Ruinstorm

by David Annandale

  Sanguinius turned to the pict screen on his hololith podium and called up the topography of Pyrrhan’s northern hemisphere. ‘The north-east quadrant has the potential for a clear run,’ he said. ‘North of the equatorial cordillera, it is primarily a region of plains.’

  ‘I see it,’ said Guilliman. ‘The spaces between the foundries are wide.’

  ‘Former transportation networks,’ said the Lion.

  Sanguinius changed the screen to show enemy movements on the surface. ‘The activity is minimal,’ he said. ‘All efforts are concentrated inside the manufactoria. The land is effectively empty, it will take time for the enemy to respond.’

  ‘A ground advance might go far before encountering resistance,’ Guilliman agreed.

  Sanguinius mentally traced the path from the mountains to the great forge, and the tactical situation became less important. He pictured the most savage strike he could bring to the daemons. The wounds of Signus Prime were still fresh. He would heal them with this assault. The Blood Angels would hit the daemons with maximum force. There would be anger, but no loss of control. Not this time. There would be atonement through disciplined fury. There could be a precision and a majesty in wrath.

  This was the lesson he and his sons would bring to the abominations.

  The Thunderhawk Karaashi’s Fire left the Sthenelus and plunged towards the atmosphere of Pyrrhan. Now that he finally saw it, the work of the Pilgrim filled Khalybus with both disgust and awe. Seated opposite him in the troop compartment, accompanied by five of his legionaries, Levannas said, ‘The tales of the refugees did not begin to do these horrors justice.’

  ‘The changes had only just begun when they fled,’ said Khalybus. ‘Otherwise they would never have escaped the system.’

  ‘Obscene,’ Iron Father Cruax growled, echoing Khalybus’ disgust. ‘It is an insult to the purity of the machine.’

  Khalybus nodded. The forge world’s transformation was offensive as well as monstrous. The Sthenelus had encountered daemons during its long and isolated war. The abominations were confirmation of everything the X Legion had come to despise about the flesh. They were its deformation, its corruption, its overwhelming excess. They were proof of its weakness, because it could be remade in such a fashion.

  But the metamorphosis of Pyrrhan brought the same monstrosity to the machine. The great forge and its link to the gate were a brutal refutation of any kind of purity.

  ‘This obscenity will not stand,’ Khalybus said to Cruax. ‘On this day, it falls.’

  ‘That won’t be enough,’ said Cruax.

  ‘No, it won’t,’ Khalybus agreed.

  ‘This will not stop until we find the Pilgrim,’ said Levannas.

  ‘Then we will,’ said Khalybus. ‘Before Terra or after, we will hunt it, and we will destroy it.’

  ‘So it shall be,’ Levannas said.

  What had been a hope became a vow.

  The Legions came down on Pyrrhan. Hundreds of drop pods at a time burned through the atmosphere. They were a hail of iron, the sky falling upon the land in one storm after another.

  ‘Are there any humans left below?’ Kletos asked. The drop pod shook and hammered down through the thin atmosphere.

  ‘Doubtful,’ said Hierax. ‘There is no sun. The only heat is from the foundries.’ He shook his head once. ‘No. There is nothing to save here.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’

  ‘Why did you ask?’

  ‘An idle thought, captain. I wondered what they would think, were they to look up.’

  ‘They would know they had not been forgotten,’ Hierax said. ‘But be assured, legionary, we have witnesses. They may not know it yet, but they are learning what their annihilation looks like.’

  The drop pod’s retro-rockets fired. The grav-harness strained against Kletos’ shoulders with the sudden deceleration. He grinned fiercely, anticipating the bone-jarring jerk of the landing. It came, and the pod’s hatch doors blew open, slamming down on the basalt surface of Pyrrhan. Kletos stormed out of the pod with the rest of the squad, behind his captain, joining the mustering of the Second Destroyers.

  Overhead, the contrails of drop pods and lifters clawed the sky, scarring it with silver trails. East and west and south of where Kletos stood, the lava plain trembled with the landings and the gathering forces of the Ultramarines and Dark Angels. There were far fewer pods coming down in the north. The Destroyers were in the vanguard. The fortress was still over the horizon. The march would not be a long one before it appeared. The fleets were anchored low, almost grazing the mesosphere, and they had come as far forwards as they could while still remaining shielded from the ship-killing cannons before beginning the drops.

