Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘They must die,’ Chaplain Massorus said. ‘All of them.’ His voice shook with religious hate. ‘They are profaning this ship with their existence.’

  ‘I agree,’ Volos said. The question was how. The war would be one of tunnels and corridors now. That would work to the Black Dragons’ advantage. But they were fewer than twenty. The enemy’s resources would now be infinite.

  ‘We must face the reality of our situation,’ said Urlock. ‘We are in their domain. They will win by sheer attrition, if it comes to that.’

  ‘Then let it!’ Massorus snarled. ‘We will sell our lives at such a price that they will remember their victory only with shudders.’

  An idea took shape before Volos’s mind’s eye. It was an ugly one. It ran counter to his every hope and desire. It was monstrous.

  It was also necessary.

  As the idea gathered definition, another voice spoke. ‘Lord,’ it said. It came from a ventilation hatch three metres up the port wall. It was the mortal woman, Sorina. Volos heard shuffling behind her. She wasn’t alone.

  Volos moved to the wall, reached up and pulled the grille down. ‘Show yourselves,’ he said. He would look these people in the eye. He would give them honesty. There was little else he could offer.

  ‘We’ve lost, haven’t we?’ a man said.

  ‘Garrat!’ Sorina snapped, horrified by the lack of respect.

  ‘We haven’t lost,’ Volos said. ‘But the terms of the conflict have changed. This is no longer a rescue mission. This is a war. The xenos have made combatants of all of you, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Not a rescue mission,’ Garrat repeated. ‘So we cannot be saved?’

  ‘If you fight, your souls already are,’ Massorus told him.

  The man looked like he was about to collapse in on himself. So did the others with him. They had kept themselves alive on the thinnest of rations of hope. The miraculous help had come, but only to end hope.

  Sorina was the one who rallied. ‘We can still win?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Volos.

  In the silence that followed, he saw puzzled despair on the faces of everyone in the group except Sorina. She drew a long, shaking breath. ‘I understand.’

  Garrat looked at her. ‘What do you understand?’

  ‘Sacrifice is necessary.’

  The others stirred uneasily. Sorina glanced up at Volos. He nodded for her to continue. Best that the mortals reach the inevitable conclusions on their own. But soon. There were no sounds of the wreckage being cut through behind them. That in itself was a bad sign. If the eldar felt the task was beneath them, that meant they felt their control of the ship was absolute.

  ‘There’s no returning for any of us,’ Sorina said. ‘But we can defeat the enemy.’

  Volos watched comprehension dawn on the faces before him. One of the other women said, ‘We’ll be deciding for everyone else on the ship.’

  ‘They’re dead anyway. We all are.’

  ‘It’s a question of how we choose to die,’ Garrat said. He was beginning to sound stronger, less defeated. ‘Do we let ourselves become slaves and die by torture, or do we go out fighting?’

  ‘No,’ Sorina said. ‘That isn’t a choice. That’s our duty.’ She turned to Volos. ‘I think I know what you mean to do, lord. I can help.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I worked at Atmospheric Control.’

  Volos had been planning to destroy the engines. The possibility that Sorina suggested was much better, though it would make little difference for the mortals. ‘How quick and how extensive can your alterations be?’

  ‘Very, lord.’

  ‘You know what you will have to do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A simple word, really. Such a short, small sound, coming from the fragile human frame. The scale of Sorina’s courage in uttering that word deserved far greater acknowledgment. But there was time for nothing else. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘How far?’

  ‘The centre deck, forward of the enginarium.’

  ‘Venerable-brother,’ Volos said to Nithigg, ‘Regine Sorina has earned the honour of your escort. The rest of us will draw the attention of the xenos our way, and we will ensure the bridge is not sealed.’ He looked at the other humans. ‘Do you have weapons?’ They did not. ‘Then make your preparations.’

  ‘Meet what is coming with resolution and faith,’ Massorus instructed them.

  Garrat looked at the skull design of the Chaplain’s helmet as if Massorus were his death given form. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

  Volos heard the earlier strength reaffirmed. These mortals would meet their end well. The Black Dragons could give them that and a victory. He blocked off the rest of his line of thought, though he knew that he would have to face it in the end. ‘To war, then. With fire and bone!’

