Hammer and Bolter - Issue 12

by Various Authors

  Sarpedon skidded along the floor of the bridge as the missiles streaked over him, the sound of the air ripping behind him as scalding rocket exhaust billowed around him. The sound of the impacts behind him was so loud it wasn’t even a sound, just a white wall of noise that blocked out all hearing except for the alien echo rippling around the Phalanx’s bridge.

  Sarpedon was ready for the shockwave. He took the worst of it on his shoulder and let the impact throw him into the foot of the throne pedestal, front legs collapsing beneath him to absorb the impact.

  Father Gyranar disappeared in the mass of smoke and flame. Shattered components from consoles rained down, chunks of burning metal and cabling. Cracks ran up the viewscreen, marring the view of the Veiled Region with black jagged fingers.

  Sarpedon dragged himself into the dubious cover of the nearest statue, an Imperial Fists apothecary plated in gold.

  ‘Did you think, said Daenyathos’s artificial voice from the throne, ‘that I had not thought I would face you one day? You, or someone like you. Why do you believe I selected a dreadnought as my vessel?’

  Sarpedon hauled himself up the nest few steps, crouching down behind a statue of an Emperor’s Champion from some campaign of distant legend. His nervous system seemed struck out of kilter by the missile impacts, his legs uncoordinated, his head ringing.

  ‘If you know the future,’ said Sarpedon, forcing his mind to keep up with his surroundings, ‘then you know how this ends.’

  The response was another burst of missiles, triple contrails spiralling towards Sarpedon. The Space Marine flung him across the steps leading up to the throne. The Emperor’s Champion disappeared in a burst of golden shrapnel, and the other two missiles howled past to impact against the viewscreen. Sarpedon dug in with claws and fingers, clinging to the side of the throne pedestal. Bursts of pain against the side of his face registered, in a detached, soldierly way, as shards of shrapnel embedded in his skull. One eye suddenly shut down, his vision cut in half, depth gone, the scene in front of him becoming ever more otherworldly.

  Massive shards of the viewscreen fell away like black glass daggers, shattering against the floor. Chunks of the Veiled Region seemed to have fallen away with it, the galaxy turning dark piece by piece, a broken mosaic of decay.

  Sarpedon’s nervous system caught up and the wrenching pain from his hips told him he had been hit worse than he realised. He looked down at the pulpy mess of fibrous muscle and broken exoskeleton. He had three legs left, and chunks of mutated limb lay straggling down the steps behind him. No wonder he had felt out of control. He was trying to push himself forward on legs he didn’t have.

  Sarpedon scrambled forwards a little further, to the shadow of the throne. Daenyathos was in silhouette, the light from the viewscreen having died, and looming over Sarpedon he looked less like a dreadnought and more like the vision that Sarpedon had forced into Iktinos’s mind – vast, monstrous, toweringly powerful, invulnerable to the efforts of a mere man.

  ‘It could have been anyone,’ continued Daenyathos, the missile ports on his arm closing. ‘Caeon could have led the Chapter astray. Gorgoleon. Iktinos. It could have happened centuries earlier or later. Whoever it was, I always knew I would have to face one of you. For you, this is the end. For me, this is just another footnote.’

  The storm bolter on Daenyathos’s power fist arm clicked its action and Sarpedon was suddenly looking down its barrel. Daenyathos couldn’t fire any more missiles – Sarpedon was too close, the shrapnel too dangerous. Daenyathos could not risk damaging his dreadnought chassis now.

  Sarpedon tried to take cover again but Daenyathos’s aim was too good. The first volley of bolter fire shredded the step in front of him, gold plate and granite dissolving under his hands. The second slammed two shots into his torso, the bolter shells penetrating the ceramite and bursting against Sarpedon’s breastplate of fused ribs.

  He felt the bone breaking. The sensation was clear among the shock that hammered through him. Twin craters were blown open in his chest and the air touched the mass of his lungs, the pulsing surface of his heart. Sarpedon fell onto the steps and rolled onto his back, gasping as his body recoiled.

  He was a Space Marine. He would survive this. He could survive anything. Before, he had doubted. But now, so close to death, his certainty was complete. He would survive this. He was Sarpedon, Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers, a man the galaxy had sought to kill, yet who had survived long enough to breathe the same air as the only enemy he had ever really had.

