by Steve Lyons
They were hit as soon as they dropped out of the warp. Galenus had barely had time to see it coming. He stood on the bridge of the Quintillus, framed by the spreading bronze wings of the Imperial aquila in tarnished bas-relief. He had mag-locked the boots of his power armour to the deck plates, anticipating another rough re-entry into real space.
The battle-barge’s ancient engines had howled out their usual protest as the nature of reality had been forcibly rewritten around them.
Next, the shutters that had covered the viewports during the jump – to spare the eyes of the crew, and their minds, from the terrors of the immaterium – had begun to retract.
Galenus had seen the enemy ship in front of them, close enough that he couldn’t make out the stars behind it. He had caught a fleeting impression of a slime-covered hull and cannon barrels glaring out at him from an endless row of dark turrets.
Then, the cannons had flared in unison.
Sergeant Arkelius was in one of the Quintillus’s launch bays.
He felt the first shockwave rippling through the ship, and knew it was under attack.
He kept his balance by bracing himself against the Hunter tank beside him – and by shifting his fully-armoured weight onto his left foot.
A bolt of pain shot through his left hip, the legacy of a recent injury. Arkelius grunted; not because of the pain itself, but because of what it represented. He didn’t like to be reminded of his all too recent failure.
A ship-wide alert signal began to wail.
He felt the deck beneath his feet tilting. The Quintillus, he deduced, was taking evasive action – too urgently for the artificial gravity to fully compensate. Their enemy – whoever, whatever they were – were well armed. The yields of a hundred warheads couldn’t ordinarily have shaken the Quintillus.
Several Chapter-serfs – roughly half of the score or so present – had been bowled over by the shockwave. They were struggling to their feet again, resuming their work, before their masters – a squad of Techmarines – could punish them for their tardiness.
The Chapter-serfs were loading up a pair of Thunderhawk gunships, preparing them for an imminent launch.
Arkelius, likewise, did the only useful thing he could do in the circumstances. He prayed. He asked the Emperor to protect His faithful sons in the Ultramarines Fifth Company – for the sake of the vital mission ahead of them and, he dared to hope, the many more to come.
It wasn’t that he was afraid to die. Far from it. It was just that, for the past five weeks – every frustrating hour spent in enforced inactivity – only one thought had kept this faithful warrior going. He had looked forward to the moment when he would finally return to the battlefield and see the whites of his enemies’ eyes again.
He didn’t want to die like this.
The enemy ship was a battle-barge, like the Ultramarines own, with the same void shields and bombardment cannons. It could have been assembled on the same forge world.
The difference was that, now, it was in the hands of traitors.
It had been allowed to rot. It looked to Galenus like the hull was held together by rust, while patches of fungus clung to it like green and black warts. Three circles had been painted crudely across the bow in a triangular pattern: the symbol of the Plague God. This was a Death Guard ship.
It must have been lying in wait at the edge of this system; that much had been expected. Its near collision with the Quintillus, however, could hardly have been planned. A skilled psyker might have sensed the Imperial barge’s approach through the warp, but could only have guessed at its precise time and point of emergence.
The shipmaster’s quick reflexes – and those of his helmsmen – had saved them. The Quintillus had pulled up and away from the enemy vessel, void energy sparking from their two sets of shields as they scraped together.
The shipmaster ordered his gunners to return fire at will. They brought the whole of the starboard weapons battery to bear. Galenus watched and nodded his approval as a series of explosions tore along the plague ship’s mottled hull.
The plague ship banked away laboriously, striving to protect its weakened spot from further attack. The Quintillus’s route into the system was now clear. The shipmaster glanced at Galenus. ‘We could come around and finish this, while we have the advantage,’ he said.
Galenus shook his head. ‘I say we resume our course.’
It was the shipmaster’s call. However, he chose to follow Galenus’s wishes.
The battle-barge was carrying three companies’ worth of Space Marines. In fact, it was carrying three Ultramarines companies: the Emperor’s finest, so they prided themselves. Galenus was the captain of one of those companies – the Fifth Company, the Wardens of the Eastern Fringe – and the officer in overall command of their combined force.
They were answering a distress call from a world at the edge of the Ultima Segmentum: the region of space that the Ultramarines administered. Galenus could see the world in question now through the forward viewport: a luminous green disc, encircled by infinite shadows.
A servitor advised that the plague ship was coming around behind them. It wasn’t about to let them go so easily. The shipmaster had all available power diverted to reinforce the Quintillus’s stern shields. Simultaneously, Galenus activated the comm-bead in his gorget and broadcast on a ship-wide frequency. He ordered all ground forces to report to their drop pods and ships immediately, and prepare for emergency deployment.
The bright green world in the viewport was growing steadily larger.
Galenus could see now that its colour was an unnatural one: it was sickly, almost yellow. It made him think of rotten fruit. Worse still was the seething corona of purple energy that crowned the yellow-green planet’s northern hemisphere.
The Chapter Master himself had briefed Galenus on this mission. He had told him that the battle for the world that lay ahead of him – the world and its people – had already been fought and lost. He was fighting for something far more important now.
