Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  Toharan stared at the completed grinder. He drank in the sight of worlds transformed into an engine of perfect annihilation. There, before him, captured by the eye of bone, was the promise of something even more important than what Nessun was preaching. He could see the art. He could see the weapon this represented. The Imperium would fall before a beast that was fed by the very destruction it caused. But did even Nessun understand the gift of that destruction? Toharan could barely articulate it to himself, though he could feel it in his breast and in his soul. He had just been witness to the reduction of billions of lives to nothing . Aighe Mortis would be ground to dust. Exterminatus left the husk of the planet behind, but the grinder returned matter to the void. It would deal a death blow not only to the Imperium, but to existence itself. The terrible pressure of being would ease as he travelled on this chariot of oblivion. He would see the universe reduced to purity under its wheels.

  Toharan smiled. Toharan laughed. He was giddy. He felt liberated. He experienced true joy for the first time in his living memory.

  And then Volos had to spoil the perfect moment.

  ‘Approaching ships, Father,’ a Sword said.

  Toharan saw them too: bright specks emerging from the grinder, streaking away from the very nexus of the destruction. Nessun noticed, and the eye-screen changed focus and perspective. It narrowed its attention to the specks, magnifying them, revealing their identity. ‘Thunderhawks,’ Toharan muttered, cursing.

  ‘How long before they reach us?’ Nessun asked.

  Toharan ran some numbers in his head. ‘About an hour.’

  Nessun never took his hands from the vertebrae as he spoke. ‘And you control the strike cruiser?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then there is nothing they can do to harm this temple.’ There was a hint of strain in the cardinal’s voice, and he spoke slowly, as if it were hard for him to keep track of his own words. The instrument was demanding his concentration, leaving little for the rest of reality. ‘Deny them access, and they will shatter into foam against the rocks of our defence.’

  The Thunderhawks were entering the moon’s atmosphere when Maro broke the vox silence. The Immolation Maw was speaking to its children again. ‘Apologies, captain,’ Maro said. ‘There has been some heretical activity aboard, but the ship bathes in the Emperor’s light once more.’

  ‘I am not your captain, brother,’ said Volos.

  ‘But you are. That pretty-faced traitor down there is no captain of mine.’

  ‘You have my gratitude, brother-helmsman. Please stand ready.’

  The gunships overflew the temple. Volos looked down at the ruins of the Revealed Truth . There were recognisable fragments: a twisted turret here, a blackened gothic arch there. He could tell what had happened, and though the impact of the cruiser had gouged the surface of the moon, there was no crater, and the temple looked untouched.

  Volos thought through the options. He didn’t like the prospect of assaulting the only entrance. He wanted a second avenue of attack. The transparent dome was inviting, yet it had somehow survived the annihilation of a Retaliator-class cruiser.

  Nithigg had come forward to the cockpit and took in the scene. ‘It would be nice to bomb the place flat,’ he sighed.

  ‘In through the roof, is what I want,’ Volos told him. ‘I don’t care how sorcerous that dome is. It has to be a weak point. We smash it.’

  ‘And how are we going to manage that?’

  ‘If we can’t shoot it out, we’ll use the temple against itself. I doubt we can level it, but I think we might be able to wrench it out of true.’ He turned to Keryon. ‘We’ll need some distance and altitude.’

  Nithigg chuckled. ‘This isn’t going to be subtle, is it?’

  Volos grinned, but he was also snarling in anticipation of crushing vengeance. ‘I am Adeptus Astartes, not Inquisition. Of course it isn’t going to be subtle.’ Then he voxed Maro and told the helmsman what he wanted. If the move killed everyone in the temple, so much the better.

  They saw the Thunderhawks pass overhead, and then head off beyond the curvature of the moon. Toharan wished for anti-aircraft weaponry. ‘Make the jump,’ he told Nessun. ‘Take us into the warp now.’

  Nessun gave a short jerk of his head. He had no concentration to spare. His fingers were a blur of music. ‘Not ready,’ he grunted.

  The red glow of the moon’s surface was leaking out into its atmosphere. It spread like a focused aurora across the gulf of the void towards the grinder.