  Kletos could remember a time when Guilliman had been reluctant to unleash the Destroyers. That had begun to change after the Thoas campaign. After Calth, he had been much freer in using the brutal weapon they were. And here was a world where the concept of mercy was inconceivable. Kletos had no illusions about the kind of warrior he was. The Second Destroyers were the side of the Ultramarines that was not celebrated in chronicles or in murals. They were the warriors of hard necessity, of scorched earth and of weaponry many would prefer not to think about. They fought with no less discipline and no less a faithful application of the primarch’s precepts than any other company. But alchemy weapons and rad bombs were messy. The wars of the Destroyers were messy. There was no pretending their campaigns were anything else except the brutal extermination of the foe.

  So they had proven aboard the Annunciation. So they would prove again on Pyrrhan. This was a mission of annihilation.

  Rhinos rumbled forwards to the drop pods and lowered their loading ramps. Kletos followed Hierax into the Blood of Honour. The heavy armour landings were a continuous earth tremor.

  Next to Kletos, Mnason grumbled, ‘More sitting. No marching.’

  ‘There will be plenty of marching,’ Hierax said. ‘But speed is the watchword of our advance. Tell me, legionary, are you opposed to reaching the enemy faster?’

  ‘No, captain, I am not. Please consider me happily resigned to sit a bit longer.’

  ‘So noted,’ Hierax said. He cocked his head, listening to his vox-bead. When the loading ramp clanged shut, he banged a gauntleted fist against the bulkhead separating the troop compartment from the driver. ‘Teosos,’ he barked. ‘The order is given. Take us forwards.’

  The Blood of Honour lurched forwards, accelerating quickly. The Rhino was hungry for battle.

  The armoured columns roared across the wide plain of Pyrrhan. Hierax opened the roof hatch of the Rhino to man the pintle-mounted storm bolter, and to witness the charge. For miles on either side of him, for many more to the rear, tanks and armoured transports in the blue and black of two Legions covered the land, and filled the air with choking clouds of exhaust. The air of Pyrrhan was thin and cold, and only the infernal heat of the foundries prevented the atmosphere from freezing and falling to earth. The smell of the engine fumes came in through the filters of Hierax’s helmet rebreather. He welcomed the stench of human machinery. It represented order. It was the hard, burnt tang of reason going to war.

  Half a mile to his right, the Land Raider Flame of Illyrium advanced between the columns to lead the charge. It was the primarch’s command vehicle, and Guilliman rode in the upper hatch, pointing the way forwards, a living monument of gold and blue taking his sons to burn their way through the enemy. Hierax couldn’t see the lead elements of the Dark Angels from this distance, but he was willing to wager the Lion was as visible to them as the Avenging Son was to his legionaries. Hierax’s heart swelled with the pride of crusade.

  ‘Hierax,’ Iasus voxed, ‘what say you?’

  Hierax glanced to his left, to where the Chapter Master rode as he did. ‘I say this is a sight long past due,’ he answered.

  The sight was of the unity of the Emperor’s
loyal Legions, of determination, and of their crushing strength. For several more minutes, Hierax consciously gave himself leave to revel in the sweep and storm and majesty of the tide of armour.

  Then the fortress began to appear over the horizon. The black, infinite wall ate the sky. The Ruinstorm disappeared behind it. Darkness and red flame climbed higher and higher, swallowing the sky, becoming the sky. Hierax felt its inconceivable mass pressing down. He was suddenly aware of the horror of scale. The world on which so vast a display of Legion might was advancing was less than a speck beneath the daemonic construction.

  Hierax lowered his gaze, bringing all of his attention to bear on the land before him, pushing the monster in the sky to the edge of his consciousness. He stared straight ahead, a motionless sentinel. The hours passed. The Ultramarines and Dark Angels covered hundreds of miles towards their goal. The land was uneven but ­battered down, the rock so rounded by erosion it was a faded corpse of topography. At last, far ahead, belching smoke, the first of the forges came into view. They were pointed, twisted silhouettes. They looked like torn fragments of the night, spewing flame.