  Sarpedon planted a hand on the step in front of him and turned himself over. His remaining legs fought to push him up onto his talons. He looked up, blood running down his face, thick gobbets of it pumping from the wounds in his chest. The Axe of Mercaeno was still in his hand.

  ‘There is no future,’ he said through blood-spittled lips. ‘There will be others like us. They will break out of this cage of a galaxy, they will bypass everything you have engineered to stop you. Human beings cannot be kept caged by fate. Not all of them. Someone will remember us, and someone will follow.’

  Daenyathos took careful aim and blasted another storm bolter volley into Sarpedon. This one hit the wrist and elbow of his right hand, the one in which he was carrying the Axe of Mercaeno. The bones of Sarpedon’s forearm shattered and his arm fell useless, the Axe of Mercaeno clattering down the steps.

  The pain did not come. Sarpedon did not let it. He forged forwards a few steps more, so the massive armoured legs of Daenyathos’s dreadnought were just a couple of metres from his face.

  Daenyathos’s power fist reached down and snatched Sarpedon up off the floor, the articulated fingers closing around his shoulders and waist. Sarpedon’s head lolled like that of a rag doll, his legs dangling uselessly under him, as he was held immobile up in front of Daenyathos.

  Sarpedon could see, through the eyepieces of Daenyathos’s armoured helm, the eyes of the man inside. They were full of amusement, as if Sarpedon was an animal or a child playing at being a soldier, something to be pitied and taught its place, something to be mocked.

  ‘Did you truly think something like you,’ mocked Daenyathos, ‘could kill me?’

  ‘I didn’t have to kill you,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I just had to get you close.’

  Sarpedon’s one good hand reached into the ammo pouch at his waist. Daenyathos registered what Sarpedon was doing and the servos in his power first whined.

  The massive fingers of the fist closed. Sarpedon could feel the ceramite around his torso tensing and buckling, massive pressure crushing down. The seconds stretched out and he imagined, in precise detail, how his organs would look being forced out of his chest under the pressure, hearts bursting, tatters of lungs oozing out, entrails following, the awful wrongness of his distorted body filling him in the moments before death.

  It seemed an age before his fingers closed around the haft of the Soulspear.

  The artefact’s twin blades speared outwards, caged vortex fields consisting of anti-space where no material substance could exist.

  The pressure forced Sarpedon’s right arm out of place. His shoulder blade split and the joint crumbled. Each segment of the destruction registered like stages in a scientific experiment, observed with calm and detachment in those moments before the pain receptors fired and reached Sarpedon’s brain.

  Sarpedon whipped the Soulspear up, one blade swinging up through the sarcophagus that made up the armoured centre of the dreadnought. Sarpedon’s wrist flicked and the other blade arced up to complete the cut, two slashes of blackness that between them formed a plane separating the front of the sarcophagus from the body of the dreadnought.

  The pressure relented. The power fist fell inactive, the energy no longer focused through its servos to crush Sarpedon’s torso.

  The energy finally went out of Sarpedon. The weight of the Soulspear, negligible as it was compared to a boltgun or the Axe of Mercaeno, was too much. The weapon fell from his fingers. The blades disappeared and the short met
al length of its haft tumbled down the steps before the throne.

  The front of Daenyathos’s sarcophagus followed. It clanged as it fell end over end down the steps, the sound echoing off the walls of the bridge, the final sound as it hit the floor like the tolling of a bell.

  Sarpedon’s breaths were shallow. The ruination of his shoulder hit him and the pain was like a sun burning where his shoulder had once been, a ball of fire surrounding the mass of ripped muscle and cracked bone.

  He forced the pain down. He had suffered before. It meant nothing. His eyes focused, and he was looking into the face of Daenyathos.

  The whole front of the sarcophagus was gone, and the life support cradle was revealed in which Daenyathos had spent the last six thousand years. It was a biomechanical tangle of cabling and artificial organs, pipes and valves hissing cold vapour, blinking readouts mottled with the patina of centuries.

