by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
Molkis felt the orks’ warm blood spraying over him. He drew his blade and sliced off a head, an arm, a hand, as he had done as the greenskins breached the pass at Malikan Gate. One tried to get behind him but he threw it over his shoulder and pressed it to the ground, forcing his bolter barrel up under its jaw and blowing away the upper half of its skull.
‘Good kill, my brother!’ cried Chapter Master Tekelon, who saluted from across the battlefield with his power spear. ‘Thus does Molkis shame us all with the tally of the dead he reaps! I shall not wager the day’s kill against you again!’
‘I will offer you fine odds, Chapter Master,’ replied Molkis as he blasted a wide wet hole in another ork scrambling through the corpses at him. ‘If you will take them!’
Molkis felt a tugging at his arm, small like a persistent insect. He glanced down and saw Scout Desaan, face wide with concern.
‘Brother Molkis, focus! See what is around you. The greenskins are massing again!’
No, thought Molkis. He was not fighting the orks with combat knife and bolter, as he had done centuries ago. He was entombed in this Dreadnought. And Chapter Master Tekelon was not there. He had died soon after Molkis’s entombing, and Midnias was master of the Obsidian Glaives now.
How easy it was to forget.
The first wave of orks had been beaten back from the cathedral. The floor was slick and gleaming with their blood. The Obsidian Glaives were hauling their fallen back from the front line as a few scattered shots from the orks pinged against the pillars. Some of the fallen were wounded, being helped to their feet by their brothers – others were unconscious and limp. Some were clearly dead, torn open or beheaded.
The ork dead numbered in the hundreds. They were draped over the stone benches and heaped against the walls. But there were more of them still to join the fight, chanting their war cries beyond the breach, ready to storm it again and buy a few more Space Marine dead with dozens of their own.
‘Hold the doors!’ ordered Captain Seharra. ‘Give them ground so they pay for it in blood!’
The Obsidian Glaives were forming up around the archways leading into the cathedral, hauling broken benches into barricades and kneeling in gun lines like an execution detail.
‘Come, brother, take your place,’ said Desaan. The Scout was still holding on to Molkis’s lascannon arm. Molkis allowed himself be led to a gap in the line where an archway pillar had fallen to ork gunfire.
‘How fares Brother Molkis?’ asked Seharra to Desaan.
‘Ready for the fight,’ replied Desaan.
Seharra looked at Molkis, something uncertain in his face. ‘We need you with us, Brother Molkis. Here and now. See the enemy before you and the battle-brothers beside you.’
‘I can,’ said Molkis. His synthesised voice was low and grating, like stone grinding against stone, and it shocked him to hear it instead of the voice with which he had spoken to Captain Tekelon.
That had been more than three hundred years ago, Molkis reminded himself. Tekelon was dead, and Molkis was no longer that man.
‘We shall be with you, captain,’ said Desaan.
‘The brothers of my company look to you both,’ said Seharra. ‘There is no need to fight enemies who are not there. We have plenty already who are.’
A great war cry rose from beyond the breach, a mingling of hundreds of ork voices. One among them led the chanting, guttural and loud as a vox-hailer. The other greenskins echoed the leader’s cries and the chant sped up. The shape of a single ork appeared in the breach – it was enormous, taller by half from its fellow greenskins, wearing a ragged mismatch of wargear. On its head was jammed an Imperial admiral’s hat with a feather still stuck in the band. Its shoulder pads were battered steel and hundreds of Imperial Guardsmen’s dogtags hung from them like brocade from an officer’s epaulettes. The greenskin’s mouth was crammed with gold-capped tusks and it wore a patch over a mass of scar tissue covering one eye socket. In one hand was a naval cutlass, presumably stolen from an officer of the sector battlefleet. In the other was a huge, crude flamethrower bulky enough to have been cobbled together from spaceship parts.
The greenskin’s abdomen had been torn out, perhaps by injury, perhaps by choice. In place of the missing organs was a round furnace, spurting flame, connected to the flamethrower by a thick ribbed tube. A heap of fuel burned behind a barred door on the ork’s belly. The ork’s lips peeled back in a grin and flame flickered behind its gilded fangs.
