Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Very well, I thank you for your guidance, Veteran Brother-Sergeant Voldo. You remain my teacher in all things.’

  ‘You are welcome to my advice, Lord Captain Galt, and have but to ask to receive it, although the burden of command is yours alone. Whether or not you follow my advice is a matter for your judgement and conscience.’

  ‘There is one more thing I wish to discuss with you.’

  ‘And that is, my lord?’

  Galt hesitated. He saw Voldo as he had seen him in his vision of the Shadow Novum, beyond the affairs of the living. He tried to keep his voice steady, not to let tremors of worry for his teacher unseat his authority. Self-doubt is ever the overthrow of reason, Guilliman had written.

  ‘A small matter of a mission, veteran-sergeant. To the hulk. It shall be your honour to be first aboard. You have fought within many space hulks, and you more than any officer here have experience of fighting alongside brothers of other Chapters. I can think of no one more suited to this task. Success is required, many eyes watch us. The honour of the Novamarines is at stake. You will have but a limited time to succeed, your action must be coordinated with those of the Adepts of Mars upon the surface, and with no means of communication between your men and the hulk’s interior, you will be forced to operate with haste to ensure the mark is hit.’

  Voldo smiled. ‘A grave responsibility, lord captain, but one I gladly accept. I will see us victorious, you may have no doubt of that.’

  They spent some time examining mapping data and plotting a route for Voldo’s force, debating the advantages and disadvantages conferred by varying squad weaponry, the role the Blood Drinkers would fulfil, and how best to protect Magos Nuministon should the worst occur. It was good talk, battle talk, and the detail of it occupied Galt’s mind and drove away his misgivings.

  And yet, when they were done and Voldo strode out of his chambers to gather his men, Galt still wondered if he had done the right thing.

  The star Jorso blazed at the Space Marines upon the hulk, its angry light unfettered by atmosphere or shielding. The radiation it emitted was enough alone to kill a man, and Voldo was glad of his Terminator armour, and the protection its sensorium offered his own eyes.

  Sparks sprayed into space, silent shining rain, as Veteran Brother Gallio carved at the hulk’s surface. Voldo felt the action of Gallio’s chainfist through feet mag-locked to the skin of the ancient ship they sought to access, some bulky Imperial merchantman of uncertain age. There was no noise in the vacuum. Clastrin, almost as bulky as the Terminators in his full servo-harness, knelt by the veteran brother, plasma torches burning on the end of two of his additional mechanical arms, cutting four metres away from Gallio. Slowly, the pair of them were sketching a hole in fire of sufficient size to allow themselves access to the inner hull, where they would cut a doorway large enough to accommodate the massively armoured brothers.

  Voldo watched their transport lift off and retreat to a safe distance, weaving a path through the clouds of debris sent up by the earlier bombardment. Static hissed through his helmet vox. The remainder of Squad Wisdom of Lucretius stood about Voldo and Gallio in a defensive pattern – Veteran Brothers Militor and Eskerio, and Veteran Brother Astomar with his heavy flamer under his right forearm. The Blood Drinkers Squad Hesperion stood close by, lightning claws gleaming. They wore Mark-IIIc suits, more recent than his own squad’s armours, although the youngest was doubtless a thousand years old. Tuilles hung from their belts, protecting their thighs, the adamantium reinforcement ribbing was slighter, while their sensorium augur units, mounted upon the top-left front of their suit cowls, were larger and more complex than those of Voldo’s brothers. He read their nameplates again: Genthis, Curzon, Tarael, Azmael and their leader, Alanius. Between the two squads were Nuministon and his two servitors, clad in thin, transparent vacuum suits. They carried a device somewhat like a large urn. A foot on a piston descending from a cylindrical component topped with access ports, a screen and a keypad; the seismic probe that would gather the vibrational data needed to form an accurate map of the hulk.

  Nuministon wore armour of reticulated plates fitted to his machine body. It was made of a metal that could not decide if it were gold in colour or cold, metallic green and shimmered between the two. His armour incorporated powerful machine legs, and was topped by a pig-snouted helmet adorned with numerous emerald sensor eyes. The insectile look of it was bizarre, not something fit to clad a man. Voldo looked away from it, his eyes offended. He swept his gaze across the unnatural landscape of the hulk, helmet tactical overlays picking out points of strategic interest and peril.