  The Philosopher-Soldier hung among the cabling, restrains locking him in to the life support systems. He was pale and withered, his limbs atrophied, the skin shrunken around his skull and ribcage. Red welts had swollen up where pipes and wires pierced his skin, carrying the mental signals that moved the dreadnought body around him. His eyes were squinting in the sudden light, pupils shrunk to nothing.

  Sarpedon had never seen such a pathetic example of a Space Marine. The musculature was gone, the skin stretched around a body starved of movement for six millennia. Daenyathos gasped in shock, the feeling of outside air alien to him now.

  The grip of the power fist relaxed. Sarpedon clattered onto the steps of the throne mount. Daenyathos was in shock, unable to function, and for a few seconds he would be unable to know where – or even what – Sarpedon was.

  Sarpedon, one arm hanging limp and useless at his side, clambered up the front of the dreadnought until he was level with Daenyathos. He tore out handfuls of cabling, wires slithering out of Daenyathos’s stick-thin limbs. Dribbles of watery blood spattered onto the gilded steps. Sarpedon grasped Daenyathos around the neck – his hand easily encircling the scrawny throat – and pulled Daenyathos out of the sarcophagus.

  The Philosopher-Soldier’s body came away easily, Daenyathos unable to put up a fight. Sarpedon carried him down the steps to the deck of the bridge, his remaining talons kicking aside chunks of smouldering debris. The dreadnought chassis remained standing before the bridge captain’s throne, gutted of its occupant, silent and unmoving.

  ‘Wait,’ gasped Daenyathos in a voice that could barely struggle above a whisper. ‘You are a part of this. You can be something great. Imagine the role you could play in a galaxy remade by me. Imagine it.’

  ‘I have a better imagination than you realise,’ said Sarpedon, grimacing as he dragged himself towards the blast doors at the back of the bridge. ‘I have seen it, and it is no place for me.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ hissed Daenyathos, a desperation in his voice that had never been there before.

  Sarpedon did not answer. Daenyathos’s protests were lost in the sound of the flames licking up from the ruined bridge.

  ‘Forge on,’ cried Luko as he forced himself another pace through the sucking mire of gore. ‘Just a few paces more. Onwards, there he stands, our prey. Onwards!’

  The daemonic cyst had responded to the strike force like an organ threatened by infection. It had filled back up with blood, its fleshy walls erupting in tentacles to snare the intruders and drag them down into the gore. Attendant daemons had uncoiled from the filth and leapt to attack.

  Abraxes stood up from his throne of twisted corpses, the spectral image of the battle on the barracks deck fading around him as the newcomers grabbed his attention.

  ‘You are beneath my notice, and yet I must stoop to kill you,’ he said, his voice like a bass choir. ‘Your presence offends me.’

  The remnants of Squad Prexus crashed into the horrors forging through the lake of blood. The Imperial Fists wrestled with things that grew new limbs and fanged mouths at will. One Space Marine was dragged down into the blood and half a dozen horrors leapt on top of him. Spiny hands ripped him apart. An armoured leg was thrown between them, a trophy of the hunt, and the warrior’s head was pitched against the fleshy wall.

  Sister Aescarion and Graevus fought like one individual, the axe of one parrying while the other struck. The two whirled in a dance that took them through the assaulting daemons, cutting mutating bodies open and shattering horned skulls. Luko followed in their wake, stabbing the surviving daemons with both lightning claws, lifting them proud of the blood and thrashing them into shreds.

  Behind Abraxes burned the portal. It was a shimmering circle, edged in blue fire. Beyond it could be glimpsed something that resembled the void of space only in its darkness. The masses of power, like mountains of seething energy, loomed in that darkness, and carried with them a sense of appalling intelligence. They were watching, these powers of the warp, eager for the last obstacles to be removed so they could force the whole potential of their chaotic hatred through into realspace.

  The sight of them could drive men mad. The Astartes had to force their eyes away, for they could become lost in contemplation of that towering evil. Even this slight glimpse of the warp could corrode the mind. On the shore in front of the portal were still engraved, on the rotten remains of the cargo bay deck, the sigils that had called the portal into beings, and they burned blood red with anticipation.

