Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Yes,’ Vritras agreed. ‘They will have nowhere to hide from us.’

  Toharan laughed, though he caught himself hoping that it wasn’t bravado or recklessness speaking through Vritras. He banished the thought. He didn’t agree with many of Vritras’s decisions, but he had no cause to question the captain’s tactical wisdom. Vritras had led Second Company to too many victories for that sort of doubt.

  Vritras turned to Massorus. ‘Brother-Chaplain, we are ready. Brother Kommodor, raise our standard.’

  Kommodor did as Vritras ordered, and Massorus began to speak. ‘Warriors of fire and bone!’ he cried. ‘See what pestilence awaits the purging flame of our wrath! March in their midst with holy violence. To the foul and the faithless, bring the Emperor’s truth. To the treacherous and the corrupt, show them the only mercy they deserve. Show the finality of death without redemption. Cast them into the tomb of infinite pain. Throw them to the eternal darkness beyond the Emperor’s light. For Antagonis!’

  ‘For Antagonis!’ came the shout. It was a full-throated roar, made monstrous in its volume and rage by helm speakers. It rose from Squads Pythios and Nychus, Neidris and Lanx. And then justice charged down the hill.

  Four squads. Just under half of Second Company’s full strength, and not one of its precious few land vehicles deployed. Vritras had held back squads on the Immolation Maw for possible boarding action against the Revealed Truth . Now forty Space Marines slammed into thousands of the warp-corrupted, about to fight their way over a kilometre of open ground towards the entrenched position of the god-warriors of Chaos. It was, Toharan thought, as he gave himself over to the fury of war, a good day.

  With no home world, the Dragons had no infrastructure to produce and properly maintain vehicles. Those they had were for ultimate measures. But what did they need with vehicles when each Space Marine was a main battle tank with legs? Vritras’s spearhead began its destruction of the enemy with fire from the rear. The Devastators of Squad Lanx unleashed their heavy bolters. Rounds with the destructive punch of artillery shells tore the cultists apart. A trench opened up in the enemy. The Dragons poured into it, gouging deeper into the formation. Command squad Nychus was the tip of the spear. Vritras was the sharp edge, leading his men into the sundered flesh of the foe. Toharan followed with Massorus, Rothnove, and Apothecary Urlock. Massorus’s litany of salvation and destruction became more rabid with every swing of his crozius. For all its fury, language could not express the depth of his disgust with the heretics, and his religious outrage found outlet in the obliteration of the unholy. Rothnove, meanwhile, seemed calm. The Librarian was silent, but shouted all the same. His anger crackled in the bolts of warp energy that shot from his hands and incinerated the heretics.

  Canoness Setheno strode beside Massorus. She was as silent as Rothnove, and if she felt, as Toharan thought she must, hatred for the enemy, it was visible only in the frozen scream of her helmet, and in the savage, spare precision with which she dispatched the cultists to hell. She fired her bolt pistol with her left hand, and in her right was her power sword. It sliced through bodies with the hiss of the sacred.

  Just behind, and spread out a bit further, came the rest of Squad Nychus: five warriors in Terminator armour. They were juggernauts who crushed and pulped the foe and barely noticed that they did so. And behind them came Tactical squads Pythios and Neidris, widening the swath of destruction and beginning to train their fire on the Chaos Space Marine positions ahead.

  The cultists didn’t try to defend themselves. They threw themselves against the Dragons. The chattel of the Sword were joyous as they fought and died. Consumed by faith, many of them were smiling right up to the moment Toharan shot them in the face or decapitated them. The Black Dragons’ advance was steady and measured. The cultists were little more than a morass that had to be waded through.

  They were enough. The spearhead was a concentrated, slow-moving target. The squads were halfway across the plain when the psyker attack hit. It was a steady barrage of energy blasts that were Chaos itself. They dragged claws down the veil of reality, rending its flesh, making it bleed. Colours that screamed and sounds that blinded erupted over the squads. Brother Reprobus took a direct hit to the breastplate. The Terminator staggered, but kept walking and firing. His armour cracked, the ceramite twisting itself into a spiral, but it held.

  ‘The traitors attack with the taint of the warp!’ Massorus shouted. ‘Deny it and all its works! Feel the Emperor’s steady hand and brush aside the shape of lies!’

