Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  Memories of confrontation and furious words in the Chapter council chamber dissolved, the deep dishonour of Holos’s dismissal from there by Ganlan Sang, the Chapter Master in those dark days. This troubled Holos even more than the face of the terrified woman and the taste of her blood.

  Holos turned his concentration to climbing. Will was the greatest weapon against the Thirst, concentration the expression of will.

  On Holos went, recreating his climb, this moment in time two thousand years in the past reinvigorated and played anew through the medium of Caedis’s soul. The suns grew hotter. Then came the First Period of Shadow, as Haemos dragged its apricot body across the sky, blotting out the sunlight in its twice-daily eclipse of the suns. Hot winds blew hard when this happened, drying Holos’s meagre sweat to salt on his face. The shadow was welcome, and Holos went on with renewed determination. He reached the top of a bluff of rock, a harder protrusion in the unstable slag of the volcano’s cone.

  Atop the rock he encountered his first astorgai. It attacked him without hesitation, swiping at him with its pinion-talons.

  The monster was small, a fledgling, although its pinion-talons were still deadly. It had yet to grow its dexterion-claws, those small maniples that grow from a pubescent astorgai’s chest. It hopped forward on its single foot, and slashed its hardened feathers at Holos. They hissed through the air towards his face.

  The Space Marine snatched his power sword from its scabbard. He dodged backward, bringing himself dangerously close to the edge of the outcrop. The astorgai laughed and cursed in a tumble of words, some of which were recognisably human. The astorgai were curious creatures. No one was sure if they were truly sentient, or animals keyed into the psychic space of the warp. How many of them there were, where they nested, how they bred – all was unknown. There were certain ruins on Haemos’s forbidden, poisoned surface that hinted that the astorgai might be the devolved remnants of a civilised xenos species, but that was hotly disputed by the Chapter and Adeptus Mechanicus xenologians both. All that was certain was that they had been on San Guisiga longer than men, and had defied every attempt to exterminate them. To the Space Marines who made their home on San Guisiga they were a nuisance, to the small baronies the Blood Drinkers drew their recruits from they were a deadly menace.

  Holos ducked a pass of the astorgai’s wing, the razor-sharp keratin of its pinion-talons rattling as they whisked overhead. With the economy of long practice, Holos stepped inside the arc of the weaponed wings and skewered the astorgai child upon his power sword. The weapon passed into its flimsy body with minimal resistance. Smoke issued from the wound under its prominent breastbone. The thing’s beak clacked once, its hard, forked tongue hissing alien words of hate at him, then its three eyes slid shut, its wings folded, and it died.

  The creature slipped from Holos’s sword. He did not spare it another glance.

  Caedis shoved at the arm gripping him. The astorgai lay behind him. He had triumphed. He had to climb!

  ‘My lord! My lord! It is I, Reclusiarch Mazrael.’

  Caedis’s eyes refocused. The mountain was gone. He was no longer Holos. He wore his Terminator armour. Gladius Rubeum was in his hand, holographic scenes of old victories playing on the faces of its blade. At his feet a genestealer lay dead in a nest of leaves, the point of his sword through its heart. He glanced up. A riot of blue-black foliage crowded him.

  ‘Brother? Mazrael?’ Caedis’s voice sounded wrong to him. His throat was dust-dry and the words that had come from it similarly so. But it was more than that. Caedis had expected to hear the voice of Brother Holos, not his own. ‘I dreamed, brother, a waking dream.’

  Mazrael gripped Caedis’s shoulder guard. ‘I know, lord.’ The vox clicked as Mazrael shifted their conversation to a private channel. In his confused state, it did not seem significant to the Chapter Master.

  ‘Why do I see the trial of Holos? Why not the travails of Sanguinius? I do not understand.’ He said.

  ‘The Black Rage blesses you, my lord,’ said Mazrael. ‘Those great heroes of our Chapter do not see what the other scions of Sanguinius see. They are few, but they are gloriously blessed!’

  ‘To see Sanguinius’s final moments is not a blessing?’

