarold,’ Egeslic said, ‘you should see this for yourself.’
‘That,’ said Techmarine Isendur, pointing into the heart of the crater that had been dug into the ice, ‘is the source of the anomalous readings.’
From the Space Marines’ position at the mouth of the pass, sheltered by the shadows of the looming wind-scoured ice sculptures that surmounted the ridge in impossible overhangs, Brother Jarold surveyed the rift in the ice below them.
The ork-dug crevasse was a hive of seemingly disorganised industry. Everywhere he looked he saw orks. The foul xenos covered the glacier in a thick, dense green carpet as they swarmed over the dig site, the clamour of their mining machines ringing from the ice walls around them. There were customised digging machines, and other ork vehicles had been pressed into strange service here too. Some of these machines bore banner poles, bearing the iconography that demonstrated the ork tribe’s loyalty. The sight of the Scarred Ork again – the ugly steel-cut tribal glyph bearing a rust red lightning bolt scar that bisected its crude simulacra features – filled Brother Jarold with both righteous satisfaction and indignation in equal measure.
They had found the one tribe that Jarold had hoped they would. The orks labouring within the ice pit were of the Blood Scar tribe. Truly the Emperor was smiling upon their endeavours that day.
But focusing again upon the coarse alien totem Jarold felt rage burn within him like he had not known since the moment the reconstructed warboss Morkrull Grimskar had made his cowardly escape, taking the body of the Emperor’s Champion Ansgar with him as he teleported out of the mekboy’s crumbling lab smothered within the foetid green depths of the equatorial jungle.
‘Is there a teleportation device somewhere here?’ Jarold demanded of the Techmarine, watching the waves of green corposant rolling across the underside of the thick clouds that covered the arctic valley. He had to be certain.
‘I have recalibrated the signum and fine-tuned the signal, brother,’ the Techmarine said. ‘And there is.’
Excitement pulsed through the husk of Jarold’s mortal remains locked within the life-preserving amniotic tank of the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus.
Had they really tracked down their long-sought-for quarry at last? Was the warboss here? And if he was, was Brother Ansgar with him?
Jarold gazed down into the crater again and treacherous doubt began to creep between his thoughts of righteousness revenge. But it was not the size of the ork horde that filled Brother Jarold’s mind with appalled awe and wonder but the effigy that they had virtually finished digging out of the solid ice of the glacier that had spilled between the frost-chiselled peaks into this valley like some great frozen and fractured river.
Venerable Rhodomanus saw it too. And remembered.
The war machine. An appalling amalgamation of scavenged weapons and armour, the product of unholy alien engineering and genetically pre-programmed habit, the living embodiment of ork savagery and the re
lentless desire for war.
The monster – for it was a monster – crashed across the glacier, decimating the Crimson Fists’ frontline. The Space Marines brought their armour and heavy weapons to bear but it was too little compared to the might of the monstrous god-machine that now marched to war before them.
Desperate times called for desperate measures and Rhodomanus had never known them more desperate. Something had to be done to bring about the destruction of this angry god.
And so, supported by his noble brethren Fists, he had strode forth to conquer the beast in one final act of self-sacrifice. His battle-brothers falling one by one at his side, giving their lives – all of them – that he might complete his final mission, weathering shoota, kannon, gatler and a storm of rokkits, the ancient was able to breach the stompa’s shields and place the thermal charges at its very feet.
‘The Emperor protects,’ he intoned, quietly resigned to his fate.
Then all was white noise, heat and light.
For one brief moment the ice of millennia became a torrent of liquid water again and the blazing stompa sank beneath the sudden waves. The force of the blast hurled Rhodomanus across the sky like a blazing comet and he thought he heard the Emperor calling him to serve at his side in the next world…
‘The idol lives,’ Rhodomanus breathed.
It was clear to all – and not just Techmarine Isendur’s practised eye – that the orks had finished carving the remains of the war machine from the body of the glacier and were now busy attempting to reactivate it; re-fuelling it, testing its growling motive systems and firing off bursts of random weapons-fire from its many and varied weapon emplacements.
There was a hungry roar of pistons firing and thick billows of greasy black smoke gouted from the proliferation of smoke-stacks and exhaust flues that rose from the back of the alien war idol.
‘That, I take it, is not the source of the signal we have been tracking, is it?’ Jarold quizzed the Techmarine standing beside him.