Ruinstorm

by David Annandale

  The Samothrace, already rising, narrowly avoided a collision. The behemoth passed just below its stern. The barrage of warp fire had the effect of a supernova in the heart of the fleets. Multiple beams burned through the Glory of Fire and the Legendary Son. The ships seemed to freeze in their forwards motion, transfixed by a hundred spears of night. Their atmospheres vented in moments, gales blowing out of multiple killing breaches in their hulls. The Glory of Fire’s engines went critical. The shockwave from the plasma detonation crashed against the void shields of a dozen ships, breaking open their defences, leaving them vulnerable to a new deluge of enemy fire. The Glory of Fire vanished in its self-immolation. The Legendary Son went dark. Tears half a mile long raked its hull. Its engines were silent. Its decks had collapsed and fused with one another. Tens of thousands of crew were crushed to a thin slick of pulp in fused ruin.

  The Veritas Ferrum was a bludgeon, breaking open the wedge, forcing the vessels into evasive action, the impact rippling out over the entire span of the fleets. As the shockwave from the Glory of Fire had expended its fury, corrupted light ran down the length of the Legendary Son. Its hull grew spines, and it accelerated again, turning its guns on the Unbroken Vigil. The other ships hit by the daemonic barrage also transformed into corrupted wraiths. They attacked, burning the vessels that had come to their aid. The formations of the Ultramarines collapsed. Disorder grew exponentially. Ships that had not yet died succumbed to the infections of their festering wounds. Machine-spirits screamed in madness. They fell into oblivion, but the madness lived on, and summoned them forth again, transformed into monsters. Metastasising cancer reached more deeply and widely through the ships of the XIII Legion. The attack that had begun from the front was now coming from every direction.

  The charge of the Veritas Ferrum disrupted the forwards movement of the Imperial fleets. The daemonic ships multiplied. Immediate, proximate fire forced the Legion ships to turn away from the advance and bring their weapons to bear on the revenant vessels. The wedge formation turned into a melee.

  The Veritas Ferrum moved deeper into the formations, spreading ruin with its monstrous broadsides. Its escorts followed closely. With the Ultramarines stalled, the Dark Angels and the Blood Angels used the forwards momentum they still had to bring the angles of their attacks inwards. Their crossfire decimated the rearmost ships of the daemonic fleet. Behind the enemy came the great swarm of bones. The shell had fractured into clusters ranging in size from a single grave to planetoids. The arriving storm drew the focus of the I and IX Legions. The shell disintegrated under fire, but the storm was infinite. For hundreds of thousands of miles, the void was grey with rushing death. More than half the ships had to use their guns to keep the battlefield clear. And still some of the larger chunks came through. Meteors of bone slammed into flanks and superstructures. The skull with the spiked crown, larger than a hive city, smashed into the bridge of the Blood Angels Nine ­Crusaders. The collision destroyed the skull and decapitated the ship. It surged on through the void, rudderless, its officers dead. It disappeared into the grey tempest, battered into darkness, at last dying in fiery paroxysm.

  The Samothrace climbed above the Veritas Ferrum, then came about. Altuzer expected the Veritas to have put real distance between them by the time the Samothrace had finished its turn, but the daemon ship had slowed. It was where it sought to be, in the midst of its prey. Everything was lesser before it, and everything died, only to rise again as a hideous disciple, spreading its message of devastation.

  ‘All ships,’ Altuzer voxed across the fleets. ‘If you are crippled, enact self-immolation.’ The Glory of Fire had not risen from oblivion. Its destruction had been complete. ‘Take the enemy down with you.’

  The Veritas Ferrum was in close range. It was under fire from every ship not already engaged. The efforts were futile. The salvoes were small, and impacts healed as fast as they formed. If the initial strikes had had so little effect, it would take something catastrophic to break the spine of the beast.

  The desperate idea came to her in the moment huge batteries on the stern of the Veritas turned and fired at the Samothrace. There was no question of evasion. She winced at the light from the void shield flares. They deflected the worst of the initial damage. Then the black, burning lightning seared its way through and struck the Samothrace amidships. The armour of the upper hull erupted. Ruptured plasma conduits launched geysers of flame into the void. Altuzer felt the depth of the wound without a damage report. The deck shook as if the battleship were staggering, a giant of legend struck and bleeding from the abdomen. She knew the controls were sluggish. She knew they were losing velocity. The rhythm of the engines changed.

