“Then retreat with your fellow Fire-born. You overstretch yourself, brother.”
Tsu’gan took out his frustration on a servitor that had strayed ahead of its pack, pummelling the creature with a blow from his fist. Inwardly, the brother-sergeant gave a sigh of relief — he knew were it not for Dak’ir’s contingency, he would probably be dead. That admission alone burned more than the thought of perishing unheralded on the Archimedes Rex. Tsu’gan was determined that the debt would not last.
Storming through the tightly-packed corridors of the Mechanicus ship, the Salamanders fought in the way they were made for — up close and eye-to-eye. Though they had exhausted both flamers, their zeal and wrath more than compensated for it. Blood and oil ran thick as they held their lines and won metre by gore-drenched metre, the tally of dead servitors in the hundreds. Tenacious and unyielding, they epitomised the Promethean ideal — they were Fire-born, Salamanders. War was their temple; battle the sermons that they preached with bolter and blade.
Their violent efforts took them as far as a wide gallery, possibly an inspection yard given the ranks of assessment tables lining either side. Stout metal columns etched in binaric and the sigils of the Omnissiah punctuated each of the empty bays where armour, weapons and other materiel would normally be logged, examined and approved by inspection servitors. The barren bays were overlooked by broad steel gantries that hung fifty metres up. Any details were lost in shadow, but they were supported by angled stanchions enabling them to take a considerable mass.
Servitors spewed from blast doors that were opening in three locations around the yard. Tsu’gan, who had slashed and bludgeoned his way to the front, met them with a furious battle cry. He clove the arm off one automaton, spilling fuel and releasing sparks as Dak’ir bifurcated another from sternum to groin. A clutch of wires slopped from the ragged wound like intestines as the brother-sergeant swept past it looking for another foe, before Ba’ken followed in his wake and crushed the stricken wretch with his piston-hammer.
An organised retreat had turned into a melee. The Salamanders fought in groups of two and three, watching their brothers’ blindsides as they brought fire and fury to the relentless enemy. Only Pyriel fought alone. None dared approach the Librarian, his force sword carving irresistible death arcs through anything it touched. Psychic fire spilled from his eyes like an optical laser, tearing through a line of servitors and severing their mechanised torsos. A clenched fist, and the summoned firedrake roared into being, the elemental burning down automatons as it swept over them in a fiery wave.
“In the name of Vulkan, repel them! Fire-born do not yield!” Pyriel bellowed a rallying cry as the servitors closed inexorably.
With their ammunition all but spent, many of the Salamanders had turned to close assault weapons. Some carried the traditional combat blade, akin to the Ultramarine spatha; others wielded hammers in homage to the blacksmith, and Vulkan’s adopted father, N’Bel or in tribute to the primarch himself who had first taken up the weapon to defeat the xenos plaguing Nocturne and liberate the planet.
Honour, for all its noble intention, meant precious little as the Salamanders were slowly enveloped. At distance, the servitors were no challenge. Bereft of ranged weapons, the automatons could be vanquished with ease. At close quarters, they were a different prospect. Though slow and cumbersome, their claws and drills and hammers were deadly, easily capable of chewing through power armour. Attacking in such numbers with no sign of respite; unless something changed, the Salamanders could not hope to prevail…
The rash of fatalism flashed across Dak’ir’s mind as he put another servitor down. Despite his training, the many hours of drills, the constant honing of his skills and building of his endurance, the brother-sergeant was beginning to tire. They’d sustained casualties. Brother Zo’tan was limping; S’tang had a fierce dent in his battle-helm that had probably cracked his skull; several others nursed shoulder or arm wounds and fought one-handed.
Tsu’gan raged against the inevitable, easily killing twice the servitors of any of his battle-brothers. Even Pyriel, with all his psychic might, was hard-pressed to keep pace with the rampant brother-sergeant’s tally. Fatigue, to Tsu’gan, was an enemy just like the automatons. It had to be fought and bested, denied at all costs.
It was little wonder he carried such sway amongst the other sergeants of 3rd Company. But even Tsu’gan’s will had its limits.
Something hard and heavy struck Dak’ir across his unguarded left flank. White heat flared behind his eyes as he felt his rib plate crack. Blood was leaking down the side of his power armour, black and thick like the oil of their adversaries. Darkness clawed at the edges of his vision. As he fell back, he saw the face of his killer — pitiless eyes stared back at him from above a mouth obscured by speaker-grille, framed by skin with a deathly pallor. Dak’ir thought of the robed figure in the temple as his body met the ground, his inevitable death playing out in slow motion.