  They couldn’t brush aside what screamed their way now. The sorcerous bolt was enormous, rolling, hungry. It devoured cultists as it came, and its howling murder of the real only grew stronger. ‘Evade!’ Vritras yelled and the spearhead split, its advance stopped as the Dragons threw themselves out of the way of the ball of insanity. Reprobus, slower in his armour, already wounded, took the bolt full-on. It smashed through the cracks in the ceramite and blew his breastplate wide open. He began to transform. Ripples over his body grew to a storm of flesh and bone, and his entire frame became a liquid flow of endless mutation. An arm became a claw, and then a mouth, and then a head, and then sprouting, bubbling tumours. His armour sloughed off. And through it all, as his physical identity shifted, split, multiplied and vanished, he roared, his pain and anguish transmuted into battle rage. He plunged forward a few steps, flailing. He smothered cultists with his shifting flesh until his legs vanished and he fell. For a moment, his head was visible again, eyes wide with a terrible hope as they turned to look for his brothers. Vritras answered that hope with his bolter, granting Reprobus the Emperor’s Peace.

  ‘Exterminate the sorcerers!’ Massorus yelled. His shout was drowned out by a nerve-scraping shriek. It was the cry of a hawk paralysing its prey. It was the inhuman shout of Raptors. The Chaos assault unit had been held back somewhere in the mountain slopes, Toharan realised. Now, jump packs fuelling their flight, the warriors tore into the Dragons. Toharan had fought Raptors before, and was used to the mutations and body modifications that turned them into mirrors of their namesakes. The Sword Raptors were different. Though they struck with lightning claws, the gauntlet-mounted blades that were a Raptor fetish, they had not altered their feet into talons. With the oily gold of their armour and the huge arch of the jump packs, their span spread to resemble iron wings, the warriors weren’t birds. They were angels who didn’t know they had fallen.

  One Raptor slammed into Massorus like a beatific meteor. The two Space Marines, bright traitor and dark loyalist, rolled together. The Raptor sank his claws into Massorus’s gorget. The Chaplain held on to his crozius and smashed it against the side of the Sword’s skull.

  Another tried to land on Toharan’s shoulders. He heard the shriek, sensed the rush of the strike’s wind, and sidestepped. The Raptor hit the ground in a crouch. Toharan fired his bolter at the jump pack’s fuel reservoir. Multiple rounds struck in the second before the Raptor could rise. Promethium exploded, wrapping the traitor in flame. He shrieked and leaped at Toharan. The blasting fuel knocked him off-balance and he missed, his claws slashing empty air. Toharan swung his chainsword into the back of the Raptor’s neck, chewing through armour and severing spinal cord.

  The creature fell, but then Toharan was crouching low as heavy bolter fire scorched the air above his head. More blasts of Chaos energy rained in, and the Raptors kept slashing. Massorus had pulped his opponent’s head, but another had managed to tear off the helmet of Brother Demorgon of Squad Neidris. The Raptor punched his claws into Demorgon’s eyes.

  The spearhead had stopped advancing. Cultists pressed in, making an offering of their bodies and holding the Dragons while the Swords of Epiphany cut at them, piece by piece.

  The closing of a dragon’s talon did not mean attacks from just two sides. The grip of a dragon punctured its prey on at least three. Vritras’s talon had lost one angle of attack as the Immolation Maw fought off bombers and fighters. The second was stymied. But there was a third. It was the stabbing
thrust.

  Standard Codex doctrine called for assault squads to be deployed in deep strikes at the start of an engagement to destabilise an enemy before the main attack flattened him. The simple geometry and absolute bulk of the vault, coupled with the size and strength of the defending force, blurred the line between dogma and pointless sacrifice. And the Black Dragons were not a Codex Chapter. Vritras had held back the thrust. It came now.

  The Doomfires unleashed punishing payloads against the Immolation Maw ’s void shields. The massive ship couldn’t outmanoeuvre the bombers and their escorts, but the turret fire held the worst of the attacks at bay and whittled down the pack. Maro kept the strike cruiser in motion, and hit his second waypoint. He fired one more drop pod. The Dragon Claws landed in the mountains, on the opposite side of the battlefield from the rest of the squads. They raced towards the vault. Though it loomed higher than the mountains, its roof was still within jump pack reach from the top of the nearest peak. When Volos came down on the roof, the surface beneath his boots was odd. It was smooth as metal, as bedrock solid as any mountain, and yet he felt like he was walking on writhing worms. He grounded each step, careful to keep his balance.

