He heard the roars of a madman, and turned to see the Terminator-armoured figure of Ruokh being lifted away from one of the shuttles by the chains of a mechanised crane traversing along an overhead girder. His armour was a shattered ruin, rent apart by heavy weapons fire and ordnance. It hung off him loosely, sparking servos and leaking cables exposed. His hulking chainfists were crimson – pieces of flesh and congealed blood coated his arms to the elbows. His helm had been ripped away, and he was roaring incoherently. His hairless face was splattered in blood. His mouth was coated in gore – clearly he’d been feasting on the bodies of the fallen.
They’d lost many good legionaries today – too many – yet this ravening berserker survived? Brond shook his head.
Brond’s seneschal, Maven, appeared at his side. He handed the mortal his helm.
‘Khârn,’ he said. ‘Has he returned?’
‘No, my lord,’ said Maven. ‘What happened? Did the Emperor’s Children betray us?’
Brond laughed, and turned away.
Khârn levelled his plasma pistol at the admiral’s face.
‘Do it,’ he said.
‘I will not,’ said the admiral, staring defiantly at Khârn, though sweat was running in rivulets down his face. ‘I defy you, Kh–’
The back of his head exploded, spraying superheated brain matter, blood and retina-searing plasma overflow across the bridge. He toppled back into his command throne where he lay slumped, what matter remained in his brainpan spitting and cooking.
‘You,’ said Khârn, turning his weapon towards the next in command upon the bridge, a wide-eyed lieutenant commander. ‘You do it.’
The officer gaped at him, unable or unwilling to form coherent words.
He joined his commanding officer, collapsing to the deck.
‘Who is next?’ said Khârn.
A flicker in the eyes of a junior officer identified the next in the chain of command, and Khârn turned. His plasma pistol was venting steam from its coils. Had his hand not been encased in ceramite, the scalding would have stripped flesh from bone.
A severe-looking woman with a coiling, embryonic tattoo on her cheek stared at him defiantly. She spat at Khârn’s feet.
‘This one at least shows some spirit,’ he said, as he placed the barrel of his pistol against her forehead. To her credit she did not flinch, though this did not save her from the fate of her superiors. She fell back against her command station, dead, and lay sprawled across its consoles.
Khârn stepped in close to the next officer down the chain of command. He cowered before the World Eater, shying away from him.
‘Will you do as I ask, mortal?’ said Khârn, his voice a growling, intense burr. ‘Or is it your turn to die?’
‘No, lord,’ said the man, shrinking beneath the unblinking gaze of Khârn’s lenses and his own self-loathing. ‘I mean… yes, lord, I will do as you ask.’
‘Then take your place… acting shipmaster,’ said Khârn.
All was silence within the bridge as the man moved across the deck, averting his eyes from the ruin of his commanding officers.
He came to a halt before the command throne, looking aghast at his admiral, sprawled upon the plush leather seat, his head a smoking mess.
He looked around the bridge, eyes wide, but no one stepped forward to help him. He glanced back at Khârn, who was watching him closely, and quickly dropped his gaze. Breathing hard, he tugged at his dead admiral, but could not move him. He began to hyperventilate.
‘It is only dead flesh,’ snapped Dreagher. The man gaped up at him, unmoving. To Dreagher’s disgust, he realised that the man had soiled himself.
Snarling, Dreagher stepped forward and grabbed the dead admiral by the front of his jacket and hurled him aside. The corpse smacked against the far wall with a wet snap, and collapsed to the deck floor, its back twisted unnaturally beneath it.
The newly elevated officer took the command throne gingerly, lowering himself into its embrace as if the leather itself were cursed.
‘Come about to a new heading, shipmaster,’ said Khârn.
‘New heading, aye… sir,’ said the man, nodding.
‘Here,’ said Khârn, jabbing a finger at a point on the holo-display.