With its final, indecipherable words the magos had damned them all.
Muted thunder brought Dak’ir around. He’d been out for a few seconds before his body’s physiology staunched his wound and clotted the blood, repaired his bones and sent endorphins to his brain to block the pain. He wasn’t dead, and with that realisation others followed.
Muzzle flares lit the gloom in the vaulted ceiling above, the thud-crack of bolter fire emanating from the gantries. Something heavier accompanied it, a dense chug-chank, chug-chank of a belt-fed cannon, the grind of tracks rolling against steel and the creak of metal stanchions pushed to their limits.
Dak’ir was back on his feet before he had even told his body to rise, and in the killing mood. His chainsword hadn’t stopped churning even as he fell, and the teeth found fresh flesh to chew as the Salamander fought.
Through snatched glimpses in the melee, Dak’ir caught the flash of yellow and black armour, the snarl of a painted skull, predator’s teeth daubed down the edges of a coned battle-helm. As the barrage of enfilading fire continued from either flank, ripping up servitors, a further epiphany materialised in Dak’ir’s mind. Their saviours were Astartes.
Caught between such forces, the servitors finally began to thin out and fall back. Not out of fear or even any remote sense of self-preservation; they did it because some nuance in their doctrina programming had impelled them to. Emek would later theorise that the casualties the combined Space Marines had inflicted were such that they endangered the minimum output capacity of the forge-ship and this protocol, entrenched in one of the Mechanicus’ fundamental paradigms, overrode any others and resulted in capitulation. The machines simply lowered their tools, turned and retreated. Some were slain as they retired from the fight, the last vestiges of battle-lust still eking out of the blood-pumped Salamanders. But the majority left intact, shuffling back to slumber until they were called upon by their masters to engage in their work routines once more. It was an order that would never come — for Dak’ir was certain now that the magos in the octagon temple had been the last aboard the Archimedes Rex.
As the bolter fire of the mysterious Astartes died, so too did the light cast by their muzzle flares and they were thrown back into obscuring shadow. Dak’ir considered utilising his optical spectra to penetrate the gloom and get a better look at them, but decided to wait as they marched heavily down the gantry. A pair of lifters stationed at either end of each one brought the Space Marines down to yard level, where the Salamanders could see their allies clearly for the first time.
Dak’ir was right; they were indeed Space Marines — ten of them, broken into two combat squads reunited when the lifters hit deck-plate, plus a Techmarine who manned a battle-scarred mobile gun platform. The war machine rumbled on steel-slatted tracks, cushioned on a bed of vulcanised rubber. Its design was narrow, ideally suited to the close confines of the Mechanicus ship that had prevented Brother Argos’ much-needed, as it transpired, inclusion in the mission. The STC used to construct the gun, a pair of twin-linked autocannons with a m
odified belt-feed, looked post-Heresy but pre-Age of Apostasy. Similar in essence to the Space Marine Thunderfire cannon, the platform also bore the hallmarks of a Tarantula-cum-Rapier-variant mobile weapons system — something the Adeptus Astartes hadn’t used in either form for many millennia. The example before the Salamanders was evidently based on archaic designs.
The Space Marines themselves appeared to be just as archaic. Most wore Mk VI Corvus-pattern power armour, stained yellow with a black cuirass and generators, the left pauldron studded with fat rivets. The armour’s plastron was bereft of the Imperial eagle, and carried only an octagonal release clasp, unlike the modern suits of the Mk VII Aquila-pattern. Every suit amongst them, bar none, was patched and chipped. The rigours of battle were worn proudly as marks of honour, in the same manner as the Salamanders’ branding scars. It was armour that had been made to last, not in the sense of its superior forging or exceptionally durable craftsmanship; rather, it was battle-plate that had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of victories and been strung back together and hammered into shape by any means necessary in order that it saw another.
Bolters were no different. Lengthened stocks with the extended shoulder rest were an antiquated version of the Godwyn pattern Mk VII carried by the Salamanders — albeit with Nocturnean refinements. Drum-fed and carrying sarissas — a saw-toothed bayonet-style blade affixed to the gun’s nose — the bolters hefted by the yellow-armoured Astartes were the sorts of outmoded weapons best left to museums.
But these warriors were hard-bitten veterans, every single one. They didn’t have the forges or the technological mastery of the Salamanders. They were seldom re-supplied or their materiel restocked or replenished. They knew only war, and fought it so relentlessly and without cessation that their equipment was battered almost to destruction. As the leader of the Astartes stepped forward, his honour markings indicating he was a sergeant, and proffered a hand, Dak’ir was struck by a final revelation:
These were the other intruders aboard the Archimedes Rex.