  The Death of Integrity was the biggest space hulk Voldo had seen, big enough to ape a moon in feature and form. The surface stretched away tens of kilometres, ships’ prows raised in baroque mountain ranges, buckled hull skins waterless valleys edged with knives. It was a topography forged of ruin. The shadows cast by Jorso’s strong light were hard, night-blue, confusing the pseudo-landscape further, and with the nearness of the hulk’s horizon made the scale of the hulk difficult to judge. Still, some parts of the Death of Integrity were recognisable as the craft they had once been, and this gave Voldo some reference by which to gauge distance. Close by, the flank of an Imperial light freighter canted at a drunken angle, nose buried in the agglomeration, cargo pods torn, whatever they had contained long gone. Other components of the hulk were beyond comprehension, strange vessels made by alien hands, or rotting things that looked grown, not built. Many were so battered and crushed as to be unidentifiable, reduced to tangled superstructure or plaited rucks of metal. The exteriors of those that retained their shape were scarred with long exposure to space and the warp. Patches of paint and colour were a rarity. Massive rents split the surface of the hulk, leading down into a fuliginous dark so complete as to be tangible. Rock there was aplenty, stray asteroids pulled in by the hulk’s weak gravity and impacted into the surface. Dirty ice hid in nooks, and hoarfrost coated every surface not exposed to the sun, the legacy of ruptured water tanks, aquatic shipboard environments, and hydrogen-oxygen mass reaction drives.

  Not far distant was the evidence of the earlier bombardment; massive craters, droplets of frozen metal sprayed around them in elaborate patterns. Somewhere beyond that, three other groups would be working their way within the hulk, placing explosive devices just under the surface to generate tremors via sequenced explosions. It was these detonations that would be recorded by the seismic probe, and their timing that necessitated his own party’s haste.

  Voldo’s eye strayed to his mission clock on the inside of his visor display. For now it was still, the eight hours on it would not count down until Galt and Caedis had been informed that the Adeptus Mechanicus teams had withdrawn. When the clock reached zero the Adepts of Mars would detonate sequenced charges, sending shockwaves rippling through the hulk.

  He checked the progress of the cutting, wanting to steal a march on the clock’s activation. The Forgemaster and Terminator were through the outer layer of the hull. They pulled the metal away, their efforts enough to send it spinning off into space, and quickly cut through the reinforcements, frames, conduits and cables that lay underneath. They stepped down into the pit they had made and began to tackle the inner skin, cutting a smaller hole within the hole. White plumes of gas jetted out as they breached the compartment below and its atmosphere vented into the vacuum. Gallio worked anticlockwise from his starting point, Clastrin starting at the other side, moving towards where Gallio had begun. Gallio’s cuts were ragged from the action of his chainfist, Clastrin’s smooth and continuous, beaded with molten metal that cooled slowly in the absence of atmosphere, losing heat only through direct radiation.

  The gas jets lessened and ceased. The corridor below them had emptied of its air quickly, suggesting to Voldo that it was sealed. He mentally calculated its volume based on the amount of gas he had seen vent. A thought brought up the incomplete map they had of their immediate surroundings on to his visor display. The surface corrid
ors had been as thoroughly scanned as circumstance allowed and were well-defined, but further in, and especially closer to a nearby reactor, the map faded into probabilities, and then blankness. He compared the conclusion to his calculations with the map. It appeared they matched, and so they should. He grunted with satisfaction.

  The Forgemaster and veteran brother worked fast. Within three minutes the two cuts were close to meeting. Not too soon either. Debris was falling back down onto the hulk’s surface with increasing regularity. Voldo’s suit told him that the hulk’s gravity field was under 0.02G. Not enough to make him safe were his mag-locks to be disengaged – he would be lost to the void simply by taking a step – but enough to bring some of the debris circling the hulk back down onto the whole, even so soon after the bombardment.

  The vibrations from Gallio’s chainfist cut out, informing Voldo the entryway was finished. He turned to watch as Clastrin stood and stamped on the metal. It fell inwards.