  Mazrael shook his head, his voice cracked with emotion; tears, and laughter. ‘No lord – do you not understand? While our brothers see the cause of our damnation, we witness the moment of our salvation – the climb of Brother Holos, the very thing that set us free! This is why we, lord, among all of the sons of the Blood Angels, feel hope. This is the greatest hope of all, and you are party now to its final mystery. Rejoice lord, rejoice as you witness the events that saved us!’

  Caedis looked around the room they were in. His Terminators stood easy, the gravity here was functional and only slighter higher than Terran norms. They were in a domed garden room. The glazing of the roof was all broken, part of the framework pushed in by the ruined hull of another ship. But somehow the room’s miniature sun glowed still, water flowed through a recycling loop, and the garden’s plants had run wild. To waken to this strange oasis from Holos’s climb was doubly disorienting.

  The plants had twined into one another, stems merging and forming hollow, cell-like compartments of wood. The room was crammed to half its height with thicket. The Terminators had forced their way through. Signs of combat scarred the place, flames guttered in the foliage, and many dead genestealers lay on the floor or caught among the branches.

  ‘How long will I remain with you? How long until I rejoin Holos?’

  Mazrael shifted his grip upon Caedis’s armour. ‘I do not know, brother. Since Holos’s time, only a few brothers have relived his climb. Of those brothers who succumb to the Black Rage in our Chapter, the majority see things as all of Sanguinius’s sons do, they might get a glimpse of the living Sanguinius, or feel the pain of his death. Others more favoured might relive the whole of his death combat against the Warmaster. But for the most part, they feel only his anger, or his rage at Horus’s betrayal of their father, nothing more. But there have been those who have not witnessed the ruin of man’s dream, but trodden in the footsteps of hope, climbing with Holos to the source of our salvation. You are the eighteenth, the eighteenth in two thousand years, lord. You are privy to the ultimate mystery of our Chapter.’

  ‘What do they find, at the end, these brothers that follow in Holos’s wake?’ said Caedis. Using his voice was painful. He swallowed, no saliva came, and the sensation of his muscles contracting was like glass in his gullet.

  Mazrael shook his head. ‘None know. All die.’

  Caedis closed his eyes behind his helmet visor. He sagged and nodded. Of course.

  ‘Will you rest, lord?’

  ‘No. I must climb, climb to the very summit of Mount Calicium.’

  ‘Very well.’ Mazrael signalled to the others that they would go on. They pushed through the vegetation, glass from the long-shattered dome crunching under their armoured feet.

  Chapter 15

  Fear the Alien

  The Adeptus Mechanicus road into the hulk went downwards at a steep angle. Its surface was spongy but otherwise firm, the consistency of it unchanging whether it covered solid metal or bridged broad canyons. It was not of any metal that Mastrik knew; nevertheless, when the Adeptus Mechanicus advised the battle-brothers to activate the mag-locks on their boots to better secure themselves, they found the road anchored them in place well enough.

  The road went down in a dead straight line for several kilo-metres, towards where the cavern lay. It had been carefully chosen, the Adeptus Astartes banking on the genestealers heading for the deepest atmosphere-bearing chamber they could. There, rather than the safety they craved, the genestealers would find only death.

  The army descended twenty brothers abreast. They chanted their hymnals as they went, the songs of two Chapters clashing on the airwaves. Techmarines and Mechanicus adepts set relay beacons at intervals on the walls, linking the force to the fleet. The technology th
e Adeptus Mechanicus used was potent, almost scouring the angry roar of Jorso from their communications entirely.

  The shaft and its road ended in a new airlock some fifty or so metres out from the cavern where Battleforce Anvil was to stand its ground. The airlock had been attached to the side of an alien freighter by the Adepts of Mars, in order to keep the atmosphere in the cavern. A road wide enough for the Space Marines to march three abreast was being cut on the other side of the airlock. Mastrik ordered his men to halt while the work was finished. He and Sorael went over the images of the chamber and reviewed the marching order of their men. A vanguard of seven Terminator squads were to go first to guard against ambush, followed by the battleforce’s Devastator squads. This would allow them to spread out quickly to advantageous firing positions.

  Twenty minutes later, Plosk informed them that the airlock and final passageway were complete. In batches of forty, the Space Marines began to pass into the hulk cavern.