  Ahead, the Veritas Ferrum began to come about. It was slow, a world changing orbit. As it gradually turned to port, the jaws of the bow were half-closed. The skull appeared to be grinning. Soon the Veritas would be broadside to the Samothrace, half its batteries trained on the Ultramarines flagship. And it was still moving forwards. When the Veritas fired, the ships would be at point-blank range.

  ‘Launch cyclonic torpedoes,’ Altuzer said.

  ‘Shipmaster,’ Lautenix began, ‘this close in…’

  ‘We will achieve at least one of two ends,’ Altuzer finished. ‘Single-stage torpedo. Give me detonation on impact.’

  The Samothrace launched its planet killer. Altuzer and her officers stood to attention to witness the end of their tragedy. The torpedo hit. The entire length of the Veritas Ferrum convulsed as if it had turned liquid. A maelstrom took hold of the ship’s hull.

  Then came the great fire.

  Guilliman and the Lion dived through the doorway ahead of the collapsing walls, then turned to meet the immense daemon’s attack. The monster’s charge threw rubble across the hall. The altar room was gone. The portal covered the north wall, the materium screaming at its edges. The portal unleashed a flood of daemons into the temple. They swarmed before the giant and around its feet. It crushed the slew beneath the slow, grinding iron of its legs.

  Dark Angels, Ultramarines and Blood Angels met the daemons with a battle cry of vengeance. The hall boomed with bolter thunder and the purifying blaze of power swords. The fury of the legionaries broke the daemonic tide, and the space beneath the dome became a maelstrom of slaughter.

  ‘Loyal sons of the Emperor,’ Guilliman called, ‘now we shall make the enemy fall!’

  The primarchs ran at the great monster as it reached for them. It smashed its colossal sword at Guilliman. He rushed under the swing. The sword buried half its length in the flagstones. They melted into gibbering flesh. Warp flames rushed outwards from the gap. Guilliman fired upwards with the Arbitrator into the daemon’s wrist. He struck the limb with the Hand of Dominion at the same time. Muscle and bone parted. Ichor gushed into Guilliman’s face, bubbling his skin with acid. Severed from its master, the sword exploded with a wave of uncontrolled energy.

  The daemon screamed and struck at Guilliman with its immense claw.

  Guilliman threw himself to the side, but the edge of the limb clipped his shoulder, smashing him down. His fall drove a groove into the floor. He rolled to his left just as the huge arm came at him again, pulverising stone, shaking the walls of the Delphos.

  As Guilliman regained his feet, the Lion leapt onto the back of the beast. Shrieking in rage, it whirled its giant mass, trying to shake the primarch off. It horns slanted backwards over its head, and the Lion had seized one of them. His cloak billowed behind him as he clung on with his left hand. His right raised the Wolf Blade. ‘I hunted greater beasts than you on Caliban,’ he shouted, ‘and I slew them all!’ He sawed into the rear of the daemon’s neck. It reared up, scuttling backwards on four of its legs. It slammed into the temple wall, crushing the Lion between its bulk and the masonry. The Wolf Blade kept snarling. Gouts of ichor and shredded flesh splashed up on the stone.

  The daemon looked straight up. Serpent and lightning, its tongue wh
ipped out of its mouth. The hall strobed with violet and green light as the tongue lashed behind the daemon’s head. The wall burst into flame. It limned the silhouette of the Lion as he drove the Wolf Blade deeper into the daemon’s neck.

  Guilliman pounded over the floor after the great daemon. Whirlwinds of fire and flesh tried to stop him. He held the trigger down on the Arbitrator. The stream of explosive shells shattered their forms, clearing his way.

  Above him, two of the creature’s massive, piston-driven legs flailed in the air. They clashed together, and when they did, lightning flared again.

  The movement of the legs, the timing of the collisions, the height of the daemon and the arc of a jump were the givens of an equation. Guilliman saw the vectors of force and momentum. At the moment of his leap, the equation was resolved.

