by Nick Kyme
‘We are outnumbered and cannot be everywhere,’ Iaptus shouted to his warriors above battlefield noise that had intensified with the dropping of the ramp. He took a further step upon it. ‘Defend Brother-Captain Drakgaard and Brother-Chaplain Elysius. We have orders to effect their egress from this chaos.’
‘We are retreating?’ Arrok ventured, foolishly.
Va’lin exchanged a look with Dersius who rested a hefty gauntlet on Arrok’s shoulder.
‘No, brother. But we need to regroup. We can’t do that if our commander is knee-deep in enemy dead, swallowed in that mess below.’
‘We are the ones that are going to be swallowed, Arrok,’ said Naeb with ironic cheer.
Va’lin exchanged another glance with him, but Naeb shrugged unapologetically.
‘Wyverns…’ Iaptus declared, ‘on breath of fire!’
He lifted his hammer and was about to make the leap when the gunship’s left side exploded. It pitched immediately, throwing Iaptus and the rest of the Wyverns against the right-hand side of the hold. Through a ragged gap in the fuselage, Va’lin could see the left wing had been sheared off and the engine was trailing smoke. Fire lapped at the edges of the tear, guttering with the passage of air as Brother Orcas piloted them through it at speed, whilst trying to keep them aloft.
Iaptus got on the vox. ‘Orcas!’
The reply was halting and marred by static.
‘Rocket hit… Attempting to correct, but we’ve sustained critical damage. Don’t think I can… bring her back, sergeant. Suggest emergency disembark.’
The vox went dead as the communications array failed. Klaxons were wailing inside the troop hold, which was washed in crimson emergency lighting.
‘Everyone out,’ roared Iaptus as the high-pitch whine of the engines told him they were descending fast and about to crash. ‘Now!’
The ramp had jerked back up a fraction when they were hit, so he kicked it back down with his boot and began to usher his warriors out.
Arrok went first – he and Xerus had been right behind Iaptus in formation. Then Dersius and Ky’dak jumped, the latter taking off from the ramp at a furious sprint. Va’lin quickly lost them to the smoke. He was next in line with Naeb and barrelled through the open hatch as flames from the burning engine washed across his sight.
Va’lin broke through and hit a bank of thick smoke that occluded optics so he switched to auto-senses. Naeb was gone, but he kept a track of him and the others on the tactical display flashing upon on his right retinal lens. Six were free of the gunship, in the wind. Two were still aboard, Vo’sha and Iaptus.
A missile burst through the cloud layer, an instinctive twist of his body saving Va’lin from its warhead and a short flight. He turned, head facing downwards towards the ground and looking back up. He had yet to ignite his pack in case the enemy had heat-seekers trained on the sky. The missile was still visible, arcing towards the stricken gunship with rocket-fuelled intensity. Va’lin saw the future and felt a cold ball of ice rise up into his gullet. He had one attempt to shoot the missile down. His flamer was no use. Preferring his sidearm, he ripped the bolt pistol from its holster and took aim. Buffeted by the wind and the force of acceleration as he reached terminal velocity, his hand was shaking. The missile was moving fast, closing on the gunship.
Va’lin fired off a three-round burst, hoping the spread would improve his chances.
Two shells missed, but a third hit the target. Va’lin’s triumph turned to anguish when he saw the bolt-shell detonate but only throw the missile slightly off course. It struck the gunship in the ramp instead of the underside, tearing off the hatch and throwing the two warriors who were about to leap out back into the hold. The gunship pinwheeled, plummeting now as it spun around prow to aft, trailing fire. Thick black smoke poured from its fuselage and engines, choking the hold and enveloping the gunship in a dirty pall. The glacis protecting the cockpit was shattered and exposed to the elements. As he fell, still yet to ignite his engines and watching in morbid fascination, Va’lin thought he saw Orcas on fire, wrestling with the controls.
The gunship disappeared from view, only to return a few moments later as it struck the slope and went up in a massive fireball.
Va’lin crushed down his guilt and tore his gaze away. Smoke and cloud parted, and the ground came rushing up to meet him. He fed all power to the jump pack’s turbines, barely arresting his descent in time with a huge burst of ignition.