With engines howling and void shields flaring, with the plague ship hot on its tail, its cannons blazing, the battle-barge Quintillus screamed towards a planet named Orath.
Chelaki was well acquainted with Orath’s once-fertile fields.
The last he remembered, those fields had been spinning up to meet him.
He had thought himself dead – although, in fact, this was hardly a new sensation for him. In his mind, he had been dying since the day he had first donned his silver power armour and become a Space Marine, a pilot in the Doom Eagles Chapter. Every second of his continued existence since then had been a blessing from the Emperor.
Something was burning. He could smell it, even through his helmet’s air filtration systems. There was something else too: a putrid, overripe stench that even the fire couldn’t mask, that made his nostrils want to shrivel up and close.
Chelaki remembered. He had been wrestling with the controls of his Stormtalon gunship as rune panels exploded in his face. He must have blacked out; he could feel the darkness still clinging onto him now. His injector system pumped another dose of adrenaline into his primary heart. The cold shock convulsed his body and tore his eyes open.
He was pinned in the Stormtalon’s wreckage, staring straight up at the sky, which was curiously flecked with purple. He had flown for seventeen hours across the planet – he and one other pilot – racing to the aid of a squad of battle-brothers under siege. He remembered that terrible moment when he realised they had arrived too late.
The sky had been cracked open. The unholy energies of the warp were seeping through the jagged rift. Chelaki had seen flaming drop pods plummeting to earth. His
gunship had been met by a swarm of mutant insects, and among them, worse horrors still.
He had been prepared to face a small but powerful Death Guard force. The situation, evidently, had escalated since then. Now, Orath was the subject of a full-scale invasion.
He sent out a tentative vox signal. As expected, there came no answer. The remaining members of his own squad were out of range, half a world away, at Fort Garm. As for the Fists of the Fallen – the Doom Eagles squad that had been charged with protecting Fort Kerberos – there were no other survivors.
Chelaki was the last man standing.
Today, he was more blessed than he could ever have imagined – which only gave him all the more to repay the Emperor for.
In the launch bay, a Techmarine completed his final checks on the Scourge of the Skies. He clambered down from the vehicle’s roof, and gave its newly-appointed commander an affirmative nod. It was time, then.
Arkelius took one last look around the Scourge’s gleaming blue exterior. He knew it would be some time before he saw it again – if ever.
He had never commanded a tank in the field before. He had never set foot inside this particular variant – a Hunter – although of course he had studied its schematics closely.
Like the Predator Destructors that made up most of the Ultramarines artillery, the Hunter was based on the ubiquitous Rhino template. The major differences were an extra layer of armour plating – and the Skyspear missile launcher bolted to the Hunter’s back.
The Scourge was recently returned from a complete refit. It was freshly painted in Ultramarines blue, proudly bearing the Chapter’s stylised U-symbol in white.
Arkelius hauled himself up onto the Hunter’s roof. He squeezed his broad shoulders through the tank commander’s hatch and dropped into a cramped compartment.
His crewmates were ready at their stations. He could see his gunner, Iunus, through an open hatchway behind him. Brother Corbin was in the driver’s compartment to Arkelius’s right, separated from him by a thick bulkhead.
Arkelius reached up and pulled his hatch shut, firmly. His only views of the outside world were now through narrow vision slits. The main one was in the Scourge’s sloping prow directly in front of him, and he adjusted his seat until he could see squarely through it. There were smaller slits around the hatch above him too.
He addressed his crewmates over the Scourge’s vox-frequency.
‘We’re ready to roll,’ he growled.
Brother Corbin fired up the Hunter’s engine. Its roar was deafening to Arkelius in his confined quarters. He adjusted his hearing implants to filter out the worst of it. Still, the engine’s vibrations carried through his power armour and rattled his bones.
Leaning forwards, he peered through his front vision slit.
Corbin was following the hand signals of a hunchbacked Chapter-serf, guiding the Scourge across the launch bay and towards the nearest Thunderhawk. Expertly, he threaded his way between a pair of landing stanchions. Another tank – a Predator Destructor – was already dangling from the Thunderhawk’s belly. Corbin pulled up behind it.
A moment later, Arkelius heard and felt magnetic arms clamping onto the Scourge’s hull, and they were hoisted off the ground.
He was about to tell Corbin to kill the engine when he realised that he already had.
Arkelius had read Brother Corbin’s service record prior to their first meeting that morning. He had served for almost as long as the sergeant had, and most of his experience had been gained at the controls of this very vehicle.
Arkelius, in contrast, was more used to leading infantry squads, and he had the battle honours to prove that he was good at it. At least, until that fateful day five weeks ago, when an ork’s bloody blade had laid him low.
Intellectually, he knew there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. All the same, he couldn’t help but blame himself. He felt he ought to have been more careful.
For weeks now, he had known that he was destined for the planet Orath. Galenus had assigned him to command a garrison there, watching over a pair of minor listening posts; the captain’s way, he had imagined, of keeping him on the sidelines a while longer. He couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that Galenus no longer trusted him.
