Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  Inside his helmet, Sorael smiled a humourless smile. It looked like he would get to vent his battle-fury after all. Raising his storm bolter, he strode forward.

  Mastrik gunned down another genestealer. The rest were dealt with by his bodyguard. Ranial drove his force staff through the head of an alien he had pinned to the floor under his boot.

  ‘That was too close, brother,’ said Mastrik. His usual humour had gone.

  ‘The third attack on our position. Intentionally so. They are guided, brother-captain. There is strategy behind this assault. They target us.’ Ranial pointed his staff at a group of genestealers. They ran then changed direction, all of them switching at once. ‘See how they move?’ said Ranial. ‘Their psyches are linked to one another, and to something more besides. The mind that guides them is like none I have encountered so far. Vast, alien, powerful.’

  ‘This is the largest group of genestealers we have faced for many years. But surely there is mention of similar leadership in the Librarium?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Ranial. ‘If so, it is old wisdom and forgotten.’

  ‘I cannot re-establish contact with Sorael. Things are turning against us. How close are Lord Caedis and his men to the source of the psychic emanation? The death of the xenos’s master will see us to victory.’

  ‘Closer, brother-captain, but not yet unto it.’

  All around the cavern, brothers fought. Those in power armour fared badly against the genestealers. The casualty counter in Mastrik’s sensorium ticked upwards.

  ‘They must hurry,’ he said.

  Kalael was dead, gone to the Emperor. Mazrael said quick prayers over his body before they moved on. Quintus too had been left behind. He had tried to take Kalael’s helmet so that he might continue, but the seal at the neck of Quintus’s armour was broken. His multi-lung struggled with the toxic alien atmosphere of the alien ship, and the Space Marine was soon unconscious. His hibernator put him into a deep sleep where the oxygen in his blood could be made to last for many days. If they were successful, they could recover him along with his armour, as well as the armour and gene-seed of Brother Kalael.

  Six of them went on: Brother Erdagon, Sergeant Sandamael, Ancient Metrion – as always never far from Lord Caedis, Reclusiarch Mazrael and Epistolary Guinian. Guinian pushed forward gingerly with his mind, wary now of the powerful nature of the xenos they sought. His last encounter with a genestealer psyker had been with the false Saint Hestia on Catria. A fourth-generation hybrid almost human in appearance, but alien in mind, and utterly slaved to the monsters she had given birth to. Her power had been raw but devastating; this was something different. The xenos mind was a black wall, a featureless boulder of solidified might hanging in the empyrean. No emotion, no desire; only infinite patience and hatred.

  Guinian pulled back his mind. They were close. Gelid malice chilled the space between the walls.

  They were deep into the alien ship, and the corridors had become progressively wider and taller. Thick vaulting like the ribs of a great animal braced the vessel’s inner hull. Ramps led down to the curving floor every one hundred metres, the tops of them reaching out to galleries held out on thin struts. Seven holes opened up off each of these galleries, leading off into a warren of increasingly narrow tunnels. All this Guinian saw through his sensorium; the echo locator of his suit matching details with the Imagifer Maximus’s map and filling his visor with a false image.

  The walls of the corridors they traversed were not visible to the eye. Fog filled the place. The members of Squad Hesperian had told of the mists that filled large part of the hulk, but this was thicker than the material Guinian had seen recorded by their suits. A nauseating mustard-green, it was impossible to see through and extremely radioactive. If Guinian deactivated his suit sonar he would be blind. From afar, he felt the glancing touch of Ranial, the Novamarines Epistolary. Strange, thought Guinian, to feel such relief in the contact of someone who was not a brother. There was no message to it, not that Guinian could read; he was not skilled in the thought transmission and reception such as the astropaths used, but he felt a powerful sense of urgency.

  The rad-counter in his helmet was a rattling annoyance. His brothers were distant in the fog. He felt alone, stalked through the fog by an invisible, powerful enemy.

  A burst of gunfire shocked Guinian out of his reverie.