  Oh yes , he thought. There will be fire.

  Sorina was more exposed than she had been since the raiders had attacked. She had not been in one of the main passageways for weeks. But the Dreadnought could not fit into the narrow byways that had kept her alive. So now she was performing her final dance down the main thoroughfares. And it was still a dance. Nithigg’s steps were ponderous, each one an echoing boom, but Sorina had to run to keep up. When the attacks began, she had to stick close, using the massive legs for shelter, dodging from one to the other as they rose and fell. So she danced. She danced for her life, for the privilege of the good death, and for the glory of the Emperor.

  The eldar came for them almost as soon as they hit the main passageway. They ignored her. They saw her as property, not as a threat. They tried to stop Nithigg, monsters of cruelty attacking the monster of metal. The Dreadnought responded with a devastating barrage. His assault cannon turned the way ahead into a march of explosions. The agility of the xenos did them little good. Wide as the corridor was, Nithigg filled it with destruction. The few eldar who survived the blasts came within reach of the flamer attached to his power fist. Sorina moved forward into a landscape that was a burning distortion of the ship she had known all her life. Over the centuries, the utilitarian lines of the halls had been softened with mosaics and friezes, decorative archways and memorial pillars. Now there was just a passage through darkness that flickered with flame. The deck was twisted and cratered. The stonework fell from the walls. Architectural ornamentation crumbled. And more and more, there was the stench of spilled blood and burned flesh.

  The eldar’s splinter weapons were helpless against Nithigg, but they were lethal enough for Sorina. They hit the Dreadnought’s armour like edged hail. Every time she ran through the space between the legs, she expected her flesh to be flayed by their storm. But they advanced.

  There were other weapons too. There were the ones that fired the beams of blinding night. The wave of destruction that Nithigg kept up before them became his shield. There were a few shots that went wide, thrown off by the relentless explosions. But it would only take one opportunity, Sorina knew. The right pause, the right moment, and even this colossus of war could be stopped. And so would her dance.

  The eldar used speed. So could Volos. Ormarr and Pythios punched their way to the bridge with the momentum of a torpedo. ‘We stop for nothing,’ Volos told his brothers. ‘If they shoot, close with them. If they try to use their blades, run them down. Show them a dragon’s rage.’

  They did. With fire, with bolter, with blade, and most deadly of all, with fury, they ran the gauntlet of eldar attacks. The tactic was, Volos knew, one whose success could only be temporary. In the long run, all the enemy had to do was gather numbers until the sheer arithmetic of the battlefield overwhelmed the Black Dragons. And Volos was leading an assault that would draw those numbers. He knew there would be forces dispatched to stop Nithigg, but the Dreadnought was not heading for an obvious vital point. He would look like a diversion. In reality, the main force of the Black Dragons was the diversion.

  The eldar used deception. So could Volos.

  He could even prepare a trap they could no mo
re ignore than the Black Dragons had been able to turn away from the one the eldar had set. He was heading for the bridge with two squads of Space Marines. He had to be stopped. At all costs.

  The corridors were too narrow for eldar vehicles. The enemy was limited to foot soldiers against the rolling thunder of the Adeptus Astartes. Volos kept the fire constant. There was no conserving of ammunition. Victory was imminent or it would not come at all. The squads sent a suppressive rain of bolter shells down the halls before them and hurled frag grenades around corners. They advanced behind a moving wave of destruction.

  The eldar were skilled. But they were up against a charge that nothing except sudden and total annihilation could stop. One of the gladiators lashed Urlock with some sort of power whip. Energy coursed along its length, immobilizing his armour with a massive shock. The whip’s coating was corrosive and it began to eat through his battleplate. Massorus stormed past the convulsing Apothecary and smashed the wych down with his crozius. He paused for Urlock to shake off his stun and catch up. Ahead of him, his brothers raced on.