  ‘This is not a healthy place,’ Nithigg observed.

  ‘It will feel even worse by the time we’re done with it,’ Volos replied and led the way to the roof edge. The slope to the ground was near vertical and as smooth as the roof. The Dragon Claws had a complete view of the battlefield. They saw the Raptors descend on their brothers. They saw the disposition of the Swords’ defensive positions. They saw the perfect angle of attack.

  Vasuk’s bone-blades, like Volos’s, were retractable, and now he extended them, eager for flesh. ‘An open invitation,’ he said.

  ‘Then we should accept.’ Volos launched himself into the air.

  They struck the centre of the Swords’ rear line. They were fire and darkness come to crush and smother the light of false gods. As he plunged, Volos unleashed the fury of his bolter, pinning his target to the ground, blasting away chunks of armour and gouts of blood. In the last second, he mag-locked the gun to his thigh and landed with bone-blades extended. He punctured the traitor’s primary heart and throat, destroying not just his life but his progenoid glands, erasing the legacy of the Sword forever.

  He straightened, drawing his gun again and firing on the Sword manning the heavy bolter. The traitor grunted but stayed at his post, swinging the turret around. Volos ducked under the sweep of the barrel and rammed the Sword, horns catching the foe under the arm, cutting through the seam of the armour and slicing deep into his shoulder joint. He lifted the Sword off his feet, grabbed him and whirled him against the door of the vault. The Sword slumped, stunned, and Volos pumped mass-reactive rounds into him until he was motionless.

  Something began to hum. It was a deep sound, its frequency far below what a human ear could detect, but Volos’s Lyman’s ear heard it clearly. Then a huge blow knocked him sideways.

  Makaiel was grappling with an Imperial, the two of them caught in an immobilising stalemate. Over the shoulder of the Black Dragon, he saw Ecanus shot to pieces against the door. He heard the hum. He also saw a change in the door. It was slight, but the seam that ran the height of the entrance was more pronounced, as if the two halves had parted less than the breadth of a hair. And so he knew what to do, now that it might be too late.

  No. It wasn’t too late. He lived, his vow was unfulfilled, and there was so much truth yet to propagate.

  He let his knees buckle and he fell backward, dragging his opponent with him. He kicked up as they hit the ground, and knocked the Dragon over his head. Makaiel had lost his bolter during the grapple, but his pistol was still at his side. He rolled away, drew the pistol and fired. The bolts struck the Dragon in the shoulder as he rose, spinning him around and knocking him away from the vault and into the teeming plain. Cultists swarmed over him.

  ‘Drive them back!’ Makaiel yelled. ‘In the name of our Father, drive them back!’

  The Chaos bolts pummelled Volos. Damage runes lit up in his retinal lenses. Corrupt energy crackled and cackled over him, and the force of the hits felt as if he’d been punched by a Dreadnought. He stumbled back but kept his feet, and looked for his enemy. The sorcerer had risen from one of the rudimentary trenches the traitors had dug. He was in a direct line with the Dragon spearhead, and Volos saw the scorch marks of madness on the rock of the plain and on the avenue of bodies that ran from the sorcerer to the stalled spearhead.

  Volos dropped flat and the worst of the bolts passed over his head. The sorcerer stopped his attack. Volos scrabbled forward and pushed himself up with his arms, moving to a crouch and then a leap, a burst of his jump pack turning him into a comet of hate aimed at the sorcerer. He flew at the traitor, blades out and thirsty for heretic gore. But the sorcerer had already cast another spell. He seemed to flicker in and out of being, and his movements were blurred, almost invisible with speed. It was as if Volos’s leap were being dragged through a morass of time, each second stretched to an endless hour. Volos had a momentary impression of the sorcerer bringing his hands together, and then pushing his palms out, fingers splayed.

  Up! Volos’s intuition howled.

