by Steve Lyons
‘We must assume that the Kerberos Seal remains partially intact, and that, to some extent at least, it still holds the rift in check. That the Death Guard intend to destroy it and have the means, and that the results of their so doing would be…’
He paused to suck in air between his teeth before he uttered the word, ‘Apocalyptic’.
Another voice spoke, then: a rumbling, augmented voice, a little slurred but ringing with confidence and authority. ‘Our enemies want whatever lies beneath Fort Kerberos,’ said Terserus. ‘Our sacred duty is to keep it from them.’
Nobody argued with him. The Dreadnought armour that Terserus wore – that he had earned – commanded the utmost respect and even reverence of all those present.
‘An atomic strike was considered and ruled out,’ Galenus explained. ‘We can’t take the risk of further damaging either of the Seals. That has left us with only one option. As Brother Terserus says, we have to hit the Death Guard hard and hit them fast. We have to rout them and ensure they don’t return – else, God-Emperor knows exactly what they might unleash.’
The captain’s steel-grey eyes had been darting between the various members of his audience and the tactical hololith between them. As new information had come in from his pilots in the field, the display had been remotely updated.
‘And with that, gentlemen,’ he announced, straightening his back and squaring his shoulders, ‘you know exactly as much as I do. Any questions?’
If there were, Galenus didn’t wait to hear them. He was already halfway to the door and nodded to Terserus, who followed him. His lurching footsteps shook the metal deck plates, and a couple of aides were forced to sidle out of his path.
‘Captain Fabian,’ Galenus rapped over his shoulder. ‘I want you to remain aboard the Quintillus and coordinate our efforts from here. I want to know if anything comes out of that warp rift – or of any indication that it may be increasing in size.’
Fabian pushed himself to his feet. ‘You’re going down to the planet?’
‘Hit them fast,’ Galenus reminded him, pausing in the doorway. ‘So far, our tactics are working. The bulk of the enemy forces have been drawn out from the fort site to meet our army, but not all of them. I kept two squads in reserve – one of them my own – and a Thunderhawk, for precisely this purpose.
‘I – we – will put down as far behind enemy lines as we can. We may be outnumbered, but our aim is simply to keep the Death Guard busy, too busy to dig for the Great Seal – until our battle-brothers can break through their defences and stop them permanently.’
Chelaki felt sick. He told himself that the mere sight of the rancid followers of Nurgle had soured his stomach, but he knew that wasn’t the truth.
He had reached the small rise beyond the field in which he had crash-landed. He lay flat on its leeward slope and peered cautiously over its crest.
He saw huge metal machines picking through the wreckage of Fort Kerberos. He recognised some of them as agricultural vehicles, once used by Orath’s farmers. He saw a couple of old Imperial Rhinos too. They had been defaced by blasphemous symbols and had dozer-blades fitted to their front ends.
In between the machines, he saw hunched, shambling figures, wielding shovels and pickaxes. Filthy, ragged clothing hung from their bodies; diseased skin was peeling from their bones. Their eyes, their expressions, were vacant; they tackled their labours lethargically, like failing automata, only going through the motions.
He realised what the shambling creatures were: the former farmers of Orath, along with their wives and children. Their bodies and minds had been ravaged by disease. They looked as if they should be dead, and perhaps they were.
Was this the fate that awaited him too, he wondered?
The creatures – the zombies – worked under the direction of a force of Death Guard. Plague Marines. Their armoured suits were neglected, rusted to the point where it seemed impossible that they could still function, although they did. Their original colours were long lost in a murky morass of greens and browns.
One of their number seemed to stand above the others. His armour had a greater number of adornments – presumably, his sick idea of battle honours – including a belt of human skulls slung low about his hips. His head was uncovered and looked hardly more healthy than the dead, rotting skulls did. He was missing an eye and a nose; fat, wriggling maggots had infested the empty sockets. Occasionally, a maggot would pop out of its crowded nest, bounce off its host’s chestplate and burst as it hit the ground.
