Ajax also noticed that he had not been the only man to enter into convulsions. He saw at least four others being calmed by the marines nearest them, and several others who he suspected had suffered the same and were now somewhat recovered. There were men here not just from Hydra, but Gorgon, Cerberus, and Manticore Company. Looking back at him were the faces of the men once bound together as Task Force Grendel.
"I have no memory of this conflict, so we must be losing ground at a significant pace," said Ajax with a grim tone, "And I find it ominous to see these marines with us, this is the old task force."
"Keep breathing, search your mind, and the memories will come to you," urged Hart.
"I didn’t die?" asked Ajax, a knot twisting in his stomach.
"No, my friend, we are their escorts into the fray, you have not fallen in battle for nearly two weeks, since Vulcan 9," Hart spoke in a soothing tone that gave Ajax the impression that the sniper was treating him like a spooked animal. "And yet, in the last several months you have done so a great many times, as have all the Einherjar."
"It’s the blackout, isn't it?" whispered Ajax, though whether he was asking Hart or himself was ambiguous.
"With the Bifrost gone, we have no way to replenish the Bright Lance's body forge. The solutions Idris is using to resurrect the legions vast have long since exceeded their use threshold. In short, they are in a state of rapid decline, and the side effects are beginning to reveal themselves."
"I can feel the fury just underneath my skin, like it’s trying to claw its way out of me," breathed Ajax as he continued working to calm himself. Soon, he found that his mind was beginning to clear and his headache was receding ever so slightly. The headaches had become the new normal, a baseline of discomfort in his already difficult life cycle, "Rotten elixirs and rushed deployments post-resurrection, that's a recipe for blackouts."
"Indeed, I'm sure once you fully recover from your episode you'll recall that we've had a nearly ten percent force reduction because of it," said Hart as the dropship's proximity lights began to flash and the low tone of a standard landing protocol sounded in the troop compartment, "The temple is full of berserkers, when what we need most are calculating professionals."
"Port Chiaroscuro, yes, I think it is coming to me," muttered Ajax before his body shook, this time because the dropship was indeed breaking atmosphere. "Hybrid uprising resulted in total loss of Rampart Station, which the garm will bypass in favor of attacking the mega-cities, and planet-wide civil war has made a coordinated response from Port Authority impossible. Einherjar are on the ground providing escort for evacuation, but hybrid insurgents are making it a point to target such endeavors."
"Keep digging," Hart commanded, urging Ajax on as he squeezed the marine's armored hand. "What about this mission? To what purpose have we been dispatched?"
"Re-capture the station from the hybrids before the extinction fleet arrives, turn the orbital rail guns against the garm," Ajax managed to spit out, as he took notice of the unfamiliar conventional assault shotgun cradled across his chest in place of his familiar pulse rifle. "And then launch a kinetic bombardment of all conflict zones planetside once Einherjar elements are clear."
"There is yet more, Ajax," said Hart knowingly.
"The Watchman himself transmitted the order from the Rim Worlds," Ajax sputtered, his mind racing now to catch up with the memories as they came flooding in. "Where his towership and the warship Stone Burner are purging a splinter fleet. Why would the Watchman defend the frontier while sending us to a core planet?"
And then it hit him.
Hart saw it on the marine's face, and let go of the man's hand as the sniper nodded grimly in silent agreement before Ajax managed to speak.
"Loki is here," snarled the marine, "And the Watchman has become a believer. He has let the Bloodhound off the leash, and so here we fight."
"It would appear that way," said Hart as the dropship bucked violently when the pilot kicked on the reverse thrusters which would allow the vessel to hit the landing pad and re-launch in a matter of seconds. "For he has assembled the very warriors who faced the monster once before, and perhaps fearing a fate similar to the old Watchman, and you for a long while, our leader had chosen to remain far from destiny's ground zero."
"Don't tell me you're starting to buy into the narrative strategy," said Ajax when he felt the safety harness coil backward as the pilot primed the rapid deployment rig, "You've always been the skeptic."
