Soul Drinker

by Ben Counter

  The fist closed. Advance.

  Both flamer-bearing Sixers hurried forward and aimed the spouts of their weapons into the feed. After they had washed the feed with flame the hellgun and melta-gun guard would follow, picking off those fleeing from the firestorm.

  Suddenly a plasma blast, a great bolt of white-hot liquid fire, vomited from the feed with a brash roar, drenching the flamer troops and dissolving one in an instant. The reek of burning metal swept over Kiv, and his launcher racked a grenade to echo his revulsion.

  Kiv caught a glimpse of the attackers - a sheen of purple ceramite picked out in haloes of gunfire, the glint of jade green eyepieces, the shine of bone.

  The second tech-guard had lost half his body, dripping skeleton's arm fragmenting, ribs burned clean. He had caught sight of the attackers just as the plasma gun opened up.

  'Space Marines.' he gasped, and died.

  'Give me haywires!' yelled Klayden as bolter fire spat from the feed, punching holes through tech-guard and ringing around the shifter equipment.

  Kiv knew he was their one hope - his haywire grenades could remove the Marines' advantage of armour and auto-senses. He would shout and his launcher would shout with him, sending electromagnetic waves billowing up into the Marines, shorting their senses, locking the joints of their armour. Tech-guards were dying, one decapitated as a round punched into his throat and blew his head clean off. Rounds snicked through the edges of Kiv's flak-tabard and cracked around his ears as shrapnel spun and gunsmoke coiled in the air.

  He took aim, ready to fire a haywire grenade through the shaft entrance and into the massive purple-armoured figures crammed into the metal throat. The launcher willed his fin­ger to the trigger.

  For order. For logic. For the Omnissiah.

  A crackling shaft of arunwood speared out from the shaft and stabbed Kiv through the eye.

  IT WAS SARPEDON'S first glimpse of the enemy here - a pale-skinned and shaven-headed tech-guard, clad in red-brown quilted flak-gear, his skin punctured with wires and inter­faces. The determination on the face contrasted with the youthful features as the tech-guard slid off the force staff with a flick of Sarpedon's wrist.

  There were about a dozen tech-guard still fighting, and Sarpedon wished for the hundredth time he had a better idea of the total tech-guard numbers on the platform. A hundred? A thousand? Five thousand? How many enemies would the Soul Drinkers have to fight before they could secure their honour and their lives?

  He told himself it didn't matter. The tech-guard were just men. No more.

  Sarpedon was now in the thick of the fighting, Marines spilling out around him with bolters blazing. His own weapon fired off three rounds into the chest of the nearest guard, whose left arm fell sheared at the elbow along with the hellgun he was carrying.

  Givrillian barrelled forward into their half-bionic leader and crashed him to the floor, bolter stock slamming into the man's head. The bionic hand grabbed the sergeant's shoulder pad and began tearing handfuls out of the ceramite, deep enough to draw blood, before Givrillian drove a fist through his sternum.

  Another brother Marine dragged Givrillian off the enemy's body so Thax could get a clean shot into the backs of the tech-guard now retreating between the massive steel but­tresses. He caught one of them full on, the bolt boring right through him before spattering others with gobbets of super­heated plasma. They fell, screamed, and caught fire. The Marines now advancing through the machinery picked them off before they could even start to scream.

  Sarpedon despatched a wounded tech-guard with the butt of his staff. He was the last.

  'Secure the entry point, commander?' said Givrillian.

  Sarpedon pointed down the wide, dark metal tunnel that stretched downwards. 'No time, sergeant. Press on, remember the objective.'

  A noise vibrated through the floor like thunder from a steel sky. Flakes of rust flittered down from the juddering walls and the huge chunks of machinery began to shift. Gaps between them opened up and Sarpedon could see those cogs slowly turning.

  The machinery had activated. They were being swallowed by the offspring of 674-XU28.

  NIKROS, THE SINGLE Marine who remained of Squad Phodel, along with Apothecary Daiogan who had also survived the crash, somehow managed to find a way into the platform's secondary magazine chambers and set krak grenades to destroy the caches of macrocannon ammunition. Then their luck ran out, however. Pinned down by a siege engineer unit, Daiogan died under a hail of heavy bolter shells and Nikros was severely wounded.