  ‘The way is clear, brother-sergeant,’ said Clastrin, his twin voices broadcast into the helmets of everyone present. Although the pops and crackles of interference marred his words, at such close range he could be heard clearly.

  Voldo walked over to the hole in the hull, slowed by the locking and freeing of his feet on the metal. He bent forward and willed his suit light on, his mind interfacing directly with the suit’s sensorium via his subdermal black carapace and the nerve shunts embedded into it. A thin beam stabbed down from the cowling over his helmet. A circle illuminated a mesh floor. ‘Contacts?’

  ‘Negative, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio, Wisdom of Lucretius’s operations specialist. He had a modified power fist, incorporating a slot for an advanced auspex in its palm. ‘But I cannot vouch for the device’s accuracy in this environment.’

  Voldo brought up the overlay that would show him Eskerio’s auspex readings. The display jumped, stuttered by the stellar broil. ‘Be steady, my brothers. We go within. Squad Wisdom of Lucretius shall enter first. Inside I suggest you pair your warriors with mine, Veteran-Sergeant Alanius.’

  ‘Agreed, cousin.’ The Blood Drinkers sergeant spoke for the first time. None of the red-armoured brothers had said anything beyond their initial greeting on the Thunderhawk.

  ‘Brother Astomar shall lead the way. I shall go second. Magos Nuministon, you and your servitors will stay in the centre of the group unless I say otherwise. Is that clear?’

  ‘Entirely, lord sergeant.’

  Voldo looked around at the fourteen-strong party: five Novamarines veterans, five of the Blood Drinkers, Forgemaster Clastrin, Magos Nuministon and his two servitor drones. ‘Today we are all brothers, although the colour of our plate be different. We are brothers born from similar seed, brothers sworn to the same service, and today in the fires of war, our brotherhood will be forged anew. Protect each other as you would your own, and we shall emerge unscathed, and glorified.’

  Voldo switched his helmet vox-caster to long range, speaking directly to the fleet. ‘Lord Captain Galt, Lord Chapter Master Caedis. We are about to enter the space hulk.’

  ‘Good fortune to you, veteran-sergeant,’ replied Galt, his voice distant and thin in the static.

  Another voice, far clearer, broadcast by the arcane might of Mars filled his helmet. Magos Plosk. ‘Mechanicus teams one and two have placed their devices and withdrawn. Mechanicus team three will be done shortly.’

  ‘You may start your clock now, brother-sergeant,’ said Caedis.

  With a thought, Voldo activated the clock. The first digit fell away; seven hours, fifty-nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds remaining.

  ‘Emperor watch over us,’ said Voldo.

  ‘We commend our souls to his armies in this life and the next,’ intoned the Novamarines.

  ‘Sanguinius’s wings shield us all,’ said Alanius.

  Voldo stepped into the hole and fell slowly into the space hulk. His feet met its corroded decks with a low clang he heard through the metal of his armour.

  The battle for the Death of Integrity had begun.

  The first corridor was empty of anything but detritus. The party arranged themselves according to Voldo’s orders, a Blood Drinker paired with each Novamarine, the tech-priest and Techmarine in their centre, and set out towards a bulkhead door some ten metres ahead. According to the data they had, the ship they had entered was a bulk agri-hauler of antique design. This close to the surface they were in the ship’s service corridors, where once upon a time maintenance crews would have patrolled, keeping sensor nets and life-bearing systems functioning, and checking for breaches in the outer hull.

  ‘Is there power?’ asked Voldo. ‘Forgemaster, do the ship’s mechanisms function?’

  Clastrin shouldered his way forward, the corridor cramped by the great suits of armour they all wore. He extruded a sensor probe from his harness’s lower arm. The metal tentacle insinuated itself into a port below the door keypad.

  ‘They do, but weakly,’ he said. ‘I detect little in the way of artificial gravity or lighting. This door should open under its own power, however.’ Clastrin withdrew, leaving the activation of the door to Voldo.

  ‘Then stand ready, I may need you to recite your prayers for the compliance of the machine.’ Voldo reached out his free hand to the touchpad by the door. He depressed a button caked with hardened dust. For a moment, nothing happened, and then a green light feebly glimmered. The door opened, shaking on gears whose oil had long ago congealed.