"That was before I met the beast that Skald Thatcher became, even if I do not remember it," said Hart as the warning lights strobed, indicating two seconds to drop, "And before marine Ajax emerged from the Bifrost to fight with us at the end of everything."
Before Ajax could respond, the dual hatches of the dropship slid open and the rapid deployment rigs ejected the marines in a cascading formation across the landing zone.
Adrenaline surged through the marine's system and his headache abated even more as he felt power crackle in his formerly leaden limbs. His vision was clear, his mind as intact as it could be, and he was ready for a fight. He swiftly glanced to the right and left as he pressed forward, taking note that he was flanked on both sides by equally determined marines carrying automatic shotguns.
The Einherjar all had boots equipped with maglocks, which, when engaged, allowed them to remain grounded when in zero gravity. In the hard vacuum of the airlock there was no sound, though Ajax could feel the vibration of fifty pairs of magboots clomping across the deck as they raced for the inner airlock.
The dropship had punched through the outer airlock of one of the dozens of warship sized docking bays of Rampart Station. The massive spaceport was a combination shipyard and military outpost, which housed a battery of orbital rail guns capable of destroying ships in void combat. The pilot of the dropship pulled up on his thrusters and the vessel burned rivulets of molten metal out of the decking as it made its escape. As soon as the dropship backed out of the chamber it sped off into the darkness, presumably keeping itself busy with evasive maneuvers to avoid the steady stream of anti-aircraft fire coming from the close- quarters batteries that bristled across the surface of the station. It was not a station built for war, though it had certainly been built with violence in mind. For the average pirate raiding party or insurgent force, seizing the station would have proven a bloody endeavor with little chance of success.
Loki and his cannibalistic hybrids were anything but average, thought Ajax as he sprinted across the deck of the shipyard. While his memories of them were gone, lost with his torc on Tankrid, he had poured over every scrap of intel made available from the accounts of men and women across human space who had encountered either the beast himself or his underlings. Yes, it was all coming back to him, even if there wasn't much, just urban legends really.
With what the Einherjar already knew of Skald Thatcher's activities with the muta-gene and the Angrboda, the marine had no doubts about Thatcher's role in the universe-wide hybrid uprisings that had crippled the war effort against the garm.
Ajax reached the inner airlock panel first and was soon joined by Ford, who produced a plasma cutter that was easily the size of a pulse rifle. In fact, the construction was similar, and the plasma cutter often took the place of chain-fires and grenade launchers as a support weapon in shipboard combat. Not that the Einherjar had done much of that, considering that they were ground forces, though cross-training had always been mandatory. In the event that the Bright Lance was boarded, for example, it would be highly likely that the Einherjar would already be on the ground of whatever objective was being contested while shunts defended the ship.
Ajax reminded himself crisply that he should not think of them as shunts, his thoughts drifting to the man named Gunnar that Jarl Mahora informed him had been pivotal in saving his life. Other men had died with Gunnar aboard the Bifrost getting Ajax out, and countless others in other spaceborne battles against garm boarders over the years. In that time it was the shotgun and the plasma cutter t
hat proved to be the most effective at killing the enemy without damaging the ship.
Ajax wished he could just use his pulse rifle, though he understood the tactical soundness of their loadout. It only took Ford twelve seconds to cut the airlock panel, which disabled the titanium bars, and allowed several other marines to lever them back and out of the way. More men grasped the double doors with their armored fingers and pulled, their combined strength opening the airlock with a slow, but steady speed.
As soon as there was enough room, Ajax, Rama, and Hart all shoved the muzzles of their weapons into the breach and began firing. The chamber behind the inner airlock decompressed and started bleeding atmosphere with enough force that had the marines not been wearing magboots they'd have been swept out into open space.
The hurricane of buckshot unleashed into the chamber shredded the bodies of several hybrids, also wearing magboots, and the pellets that did not sink into enemy flesh were ricocheted around the chamber and hurled back out at the oncoming marines. Other hybrids in the chamber rushed to meet the marines. They also wore magboots, but not a single one of them appeared to be wearing a void-worthy suit.