  So it went. Any skirmish between a single warrior and the enemy was ignored by all but one other battle-brother. The advance was relentless. The eldar never had the chance to cause a delay long enough for them to gather a concentration of their forces.

  They tried outside the bridge doors. There, they had erected barricades. They had established a strong point. They had their heavy weapons guarding the approach.

  It was not a style of war that suited them. The corridor that led to the bridge was a short one. The Black Dragons rounded the corner, their grenades preceding them. Blasts and shells took the barricades apart. The eldar still managed one round before they were shredded. Another blast of dark energy vaporized Brother Savrax. An even more intense beam shot down the centre of the corridor and melted the wall behind. It took off Braxas’s left arm at the shoulder. A hiss of pain crackled over the vox. He stayed on his feet.

  The Black Dragons reached the bridge. It was a vast space. Their run was over. Their advantage was gone.

  Atmospheric Control was almost as cavernous as the enginarium itself. The command console occupied a small, circular platform. It was surrounded by the gigantic processors that regulated the mix and feed of gases, and the banks of turbines, hundreds of metres high, that powered the ventilation throughout the ship. Nithigg stood in the centre of the platform and directed fire at the chamber’s single access point. His position was strong as long as the eldar wanted to preserve the functionality of the ship. If they realized what was happening, if they didn’t care what happened to the facility, he would be caught in a cul-de-sac, where even he might be brought down. It was the survival of the mortal that was most critical and most difficult.

  She had to live long enough to bring about her own death.

  Sorina ran to the panels. She threw switches, then began moving sliders over to extreme positions. Tocsins sounded within moments.

  ‘How long?’ Nithigg asked. He kept up the bombardment. More bodies piled up at the entrance.

  ‘Not long, lord. The system is designed to get emergency air to all areas of the Absolution within minutes.’ She looked up, eyes shining with pride and fear. ‘Not long.’

  She was so small. The gulf between her humanity and what he had become was immense. But still there was a thread of connection. It was faint, frail. It would not survive the centuries of entombment that awaited him. It was there now, though. The leviathan of war reached across the gulf.

  ‘Have courage,’ he said. ‘You have done well.’

  Volos tasted the change in the air through his helmet’s rebreather. The oxygen levels were spiking. He ducked as the leader of the eldar lashed at him with her whip. It went over his head, but her skill was such that she struck again before he could counter. He raised his left arm to parry. The whip coiled around his forearm. It was some sort of power weapon, and its malevolence stabbed through his armour. It savaged his nervous system. His teeth snapped together as his nerves erupted in agony. He couldn’t move.

  The eldar surrounded the Black Dragons, attacking them with a lethal erosion. They were laying siege to a fortress of ceramite. They were taking their time. The Space Marines had formed a circle, and were sending out bolter shells in all directions, but they could not cover every angle at every moment. In the cracks, in the pauses, the eldar sent back streams of splinter fire. Liscar, who had survived the worst of Antagonis, went down, his throat torn out by a murderous shot through the gorget.

  Volos fought to move. The eldar yanked hard on her whip. His limbs were not his own. He stumbled forward, out of formation. The xenos fiend wore armour that appeared to be as much liquid as it was solid. The leader seemed insubstantial, a ghost, yet one who had already resisted a direct hit by a shell. Her face was invisible behind her helm, but there was a cancerous desire in her every blinding move. She hissed something at Volos, and the alien words sounded like a welcome.

  The air tasted heady.

  The whip was shutting down his thoughts with the unholy pain.

  The eldar raised a blade.

  Volos raged, one monster against another, his own hunger demanding satisfaction. His will travelled the length of the spasms shaking his frame, and his bone blades shot out. The left one severed the whip. The eldar staggered back, more from surprise than the recoil. Volos lunged at her. She leapt up, somersaulting backwards over a bank of consoles. Volos’s blades slashed the metal open.

  The air, so keen, so sharp.

  The eldar snarled something in her language. Her tone was defiant.

  Volos laughed at her, his contempt a weapon. ‘You have lost,’ he said.

  Sorina said, ‘It is done.’

  ‘You have triumphed, Regine Sorina,’ Nithigg said.