  Then the magazines went up, incinerating Nikros along with everyone and everything within a two hundred-metre radius, taking a huge chunk like a bite mark out of the plat­form's surface. Several dozen tech-guard were killed as the local atmosphere depressurised, failing to get their pressure-masks on. When the bulkheads closed and the leak shut down, Nikros and Daiogan had personally accounted for almost three hundred tech-guard.

  ASSAULT-SERGEANT GRAEVUS linked up with two other units, one assault and one tactical, and threw a cordon around a huge docking emplacement that sprang from the platform's sun­ward corner. In a textbook move of which Daenyathos would have been proud, he stormed the emplacement as if it was a fortified town. Sweeping in and downwards half his troops cut their way through the tech-guard to reach the massively complex building-sized knot of wires and readouts, which contained the portion of 674-XU28's machine-spirit. Several squads of tech-guard, their weapons silenced to avoid acci­dental damage to the sacred cogitators and knowledge-conduits, attacked with bare hands.

  Graevus was a stone-cold killer with little time for such amateurish antics. He dealt with most of them personally with his power axe while Tech-Marine Lygris went to work on the link between the machine-spirit and the control systems for the Geryon.

  TELLOS'S SQUAD HAD broken through the upper surface of the platform with melta-bombs, and leapt from the rafters straight into the heart of the tech-guard prepping for combat on the vast, high-ceilinged muster deck. His squad carved out a beachhead in the shadow of the Geryon's recoil-rams, and was acting as a focal point for the assault units making it through the hull and onto the platform's muster deck.

  Tellos stood on a mound of tech-guard corpses, energy and las-fire like a halo playing around him, with Marines scram­bling up to fight beside him, firing, slicing, dying. The tech-guard fed more and more men into the maw of the killing zone he was creating - he had taken upon himself the vital task of draining the tech-guard manpower and morale while the other scattered Soul Drinker units closed in on the real prizes.

  THE MACHINERY DISGORGED Sarpedon and Squad Givrillian into the intake for the lubricant ducts. They came out halfway up the gargantuan recoil dampeners that dominated the muster deck. The metallic mandibles opened up before them and they tumbled into the slick trench of the intake, green-black lubricant sluicing over them. Brother Doshan was sucked into the yawning black oval of the intake before Givrillian dug the boots of his armour into the stained metal and halted the slide.

  Sarpedon hauled himself up so his eyes were level with the edge of the intake trench, and looked down.

  They were easily a hundred and fifty metres above the cav­ernous muster deck. From one corner billowed a great hemisphere of flame where the magazines had gone up minutes before. Smoke was thick in the air and straggling groups of tech-guard on the Geryon structure were trying to co-ordinate supporting fire. Below them the deck, parti­tioned into roofless rooms and corridors, was swarming with tech-guard streaming towards the centre.

  Towards a charnel house. Bodies lay so thick the attacking tech-guard had to clamber up a slope of their own fallen just to get into sight of the Marine position. The tactical squads who had made it this far were sending sheets of disciplined bolter drill-fire down towards the tech-guard, scattering charges so they would break uselessly against the counter­charging Assault Marines.

  Tellos was at their head, of course, his armour black with blood and his hair thick with it. It streamed down his b
are face and rained from the whirring teeth of his chainsword. In the sharp relief of his augmented senses Sarpedon watched him take down two men with one swipe, ignoring the hell-gun blast that raked channels into his armour like claw marks.

  'Voxes coming in, sir!' called Givrillian. 'Lygris reports con­tact with the spirit-link!'

  'Tell him to keep me updated. We're buying him time here.'

  'Aye, commander!'

  Lygris was good. He would know what to do.

  Every battle was tough. The star fort was tough. This was tougher by far. The Van Skorvold mutants had been deter­mined but ill-trained and of varied competence. The tech-guard, meanwhile, were quality troops equipped with some of the best weaponry the Mechanicus could forge. The star fort had been a rehearsal - this was the real fight.