Ajax raised his shotgun and fired, the weapon spitting out a blast of buckshot as fast as he could squeeze the trigger. The rapid decompression wasn't helping with accuracy, though with so many marines firing weapons in close quarters they didn’t need to be all that accurate. It swiftly became a bloodbath.
For Ajax that was in a literal sense, as he pulped the body of a hybrid who was attempting to line up a pistol shot, the enemy's corpse began weeping gouts of blood. The fluid was caught up in the decompression and splattered against Ajax in a wave of sickening red.
The marines marched onwards, and Ajax shrugged off the impact of what he thought was a pistol round before his vision was consumed by the sight of a hybrid standing a few feet away dressed in orange coveralls.
The man screamed, then he ceased to be a man. His arms erupted with bio-blades and his jaws separated to reveal a fanged maw. Despite all of that, what struck Ajax was the hybrid's jet-black eyes.
Ajax just had time to raise his shotgun and squeeze the trigger once as the creature ripped its feet from the magboots and leaped toward him, propelled by the force of decompression. The hybrid's torso took the brunt of the blast but the decompression carried the monster forward, and it smashed into Ajax, knocking his magboots free and sending him backward.
The two of them tumbled through the open air towards the airlock, speeding past other marines as they continued forward, firing as they went. Because his magboots were activated the marine swung his body around, performing an awkward flip in midair so that he could slam his feet down on the deck. The moment he did, the hybrid, though wounded by the multitude of tiny holes in its chest, lashed out with one of its bladed appendages. The beast skewered Ajax through the calf, the point of the blade wedging itself between the plate protecting his knee and his calf.
The marine bellowed more in frustration than pain and turned to extend his shotgun, pointing it one handed as if it were a pistol. The muzzle was only inches from the hybrid's face and when Ajax fired. The beast anticipated it, flinging itself to the left, using the blade buried in Ajax’s calf as an anchor.
The marine screamed in rage and pain, but he'd been hurt plenty of times, often much worse, and he fought through it. Ajax squeezed the trigger again, and this time the hybrid was only able to dodge half of the cloud of buckshot. As the beast recovered from the shock of the wound, Ajax fired twice more, the first blast obliterating the beast's skull and the second separating the creature's arm from the bio-blade embedded in the marine's calf.
As the hybrid's corpse tumbled into the vacuum of space Ajax pressed onwards, allowing his shotgun to flail behind him on its strap as he crouched low and used his hands to help him move faster across the deck. He passed the flopping bodies of the three hybrids, their corpses still affixed to the decking by their magboots, and marveled at what he saw.
Until today, Ajax had only seen the corpses of hybrids. Even with all the conflict after the Bifrost, he had been up against garm, as the Einherjar were always last to the battle between the three opposing sides. By the time he and the marines arrived, the hybrids had usually defeated the UHC defenses, or at least crippled them, and then were themselves massacred by the garm. If their purpose had been to conquer, they'd failed miserably, though if their goal was total chaos for all forces involved, they'd done admirably well.
Two of the hybrids were dressed in the orange coveralls of dock workers, though their lolling jaws were split down the middle, revealing carefully concealed mandibles. The arms of two of the hybrids were elongated because of bio-blades that had emerged from the forearms, making them look almost like human versions of ripper drones. The remaining hybrid appeared much more human, still wearing the tan jacket with corporate logos emblazoned on the chest and shoulders that marked its wearer as an accredited company man. A submachine gun was pulling against his chest as the strap was drawn taut by the bleeding atmosphere.
That hybrid, thought Ajax, was the deadliest of the three, as it most likely could pass for human under slightly more scrutiny than the other two. The placement of the two ripper style hybrids in dock positions made sense, as did whatever white collar work the other did.
Hart reached the panel before anyone else and used the keypad to draw the inner airlock shut. As soon as it did the assembled marines were able to stand and start securing the inner airlock chamber.
Ajax rolled over onto his back, taking comfort in the fact that he heard no additional gunfire, and that for now they were clear of the enemy. He knew that would only last a few moments, if that long, so he had to get moving. Thankfully, a marine with the name Rada stenciled on his chest had approached Ajax, and without a word had begun to tend to the wounded marine.