  ‘Movement! Movement in the fog!’ Brother Ancient Metrion, the Chapter standard bearer and Caedis’s sworn bodyguard. More gunfire. A scream of pain. Blood splashed across his visor. In the mist, he saw movement, something large and powerful caused it to swirl. His suit sonar sketched a huge shape, but it was quickly gone.

  ‘Halt!’ shouted Guinian. He raised his gun and fired into the mist. The explosions of the bolts were muffled.

  ‘Report!’ said Sandamael, the squad sergeant. Their communications were fuzzed and grating, pulled at by the radiation in the fog.

  ‘Metrion.’

  ‘Epistolary Guinian,’ shouted the psyker.

  ‘I, Mazrael, live, as does our lord. Brother Erdagon?’

  ‘He is dead.’

  Tension settled on the small group.

  ‘I can’t see a thing in this! Why aren’t our sonar pulses showing us the enemy?’ said Sandamael.

  Guinian replied. ‘It is fast, and it does not wish to be seen.’

  ‘We must go on, we have to go on,’ said Mazrael. ‘The Emperor has guided us here, and our lord has one last service to perform.’

  ‘We cannot fight what we cannot see!’ said Sandamael.

  ‘It is not for us to battle this evil, but for our lord and our lord alone,’ said Mazrael.

  Sandamael swore.

  ‘Fall in more tightly. That way we will not be caught unawares,’ ordered Guinian.

  The remaining two members of Squad Blood’s Fury drew in closer to the three officers. No one spoke. Eyes were firmly fixed on the false image.

  ‘There!’ called out Ancient Metrion.

  A green outline moved from left to right across their false images. It was too fast for the sonar units to define its shape for them. They raised their weapons as one and opened fire. They were gratified with a roar, but whether of pain or defiance was impossible to tell.

  The psychic presence of the creature was so intense as to have a smell: a cold, dry scent that was offensive to Guinian in every way. A part of it touched upon him. He felt contempt from it. It drew away.

  ‘What is it doing?’ shouted Metrion. ‘Come here and fight us, xenos coward!’

  In reply, a genestealer reared up from a tunnel mouth that opened up suddenly in the floor. Metrion was quick, and filled it full of bolts.

  ‘It is not alone.’

  ‘Contacts, brothers, I have motion all over the room!’ said Sandamael.

  ‘The leader, where is it?’ said Mazrael. ‘Lord Caedis must kill it.’

  ‘I will find it.’ Guinian was wary of contact with its mind, but he had little choice.

  He opened his mind.

  His soul was exposed, raw and vulnerable to the full might of the creature, this… broodlord. It regarded him dispassionately, with unblinking evil. Its mind covered the hulk with a dark umbrella of psychic energy, strands of it linking to hundreds of other, lesser genestealers. The thing was powerful, far greater than anything Guinian had experienced for a long time. He had experienced contact with mightier minds than this, and fought some, but it was the glassy implacability of this one that perturbed him, its absolute featurelessness. There was nothing in it other than a need to head onwards, infecting and subjugating, before heading on again. It was a bestial urge, but emanated from no beast. It was too… perfect. There was something it fled, not from fear, but from instinct. Guinian dared to look beyond. From its mind weak tendrils reached outward, touching upon all the broods of genestealer which it had created across space. Beyond, a greater network still, linking it to other minds, faint presences far away, but all as particular, as featureless in their singular purpose.


  Behind that… Guinian could never describe it. A mass. A blank space in the empyrean, a terror. A zone where the roiling variety of the immaterium had ceased to be. A shadow in the warp, distant yet, but imminent.

  The creature let him see, of that Guinian had no doubt. Then it turned its full psychic might against the Librarian, funnelling the sense of dread the shadow generated, a horror born of incalculably deep space and time. It filled Guinian’s mind. He clutched at his helmet and sank to the floor, a low moan escaping his lips. For the first time since he had been made a Space Marine, Guinian knew fear. Only his psychic hood prevented his mind being boiled off into nothingness.