  As his legs bent, he maglocked the Arbitrator to his side. He jumped, and reached up with his now free right hand. He grabbed the end of a leg as it rushed inwards, and used its momentum to launch himself at the daemon’s chest. With all the force of his flight, he drove the Hand of Dominion into the monster’s thorax. The power gauntlet annihilated daemonic matter. The huge body collapsed below the neck. The monster’s roar was cut off. It slashed out one more time, then disintegrated. The body tried to heave back, but the Wolf Blade’s growl rose in a rattling crescendo, and the sword ripped all the way through and came out the throat.

  The daemon slumped down. Its fall crushed a score of lesser abominations that had rushed forwards, shrieking, as their leader was destroyed.

  Guilliman and the Lion jumped down from the body. Foul smoke lifted from it, hacking at the throat with razored claws. The metal and the flesh began to lose substance. The primarchs waded into a streaming rush of daemons. The portal disgorged them without cease.

  ‘There are too many to stop,’ Gorod voxed.

  The abominations were a tide flowing past the blocks of Legiones Astartes and out of the hall.

  Guilliman blasted the head off a four-legged fiend with a scorpion’s tail. ‘Are you in contact with our forces outside the temple?’ he asked.

  ‘Not since the portal opened.’

  So be it. He trusted the Chapter Masters of all the Legions to do what had to be done. And stopping the incursion was a distraction, not the goal. The three Legions were not here to reclaim Davin.

  ‘We fight to hold our position,’ he said, answering Gorod but voxing on an open battle channel. ‘We stay in this hall. There is no retreat.’ Two crimson daemons, wielding swords, attacked him with simultaneous swings. They were far too slow. The Hand of Dominion crushed the skull of one abomination, the Arbitrator cut the other in half.

  A monstrous wave of force blasted from the portal, disintegrating the daemons on the threshold. The floor of the temple heaved upwards, splitting into uneven plates of stone. The dome cracked open and rained masonry. The walls swayed, buckled and leaned in towards each other.

  The tremors rolled on. The Delphos groaned. From inside the gateway, Sanguinius roared.

  To a man, the Sanguinary Guard turned at his voice, plunging into the abominations with renewed fury.

  ‘Now the battle is truly joined!’ the Lion called.

  Side by side, Guilliman and the Lion fought their way through the tide of daemons towards the portal, marching steadily over the pitching and rising floor. The portal flashed and raged. The temple rocked back and forth, buffeted by the clashing, unseen waves of a struggle beyond Guilliman’s reach.

  The flame burst swallowed Sanguinius and Madail. The conflagration ate at the Angel, turning his matter into energy. Lightning flashed outwards from the tips of his wings. The daemon snarled in anger, its many eyes narrowing. It slashed to the side, twisting the Blade Encarmine in Sanguinius’ grip and throwing him to his left. He made the flight his, catching the momentum with a beat of his wings. He rose into the air of the enginarium. The abominations below raged at him. Clawed hands reached for him from the galleries. Winged monsters circled the dome, their mindless screams piercing through the clamour, but they did not descend to meet him. The gathered army of abominations was not intervening. His struggle with Madail had an audience, and, for the moment, nothing more.

  Madail looked up at him. ‘You do not die here,’ it said, confirming fate. Its voice was tremendous, drowning out the thousands of horrors bearing witness. ‘Death is later, forged in futility. Here destiny is remade. Here you will serve!’

  Flames coursed through Sanguinius’ blood. The mercy that tempered his spirit had fled. It was not wanted here. He dived towards Madail, and answered the daemon with the Spear of Telesto. Blazing gold struck the daemon full in the chest.

  Madail roared. The priest of Chaos Undivided who saw the hidden, who looked into the depths of primarchs and Legions, recoiled, and for a moment, its eyes were shut. It was blind. The blank eyes of its skull erupted with sheets of warp flame. Madail turned its head from side to side, sweeping the enginarium with the fire. It caught the shrieking abominations in the dome during the burn. They tumbled downwards, their bodies given over to sudden change, their forms losing all coherence and then cohesion, until they were a rain of ash upon the deck.

  Unbound from the chains of the daemon’s lies, Sanguinius soared on the wings of his freedom. He swerved around the blasts from its eyes. He would fell this priest. He would cleave the Undivided.