‘My lord?’ said the officer, not understanding. ‘That will take us into–’
‘Do not make him repeat himself,’ warned Dreagher. ‘It would not be wise.’
The new shipmaster blinked.
‘But I don’t… I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘You do not need to understand,’ said Dreagher. ‘Just to act. Now.’
The man nodded, and cleared his throat, composing himself. Or at least, composing himself as much as a man who was visibly shaking and sitting in his own filth could. He tapped a sequence upon the control slate hovering before him, marking the coordinates.
‘Come about to new heading,’ he began.
‘Louder,’ snarled Dreagher.
‘Come about to a new heading,’ repeated the officer, raising his voice. ‘Coordinates are marked.’
A visible wave of consternation swept the bridge as the orders were relayed.
Khârn moved towards the master of navigation, hard-wired into the fore of the bridge controls, and levelled his plasma pistol at him. The man was of middling years, and he glared up at Khârn, his expression one of defiance – but also fear.
‘Enact the new heading, Master Fleicher. Please,’ said the shipmaster. ‘That is an order. I do not wish to see any more killing upon the bridge.’
The master of navigation scowled, and for a second Dreagher thought Khârn was going to be forced to shoot him. The man spat onto the floor at Khârn’s feet, then turned to his console.
Dreagher was sure Khârn was going to kill the man then – he was not sure he would have been able to restrain himself in Khârn’s position – but to his surprise, Khârn merely chuckled, turned away and came back to the shipmaster’s side.
‘All power to front shields and engines,’ said Khârn, his voice calm and even, yet oozing menace.
‘All power to the front shields and engines,’ said the officer.
‘All power to front shields and engines, aye!’ came the confirmation shout from the command deck.
The bridge returned to a semblance of normality, with the assigned personnel and officers busying themselves at their allotted tasks. Dreagher shook his head. They were like drones, he thought. Too crippled by fear to act against them, they latched onto their orders like drowning men to a raft. It was pathetic.
They felt the massive cruiser alter its course beneath their feet.
‘We are being hailed,’ said the shipmaster. ‘The fleet wishes to know why we have changed our course.’
‘Ignore them. Shut down your comms,’ said Khârn.
‘We can only hold this trajectory for twelve minutes before we will be locked in the planet’s gravity well,’ said the shipmaster. It seemed to Dreagher that he had regained something of his composure. ‘We will need a new course before then to avoid it.’
‘Understood,’ said Khârn. ‘Is our heading locked in the ship’s cogitators?’
The shipmaster looked over at his master of navigation. The older man nodded curtly.
‘Yes, my lord,’ said the shipmaster.
‘Good,’ said Khârn. He turned to Dreagher. ‘Kill them all.’
The Emperor’s Children fleet looked like a swarm of hornets whose hive had been kicked. Fighters and gunships surrounded the larger ships of the line and cruisers, even as the larger ships rearranged themselves into an attack formation.
A number of World Eaters battleships were advancing into range, Goghur’s flagship leading the charge. Other World Eaters ships hung back.
On the edge of the formation, one ship did not join the others. It refused to respond to the flur
ry of vox-hails directed towards it, and while the other battleships closed ranks, readying their torpedoes and marking enemy targets, it swung away, its golden-tipped prow angled towards the planet the Emperor’s Children had laid claim to.
Though there was no concept of up or down in the void, the Emperor’s Children fleet was arranged in such a way that all of the ships were lined up together along the same bearing, the icy moon where the World Eaters had attacked them located above and before them, the planet below. To those looking out from oculus portals and view-stations across the III Legion fleet, it looked as though the Golden Absolute was sinking, its prow dropping until it pointed towards the planet. Its powerful plasma engines were firing at full capacity, filling the void behind it with a blue-white sheen.
It wasn’t until the battleship’s prow had pierced the upper glowing atmosphere and it had spewed forth a barrage of drop pods from its upper decks that the fleet realised what was happening; the ship had been commandeered by the enemy, and that they were using the ship as a living weapon against the Emperor’s Children-held world below.