  He saw the genestealer in his mind’s eye: bloated, as powerful in body as it was psychically. It regarded him with a species of alien humour, and he was certain it was enjoying his pain.

  The noise of gunfire around him intensified. The cries of alien monsters troubled the fog. He was almost helpless. Almost, but not quite.

  He reached out to Caedis’s troubled mind. With one last effort of will he pushed the location of the genestealer broodlord into the Chapter Master’s thoughts. Caedis’s head moved sharply, and he strode from the room with purpose.

  Guinian had in return from Caedis’s mind an impression of somewhere else entirely, before the claws of fear closed about his being. He looked at the shadow in the warp, and it looked back.

  With a cry, Guinian collapsed into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 18

  The Two Hundred

  Holos was lost deep in a labyrinth of lava tubes and fissures in the side of Mount Calicium. Choking, sulphurous vapours obscured his way. The cries of his enemies mocked him from the fumes.

  Holos despaired. The enemy were afraid of his might and they hid from him, they preferred to let him die in this poison than fight him face to face.

  ‘Come out! Come out and fight!’ he roared. Rage gripped him. He was thirsty, so thirsty. He would not last long, he had to make the summit and fulfil the prophecy of his dream. He would find the answers it prompted him to find, or his Chapter would die. Under the burning need of the unfettered Thirst, through the intermittent and troubling visions of the Black Rage, he knew this as well as he knew his own name. It was not his own salvation he quested for, but that of his brothers. Frustration tore at his heart. He would have cried, had his dry eyes still had tears to weep.

  ‘Lo-tan! Guardian of the peak! Come to me and face your doom! The Blood Drinkers will persist, their salvation demands your death!’

  No reply. The lesser astorgai cackled and whooped at him, repeating his words in their parrot-like way, adding mocking nuances to his words.

  ‘Gah!’ he shouted. He smashed Encarmine Dread into the wall, its energy fields carving away a chunk of stone. He raised his sword for another blow. Confusion passed over his face, he regained a measure of control. He fell to his knees and gripped his sword hilt in both hands, point down. Through the fugue, he uttered a prayer.

  ‘Help me, oh Emperor. Show me the way to my foe, so that I might slay him for you and be done with this place. Aid me, so that I might aid my brothers.’

  Instantly, he felt a presence. He looked up. There was a mind touching his, then many minds, fragmented presences from many times, all showing him the way. He fastened on the strongest. He had the impression of a different fog, a brother of sad countenance in an Epistolary’s armour, then that was gone and only the guidance remained. He bared pointed teeth and went where the mind bade him, through a series of passages, taking numerous turns he could not hope to remember. The cries of the lesser astorgai dwindled. Twice he was forced to kill, but these astorgai died quickly; Holos’s purpose and will were reinvigorated. He went past bubbling pools of volcanic acid, over deep chasms, past rank holes whence the rotten-smelling vapours issued. Eventually, he left all this behind. The floor rose, bringing him above the broil and into a long cave. There, enthroned on a pile of human skulls, squatted Lo-tan, lord of the astorgai, and guardian of the way to the peak of Mount Calicium.

  The creature attacked without preamble, launching itself into the air and gliding right at Holos, single foot outstretched. It stank of carrion and old blood, smells that Holos had become all-too familiar with as the madness had gripped his Chapter.

  Holos dodged the creature. Lo-tan was quick and changed its path mid-flight with a twitch of broad, red-mottled wings. Holos was barged aside with such force he slammed into the wall. Encarmine Dread was trapped beneath him. He pushed himself from the stone as the chest-claws of Lo-tan grabbed at his left arm. These were mighty, and the metal of his armour buckled under the monster’s strength. With a grunt of pain, he twisted from the wall and swung around his pinned arm, sweeping Encarmine Dread around. The weapon bit into the chest-claw of the astorgai, half-severing the grasping hand. The creature jerked back, twin-beaked mouth roaring. Green blood pattered to the floor. Holos stepped backwards, sword ready. Lo-tan did the same. The two circled each other, altered man and alien monster looking for the kill.