  The Sword, Gabrille, said to Toharan, ‘We must prepare for an incursion.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Disciples, with me!’ he called, and the Legion name sounded right when he spoke it.

  ‘Orbital launch!’ Symael yelled.

  Toharan looked up, through the dome at the dark and stars. One star was rushing towards them. It became a streak, then a shape. In the eternal fraction of a second before it hit, Toharan had time to realise he was seeing a torpedo come for them. He had time to know that he had lost the Immolation Maw. He even had time to deduce, if only one torpedo had been launched, what sort of ordnance it must be.

  He did not have time to brace himself.

  His helmet shut down his senses to protect him from the worst of the flash and blast of the cyclonic torpedo. It couldn’t protect him from the upheaval of the ground beneath his feet. The world shook and rolled. He was a storm-tossed ship. Blind and deaf, he felt himself flying. He slammed into a wall, fell to the floor, and then he was tossed into the air again as the earth bucked. The shutters over his lenses lifted, and the sounds were unfiltered once more. The destruction of the Revealed Truth was dwarfed by the searing madness of the new explosion. This was beyond fire, beyond heat, beyond comprehension. He was at the heart of the universe’s birth and death. Reality’s scream was so intense he could barely see the other figures around him as they were thrown about like dice in a cup. There was nothing to hear except the thunder of dying gods. Brilliance roiled. Waves of flame the height of forever smashed into and over the temple without pause. The ground writhed, caught in a tectonic seizure. The temple twisted with it, its walls torquing.

  At the rear, the metal entrance doors blew off like leaves in the wind. On the top, the dome imploded. Jagged chunks of xenos glass hailed down into the great hall. Fire and heat rushed in with it. Toharan rose to his knees only to be knocked down by a chunk of glass the size of a boulder. He saw two Swords actually manage to stagger a couple of steps towards Nessun, their arms raised in an attempt to shield him. Then everything was glass, fire and the heaving of earth. He was slammed in every direction until he was completely disoriented. The blows of a world rained down on him, and even his Space Marine physiology was overwhelmed. He blacked out.

  When he crawled back to full awareness, he found himself lying a third of the way up the staircase that circled the wall. He had no memory of landing there. He had gone limp in the jaws of the explosion, and rolled with the hits. A few ribs and teeth felt loose, but his limbs were all working. The fire was withdrawing, its fuel consumed, its work done. The temple still stood, but the walls were scored. Massive cracks ran their length. The staircase had numerous uneven passages and missing chunks. Toharan was astonished that the walls had not fallen. The rock had twisted like cloth, yet retained its integrity.

  Not all the Swords of Epiphany had been as lucky. Toharan saw one who had died beneath a chunk of the dome three times the size of the one that had hit him. He saw another one who had been reduced to a smouldering wreck. He also saw one of his Disciples, Kataros, lying slumped against a damaged section of wall. The Space Marine lay at bizarre angles. He’d been shaken into pieces.

  He looked for Nessun. The cardinal was hunched over the instrument. His white robes were scorched. Silk was torn where he’d been hit. So was his flesh. Toharan joined Gabrille at his side. ‘How is he?’ Toharan asked. He glanced up into the sky. The aurora was still there. Perhaps it didn’t need Nessun after all.

  The cardin
al raised his head. His hair seemed to be hanging off his scalp, ready to slip off at the first sneeze. Blood poured from his forehead. Nessun licked his lips, tasting his own vitae. And still his hands moved over the giant backbone. He had nothing like Space Marine armour, but he had weathered the storm as well as, or better than, any of his acolytes. He had been protected by the machine, Toharan thought. The former Ecclesiarch was still being watched over by the gods. Nessun parted his lips in a bloody smile of triumph.

  In the new silence, one barely broken by the metallic clunks of warriors putting themselves back together for the next battle, Toharan heard the snarling roar of the Thunderhawks on approach again. It sounded low to the ground.

  Nessun heard the gunships too. His grin became wider. ‘Too late,’ he whispered. ‘I am ready.’

  The grinder jumped into the warp.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE WAR OF REDEMPTION

  Setheno returned to the bridge to find that the Gemini grinder had vanished.