Molkis’s hearts leapt as the targeter built into his sarcophagus ringed the greenskin in red, and he raised his lascannon to fire. But the orkish pirate bellowed and dozens more swarmed in around it, obscuring the shot. The Obsidian Glaives opened fire at the same time Molkis did, without Seharra having to give the order. These orks were elites, heavily armed and armoured, and they weathered the first volley of bolter fire with only a dozen or so fallen. They bellowed as they vaulted the stone benches and closed with the Obsidian Glaives.
‘They shall not force this breach!’ yelled Seharra into the vox-net. ‘They shall find no foothold on sacred ground!’
An ork in a full suit of mechanical armour stomped towards Molkis’s position. Its armour was a mockery of a Space Marine’s: crude and massive, spurting hydraulic fluid as it absorbed chains of bolter fire against the bullet-scarred plates. Only the upper part of the ork’s face was exposed, the lower half covered with a massive steel jaw plate cut into jagged teeth.
Molkis strode forward from the cover of his archway. An enemy like this was not to be received on his own terms, by waiting back and allowing him to strike with all momentum. Thus the Codex Astartes read. Molkis followed it to the letter as he crashed into the armoured ork, knocking it to the ground with the weight of his sarcophagus and ramming his power fist down into its body.
The ork caught the Dreadnought’s fist as it descended. The xenos was strong enough to halt the fist as Molkis powered it downwards. The ork’s eyes narrowed into red slits as Molkis pushed harder, besting the ork by a fraction to grind the weapon down.
The greenskin leader was laughing. Molkis flicked a lens up to the breach where it still stood, surrounding by the seething mass of orks pouring through the breach. Among them were several orks less armoured then the others, carrying not guns or blades but bundles of crude stick explosives with lit fuses hissing. These orks were covered in weeping scars, as if they came from a whipped and tormented caste marked out for a suicide mission.
‘Perfidy!’ cried out a voice over the vox-net. ‘They will bring this place down!’
More of the explosive-carrying orks were making it onto the cathedral floor. Molkis paused his crushing of the armoured ork long enough to draw a bead on one of them, whose face was half stripped down to the bone and who carried a hopper of burning explosives on its back. Molkis fired twin lances of crimson light from his lascannon and the ork vanished in an eruption of flame and debris. The shock wave of the blast hammered against Molkis and shards of stone rattled against him.
‘Shoot them down!’ ordered Seharra. ‘Do not let them…’
His voice was lost in a trio of explosions that ripped through the cathedral. Pillars collapsed. Black torrents of stone poured from the shattered ceiling. Molkis tipped to one side as the floor shifted underneath him.
In the tumult Molkis saw Scout Desaan yelling, but the noise was so vast he could not make out his words. Desaan was falling away – no, it was Molkis who was falling, pitching onto his side. The floor was sinking into the crypts below. Obsidian Glaives and orks tumbled past him. The armoured ork was gone, crushed beneath Molkis or pitched into the catacombs.
Darkness closed in. Falling stone hammered against Molkis. He could hear now – the roar of the collapsing cathedral mingled with the laughing of the orkish warlord at the destruction he had created.
Another explosion shuddered the cathedral. A pillar fell, trailing pulverised rock.
One of the hands of Guilliman’s statue tumbled past Molkis into the crypts.
‘…back! Fall back!’ Seharra was ordering. The vox-net was full of static and Molkis could barely make out the words. Gunfire streaked back and forth above as Molkis tried to shift his weight and get upright again.
The ceiling above bowed down and split. Rock rained down. Men and orks were yelling as they were crushed. The torrent slammed down onto Molkis so hard another, more profound darkness fell behind his eyes.
The Penumbral Spike was riddled with chambers, some of them enormous assembly grounds and sparring arenas, others tiny cells or shrines to heroes whose inscriptions were all that remained of them in the Chapter’s memory. Natural volcanic tunnels had been enlarged to form the interior of the fortress, each constructed with a mind towards defending against an invader – dead ends, switchbacks, false gateways leading to killing zones. But no fortress was completely impregnable. Room by room, doorway by doorway, Penumbral Spike was falling.