  In the endless red-lit gloom, there was movement on the ground.

  ‘Captain,’ Teosos voxed, ‘we have contacts ahead.’

  ‘I see them.’

  The land appeared to be boiling. He was too far away to make out the details. The motion of the daemonic mass made him think of insect swarms. There was a suggestion of inhuman limbs and shapes in the jerking, flapping, skittering approach of the abominations. This was a tide too, and it was everything the Ultramarines and Dark Angels were not. It was undisciplined. Closer now, the wave of the enemy was filled with competing currents. It was chaos, rushing to repel the invading order.

  Hierax closed his grip on the storm bolter. He gauged the shrinking distance between the two forces, calculating the moment he would begin to fire. He predicted the precise second the longer-range guns of the Land Raiders began to thunder. He nodded as solid lines of artillery blasts engulfed the leading edge of the daemonic charge. He could see the exact spot on the barren ground where the mailed fist of the Legions would slam into the jaws of the daemons. Without asking Teosos, he knew how far they were from the primary target.

  Still far. Too far to punch through without committing to a long campaign, one that the daemons, with their infinite resources, would win. The charge had been fast. It had summoned the enemy to the battlefield. The daemons were rushing to stop the threat of two Legions.

  Now was the time for the true speed of the attack. Now was the time for the third Legion.

  And because it was time, Hierax allowed himself to look up once more.

  The firmament screamed. The sky above Pyrrhan was filled with crimson anger. Squadrons of Blood Angels Stormbirds streaked over the battlefield in the direction of the great forge. There were so many engines howling at maximum velocity that Hierax could hear them over the grinding rumble of the tanks. The glare of the exhausts was a purging light, brighter than the baleful, flickering glow of the fortress. The gunships were the Warhawk IV model, winged giants, each carrying a hundred Legiones Astartes. If the tanks of the XIII and I Legions were a battering ram into the mass of the daemons, the IX Legion was a hurling spear into the foe’s heart.

  Hierax watched the flight of Angels until his internal sentinel signalled the coming of yet another movement. He faced forwards again, and opened fire with the storm bolter.

  The Warhawk Talon of Baal flew over a land begging for flame. Sanguinius stood at the open side-door. He held on to the bulkhead and leaned out into the wind, looking towards the great forge and the pillar linking it to the gate. The speed of the Talon blurred the enemy below, turning the daemons into a grasping abstraction. Bursts of psychic fire lashed upwards at the Stormbirds. It was scattered. The daemons’ attention was still concentrated on the ground attack. The manufactorum reared ahead. It had appeared at first like a broad-shouldered mountain, a volcano of warp-altered industry. The Blood Angels flew between lesser forges, large as mountain chains. They held traces of the human constructs they had once been, now distorted by immensity. Chimneys were thousands of feet high. Conduits were half a mile thick. Vaulted archways had turned into fanged maws, iron and flesh and stone indistinguishable.

  The primary manufactorum dwarfed them all. As it filled Sanguinius’ sight, he could see here, too, the echo of the thing it had been.

  At his side, Raldoron asked, ‘How will we know what to attack inside?’

  ‘Look,’ said Sanguinius. ‘You can see the essence of what was taken by the enemy. The principles of the construction have some of the human in them.’ The manufactorum was built of monoliths the size of hive cities, but it was still recognisable. It was still a foundry.

  ‘They use us,’ said Raldoron. ‘Everything about us.’

  ‘Yes. Do you see what that means? At some level, they need us as the foundations.’ Or our horror is simply the worse for seeing the human endeavour made monstrous, he thought. ‘What we know, we can fight,’ he said. ‘What we can fight, we can destroy.’

  They know us well enough to fracture us along every weakness. Time we turned that principle against them.

  The Talon of Baal angled downwards. The main gate of the foundry was visible now, illuminated by the glow of industry within. It was twenty miles high and ten wide. Its iron doors were open, vomiting forth an endless stream of daemons. They scraped against the basalt ground as they closed, striking comet tails of sparks. The movement was slow, the march of glaciers towards collision. Past the gate, the foundry was a hive of tunnels, clearly too small for the Warhawks. The squadrons of immense gunships made for the terrain immediately before the gate. At the rate the doors were closing, the Blood Angels would have several minutes yet before the way in was barred.