  ‘Is that worm dealt with?’ Maro growled.

  ‘He is. Helmsman, where…?’

  ‘Into the warp.’

  ‘Can your navigators track it?’

  ‘Something that big? They would have more trouble trying not to see it. We are about to make the jump, canoness.’

  ‘Good.’

  The Thunderhawks were making a low attack run on the entrance to the temple when the sky disappeared. The stars and the healthy black of mere void vanished. A gaping wound opened up in reality. It engulfed the Gemini configuration. Volos saw the firmament swallowed by the sea of the warp. Things that pretended to be colours stabbed down in tornado formations towards the surface of the moon. What writhed overhead was not a storm, but something far more lethal.

  ‘Oh, how nice,’ Keryon grumbled.

  ‘This changes nothing,’ Volos told him.

  ‘This ship doesn’t have a Geller field.’

  Nithigg said, ‘If we were at immediate risk, we would already be destroyed. This machine is like the Flebis vault. It is already of the warp, and is able to maintain its integrity, and ours as well.’

  Without looking up from his vector of approach, Keryon flicked a hand at the grasping warp-flow above. ‘I’m sure you’re right, and that that’s as harmless as it looks.’ He sounded grimly amused, as if the day had reached a certain perfection of vileness. ‘Make ready,’ he said.

  Nithigg nodded and headed back to the crew compartment. Volos waited a moment longer. He wanted to see the next step in the retaliation.

  Keryon brought the Battle Pyre within metres of the surface. He flew as if he were piloting a Land Speeder. The temple gates rushed towards them. Keryon fired a salvo of Hellstrikes and pulled up. The missiles flashed inside. The explosions were funnelled out of the entrance and washed over the Thunderhawk as it angled towards the temple’s peak. ‘Message delivered,’ Keryon said. The Nightfire followed to make sure the message was understood.

  Volos clapped Keryon on the shoulder guard and left the cockpit. He wasn’t even on the field yet, and he could already taste the blood of traitors in his mouth.

  The missile detonations were trivial after the cyclonic torpedo. But they did their work. Swords and Disciples were blown apart, armour and meat sent flying across the hall. Those not caught in the direct blast were knocked to the ground again, fire scorching their ceramite. Toharan cursed, shaking off the stunned ringing in his head. The Dragons were keeping them off-balance, blocking their attempts to regroup and prepare a defence.

  He staggered up, saw Symael, and pointed at the entrance hall. Symael nodded, and was already throwing together a group to interdict that access point. The squad that formed was made up of both Disciples and Swords. The cooperation was good, but the organisation was improvised, driven by the demands of time and not strategy. They were losing the advantage of their numbers and of their defensive position.

  Those were irrelevant concerns, Toharan told himself. His destiny was unalterable.

  One of the missiles had flown straight into the instrument. Toharan looked at Nessun. Gabrille was beside the cardinal, arms out to support him. There was little recognisable in the creature that stood there, consumed by the music. Its shape was human, but flesh and robes had been burned away. Instead of showing the raw pink and black of blast injuries, Nessun had turned the cartilage-grey of the organ. He was becoming part of the machine. The entities of his collective being were transforming, building layers of ornamental bone over his actual skeleton. He turned his head Toharan’s way, and for a brief moment, his eyes were able to see the room. The screen above Nessun’s head was suddenly filled with Toharan’s image. Nessun’s skull was art now, an ecstatic expression of death and music. Bones whose new purpose was to replace the weakness of flesh had taken the place of his lips, and they arranged themselves into a terrible grin. ‘Perfection,’ Nessun croaked with the sound of twigs on slate. His eyes were scale reproductions of the screen. They were stones with the power of sight. They gazed at Toharan for one beat more, promising glory, and then their attention soared away. Toharan and the hall vanished from the screen, replaced by the hungry joy of the warp and the spinning grinder.

  ‘He doesn’t need us,’ Toharan told Gabrille. ‘Not anymore.’ The instrument had been untouched by the rocket strike.

  Gabrille nodded, grabbed his bolter, and ran with Toharan to the staircase. The Battle Pyre was passing over the shattered dome.