But then, everything had changed.
It was quiet inside the Hunter battle tank, and dark, just a little light falling into Arkelius’s compartment through the vision slits. He could hear Iunus breathing softly behind him.
This wasn’t the way he had pictured his arrival on Orath, and for that much, at least, he was profoundly grateful. Nor, indeed, was this how he had envisaged his long-awaited return to battle, with his boltgun holstered at his weakened hip and his chainsword sheathed.
He wouldn’t see the whites of any enemies’ eyes today.
The yellow-green planet now almost filled the forward viewport.
On its master’s command, the Quintillus threw open its launch bays. It spewed out a swarm of smaller vessels: Stormtalons and Thunderhawks, mostly. The swarm peeled away from its mother ship and streaked eagerly towards the looming, bright orb.
The smaller ships outpaced the Quintillus as it began to level out of its dive. Their ceramite-plated hulls blazed fiercely as they struck the planetary atmosphere.
On the bridge, Galenus’s eyes were glued to a tactical display. It showed a rolling map of the mostly flat terrain beneath him, and the battle-barge’s position and projected flight path relative to it. His objective on the ground was marked too, with a blinking red triangle. It was labelled in High Gothic script as ‘Fort Kerberos’.
The triangle was partially obscured – and near-encircled – by an irregular purple shape, which blighted the tactical display like a stain. It could only have been Orath’s newly opened rift. It was larger than Galenus had imagined.
He knew, from his briefing, that time was very much of the essence. He had to position his troops as close to the fort as he possibly could. He couldn’t risk the Quintillus being sucked into that rift, however.
He had asked the shipmaster to take them lower than he would normally have dared.
He knew they were taking a gamble. The battle-barge wasn’t built for atmospheric flight. Its engines were already upping their protests a notch – even at this distance from the planet – as they fought to resist the slightest tug of gravity upon their massive burden. Even if they won that battle, there was a chance of the ship’s hull buckling under the stress.
Galenus focused on the tactical display in front of him as the shipmaster barked out a series of minor course corrections. The Quintillus was flying underneath the warp rift now – and its icon was steadily approaching the blinking triangle.
At last, the red triangle turned white as the ship’s icon overlapped it, and the shipmaster issued a one-word command.
‘Now!’
A servitor confirmed that his cue had been acted upon.
The drop pods had been ejected, each carrying two combat squads of five Space Marines. They appeared on the tactical display as flickering images, plummeting to the ground faster than any cogitator could lock onto them and track them.
That was it, thought Galenus. Three companies despatched to the latest battlefield as required. Now he could worry about himself – and the Quintillus.
The shipmaster bellowed over the screaming engines, ‘Get us out of here! Pull up!’
The crew seemed to have been wrestling with their controls for an age before the battle-barge responded. At last, it began to climb again, centimetre by agonising centimetre. It grazed the outermost tendrils of the warp rift, and Galenus had to shield his eyes from its vicious purple glare, which was already making his brain itch.
The Quintillus wrenched itself free of Orath’s pull and soared again. Had Galenus had the time, he might have breathed a small sigh of relief. But they weren’t out of danger yet. ‘The
plague ship,’ barked the shipmaster. ‘Where is it?’
Crewmembers were scrambling around the bridge in a frenzy, running diagnostic checks, taking readings. ‘It broke off its pursuit of us, sir,’ one of them reported. ‘It went after the transporters.’ He punched up the information on the tactical display.
‘Bring us around,’ the shipmaster ordered. ‘I want eyes – and guns – on that junk pile.’ Once again, the deck plates tilted as the Quintillus banked ponderously to the right.
A moment later, Orath heaved back into sight in the forward viewport – along with the rotting plague ship, which was now between them and the yellow-green planet.
The plague ship had a straggler in its sights. Its cannons blazed, and the luckless Thunderhawk – along with its pilot and the Predator Destructors it had been carrying – were consumed in a blossom of flame.
Galenus held himself still, clenching his jaw. He had to remind himself that this wasn’t his battle to fight. The shipmaster knew what he was doing.
On his snarled command, his gunners assailed the plague ship with everything they had: assault cannons, torpedoes, they even brought their lances online and pounded the enemy’s shields with focused energy beams. The plague ship reeled under the sustained assault and the last of its would-be prey, the Imperial swarm, slipped out of its grasp.
The Quintillus kept up the punishing bombardment regardless.
Galenus watched with grim satisfaction as a muck-encrusted engine pod exploded. The stricken plague ship came around, and, for a moment, the captain thought it was actually going to try to ram them. It veered away, however, and plunged into the warp rift instead.
It was probably returning to the Eye of Terror, he thought. Doubtless, it had a base there, perhaps on the Plague Planet itself.
He only prayed that the ship was as damaged as it had appeared to be. Otherwise, there was a chance of it returning – loaded up with reinforcements.
Chelaki remembered.
Blazing drop pods plummeting from the sky; the air filled with hideous, bloated flying insects, large enough to be ridden as mounts; Fort Kerberos in ruins.