  She smiled, and did not close her eyes as Nithigg ignited his flamer in a pure oxygen atmosphere.

  The Absolution became a torch. The fire was a flash of total incineration, a rage of perfect flame that swept through every hold, corridor, chamber and shaft. In the positions furthest from the control centre, humans and eldar had several seconds to hear the great roar, and wonder what it portended. They died together, corpses fused beyond distinction by the breath of the dragon.

  The burn was total. The ship screamed, and as its power died forever, the webway passage, already strained by its size, collapsed, dropping the Absolution back into the materium.

  Volos’s auto-senses sealed him off from the ship’s agony. He stood still, surrounded by flame. For a few moments, he could hear and see and smell nothing. He was alone with the awareness of monstrosity.

  Then the air was gone. The fire died, leaving the ship with darkness, silence, and ash. Volos could see again, the world tinted green through the hunter’s sight of his lenses. He looked for the body of the eldar leader. His lip curled when he did not see it. He was surrounded by the cinders of her army, though.

  Braxas said, ‘I am receiving a hail from the Immolation Maw , brother-captain.’

  ‘Send news of our victory,’ said Volos. ‘The rest of you, return to our ship. I will go meet Venerable-Brother Nithigg.’ Together, he thought, they would walk through what they had wrought here. They would bear witness. They owed that much to Sorina, and to the half a million who had died.

  They would pay their respects to the half a million mortals whose flesh was the necessary tribute to a dragon’s war.

  The air at the centre of the landing pad glowed golden. Rain hissed as it blew into the light. The teleport locus grew brighter, as intense as hot metal, whiting out the faces of Colonel Indrana’s few remaining officers. Most of them had never witnessed a teleport before. A couple of them gasped, holding their hands up to shield their faces. Colonel Indrana squeezed her eyes shut against the glare.

  The light shrank, coalescing into nine giant forms. It burned brightly and solidified; where before there had been empty space, angels stood. Indrana blinked away retinal after-images.

  The Space Marines we
re huge, taller than Indrana and the other women under her command by half a metre or more, and far bigger than this world’s men. They had come arrayed for battle in power armour, finely wrought and decorated. Each carried the mark of their Chapter upon their left shoulder, a drop of blood hanging above a stylised chalice. Of the nine, five bore armour entirely in the Chapter’s red. A guard. One of these carried a banner of fine workmanship, two others sported claws upon their gauntlets as long as Indrana’s arms while the remainder carried boltguns. They were alert, their armour’s motors whining softly as they swept the pad for threats.

  The other four were officers or specialists. Indrana knew enough of the Adeptus Astartes to see that. Their battleplate was ornate beyond compare, and each different to the next as summer was to winter. One was garbed in deep blue, a psyker who carried a staff shot through with crystal, his head nestled in a web of arcane technology. Another wore white armour bearing the marks of the medicae, the third wore a helmet ghoulishly fashioned in the form of a skull, his armour black. And their leader…

  The Chapter Master was taller than the rest, a man of noble countenance, clad in red and gold. The pelt of a great beast was pinned to his shoulders. Only he and the psyker had their faces revealed. Beneath the sheen of the rain, Indrana thought their skin and hair looked oddly dry, and yet both were preternaturally beautiful , as perfect as the statues on the Reliquary Sanctum; angels cast in plaster.

  The Chapter Master looked around at Indrana’s tattered retinue. She felt acutely aware of her filthy uniform. She stood as straight as she could. Amusement played in the Chapter Master’s pale eyes. It never occurred to her that he might be laughing at her, it was clear to all that his eyes saw evidence of battle, and that he was pleased because of it.

  ‘Colonel Indrana?’ the Chapter Master said.

  She blinked, momentarily forgetting her own name. He came closer, boots clanging on the landing pad. She was forced to crane her neck to look up at him. She knew she was unpresentable – dark rings surrounded her eyes, smudging her dark brown skin black. Her body odour was rank in her own nostrils. No one had access to the comforts of life here anymore. How different to her he was, tall and shining in his armour, a saint come down from the sky. She felt ashamed.