He landed hard, buckling at the knees, and heard his powered joints protest at the rough treatment. Then he was moving, shooting at targets with his bolt pistol. A cultist’s head exploded. A renegade armoured in heliotrope purple went down with two shell holes in his torso.
Despite the frenetic chaos of the battle around him, Va’lin realised he had landed far from the intended drop zone. He couldn’t see his fellow Wyverns, let alone Drakgaard or Elysius. They were scattered, thrown apart as their Thunderhawk had pitched and yawed in its death throes. Though the smoke cover at ground level wasn’t as thick as it was in the sky, the ravine was massive and overrun with clashing warriors from both sides. He was alone, though not for long.
Having witnessed Va’lin’s descent and subsequent arrival, a swathe of heretics were converging on him led by a warrior of the Black Legion.
Two warbands, Va’lin realised, recalling the conflicting sigils he had seen during the Canticus street battle when the Wyverns had lost Sor’ad. An alliance explained the sheer numbers of troops the heretics had in reserve. They had been waiting here, under the earth, to attack. A rudimentary trap. It was sprung by a desire to end the war quickly and inspired by the erroneous belief that the heretics were all but defeated. Blind, without proper reconnaissance, the Salamanders had rushed into an unknown part of Canticus and denied all of their methodical instincts into the bargain.
As the heretics came for him, Va’lin brought to mind the words of Zen’de.
He who knows himself, knows truth. He who knows himself and acts to his own strengths shall deny all lies that might bring about weakness.
A pity they had not heeded their own natures, but it was too late now.
Va’lin stowed his sidearm and brought up his flamer. A long, fiery plume ignited on the air and struck the baying mob with enough force to knock down the heretics who burned horribly.
Not the Black Legionnaire, though. He emerged from the conflagration wreathed in fire and spitting curses to salve his obvious pain. Two dark eyes glared out from a pallid-looking face etched with the eight-pointed star of Chaos and promised pain and suffering for the Salamander.
Clenched in both gauntleted hands, the warrior hefted a flanged mace that exuded a strange, aetheric mist. Images formed and collapsed in that mist, the faces of the damned and the claws of their tormentors. He would need to be wary of the mace.
The flamer would be useless in close combat and didn’t look like it would stop the Black Legionnaire. Va’lin drew his sidearm and gladius, letting the flamer fall. That made the warrior smile, though his eyes shone with murderous intent, and he saluted the Salamander for his reckless bravura.
‘Vorshkar,’ uttered the traitor, nodding to Va’lin.
He had surged through the flame storm like a mad dog but now gave his name as part of some strange honour ritual. Va’lin had heard of the capricious nature of the warriors of the old Legions, those poor souls trapped out of time, their sanity gnawed away by daemons but had never experienced it before. Regardless, he answered the warrior with the same contempt he would any traitor.
‘Death to the slaves of Ruin,’ he spat, and adopted a fighting posture, leaning forwards in preparation for a small burst of ignition. A sudden attack might provide a sorely needed edge.
The warrior’s smile faded. His reply in Gothic was hard for him to form but he delivered it with certitude and malice.
‘Yours will be slow and lasting, Vulkan’s son.’
Va’lin gunned the throttle, boosting into an abrupt but rapid charge. His transhuma
n mind had already analysed the traitor’s defences and found his face and neck to be his weak points. The Salamander aimed for them, firing off a snap shot into the warrior’s torso to distract from the intended killing stroke with his gladius.
But where the blade should have cut through jugular and carotid artery, it only sheared through air. The warrior had evaded him, moving faster than the jump pack’s propulsion capacity was able to move Va’lin.
A blow resounded against Va’lin’s shoulder, crumpling his guard and carrying on into his jump pack. The left jet turbine exploded, ripping apart much of the protective housing and spraying it over the side of Va’lin’s armoured face. Shrapnel from the sundered intake vent embedded in the side of his battle-helm crazing the visual feed from the left retinal lens and effectively ruining depth perception.
A second blow hammered against Va’lin’s ribs, denting the plastron and shearing the jump pack’s quick-release strap. Pain resounded through his body, felt in his shoulder and chest at once, so acute they vied for dominance on the scale of Va’lin’s agony.