‘Bring us the devastation, Lord Guilliman,’ said Chapter Master Midnias as he knelt before the Vaevictis Monument. The monument chamber had been enlarged many times to contain the stasis chambers in which were displayed arms and armour captured from fallen enemies. One contained a slender crystalline rifle of elder design, another the crested skull of an enormous war-beast fielded by the tau. Some held fragments of armour carefully suspended in psychic wards, taken from warp-corrupted foes.
‘Give us the wisdom to bring it down on our enemies. Bring us the hatred, Lord Guilliman. Give us the discipline to wield it as a weapon. Bring us the deliverance, Lord Guilliman, from the end of days.’
Scout Desaan waited until the prayer was finished. Only when he finally entered the chamber did he see the other Obsidian Glaives standing in the gloom, among them Scout-Captain Terundel of Desaan’s own Tenth Company.
‘Scout,’ said Midnias. ‘You have come to tell me that Brother Molkis has fallen.’
‘He has,’ replied Desaan. ‘The greenskins collapsed the cathedral. Molkis was buried. Captain Seharra was taken to the apothecarion, they say…’
‘I know of Seharra,’ said Midnias. ‘I needed to hear of our Dreadnought’s loss from one who had seen it with his own eyes. I am aware of Molkis’s recent waywardness. Had he been separated he might not have returned to us without one to guide him, as you have. Now I am certain.’
‘A choice must be made,’ said Captain Elhalil of the Sixth Company.
‘And it is only I who can make it,’ said Midnias.
‘You know my mind, Chapter Master,’ said Elhalil. ‘To me, this point was reached the moment the first greenskin set foot on Obstiria. We should have…’
‘There is no should or should not,’ snapped Midnias. ‘There is the word of the Codex Astartes and the certainty a lifetime of battle has given me.’ Midnias looked towards the shadows and Desaan saw another Space Marine there, in glossy red armour instead of the black of an Obsidian Glaive. ‘Can it be done?’
‘It can,’ replied Techmarine Javan. ‘Though with all my heart I beg you not to ask it of me.’
‘What does your heart say about defending this ground from the alien?’ demanded Elhalil. ‘What can be more important than that?’
‘The survival of our Chapter’s soul!’ replied Javan. ‘The thousands of years that will be lost! Some of the neural couplings are almost completely degraded. With the radiation readings from the last year, there is no saying how long…’
‘I will tell you how long!’ shouted Elhalil. ‘As long as it takes the greenskins to force their way through the lower levels and into the vaults! Can you not hear them? They tunnel through the Spike as we speak. This Warlord Flamegut has ten thousand lives to spare and it will pour them all through the catacombs to fill this Spike to the brim with greenskin flesh. If, of course, the orks who took the fighter hangars do not get there first. That is how long the soul of this Chapter has before it is extinguished!’
‘Enough, my brothers,’ said Midnias. He did not need to raise his voice to quell the argument. ‘Obstiria is a cruel world, and the words of the Codex have bound us to a path that has done much harm to those who are most precious to our Chapter. But Elhalil is right. Though it cost us everything, we must make this stand. Not because our pride demands we repel the invaders, but because the orks who are halted here will not join the warfleets pouring into the sector. More lives than our own, even of our greatest heroes, depend on us. There is only one choice I can make.’
Desaan looked across the faces of the Obsidian Glaives. Though Javan tried to hide it, he was heartbroken. Desaan had never seen such sorrow in a Space Marine, let alone in a Techmarine who was supposed to become in outlook like the machines he tended. Elhalil, for all his bluster, seemed to bow under the weight of Midnias’s decision.
‘Go to the vault, Brother Javan,’ said Midnias. ‘Take with you everyone you need. Wake them. Wake them all. May Guilliman guide our hand.’
Desaan had never seen the inside of the vault. Very few ever did except the highest-ranked of the Chapter and the Techmarines who maintained it. Scout-Captain Terundel had beckoned Desaan follow as Javan took a detail of Obsidian Glaives to the vault, and Desaan had known immediately what his purpose was to be.
The vault was clad in cold steel, the only chamber in the Spike not to be walled with the living rock of the mountain. Rivulets of condensation had frozen into beads of ice around the cryo-towers standing like the pillars of the cathedral. They exuded an aura of such deep cold that the air Desaan breathed felt brittle, as if it might shatter in his throat.