  Another burst from the jump pack, popping him up, destroying the arc of his leap and spoiling the angle of attack. But the sorcerer clicked back into stable reality, and from his hands came a ball of nightmare, rolling over the ground to meet Volos. He flew over the inferno of change, but his blades caught the outer edge of the spell. He felt a shift, a fusing of chance and fate. Then he was on the sorcerer, and when he swung a blade, it sliced through the sorcerer’s gorget like an afterthought and sent the traitor’s head flying.

  Volos blinked and looked at the blades protruding from his wrists. The adamantium and the bone had run together. The blades were shaded like limestone, and veined like marble. They were something different now, and when he retracted them, he half-expected them to shoot up his arms and into his brain. The moment of agony was worse than before. Otherwise, he felt no different.

  His attention returned to the battlefield. Nithigg was dispatching another sorcerer. Vasuk was down, just before a trench, but dragging himself up again. The Dragon Claws had been pushed back from the immediate area of the doorway, but the psyker attacks had ceased, and the heavy bolter was silent. The Raptors were down. The spearhead was moving again.

  Volos bared his fangs behind his helmet grille. The traitor line was broken. A concentrated push now and they would crush the Swords against the wall.

  The cultists were routed, too. The robed disciples were fleeing the field, running pell-mell to the vault, brushing past the Swords and heading straight to the door. The Swords must have sounded the retreat, Volos thought as he began to charge the few dozen metres back to the vault. He wondered where the heretics thought they would retreat to, and he almost felt sorry for the fools in their final seconds before being slaughtered.

  Most of the Swords of Epiphany were sending a shredding hail of bolter fire at the attackers. Volos crouched low as he ran, and he took some hits, but the defence wasn’t enough to stop the Dragons, only slow them a few seconds. Then he realised that the other Swords weren’t even looking at him or his brothers. They were watching the cultists pile up near the door. He saw what was about to happen, and ran faster because he knew he must stop it, and knew also that he was far too late.

  The clamour of bolters and grenades echoed off the face of the vault. Nessun’s faithful died by the dozens. Their blood splashed up the sides of the door. The hum became a staggering blow, a seismic vibration that tried to bring Volos to his knees. Static filled the readouts on his retinal lenses. He forced himself to keep moving, though his head was filled with electric agony. The hum became a rumble that seemed to spread from inside his skull, down through his feet and into the earth itself. Then the ground really was shaking as the mammoth doors opened like twin mountains grinding apart.

  The Swords of Epiphany charged over
the corpses of their disciples and disappeared into the vault.

  CHAPTER 12

  OH, WHISTLE, AND IT WILL COME

  The Black Dragons regrouped at the entrance. The urge was to race after the traitors, guns blazing. There had been a toll of brothers’ blood paid, and a debt in kind was owed. But the vault was not going to make pursuit easy.

  The doorway opened onto an immense chamber, hundreds of metres high. The interior was lit by a glow that had no discernible source, as if the light simply floated inside the structure. The glow was the dark red of an infected throat. The diseased architecture also resembled a throat. The walls were slightly concave, and rose to a curved ceiling. The chamber was ribbed, and there was a smooth, curved softness to the protrusions, suggesting not the rigidity of bone but the pillowing of flesh. The floor had a single groove running down the centre, and on either side there was a low, curving rise. It was a tongue. The hall followed a gradual downhill slope for at least a kilometre, and then appeared to hit a sharp drop. There was no sign of the Swords of Epiphany. They were gone, leaving only the echoes of their march behind. The acoustics of the chamber played havoc with the echoes, bouncing the sounds around and redirecting them, amplifying and distorting them. The echoes were so loud, it was as if the traitors were present, and Volos looked over his shoulder for a moment when the thud-clang beat of boots on the stone-metal of the vault’s surface appeared to come from behind. The echoes weren’t dying off. They were self-perpetuating and self-generating. The sound built on itself until there were no distinguishing individual footsteps. The din became a single, space-filling tone. It seemed to Volos that it was just about to develop an actual melody when it cut out and silence returned with the blow of a fist.

  ‘Where are they?’ Toharan wondered.

  ‘Past that drop,’ Melus said.

  ‘But how did they get there so fast?’ Volos wanted to know. The Dragons had been barely thirty seconds behind the Swords. The traitors couldn’t have covered the distance that stretched ahead so quickly.