He was sunk to one knee before he had even managed to raise his sword weakly in defence.
Vorshkar’s mace was invested with the sorcery of the warp but it did not just grant him deadly potency, it also imbued the warrior with preternatural speed. It was a boon that Va’lin had no power to counter. He reacted but it was as if he had been drawn into a well of extreme low gravity and every movement was slow and laboured.
A third blow shattered Va’lin’s standing knee, breaking his armoured pad apart and sending him crashing to the ground. He tried to look around and find his enemy but injury warnings were streaming across both retinal lenses – the right clean and grim with severity, the left a cracked and hazing mess.
In the end, Va’lin felt the traitor’s boot slammed atop his chest. He met Vorshkar’s gaze, the warrior looking down on his defeated opponent with amusement. Another smile twisted his ivory-pale face.
‘I lied about it being slow and lasting,’ he admitted, ‘at least in this realm of existence. I am about to end your flesh, Vulkan’s son, but your soul… well,’ he let out a long, malicious breath, ‘that is for the neverborn to decide.’
‘Never… born?’ Va’lin croaked, not understanding, as consciousness began to leave him.
Vorshkar’s eyes narrowed. ‘Let me show yo–’
A flash of light overloaded Va’lin’s optics, rendering him blind. In the second of vision he was afforded before blackout, he saw Vorshkar thrown onto his heels, his neck snapping back as he unleashed an agonised scream.
It was the last sound Va’lin heard as he faded – his body shutting down, his mind suddenly awash with visions of the fire canyons.
Rest, the figure in his dream said again.
None can come back. Zantho’s words resounded, echoing the Promethean belief in the Circle of Fire. None can come back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Heletine, Canticus, inside the ravine
Elysius dragged Drakgaard’s prone form across the battlefield, Her’us and Vervius guarding their retreat. These two were the last of their kind – the rest of the Serpentia were dead. Not even their bodies could be recovered. The battle was over, the Imperial forces defeated. Tenacity met its equally potent counterpart in a Nocturnean’s cultural psychology, pragmatism, and lost.
Fight on and they would certainly be destroyed utterly. Retreat now and regroup, at least they could muster whatever was left of their forces and salvage some kind of military response.
With Drakgaard incapacitated, command fell to Elysius, and the Chaplain had no hesitation about giving the order to fall back. Most not clad in drake-scale armour already had, though precious few Cadians were left alive to be ashamed of the fact.
Armour had come in from the east, a ragged assembly of Space Marine tanks under the charge of Sergeant Zantho, battered and bruised from shouldering their way through the rubble of a city. Elysius could not comprehend how many vehicles Zantho had lost or what sort of damage had been done to the ones that were currently bombarding the heretics to curtail any meaningful pursuit, but would have laid oaths that it was grievous.
‘We are clear of the third vector, brother-sergeant,’ voxed Elysius, his bionic arm and power glove making light work of hauling Drakgaard up the slope.
‘Understood, Brother-Chaplain,’ came the reply from Zantho a moment later.
Three more seconds elapsed before the area of the ravine Elysius and the remains of the fire-born had just evacuated was engulfed in a hail of explosive shellfire.
On the opposite side of the battlefield, the Sisters of the Ebon Chalice were still engaged in a fighting retreat themselves. Of the promised reinforcements, a vast Ecclesiarchy warhost, only these Seraphim had answered the call. There was no time to question that now, but Elysius was determined that if he lived he would have an answer, one way or another. The betrayers, whoever they were, would be punished.
As he reached the ridge line, a Rhino armoured transport was waiting with a rough bodyguard of fire-born outside it firing off shots into the ravine to deter any last ditch attacks. Elysius got Drakgaard aboard, sending him off with Her’us by his side in the troop hold. A Thunderhawk was waiting to take them back to Escadan, one of the few that could still fly.
Elysius stayed behind with Vervius to oversee the retreat. The Chaplain’s jaw clenched at the sight and the thought of such utter defeat.
‘Chaplain,’ uttered Vervius.
Elysius turned to face him.
‘You are bleeding, sir.’