Chelaki trained his auto-senses on the ghoulish figure. According to his range finder, he was half a kilometre away. Too far for a kill shot to that tempting bare head, even if he had a working bolter with him. And, with the zombies and the Plague Marines in between them, he knew he would never reach him.
He could still see dark, flying shapes through the ever-present haze, further from him now than they had been before. He glimpsed a pair of shapes larger than the others with jagged, razor-edged wings, leaving smoke trails, and he remembered the machine-creature – the fire-belching daemon engine – that had wrenched him out of the sky.
The bulk of the Death Guard army, Chelaki supposed, would be marching beneath their fliers, to the north-west, closing with the Imperial forces that had landed in that direction. He could hear the grinding engines of their tanks and even glimpse the backs of some of them as they set up a defensive line in front of the excavation site.
Chelaki and his brothers had been charged with protecting this world. They had failed, and this part of it at least had been claimed by Chaos. But the Emperor had given him a chance to expunge his shame; Chelaki had no doubt that he had been spared and placed here in this spot at this time for a reason.
Now, he only had to work out what he was meant to do; how best to utilise the fragile gift that he had been given. He had to make the rest of his life count for something.
‘I have eyes on the enemy, sergeant,’ reported Corbin.
‘I see them too,’ Arkelius growled. ‘Maintain formation. Turn us six – no, seven – degrees to port and ease up on the pedal a little.’
They were just about visible through his forward vision slit: the first ranks of the plague army who were grotesque, man-sized daemon creatures, grey-skinned and so badly deformed that from this distance it was hard to tell where one of them ended and the next one began.
They were like a tidal wave of putrid flesh, crashing over the horizon, and Arkelius knew from the vox-chatter that filled his helmet – from the reports of the Ultramarines Stormtalon and Thunderhawk pilots – that there were worse horrors to come behind them.
Ashen-skinned daemons were appearing in the gloomy sky too. They were riding on the backs of huge, hideous winged insects, wielding swords.
Arkelius heard the familiar rattle of autocannon fire. The sound was muted by the Scourge of the Skies’s armour plating and almost drowned out by its engine. Still, the signal it sent out was clear enough. Battle had been joined.
The Predator Destructors ahead of him strafed the enemy while they had the chance, and the daemon creatures – scores of them – surged forward, snarling and salivating. On Captain Numitor’s orders two hundred Space Marines broke into a full charge, and the opposing forces met in a savage explosion of fire, metal, entrails and blood.
Arkelius dragged his eyes away from the grisly spectacle.
He couldn’t be distracted by what was happening on the ground. Not today. Today, his primary concern had to be with what was happening above it. His new charge was named the Scourge of the Skies for a reason.
A squadron of Imperial Stormtalons had entered the fray, screaming noisily over Arkelius’s head, appearing in his limited field of vision a moment later. A couple of daemon riders were riddled by the gunships’ assault cannons, thrown backwards from their insect mounts, while at least one of the giant flies too was blasted to pieces.
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nbsp; Several of them kept coming, nevertheless, soaring effortlessly over the melee on the ground, and suddenly it became clear to Arkelius that their targets were the big guns at the rear of the battlefield, the Scourge of the Skies and its fellows.
Not a moment too soon came the order from Captain Numitor for all artillery units to halt and to hold their positions, firing at the enemy at will.
‘Corbin, step on the brakes, but keep the engine ticking over,’ Arkelius instructed. ‘Iunus, pick a target – an airborne target – and lock onto it. Find a mount with a rider if you can. That way, we have a chance of scoring two kills with a single hit.’
Corbin voxed him, ‘If there’s time, we should plant the stabilisers before we–’
‘Yes,’ said Arkelius, tersely, ‘thank you, brother, I am aware of that. Lower the stabilisers.’