  'With me!' Sarpedon called, and Squad Givrillian clam­bered out beside him as the closest tech-guard stragglers spotted them and moved to fire.

  THIS WAS WHY he had been born. This was why the Emperor had looked upon him and marked him out as a warrior, so the year-long Great Harvest of the Soul Drinkers had found him a strong and valiant youth, driven to excel, fearing not even the armoured giants who strode from their spacecraft to judge him.

  To fight. To bathe in the blood of his enemies, to know that every cut and stab and bullet fired was for the good of mankind and the glory of the Imperium.

  This was why Tellos had been born.

  They were learning fast, these tech-guard, as does anyone who must learn to survive. Their advantage was the quick-firing high-impact energy weapons and they were sending fire-teams around all sides of his makeshift position to assault from many directions at once. Tellos, like any Soul Drinker, knew the power of psychology in the thick of com­bat - he picked out one enemy front, annihilated it totally, and left the others gazing into the gaping hole in their attack. They faltered, they turned. Then they died, for turn­ing to flee is the most dangerous thing a warrior can do.

  He dived in - literally, blade-first over the heads of a tight knot of tech-guard, two of their number manhandling a bronze-chased autocannon. He hit shoulder-first, buckling one man's ribcage underneath him, chainblade lashing out at the legs of another. His other hand held his combat knife and it jabbed up beneath the jaw of one of the autocannon crew. Tellos twisted it, felt the gristly wrench as the jaw came loose, and withdrew it in a fountain of blood.

  Hot pain punched through his knife arm - a hellgun shot, thin and powerful. It went through the muscle and painkillers shot into his veins. The offending gunman was bisected with a wild upwards stroke, a novice's cut that would have left Tellos wide open to counter-thrust from any foe not shell-shocked and panicking.

  He knew they would be defeated even now, nerves in tat­ters, unable to counter the most base of attacks. Elegance and duelling had its place in war - but the need here was for butchery.

  He loved them both alike. The fine art of noble combat, and the glorious rash of righteous carnage. He had loved them both even before the ships of the Great Harvest had come to his world. It was why he had been chosen.

  Behind him his squads followed up, firing bolter shells into fleeing backs and quickly slaying anyone still close. The Tactical Marines further back sent volleys of shells over their heads to explode against the partitions and machine-stacks, keeping tech-guard heads down.

  A few energy bolts lasered down from a hidden position and a Marine was cut nearly in half by a thick crimson melta-beam. Another took a bad-looking abdomen shot from a las-weapon and had to be dragged as the assault squad regrouped before they were surrounded.

  They were dying here. Tellos's squad was already down to half-strength. Only a couple of their fallen would ever fight again, for the formidable tech of their enemies inflicted griev­ous and unbeatable wounds. Pallas, the apothecary who had made it to the position with some of the Tactical Marines, was busy collecting gene-seed from the fallen as well as patching up the brothers' wounds.

  But they had taken down hundreds, maybe thousands between them, and there were only so many tech-guard on this platform. Marines were hard to kill and harder to beat, and though Tellos himself bled from a dozen wounds he was more eager for the fight than he had ever been. If they had to die, they would. But they would win.

  Someone screamed, and Tellos was shocked to realize it was a Space Marine, for Squad Vorts was suddenly under attack. His auto-senses blocked out the flare but the shower of sparks was still spectacular, cascading from the sundered body of one of Vorts's Assault Marines. Attackers were storming the rear of the position, leaping from wall to console to corpse like inhuman things.

  There were half-a-dozen of them and their skin was covered in swirling designs glowing blue-white so brightly the glare would hurt a normal man's eye. Flashes of lightning burst from their fingers and eyes, and rippled across their bare tor­sos. They were moving so quickly that Vorts's men hadn't had the chance to counter-attack.

  Electro-priests. Tellos had never seen a real one - few in number but famously deadly, fanatical dervishes of the machine-cult. He faced them and readied that charge. This was why he had been born.

  One was cut down by bolt pistol fire before he got there. Another was speared neatly by a chainblade as he landed. The others were suddenly in the middle of Vorts's squad - a helmet exploded under an electrified hand, a Marine was hurled twenty metres in the flash of energy discharge, trailing smoke from a ruptured chestplate.