  Epistolary Ranial, Captain Sorael, and Captain Mastrik were among the very first through, preceded by the guard of Terminators. Half a dozen Techmarines stood behind them; their role would be to finish the tunnels prepared by Strikeforce Hammer.

  The airlock chamber was roughly skinned with a soft plastic that had bonded itself to the walls. The Mechanicus had not bothered with atmosphere extractors. The entire force would be through in six batches, and the volume of air in the cavern was so great that the loss of a few hundred cubic metres was immaterial. Thus air rushed into the temporary airlock with a thunderclap as the doors to the cavern were opened. When the next group came through, it would rush into space.

  Frost rimed the Space Marines’ battleplate as the gas condensed on vacuum-chilled metal, fogging their helmet lenses. Mastrik willed his armour to dissipate some of its power plant’s excess heat through its outer shell, and his vision presently cleared. They went out into the huge space of the cavern, Terminators first. Then the officers, who stood to one side as the Techmarines marched out and down onto the cavern floor in the wake of the Terminators. The Terminators escorted the Techmarines across the cave to where they would cut two entryways, the third tunnel’s mouth already existent, being a rent in the wall of the cavern.

  The airlock closed. Two minutes later it opened again. Four squads of Devastators came through, and headed to various vantage points on the cavern wall. They bounded upward relative to Mastrik’s position, pulling themselves easily along in the low gravity.

  Mastrik’s bodyguard, and that of Sorael, waited at a distance as the three officers surveyed their battleground. Mastrik’s sensorium thrummed with data, too much to be properly displayed within his helmet’s display. He carried a supplementary auspex on the outside of his suit. It was plugged directly into his Terminator armour, drawing from its power and interfacing with the suit’s cogitator. Mastrik held this device up, using its screen to display a broader view of the cavern than his helmet could accommodate.

  He ran the auspex over the cavern, his eyes darting between the graphical representation and the cave, his enhanced mind comparing the two. As the Imagifer had predicted, the far wall was almost entirely taken up by the side of an immense, alien vessel. The part of it visible was several hundred metres long and two hundred high. More of it lay below and above them, inconceivably huge. Panels had come away from the body in a few places, exposing the superstructure beneath, but in the main it was sound. Where paint had survived, faded stripes of yellow and green that must have been garish once crossed the hull. Blocky alien glyphs covered a portion of it. The side of the cavern the Space Marines occupied was also as depicted by the Adeptus Mechanicus’s device. A large asteroid made up the majority of the wall. It leaned into the alien vessel high above to form a ceiling with a steep apex. Lower down, its irregular body bulged inwards, creating a choke point roughly two-thirds of the way into the cavern from the airlock. The cavern widened out beyond this, in the manner of a true cave, but even at its narrowest extent the floor was seventy metres across.

  The rock of the asteroid was relatively smooth; the rest of the wall it was embedded in was not, comprising a number of smaller craft and pieces of debris jammed against each other. This part of the cavern presented a jumble of jutting spars, square caves and ledges. It was directly opposite the tunnel mouths opening into the cavern, and it was in this three-dimensional maze that a number of the combined Chapters’ Devastator squads took up station.

  The tunnel mouths – two now being cut as Mastrik watched – were towards the bottom of the cavern. But to see the disposition of the Adeptus Astartes forces, and indeed the cavern itself, in terms of up and down would be a mistake. The centre of the agglomeration, and hence the pull of its weak gravity, lay at an angle four degrees steeper than the Adeptus Mechanicus’ entry tunnel, but the gravity field of the hulk was so weak as to be almost negligible. The agglomeration was large in size, but its cumulative mass, filled as it was with many cavities, was low. There was a ‘downward’ gravitational force, but if a Space Marine were to fall from his perch above the airlock, it would have taken him minutes to reach the floor.

  Mastrik snapped off his auspex. ‘The Imagifer Maxiumus’s representation of the cavern is almost one hundred per cent accurate, Brother-Captain Galt,’ said Mastrik.