  Abraxes strode into the gore. A blade appeared in his hand, a sword of frozen malice, and he cleaved it down into the battle around his feet.

  Luko felt his gut tighten as he saw Apothecary Pallas in the blade’s path. Pallas tried to yell something in defiance, but Abraxes was pitiless and did not grant him the chance. The blade carved down through Pallas’s shoulder and came out through his abdomen on the other side, slicing him in two across the torso.

  The two halves of the Apothecary’s corpse flopped into the blood. Daemons pounced on them to tear the remains apart.

  Luko realised he was yelling, a cry of horror and anguish. Pallas was his friend, in a galaxy where friends were rare.

  Aescarion reached the shore where Abraxes’s throne stood. Graevus was still waist-deep in the blood, fending off the daemons that sought to drag them both down.

  ‘What means your strength?’ shouted Aescarion over the cackling of daemons and the thrumming of the gate. ‘That your arm can lay low a Space Marine? What does this mean laid against the might of the God-Emperor’s children?’

  Abraxes turned to look down at the Battle Sister. ‘It means that you die, whelpling girl,’ he replied, shaking Pallas’s blood from his sword.

  ‘Destroy my body if you will,’ shouted back Aescarion. ‘But you cannot break my spirit. A prince of daemons might claim the heads of every enemy he faces, but he will never count the soul of a Battle Sister as a trophy!’

  Abraxes raised a hand, and purple-black fire flickered between his talons. ‘You do not challenge the warp, child,’ he sneered. ‘I shall keep your mind as a pet, and you will worship me.’

  Fire lashed down at Aescarion. The Sister of Battle was driven back by the force that hammered into her, and a halo of flame played around her head as Abraxes’s magic tried to force open her mind.

  The Battle Sister screamed, but she did not fall.

  Luko realised what Sister Aescarion was trying to do. He threw aside the body of the daemon he had killed, and pushed on through the gore.

  Librarian Varnica reached the metallic shore. The portal howled above him, the winds of the warp tearing at him as he tried to keep his footing. He clambered out of the blood, kicking free of the sucking limbs that tried to ensnare his ankles.

  He had to force himself not to stare up through the portal. He could feel the vast intelligences beyond probing at his mind, pushing against the mental shield that every Librarian built up over years of psychic training. They were whispering to him, promising him power and lifetimes of pleasure, or threatening him with such horrors a human mind could not
comprehend.

  Varnica snapped himself free of their influence. He could not let them trick him, not now, not when he was so close, when the means for closing the portal were right in front of him.

  He broke the fascination with the portal just in time to register the power hammer arcing towards him.

  Varnica brought up his force claw to turn the hammer aside. The hammer’s head slammed into the ground, throwing shards of metal everywhere. Varnica rolled back, shrapnel pinging off his armour.

  Reinez stood over him. The Crimson Fist was a hideous sight – scorched and battered, his helmetless skull little more that burns and new scars. The deep blue and crimson of his armour was almost lost under the grime of battle. Reinez pointed his hammer at Varnica.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘You spoke against them. Now you fight alongside them. You fight to take the gate for yourselves! You are one with them in perdition!’

  ‘Damn you, Reinez!’ retorted Varnica. ‘Have you become so blind? The warp has played us all; you, me, the Soul Drinkers, all of us, and we have to put it right!’

  ‘Lies!’ yelled Reinez.

  Anger made him careless. The hammer blow was a haymaker and Varnica dodged back from it easily, raising his claw ready to snap it forwards. But Reinez had strength on his side, born of a desperate hatred. If Varnica was caught, he would die.

  Varnica’s muscles tensed for the strike. But it felt like he had hit a wall, as if something invisible was holding him fast.

  His enemy was a Space Marine. Varnica had never raised arms against a brother of the Adeptus Astartes before. The wrongness of it stayed his hand. He could not shed a brother’s blood. Even now, with all hell erupting around him, he could not do it.

  Reinez jinked forwards and drove the butt of the hammer into Varnica’s midriff. Varnica stumbled back, almost pitching into the blood. Varnica kicked out at Reinez’s legs and the Crimson Fist was caught, stumbling a half-pace onto one knee. Varnica rolled out of his way and used the second he had bought to jump back to his feet.