  Lo-tan was twice the size of the other astorgai. Its three eyes were protected by ridges of bone in a pointed face. The skull terminated in a pair of horned beak-like protuberances that gave the mouth a bisected appearance, although these were actually horned, forward-facing, flesh-tearing tools, the mouth proper being situated behind them. When it roared, Holos saw the curved teeth that lined its throat. If it caught him, this would hook into his flesh or the gaps in his armour, and by a series of powerful convulsions Lo-tan would pull him in. The rear of the head was a mass of fronds, erect with anger and stiff as quills.

  Lo-tan stalked around, bent into a bow, wings spread out around it like the cloak of a supplicant before a lord. It rested its weight on the two fingers that tipped each wing. Holos was no fool, he knew the astorgai well. The pose they adopted in combat looked ridiculous, but the creatures could move fast with a push from their single leg, sending the hardened ends of their pinion feathers scything at a warrior with lightning speed.

  Lo-tan gurgled deep in its throat. Its head bobbed on a long neck. He did not speak. It was said that only the younger astorgai spoke, an ability they lost as they aged, and Lo-tan was the oldest of them all.

  Holos gulped for air. He was tortured by visions of long-ago battles, troubled by those that were yet to come. Filled with the rage of the ancients, he wanted nothing more than to fling himself at the beast and hack at it with sword and teeth. But Holos was a Space Marine of uncommon will, that is why, or so it would be said in later centuries, he was chosen to travel to the peak of Mount Calicium. He held himself back, determined not to fall into the well of blackness overflowing from his second heart.

  With a shriek, Lo-tan struck…

  …and Caedis stepped back. The genestealer broodlord was so fast its claws were but a blur. Caedis took the blow on Gladius Rubeum . The metal rang as it had under the hammer at the time of its forging, and the images that played along its blade went out for a second.

  Caedis blinked. He was himself once more. Holos was there in his mind, the hero’s memories trying to usurp his own personality. He could see the cavern Holos fought in, he watched the astorgai as it attacked, its movements and form overlaid on the genestealer broodlord. He thought to fight it, but did not. He was not in control of his actions any longer, not truly. He lived a repeat of Holos’s adventure, and there was no choice involved. He knew full well that this was his final battle. He submitted himself to the will of the Emperor and rode out the tide of the blood-fate.

  The broodlord was four metres tall. It was old, old beyond the count of men, a monster that had grown huge in the interstellar night. Fattened on the love of its stolen family, it was the biggest of its kind for thousands of light years in any direction. It had ridden the tides of the warp for millennia, growing stronger and larger, its potency multiplying along with the number of its vile brood. Countless worlds had been infected by its seed, the will of millions of sentient beings subverted by the minds of its offspri
ng. Their parental instincts perverted, those tainted by the genestealers had no choice but to nurture the terrible children they birthed. These things meant nothing to it. It did as it was bred to do, its great mind only served to allow it to do so more effectively, or so later generations of magi biologis would maintain.

  In actuality, what thoughts troubled such a mind were forever beyond humanity’s grasp. There were few psyches as alien as those of the genestealers. Through eyes devoid of mercy, that mind looked down upon Caedis. That it recognised a hero of the human race is questionable, but what are heroes to such a creature? Where a being has little freedom of choice, can it appreciate the sacrifice heroism demands? The broodlord had encountered hundreds of kinds of thinking creatures in its journey across the stars, and millions more that were not sentient. All had fallen to their knees, wills withered by its stare.

  It tilted its head, nostrils flaring in its alien face. With its unknowable mind it reached out to this small product of evolution, a weak creature that struggled, at the moment of its extinction, with its own nature. Such things did not trouble the broodlord.

  But to think the genestealer entirely at odds with the human psyche would be wrong. It possessed paternal instincts of a sort, and when it detected the death-stink of thousands of its progeny clinging to Caedis’s weak human soul, it reacted as any father would react to the murderer of its children – with great and untameable anger.