  Galt replied, his signal conveyed by the lines of booster poles laid by the Adeptus Mechanicus and Techmarines. His voice was clear, but thrummed still, the signal waves perturbed by the uneven power outputs of the hulk’s functional reactors. ‘Good. Have your brothers take up position. Strikeforce Hammer has sealed the corridors on the upper levels and gathers for the attack.’

  ‘Our own men go to their tasks here, cousin-captain,’ said Sorael.

  ‘The tunnel mouths are being prepared,’ said Mastrik. ‘The ways within opened and all necessary escape points in the lower fifth of the three tunnels are in the process of being sealed.’

  Information to that effect was flowing in from all over the hulk to the fleet and the captains in the cave. The cavern teams’ tunnel missions were going well. Flaring light from plasma cutters lit the tunnel mouths like fire in dragons’ dens.

  ‘Look at this place,’ said Ranial. ‘I have not experienced such a hulk before. The scale of it is impressive. It is no wonder that the Adepts of Mars wish to plunder it.’

  ‘They will be able to soon, and with my blessing, for now they marshal their resources on the surface. They will enter the hulk from the cavern, but for now this is our concern alone,’ said Galt.

  ‘Have there been any enemy contacts, brother?’ asked Mastrik.

  ‘Captain Aresti reported a breakout of genestealers from sector seventeen. Sergeant Voldo is in pursuit.’

  ‘A breakout? Surely they lack the intellect for such behaviour, cousin,’ said Sorael.

  ‘Do not underestimate the genestealers, captain,’ said Ranial. ‘Their minds are alien, but powerful, and there is something…’ he trailed away.

  ‘Brother Ranial?’

  Ranial stirred himself. ‘Nothing. Nothing as yet. I feel something, perhaps, a greater mind. It is hard to tell. The warp is confused in such a place, so much history lies upon it, so much death. These places are the houses of ghosts and phantoms. I will monitor the situation.’

  The third group of Space Marines were entering the cavern. The cave was coming alive to the movement of transhumans in brightly coloured armours.

  Sorael bowed his head. ‘With your permission, Captain Galt, Captain Mastrik, I will make my way to my own position.’ Sorael had been given oversight of the far end of the cavern, the pocketed area part closed-off by the asteroid.

  ‘Be aware, brothers of two Chapters,’ said Galt. ‘We will not have found every way into the cave. We do not know the location of every genestealer roost. The enemy is legion. Be on your guard.’

  ‘As ever, lord,’ said Sorael. He quoted the Codex Astartes, ‘The enemies of men are many, our vigilance cannot cease for a moment.’

  ‘That is so, captai
n of the Blood Drinkers, that is so.’

  Forty minutes later, and the tech-priests confirmed that all doors marked for sealing had been sealed. Two new tunnel mouths gaped lips of raw metal in the skin of the alien ship. Three twisting ways through half a dozen major ships and masses of lesser debris were ready. Each sported spurs leading off to the five genestealer roosts. The last stragglers of Hammer rejoined the main force near the surface, some twenty kilometres away from Battleforce Anvil. The Techmarines of Anvil re-emerged from the tunnels back into the cavern and made their way to Mastrik’s position. There they saw to the siting of their Thunderfire cannons and prepared their servitor drones for combat. Everything was in place. The cavern stilled, and a peculiar peace fell over the space.

  ‘Captain Galt, Battleforce Anvil is prepared,’ reported Mastrik.

  ‘The Hammer is ready to strike,’ said Aresti.

  ‘All demolition teams stand ready to detonate on my mark,’ ordered Galt.

  On the surface, five demolition teams. Comprised of Adeptus Mechanicus servitors, they were guarded by the few novitiate Scout Space Marines accompanying the two Chapters, clad in space suits as their bodies were not yet ready for power armour.

  Each team’s site differed, and their equipment was suited accordingly. At site Alpha, a large laser weapon stood poised to burn its way through one hundred and fifty metres of hulk. At Beta, shaped charges were attached to the skin of the hulk, only a metre or so from the roosting genestealers on the other side. And so on, each breaching method designed for its particular spot on the agglomeration’s surface, each one with the exact same purpose in mind – to rupture the hulk and vent the atmosphere of the roosts into space. The teams retreated to surface armoured craft, or took off in their shuttles, or stood by drilling rigs, and waited breathlessly.