Ajax winced when Rama pulled the blade from his wound, though it had not been as bad as he'd anticipated.
"The bio-blades of the hybrid apparently are not barbed like the ripper drones," observed Rama as he used a handheld auto-suture to close the wound after pumping it full of stimulants, anticoagulants, and a modest disinfectant, "The gods are perhaps not as cruel as we think they are."
Ajax gave a weak laugh as the marine helped him to his feet, and in the short span of moving from where he'd fallen to the panel near Hart, the wounded marine's limp had become very nearly a full walk. Such was the potency of the Einherjar medical field-tech, for while it would keep Ajax up and fighting, he would certainly lose the leg from below the knee at some later time. If he survived today he would have to have it replaced, but for now, he was ready to fight.
Ajax saw Hart's inquisitive look and noticed Silas mustering a small group of men from Hydra Company around the main hatch, so he made a show of swapping out ammo drums for his shotgun.
It was a bloody grind to reach the central command chamber that controlled the station, though, despite the suicidal dedication of the enemy, they were no match for hardened marine discipline. Ajax's vision was swimming by the time Hart detonated the heat-putty that reduced the chamber hatch to slagged metal. The marine hit himself in the leg with another stim hypo and then steadied the shotgun in his armored hands.
Ajax only had six rounds left, but in close quarters that was still plenty of death and destruction he could unleash. The psychic pressure was significant, and Ajax had not been lost for even a moment on the unfamiliar space station. The Bloodhound was on the scent of his prey, and now that he stood at the threshold of facing it, he realized that it had made no attempt to hide.
The hatch ran in hot rivulets of molten metal. As soon as the remains of the doors could be shoved aside, Ajax rushed into the room alongside his comrades.
A swarm of hybrid berserkers surged towards them before the marines could get a full layout of the room. From what he did see before hostiles flooded his vision was a standard looking bridge covered in snaking wires and organic tendrils.
The marine bla
sted a hybrid off its feet, then put down another before Silas appeared at his side and took down another. Ajax pumped his last three rounds into two beasts that were attempting to climb over a bank of datacores. The clouds of buckshot tore apart not only enemy flesh but shattered the protective casings of the cores. The three cores shorted out, sending bursts of electrical discharge arcing into the body of one last hybrid, dropping it to the deck in a smoldering heap.
Ajax turned towards the center of the chamber, sinking to his knees in exhaustion, his empty shotgun falling to the deck. He was fading fast, the wound in his leg combining with the deep gash in his side from a lucky hybrid ambush sapping him of his remaining strength.
And that's when he saw Thatcher, or what had become of the once great skald.
The beast the men now called Loki sat upon the commander's throne, his body covered in a mixture of skald body armor and organic garm chitin. His multiple oculars moved across the marines, taking in the sight of them, though the creature did not move. It was still connected to the ship by a network of cables and organic tendrils, and Ajax found himself thinking sickeningly of how this must be what the Hive Mind looked like.
Ajax lifted his faceplate and vomited on the deck, the presence of the creature in his mind almost too much to bear when combined with his battered body. He found himself sinking into darkness.
"Welcome, Einherjar," rasped the monster as it opened its palms to reveal empty hands, clawed perhaps, but not in possession of a weapon.
"I have been waiting for you."
RIVAL
The beast had not protested when Hart used his skald's wrist blades to slice through the assorted cables that were permanently attached to Loki, after yanking out the ones that seemed modular. Nor had it struggled when blackout handlers collared it and moved the monster as it if were one of their own berserkers across the ravaged station and onto the dropship. It had offered no threats or pleading when imprisoned in a blackout cell, and though it was under constant guard, it gave no indication it wished to attempt escape. It could have, everyone swiftly realized, given that its claws and armor were part of its already heavily muscled and powerful body. The beast seemed to display the best of both garm and human combat evolutions.
Space Marine Apocalypse (Extinction Fleet Book 3) Page 16