  Tellos picked out one and drew his assault, parrying blows from bare hands stronger than plasteel. The electro-priest's eyes were silvery and blank. He jerked and spasmed quicker even than a Marine's reflexes would allow. The priest whirled, one hand chopping low and clipping Tellos's knee, and the sergeant barely kept upright as the shock ripped through his leg. He felt the charred muscle and skin soldered to the inside of his armour. This thing would die.

  He dodged, sliced, drawing a shower of sparks off the priest's torso. But the priest was still alive and grabbed the chainblade with arcing fingers. The mechanism shattered and teeth flew everywhere like shrapnel. Tellos countered with the knife, aiming for the space between the ribs where a heretic heart dared to beat, but the priest's other hand grabbed his wrist with inhuman reactions.

  The power sliced through him. He couldn't get his hand away, the grip was too strong, like a magnet. He tried to slam the wrecked chainsword into the priest's face but it caught his other hand and the circuit was completed, power coursing free through him for a split-second before with one final effort he wrenched himself free.

  Tellos landed heavily on his back and spotted the priest falling, recovering, standing again. Smoke coiled from the chainblade wounds. Tellos noticed that from somewhere it had picked up two purple gauntlets.

  Then he looked to see if he still held his knife, and saw the charred stumps of his wrists. His hands. It had his hands.

  The world was turning white around the edges and mere was a thin keening in his ears. Something grabbed him and he caught the white shoulder pad out of the corner of his eye, knowing it was Pallas who was dragging him away by the col­lar of his armour and pumping bolt pistol shells into the electro-priest's face.

  His hands.

  This was it. He would die here. Just like he had been born to fight, he had been born to die here, maimed and broken, surrounded by his brothers and the corpses of his foes.

  It wasn't bad. He would be remembered. But mere was so much more he could have done, so much...

  Something huge and dark dropped down in front of him. Power arced from its staff and around the aegis hood raised from his collar. And Tellos was glad, for as long as their com­mander was watching, he knew his death would be glorious.

  SARPEDON DECIDED TO give the tech-guard what they deserved. He decided to give them the Hell.

  What did they fear? Too simple. Go back a stage - what did they want? They wanted order and logic and a plan to the universe, a galaxy where the machine god's rules governed reality. And fear? They feared diso
rder and anarchy, confu­sion and madness, bedlam, impulse and rage.

  That was their hell.

  Somehow, the fact that these men had once called them­selves his allies made it easier. Treachery felt worse that the mark of the xenos or the pollution of the mutant - it was more immediate, a thing of pure malice. Those who allied themselves with the foulness of Chaos were traitors too, against the Emperor and the Tightness of the universe, and so it was treachery that Marines were raised to loathe more than anything else.

  Put like that, it was simple.

  He let the Hell boil up from the mound of corpses beneath his feet, and flood down from the shadows of the platform's superstructure high above. It was the screams of the dying changing to howls of bloodlust, the reek of brimstone and blood. Insane loops of colour coursed through the air and deathly stains of rust spread from the hands of great shadowy spectres of corrosion.

  The tech-guard ran but the electro-priests just convulsed in confusion and anger, too far gone to flee but unable to fight on with sounds and smells and images of disorder surround­ing them. The battered remainder of Vorts's squad took one down at chainsword length, sparks flying as the chain-teeth bored through its skin and into its hyperactive organs.

  Sarpedon went deeper. Groans of breaking machinery, like ice caps in thaw, rocked the muster deck, and the half-glimpsed shadows of falling cogs and masonry plummeted through the darkness.

  'Advance!' The voice was that of Pallas, taking charge of the surviving forces in the strongpoint. Squads Volis and Givrillian levelled bolters and swept out, storming the sur­rounding positions of tech-guard now thrown into sudden disarray by the Hell. Walls of bolter fire tore through flak-tabards and augmetic torsos. Some way distant Squad Graevus arrived, dropping in from the overhanging ventila­tion channels onto the heads of reinforcing siege engineers. Graevus's axe blade could just be glimpsed, a bright blue diamond flashing up and down surrounded by crimson mist.