  Sanguinius turned in a sharp angle away from the daemon. He arrowed his flight to the canyon between the masses of the engines. The mouths gabbled in anger, and their tongues lashed out for him as he passed. The immense, heaving walls called out for their master. With a ferocious beat of his wings, Sanguinius veered right, coming in close to the port engine. He plunged the Blade Encarmine into the wall. He flew even faster, dragging the sword through the fusion of metal and flesh. He slashed open a wound fifty feet long. The wall screamed in pain. Ichor and promethium gouted, and then there was a burst of ignited plasma. A curtain of flame billowed down the length of the canyon, washing over Madail as the daemon strode into the gap.

  Sanguinius rose above the flames, wheeled around and came back at Madail, gouging the port wall. The screams of the engines redoubled. Explosions overlapped and fuelled each other, shaking the canyon. From the midst of the developing firestorm, Madail struck out wildly, blasts of warp energy stabbing up in every direction. Sanguinius soared over the roiling core of the explosions that marked the daemon’s position, then dropped, racing back low as the fires began to fade. He swung the sword at the daemon’s neck. Madail turned at the last second, and the Blade Encarmine sank into the spined, chitinous armour of its shoulder. Sanguinius’ blow split the plate and cut deeply into the daemonflesh beneath. Madail snarled, and its immense talon seized the Angel, arresting his momentum and hurling him against the engine. The wall’s teeth gnawed at his armour and sank into his pinions. Jaws parted in fury, Madail raised its staff and aimed the weapon’s points at Sanguinius’ throat.

  Then it hesitated, remembering itself.

  You do not dare kill me, Sanguinius thought, feeling the balance of power shift his way. With a burst of fire from the Spear of Telesto, he broke Madail’s grip and launched himself upwards. He climbed high, streaking towards the dome of the enginarium, and at the peak of his flight, prepared to fall upon the daemon like a meteor.

  But Madail had not finished its sermon. ‘Be the Angel of Ruin, or the other ruin will come. It reaches for you now.’

  Sanguinius hesitated at the moment of descent. The words of the daemon stabbed through his anger. They did not diminish it, but his awareness grew of the blackness that flew with him. The thing was of him but not yet with him. It was of the future, though seeded in the past. It had no shape yet, but it was strong, and it made him strong. He could not shed it, and so he used it. Though he felt it eat at his self-control, he used it. He burned with justice. He was the fire of loyalty. The Thirst grasped at his consciousness too
, and he subsumed it to his great and perfect rage. He dived.

  His moment of hesitation was enough for Madail to recover. Arms outstretched, the daemon shouted, its hymn of praise to the gods it served louder than the choirs of thousands that surrounded it. A warp vortex, a burning wind made visible, gathered at its command. The vortex spread wide, a spinning cone of destruction. It lifted the daemon at its apex. A beast upon a throne, Madail rose to meet Sanguinius’ flight.

  The Angel unleashed another strike of light from the Spear of Telesto. The daemon deflected the blast with its staff and trained the blade at Sanguinius. The head of the weapon crackled with energy the colour of nightmares. Sanguinius folded his wings, accelerating into the dive. He struck with the Blade Encarmine. The blow would have cut a Rhino in two. The daemon took the sword in its shoulder. Sanguinius spiked and cut deep through the armour plating of the hide. Madail hissed, turning, and thrust its staff at Sanguinius’ chest. It stabbed through his armour and through his flesh. In the moment before the full shock of pain and warp fire seized him, Sanguinius stabbed the Spear of Telesto into the abomination’s central eye.

  Angel and priest trapped the other’s weapon in their body. The vortex spun them. Power burst around them. They clashed in the heart of a crucible where reality was made and unmade, where futures birthed and died. The enginarium vanished from Sanguinius’ sight. The spike in his chest, the icon of the priest’s office, sent the torments of the future through him. Psychic waves shook him, seeking to detach him from purpose and throw him into an abyss of unfettered pride. He balanced between two tempests, abstract storms of triumph and of the fall into the blackness. He could barely make out the shape of the daemon before him. He held on to the reality of his foe. He cut deeper with the Blade Encarmine. The spear grew hot in his grip as it burned the daemonflesh.