  The Dragon Claws streaked into the temple on flaming promethium. They hit the observation deck, slamming down in a ring formation, slashing the space of the great hall with a web of interlocking fire. The Battle Pyre peeled off to join the Nightfire and drop the rest of the Black Dragons at the temple entrance, and for the next thirty seconds, the Claws were on their own. Volos felt no sense of being outnumbered. He felt the strength of holy war as he and his men brought justice down on the heads of the traitors.

  Toharan was partway up the staircase, and Volos sent a concentrated burst of fire his way, forcing him and the Sword back down. Volos and the Claws ran along the platform and jumped across the space, shifting targets every few seconds, keeping their own movements unpredictable. There was no cover below. The hall was an immense killing field for them, and there were so many targets.

  There was an instinctive resistance that Volos had to fight through, a moment of horror at shooting figures in the armour of the Black Dragons. But he knew what was necessary, and the rage at betrayal gave him strength. And when he saw that Toharan’s troops had defaced their armour, renouncing their Chapter and their faith in the Emperor, then the killing was easy. ‘Exterminate them all!’ he roared. The righteousness of faith was with him, and he was invincible.

  The Thunderhawk’s assault ramp lowered the second the ships touched the surface. Thirty-eight Black Dragons thundered down its length and rushed the temple entrance. Their blood was up. They were dark fury incarnate, a pounding juggernaut of war come for judgement and slaughter. Their numbers had been reduced to less than half of what they had been, and only two squads were fully intact. They had lost one captain, and been betrayed by a second. Their true Chaplain, Apothecary and Librarian lay in comas. They were on a xenos abomination travelling the warp, and they had no reason to believe they would live beyond this day.

  They had never been more dangerous.

  For Melus, there was an additional edge to the charge. This was a battle to restore the honour of Squad Pythios. The successive commands of Toharan and Omorfos had tainted him and his men by association. The time had come to purge their shame and burn the filth who had caused it. ‘Fire and bone!’ he shouted, and the cry was taken up by his brothers, their roar a weapon in itself, launched at the craven betrayers who waited for them inside.

  The temple rose before them, its outer wall an ophidian slope of smooth, glowing rock. The entrance was wide, the enemy visible about ten metres in, where a mix of black and gold armour was gathered to meet the invasion. There was no cover inside or ou
tside the temple. The strategy for both armies came down to a brute mathematics of force. The Dragons had to smash the defences with the speed and violence of their charge. The Swords and Disciples had to hold and break the wave of the advance.

  As the unstoppable force raced towards the immovable object, the opening moves of the opponents mirrored each other. Grenades hurtled through the air, crossing paths in mid arc. Krak and frag munitions erupted in the corridor. The stonework of the temple was untouched. The bodies of the warriors were less fortunate. Melus saw a brother gutted by shrapnel, but the Dragons had the advantage of speed and movement. They dodged and rolled out of the way of the explosives, while the defenders had to break rank or suffer the consequences. ‘First blood is ours, brothers,’ he voxed. ‘Press them hard.’

  Devastators on his left and right marched forward with a measured, implacable gait, their heavy bolters chewing up opposing armour, punching the enemy further back and providing cover for Melus’s tactical team to rush in faster. The return fire was steady and skilled, but none of it was heavy. No cannons were answering the Dragons’ charge, no missile launchers, no multi-meltas. Melus dodged a grenade, rolled, came up firing and took the head off a Sword. He wondered if perhaps the renegades didn’t have any heavy weapons. Grinning at the thought of the enemy’s tactical mistake, he closed the distance to the traitor front line.

  The fire from above was infuriating. It was so fast, so intertwined, that there was no opportunity to reclaim the initiative. Toharan was on the defensive, and Volos was forcing him and his allies out of the great hall and into the cover of the entrance corridor. Once there, they would be under siege on two fronts. ‘We can’t let them box us in,’ he yelled to Gabrille as they ran across the temple floor in zig-zags, dodging rounds, firing over their shoulders.

  ‘We won’t. Are your men ready for the counter at the rear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s hit them now.’