  A brief wind blew out as the chamber beyond decompressed. Voldo stepped in, his feet thunking onto the metal floor. The lights were non-functional, the compartment dark, patches of it lit fleetingly by the Adeptus Astartes’ bobbing suit lights.

  There was barely enough room in the vestibule for the whole party, but Voldo ordered them all in. If there was atmosphere beyond these doors, he wanted to preserve it. Air of any kind would allow the motion detector’s subsidiary sensory systems to awaken; tasting the atmosphere for the taint of xenos, and feeling the mildest perturbation of gas molecules should the enemy move.

  With practised ease the Terminators spread themselves around the chamber, each pair of bone-and-blue and blood-red Space Marines covering a door, glancing blows of torchlight shining off their armour as they manoeuvred round one another. Alanius took up station in the centre close by Nuministon. Militor let his storm bolter drop from his left hand to hang by a cord from the wrist. He took out a thick stick of yellow pigment from his belt, cracked the top, and used it to paint a cross on the wall by the doorway they had entered through.

  ‘Good,’ said Voldo. ‘Mark every turning we make, brothers. I do not trust our maps. Militor, seal the door behind us.’

  Militor did as ordered.

  Voldo checked the feed from Eskerio’s auspex. There was no sign that they had been noticed. ‘Prepare, brothers,’ he said. ‘I will open this door.’

  Terminators shifted stance, bringing their weapons up, readying themselves for whatever might be within the next chamber. Voldo keyed the door open. This second portal opened smoothly, the wind that blew from it was over quickly as the pressure between the two compartments equalised. On the other side a handful of ceiling lamps flickered dim yellow, still clinging to their purpose centuries after their intended operational lifespan had been exceeded. They lit a corridor that ran straight down the spine of the ancient craft, still straight, despite the spaceship being pressed hard into the body of the agglomeration.

  ‘The atmosphere is thin, but breathable should we require it,’ said Brother Azmael, who fulfilled a similar function in Squad Hesperion to Eskerio.

  ‘Let us hope we do not, brother,’ said Alanius.

  ‘This is the way, brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio, gesturing forward. ‘In the centre of this vessel is a vertical shaft – a cargo lift, I judge – that leads right through this ship. From there we shall be able to head downwards, and from a lower deck access the vessel abutting this and so deeper into the hulk. That way we will swiftly reach the point det
ermined by the tech-priests as best for their device.’

  ‘How far to the shaft?’

  ‘One hundred and fifty metres.’

  Voldo’s eyes flicked over to his rad-counter, down in the bottom right of his helmet display. ‘Radiation levels appear low,’ said Voldo. ‘They will increase.’

  ‘Yes brother-sergeant,’ said Eskerio. ‘This component vessel’s tertiary reactor is still active, and leaking.’

  ‘Will your servitors last, Magos Nuministon? They are not shielded,’ said Alanius.

  ‘They are disposable, Lord Sergeant Voldo, and they will last long enough to fulfil their purpose,’ Nuministon said. His voice, unlike the others, blared from his helmet speakers, violating the deathly peace of the hauler.

  ‘Deactivate your external helmet vox, magos. We are here as shadows. Do not announce our presence. Communicate via vox-caster only,’ said Voldo.

  There was a click as Nuministon obeyed without demur. Voldo was grateful, he had half-expected a refusal and an arrogant proclamation on the strength of the Machine-God and the power of the metal over the flesh. He had seen many men die painfully because they held fast to the convictions of one sect or another. In his long experience, providence and plate were better shields than conviction.

  ‘An oversight on my part. You have my apologies,’ said Nuministon.

  ‘We proceed. Brother Militor, hold position and cover our rear.’

  ‘Yes, brother-sergeant.’

  ‘I shall leave Brother Curzon with you,’ said Alanius.

  ‘That is wise,’ Voldo turned to face the two Space Marines, blood and bone armours stood shoulder to shoulder. ‘The two of you await my command,’ said Voldo. ‘You will cover and monitor this accessway. The nearest known brood chamber lies some way outside this vessel, but we are still deep in the genestealers’ primary habitation zone, and I will not leave our rear exposed.’

  ‘Yes brother-sergeant,’ said Militor.