Elysius looked down at the many wounds he had sustained that had penetrated his battleplate. In truth, it was a ruin and in dire need of a Techmarine’s ministrations.
‘It’s a small matter, brother,’ Elysius replied, lifting his gaze to the ravine again. ‘Upraise the banner, Vervius,’ he said as the last few survivors made it to the ridge line and safety, ‘let our enemy know we are defiant even when we are beaten.’
Elysius spared a last glance in the direction of the Seraphim who were now embarking aboard transports. These few had defied whatever order had condemned the rest of the Imperials to defeat. By blood or torture, if it was necessary, he would find out who gave it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Nova-class frigate, Forge Hammer
Xarko’s strength was at its end. He saw the kine-shield flicker once and then dissipate. Alone in the access corridor, exhausted to the point of collapse, he faced down the four Black Dragons who had come aboard the ship intent on murderous vengeance.
Every fractional movement was bone-gnawing agony, but Xarko still drew his sword. The edge crackled with ionic charge. He doubted he could do much with it beyond lift it.
‘Don’t make me kill you.’
The sergeant in war-ravaged black plate laughed, seeing through the weak facade.
‘I shall not afford you the same courtesy, Salamander,’ he replied, exposing the sharp fangs in his snarling mouth. ‘You sealed your fate when you murdered our captain.’
Xarko frowned.
‘Murdered? You are mistaken. No blood has been shed on this ship that you did not bring about yourselves.’
‘Liar!’ spat a warrior with bone nubs jutting from his ugly pate. Another beside him snarled, clenching and unclenching fists that ended in calcified blades. The fourth was a cold storm. He’d lost an eye but the one that remained was like a chip of ice as it regarded the Librarian, and he carried the Prime Helix of the apothecarion.
‘Who are you? What are you doing aboard this ship?’ Xarko asked, stalling.
Silencing the beasts in his retinue, the sergeant came forwards.
‘We are the wrath,’ he declared in a menacing undertone, ‘here to claim our vengeance…’ As he raised his bone blade to strike, a stentorian voice echoed from the opposite end of the corridor.
‘Trouble yourself no further with him,’ said Adrax Agatone as he moved into the light with bolter raised, ‘you have much wors
e problems now.’
The captain had returned with a small war party. Sergeants Lok, Clovius and five other warriors all armed. One of them stepped in front of Agatone, seeing the familiar trappings of the infiltrators aboard the Forge Hammer.
‘Brothers…’ said Zartath, disbelieving. ‘Who sent you?’
The sergeant’s anger bled away instantly and he took a knee. So too did the others he had brought with him.
‘Don’t you know us?’ asked the sergeant, seemingly confused by Zartath’s attire but more concerned that he didn’t recognise them. ‘I am Urgaresh. This is Skarh, Haakem.’ He gestured to each in turn.
‘Thorast, my lord,’ uttered the Apothecary.
Zartath sneered, confused. ‘Lord? I am no one’s lord.’
Urgaresh rose to his feet. His eyes narrowed. ‘We are your wrath,’ he said. ‘And have searched long and far.’
‘To what end, warrior?’ Agatone interjected, reminding the Black Dragons of his presence and the bolters aimed at them.
‘To find our captain,’ said Urgaresh, as all eyes fell on Zartath.
‘Do you trust them?’
Agatone looked up from his vigil and met Issak’s gaze.
‘They boarded my ship and killed several of its crew. No, I don’t trust them.’
They were sitting in the darkened confines of the Forge Hammer’s apothecarion, the unconscious form of Exor laid down on the medi-slab in front of them. Vitals were steady but the wound he had taken from the traitor’s sword in Molior was grievous. Given the extent of the injuries and Exor’s augmentations, Agatone considered they might have been better off with an enginseer rather than a ship’s medic.
‘What will you do with them?’ asked Issak.
Agatone looked down again. The Black Dragons had been incarcerated in the brig. They went willingly, in part due to Zartath’s presence but also on account of the sheer number of bolters levelled at them.
Zartath had no knowledge of them, and had spent every moment since his brothers’ imprisonment watching them from an observation chamber. Agatone resolved to go and check in on him after he had finished visiting Exor.