  Hellstrike missiles flashed from beneath the wings of the Stormbirds. The hard rain became a sea of fire. Nose- and wing-mounted autocannons opened up, hammering the ground through the spreading fireballs. The squadrons hit with the full complement of their heavy weaponry. It was an assault that would have vaporised a human force. Clouds of dust rose, enveloping the gunships as they dropped planetwards. The downdraughts of their engines whirled the stone fragments into scouring cyclones. The Stormbirds landed on ground blackened by fire, the loading ramps coming down at the same instant that the landing gear made contact. Thousands of Blood Angels disembarked, the sound of ceramite boots on metal a pounding counterpoint to the descending whine of the engines.

  The terrain for a few moments was clear of the enemy. The bombardment had melted rock. Clusters of shell craters overlapped. Everywhere Sanguinius looked as he led the way forwards from the gunships, he saw daemons reduced to twitching, hissing pools. Carbonised bodies liquefied as they came apart at a fundamental level, losing their grip on the materium. Desultory blue and violet light, sick with the taint of the warp, flickered over the sludge.

  The gunships took off again immediately. Their pilots headed back the way they had come, turning their autocannons on the mass of daemons to the rear, holding them back. Monstrous howls filled the thin air. The daemons understood the strategy being used against them, and were trying to counter it. Sanguinius hoped the Stormbirds would buy him a few more seconds during which he would only have to fight on one front.

  The doors continued to close. Sanguinius looked up at them slowly scraping their way along the ground. Their edges, unnaturally straight, the tops invisible in the far heights, were less than five hundred yards apart now. The narrowing gap had slowed the rush of daemons to the battlefield, though the baying horde that ran and leapt and crawled and danced towards the Blood Angels was large enough. In the mass was a terrible plenty of forms. The monsters were things of disease and excess and wrath and unceasing change. Reality frayed at the edges of the daemon army, unravelled by their presence and their numbers.

  Eyeing the ferocity of the charge, Az
kaellon said, ‘They do not want us inside.’

  ‘They do not,’ Sanguinius agreed. ‘That in itself shows that we are on the right path.’

  With the primarch and the Sanguinary Guard forming the tip of the spear, the Blood Angels charged forwards to meet the enemy, bolters and lascannons striking out ahead of them. As the first of the daemons fell, Sanguinius voxed the Legion. ‘My sons, today we purge the memory of Signus Prime. Hold fast to your anger, but preserve its righteousness. Hone it. Be its master. Through it, let us thirst only for victory.’ And nothing else. ‘We will be tempted. We will not fall.’

  Not again. And not with my brothers as witnesses. If we fall again today, then the war is over. The power that built this fortress will have the galaxy as its plaything.

  He switched the channel to a private one. ‘Amit,’ he spoke to his troubled son. ‘Do you hear me?’

  ‘I do. And I understand.’

  ‘Good. But bring justice to the abominations, Amit. Be our vengeance.’ He gave license to Fifth Company and its captain. ‘Tear them asunder.’

  The spear of the Blood Angels plunged into the mass of the daemons. There was no pause in the weapons fire. Mass-reactive shells burst warp flesh apart. Las burned it to ash. The daemons did not fall as living things did. They kept coming, missing arms and legs, torsos punctured by wounds that should have been lethal. But they had become matter, and so were subject to destruction.

  Sanguinius swung the Blade Encarmine through the body of a thing whose flesh was the pink of a drowned newborn. The monster’s ­liquid howl became a doubled, burbling squall as the flesh darkened to the blue of suffocation and the two halves sprouted new limbs. The babbling maws of the beasts fastened on to his legs. As he cut them down with two swift strokes, a scream descended upon him, a scream of reason shredded, of hope turned into the anguish of doom. At its sound, the pain of his fate rose in his chest, and despair mocked the futility of every effort. The scream was a psychic javelin. It sought to transfix him, to drive his soul into the earth and hold it there, writhing, helpless before the predator.