‘I have a target lock, sergeant,’ reported Iunus. ‘Permission to–’
Arkelius interrupted him, ‘Yes, do it, just–’
Something small and round came spinning towards his vision slit – a grenade? It looked more like a skull to him. Presumably, one of the daemon insect-riders had flung it, though Arkelius hadn’t seen it. The skull bounced off the Scourge’s prow with a blinding flash, and the Hunter was rocked violently. Arkelius planted his hands on the bulkheads around him, to brace himself, as warning runes flashed red across his control banks.
‘Damage report,’ he snapped, ‘quickly.’
‘I’m running diagnostics now, sergeant,’ reported Corbin.
Behind Arkelius, Iunus had been jolted almost out of his seat by the explosion. Catching hold of a grab rail, he levered his armoured bulk back into position. ‘Do you still have that target lock?’ Arkelius asked him, and, checking his monitors, Iunus confirmed that he did.
He tightened his hand around a trigger, and the Scourge was rocked again, this time by a punishing recoil from its rooftop missile launcher. Had its stabilisers not been sunk into the ground, it might well have been toppled onto its side.
A sleek blue rocket shot away from the Hunter towards the stars. Arkelius craned forward to follow its exhaust trail with his eyes. The missile smacked into its targets – a fly and its daemon rider – and consumed them in a bloom of flame.
The hit must have registered on Iunus’s monitors too, because he couldn’t hold in a curt exclamation of triumph. He was still young; at least, he appeared so to Arkelius. Iunus’s face, he had noted that morning, was smooth and unscarred and his eyes were still blue and clear.
A perusal of his record had confirmed it: he had been a scout until as recently as four years ago, and since then had served only in his current role. As a tank gunner, Iunus would not have experienced combat as Arkelius knew it. How often, he wondered, had Iunus stood toe-to-toe with a heretic or a perverted mutant freak – or an ork – with the stink of its blood in his nostrils and throat and no time to think, his only options to fight and kill or to die?
‘We can toast your marksmanship skills later,’ Arkelius grumbled.
‘Yes, sergeant,’ agreed Iunus. ‘Reloading the Skyspear now, sergeant.’
‘Corbin, how are those diagnostics coming?’ asked Arkelius.
‘We had a little overheating in the engine,’ his driver answered him, ‘but I’ve pumped some coolant down there and it seems fine. We’ve lost external temperature sensors. Oh, and there’s a crack in my vision slit. The Scourge has coped with worse, a lot worse.’
‘Got another target lock, sergeant,’ Iunus boasted.
‘You know what to do, brother,’ Arkelius told him.
Iunus fired, and, once again, the Hunter shuddered as it spat out its deadly payload. The target this time – another daemon rider – was alert enough to see its reckoning coming. It spurred its mount into a neck-breaking dive, and the missile almost grazed the insect’s tattered wings but missed them by a hair. It soared away into the clouds and was lost.
‘Bad luck,’ Arkelius commiserated. ‘Still, two clean kills out of two shots is–’
‘The final count isn’t in yet, sergeant,’ said Iunus. ‘Ten o’clock, high, look!’
It took Arkelius a moment – but then he saw it. The Scourge’s missile had turned itself around in midair. It was coming at the insect and its daemon rider again. At least, Arkelius assumed it was the same insect, the same rider – and the very same missile.
He had been familiarised, of course – via hypno-conditioning – with the Skyspear’s unique properties. To see those properties in action, however, was something else.
This time, the daemon didn’t get a chance to dodge. Thinking itself safe, it had taken on a Stormtalon in single combat and swiped at the Imperial ship’s engine pod with a double-bladed sword. It barrel-rolled out of the way as the Stormtalon’s guns responded – and straight into the teeth of the missile that it hadn’t seen coming up behind it.
Arkelius was tempted to let out an exclamation himself.
By now, Orath’s sky was a writhing mass of wings and bodies, both organic and mechanical in nature. They were spinning, twisting, wheeling around each other in a dizzying dance; one in which the slightest misstep could result in a sudden, explosive death for the dancer.
A sustained barrage of gunfire from the ground only added to the lethal confusion.