Two dozen torpedoes screamed silently across the gulf of space towards the Golden Absolute, a vain attempt to knock it off its current course, but by then it was too late.
They struck home along the battleship’s unshielded flank, tearing great chunks from its side and laying waste to hundreds of deck-levels within, killing untold thousands, but the ship’s course could not now be altered. Its velocity was accelerating, being pulled in by the planet’s gravity. Its death-plummet was not going to be stopped now.
With awed horror the Emperor’s Children watched as the ship was surrounded in a corona of burning wash, its nose turning a fiery orange and beginning to break apart as the overwhelmed forward shielding gave way to the titanic forces arrayed against it.
The ship plunged down through the upper atmosphere of the planet, burning up as it continued to accelerate on its final, fatal downward trajectory.
One could only imagine the destruction that would be wrought on the planet itself once it hit.
‘Impressive,’ said Brond, watching from the bridge of the Defiant.
‘We received a vox-fragment before it began its descent,’ said the ship’s flag-captain, Stirzaker. ‘The signal came through from Baruda.’
‘The Blood Priest? This is his doing?’ said Brond, gesturing at the Golden Absolute as it continued its death-ride into the unnamed planet the Emperor’s Children had claimed as their own. ‘He brought it down?’
‘The message was unclear,’ said Stirzaker. ‘Vox-jamming and interference. But I believe he was saying that Khârn and Dreagher were on that ship.’
‘That I could believe,’ said Brond. ‘But if that is true, then this is over. No one will survive that impact. Without Khârn to hold us together, the Legion is dead. Turn us away, flag-captain. Let us leave this place while we still can.’
Frustration, disappointment and grief warred across the old flag-captain’s features. Still, he was not one for indecision.
‘Come about to a new heading,’ he said, his voice subdued. ‘Coordinates are as marked.’
‘Come about to a new heading, aye!’ came the cry from the steersman.
‘The time of the Legion is past,’ said Argus Brond. ‘We forge our own path now.’
Chapter 17
Scores of drop pods hurtled down through the haze of the upper atmosphere, falling like burning comets, arcs of fire trailing in their wake.
Behind them the immense bulk of the Golden Absolute plummeted down on its death trajectory. Its golden prow glowed with the fury of atmospheric entry, and bristling sensor arrays and comms turrets were ripped free, trailing off behind it like burning cinders. Born in the void, it was never designed to withstand gravitic pressures, and its integrity was failing, even as it plummeted to its doom.
The drop pods, however, were made for this type of insertion. Nevertheless, the intense build-up of heat made their interiors almost unbearably hot, despite the ablative heat shields and the entry cushion that formed beneath the blunt base of each drop pod. No unprotected human could survive those spiking temperatures, and few would have been able to remain conscious through their powered descent. But then they were not designed to transport unaugmented humans. They were designed for the Legiones Astartes.
Thick, black cloud banks shrouded the world, lit by sporadic bursts of purple-hued chain lightning. Like a meteor shower, the drop pods smashed through the clouds. Burning up, the Golden Absolute followed them down, like a colossal void predator pursuing its prey, uncaringly condemning itself to its doom.
Through shooting rain and blinding lightning arcs the drop pods roared, propelled down in a burning, dazzling display, like the fiery wrath of a primordial god. After a time, their fiery tails dissipated, the burning flames extinguishing as their velocity was slowed by the heavier atmosphere, the intense heat-build starting to bleed off.
Among the bone-bleached city below, flak turrets and missile pods atop tanks painted the purple and gold of the III Legion rotated skywards, tracking their descent. None of them fired – these drop pods were their own.
Twenty kilometres.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Lightning struck, engulfing a dozen or more drop pods in wildly dancing arcs of energy.
Two thousand metres.
Fifteen hundred.