Twelve enormous pedestals stood, each one topped by a cradle of archaic machinery and wreathed in cold vapour. In eleven such cradles stood a Dreadnought, the black armour of each covered in heraldry and battle-honours spanning thousands of years of the Obsidian Glaives’ history. The twelfth pedestal was empty, for it was assigned to Brother Molkis.
Several servitors marched from the corners of the room as Javan walked between the pedestals. He gave them orders in rapid machine-cant and they scurried off to attend to the Dreadnoughts. Each servitor was based on the body of a human, its mind wiped and reprogrammed and its limbs replaced with heavy manipulators or data-probes.
‘Brother Desaan,’ said Javan. ‘Your task of ascendance was assisting Ancient Molkis in his guardianship, is that correct?’
‘It was,’ said Desaan. ‘I saw him fall.’
‘Our elder brothers will need assistance too,’ said Javan. ‘I do not know if you have been informed of Obstiria’s curse.’
‘Its curse?’
Javan activated a control stud on the side of the nearest pedestal. Hydraulics hissed as the Dreadnought atop it shifted its weight onto its huge metal feet. Cables disengaged and spilled coolant fluid. ‘The radiation,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ said Desaan. ‘Obstiria cannot be settled by ordinary citizens. But our augmentations protect us from the radiation.’
‘As does the physiology of the ork,’ said Javan. ‘But I gather there is something about our world you have not yet been told. No wonder. It is not easy to hear.’
The servitors were completing the same procedures at the other pedestals. The room shuddered as eleven Dreadnought power plants rumbled into action. Hull lights flickered on. The Dreadnought on Javan’s pedestal lurched forward a step, pulling out the remaining cables and wires. Its pict-lenses whirred as they focused.
‘Reclusiarch Vengis,’ came a grating, steely voice from the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus. ‘I was broken in body, but I stand alongside my brothers once more.’
‘Brother Karulak,’ said Javan, ‘I fear you are mistaken. I am not Reclusiarch Vengis. He has been dead these last four hundred years. I am Techmarine Javan. Chapter Master Midnias commands us now. Do you remember, brother?’
‘What is this?’ came the metallic reply, tinged with anger. ‘Vengis dra
gged me from the fires of Kephalon Vale. I owe him my life. Who has killed him? How can I seek my revenge?’
Javan activated another panel on the pedestal console. Karulak sagged down on his hydraulics and Desaan recognised the effects of psychological stabilisers released into the pilot’s bloodstream. ‘Focus on what lies around you, brother,’ said Javan. ‘Time has clouded your mind. Do not let it wander. Your Chapter has need of you.’
‘What is the curse?’ asked Desaan.
‘Space Marine flesh is proof against Obstiria’s radiation,’ replied Javan as he continued working the controls. ‘But the same cannot be said about all our technology. The connection between the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought and its pilot uses technology that cannot be replicated. But those connections degrade with exposure to this planet’s radiation, and with them the faculties of the pilot’s mind. The Codex Astartes demands that one of our Chapter’s Dreadnoughts stand guard over our fortress but each hour of such exposure shortens a Dreadnought’s life. In here, asleep, they are protected. When active on Obstiria, the degradation continues, and as it worsens the speed of decay accelerates.’
‘They are dying?’ asked Desaan.
‘Slowly,’ said Javan. ‘But yes, they are dying.’
‘How long do they have?’
Javan glanced at a series of marks on Karulak’s sarcophagus. They were unobtrusive against the heraldry and kill-marks painted on the armour plating. Desaan recalled similar markings on Brother Molkis, but had never thought to wonder what they meant. High Gothic numerals counted out a date.
‘Karulak has four years,’ said Javan. ‘That ticks down as we speak. Some have more, most have less.’
‘And Molkis?’
‘Longer. The Dreadnoughts are rotated out of honour guard duty as they degrade and his duty was to last a year or more. After that he would be sent back to this vault to wait his rotation again. Each time would be shorter as his connections were corroded away, but the Codex demands it of us and the word of Guilliman must be honoured.’