The Ultramarines had two Hunter tanks and two Stalkers, each of the latter sporting an Icarus stormcannon array: two triple-barrelled cannons. They were peppering the flies and their riders with solid rounds whenever they saw an opening. They were forced to hold back a little, however, lest they strike an ally.
The Hunters’ gunners, with their unerring guided missiles, had no such problem. ‘Another target lock, sergeant,’ Iunus reported.
Behind his helmet, Arkelius smiled to himself as he gave the order: ‘Fire!’
A wave of nausea took Chelaki by surprise.
It swept over him, blurring his vision and robbing him of his sense of balance.
His occulobe – the implant at the base of his brain that blessed him with superhuman eyesight – tried to compensate, but only worsened matters. Before he knew it, he had sunk to one knee, one hand on the ground. He cursed himself under his breath for his weakness.
He felt his secondary heart kicking in, pumping frantically to compensate for his primary heart’s weakness.
He had given the ruins of Fort Kerberos a fairly wide berth. If only he had had more explosives about him, he thought, or a working gun, if he could have seen a way to get up close to the enemy commander. He had concluded, however, that he could best serve by joining the newly arrived Ultramarines on the battlefield, who were just a few more kilometres to the north , close enough that he was able to tune in to their vox-chatter.
Chelaki pushed himself back to his feet. He fixed his sights on the billowing cloud of smoke ahead of him, just on this side of the horizon.
He forced his leaden legs to move, one after the other, settling into a pounding rhythm as he ploughed through one infected and dying field after another. He crashed through the smouldering ruins of a brick-built farmhouse without breaking his newly regained stride.
In the smoke, he could now see the silhouettes of writhing figures. They grew larger, slowly gaining in colour and definition, as he drew closer to them. Now, he could make out the proud blues of the Ultramarines armour, and the shapes of the ghastly, grey-skinned creatures they were fighting.
Chelaki had glimpsed these daemons from his cockpit earlier, but this was the first time he had been able to get a good look at them. Like the zombies at the fort, they seemed to be in the throes of some virulent illness. Their limbs were wasting away, while their stomachs were horribly distended. They didn’t act as if they were ill, however; quite the opposite.
Each of them possessed a single, bloodshot eye, an ork-like snout and a slavering mouthful of yellowing, chipped teeth. They had horns too – a
single horn each – growing out of the tops of their heads. They did their fighting, however, with massive, rusted swords, which they appeared to wield with supernatural strength.
Five daemons had outflanked a Space Marine squad on the edge of the melee. Their numbers were even, but the daemons were winning the encounter. In the time it took to reach them, Chelaki saw two Space Marines – and only one of their opponents – falling. He howled a litany of vengeance as he thumbed the activation rune of his chainsword.
Up close, the daemon creatures had a stink of death and decay. Swarms of tiny, black flies buzzed about them; their flesh was lousy with so many writhing parasites that it almost seemed to be alive. Most horrifically of all, their bodies were bursting open at the seams like old cushions, exposing their rotten innards.
Chelaki aimed for one of those exposed spots: a gaping rent beneath the shoulder blades of one of the daemon creatures. His chainsword bit into an overripe, black organ, but it was as if the daemon didn’t feel any pain at all. He staggered it, at least, with the force of his blow and it rounded on him, swinging its rusty blade at him. He dodged its thrust, but not the offhanded swipe that followed it. The daemon’s filthy talons sliced into his wounded side, and Chelaki was unable to bite back an agonised grunt.
Blood rushed to his head, his eyes failed him again and for a second he was blind.
He could still hear the daemon creature. It was chanting an unholy catechism in some ancient, unspeakable language. He felt as if the words were worming their way into his brain, like the infinite miasma of the warp, threatening his very sanity. At least the chanting told him exactly where the daemon was, and he threw up his sword and blocked its next attack.
He heard bolter fire, and, as his vision cleared, he made out the shape of the daemon creature lying dead at his feet. One of the Ultramarines – the squad’s sergeant – had finished it off. Chelaki could take pride, at least, in having been a useful distraction. The odds had shifted now: four to three in the Space Marines favour.