A number of the drop pods struck a series of soaring, ethereal towers that appeared out of the rain, rising like spear tips from below. Some were destroyed in the impacts, while others became embedded in stone, or ricocheted wildly, spinning end over end to fall, their descent uncontrolled, to their doom.
Others continued on their downward arcs unimpeded, retro-burners firing to slow their rapid descent. They came down hard, spread across a dispersal zone thirty kilometres across. When they hit, they hit hard, slamming down with bone-jarring force, cracking the coral-like stone beneath them, or smashing through thinner layers of bone-like lattice, and coming to rest, finally, several levels below ground.
The armoured sides of the drop pods, still smoking and charred from re-entry, burst open like the petals of some deadly, death world flora.
Emperor’s Children – those last warriors who remained on the Golden Absolute and had managed to reach the drop pod bays before the ship began its fatal dive – emerged from some.
The vast majority of them, however, were empty, released as decoys.
Dreagher emerged from one. Baruda, Khârn and half a dozen other World Eaters were with him. The blood on their armour began to run, washing away in the heavy rain pouring from the heavens.
The World Eaters clambered atop a pile of pale rubble and looked out across the vista spread before them, the darkness lit by near constant lightning strikes.
A vast, crumbling city rolled out as far as Dreagher’s enhanced vision allowed. Its structures were too tall, too slender, too otherworldly to have ever been conceived by a human mind. No Terran-based technology existed to be able to create such buildings.
Inconceivably narrow, soaring towers speared skyward, each of them connected by a crystalline interlacement of delicate walkways, bridges, flyovers. It seemed impossible that these towers could bear their own weight without buckling, so fragile did they appear, yet there was an undeniable strength to them. Whatever material they were made from was clearly far stronger than any alloy that mankind had ever been able to forge. It appeared more akin to a blend of bone and crystal than to stone or metal, but it was clearly not brittle, else it would have shattered like glass beneath the smoking drop pod they had emerged from.
The rubble underfoot was bleeding. Where it was shattered, Dreagher saw that it leaked a pale, milky fluid. While the exterior of the xenos material was like crystallised bone, its centre was organic, something akin to bone marrow.
As he watched, awed by the spectacle, th
e immensity of the Golden Absolute emerged from the cloud banks overhead, ploughing straight down in eerie silence. Seeing it against the backdrop of the xenos corpse-city made it seem even more enormous, almost unfathomably so. In the vast emptiness of the void it was hard to comprehend the scale of cruisers and battleships, yet here, seeing it on an earthly scale, its immensity was frankly ludicrous. Nigh on five kilometres from gleaming prow to stern, it had not even fully emerged from the cloud bank, like some titanic leviathan of myth, when it hit the ground.
In silence, absolute silence – the deafening sound of its death would not reach the World Eaters for long seconds – it ploughed down, its own mountainous weight driving it on.
A huge cloud rose from the impact, seemingly in slow motion, before the first rumble began to shake the ground. The stern of the great ship finally emerged from the cloud cover, its vast plasma engines still screaming, trailing white-blue fire as they powered the ship down with colossal force.
The shock wave of the ship’s impact radiated outwards, causing earth-tremors and structural collapse in all directions.
Almost a full kilometre of the Golden Absolute’s prow was embedded in the planet’s surface below the towering xenos city when its downward trajectory was finally halted, and it began to tip, shattering towers and bridges beneath its bulk as if they were crystal.
The World Eaters watched the Emperor’s Children battleship die. Their vision darkened momentarily as the ship’s plasma reactor went critical, detonating with a blinding flash that lit up the darkness, dispelling the gloom and lighting up the alien city in cold white-blue light. Nothing within the radius of the vast detonation would have survived. Even at their distance, the air rippled with heat shimmer around Dreagher and the other World Eaters, and the atmosphere around them was filled with steam as the rain was burned off.
The blinding white light of the dying plasma reactor dimmed fractionally, so that with the protective photolenses of their helms, the World Eaters were able to look towards it once more.
Khârn: Eater of Worlds Page 19