“I am Sergeant Lorkar,” the yellow-armoured Astartes spoke in a grating whisper, “of the Marines Malevolent.”
CHAPTER THREE
I
Malevolence
“Brother-Sergeant Dak’ir, of the Salamanders 3rd Company,” replied Dak’ir, who found he was facing Sergeant Lorkar. After a moment’s hesitation, he gripped the other Space Marine’s forearm in a warrior greeting and nodded his respect.
“Salamanders?” said Lorkar, as if seeing them for the first time, “Of the First Founding? We are deeply honoured.” The Marine Malevolent bowed, then stepped back to remove his battle-helm as his battle-brothers looked on.
There was a strange manner about them, Dak’ir thought. The Marines Malevolent appeared edgy. All of Lorkar’s ostensible bonhomie, his deference, seemed faked, as if they had not expected company and now they had it, resented its presence.
With the gorget clasps disengaged, Lorkar lifted off his battle-helm and cradled it under one arm. Like the rest of his armour, it was chipped and scratched. Much of the yellow staining had worn away, revealing bare ceramite beneath. Black hazard markings striped the metal, which Dak’ir assumed indicated veteran status. Lorkar’s grizzled visage clinched that suspicion.
Two platinum service studs were drilled into the Marine Malevolent sergeant’s skull. His skin was dark and rugged as if the centuries of battlefield dirt and enemy blood were ingrained in it. Scars crosshatched his chin, jaw and cheekbones, a veritable map of old pain and remembered wars. His hair was shorn short, but done so crudely as if by shears and without care or the assistance of a serf. But it was his eyes that struck the most — they were cold and empty, as if inured to killing and bereft of compassion or regard. Dak’ir had seen flint with more warmth.
Not wishing to cause offence, Dak’ir removed his own battle-helm, mag-locking it to his weapons belt. A tremor of surprise ran across Sergeant Lorkar’s face, which then spread to his cohorts, as he regarded the Salamander’s visage for the first time.
“Your eyes and skin…” he began. For a moment, Dak’ir thought he saw Lorkar’s hand straying to his bolter, hanging on its strap by his side. The gesture was instinctive. Clearly the Marines Malevolent had never seen an Astartes with a melanochromatic defect before.
“As our primarch made us,” Dak’ir responded evenly, aware of his own brothers’ restiveness around him, and meeting Lorkar’s gaze brazenly with his burning red eyes.
“Of course…” The look of thinly-veiled suspicion in Lorkar’s face suggested anything but placation.
Tsu’gan’s voice broke the uncomfortable silence.
“Marines Malevolent, eh? Do you find malice to be a useful tool on campaign, brother?”
Lorkar turned on the Salamander sergeant, who was obviously goading him.
Tsu’gan decided he didn’t like the way their new found “allies” looked at Dak’ir. Their manner smacked of disgust and repellence. His intervention was not for the Ignean’s benefit, Tsu’gan’s contempt for him went deeper than the flesh, it was because the Marine Malevolent’s slight tarred all of Vulkan’s sons and that was something he could not abide.
“Hate is the surest weapon,” Lorkar replied with all seriousness. So vehement was his stress on the first word that if the sergeant had had the power to kill with it then Tsu’gan would have keeled over in his power armour there and then. “You are the commanding officer here, Salamander?”
“No,” Tsu’gan answered flatly, taunting having now turned to outright belligerence.
“That honour is mine.” Pyriel stepped forward from the throng of Salamanders, authority and certainty never more evident in his voice and manner.
“A warp dabbler!” Dak’ir heard one of other Marines Malevolent hiss. He carried a twin-linked combi-bolter and wore a beak-shaped battle-helm made to look like a shark’s mouth with painted fangs either side.
Lorkar interceded before Tsu’gan’s promised violence was enacted.
“Excuse Brother Nemiok,” he said addressing Pyriel, who exhibited no reaction. “We are unaccustomed to Librarians in ranking positions,” Lorkar explained somewhat thinly. “The Marines Malevolent still adhere to some of the tenets laid down at Nikea.”
“An outmoded set of edicts some ten thousand years old, fashioned by a council arraigned before your Chapter was even formed,” countered Tsu’gan, his mood still truculent.
“Communion with the warp is perilous,” Pyriel intervened. “I can understand your Chapter’s caution, Sergeant Lorkar. But I can assure you that I am master of my abilities,” he declared, to defuse the situation and suspend the trading of insults before they devolved into threats and then violence. “Perhaps we have lingered here long enough?”
“I agree,” replied Lorkar, with a dark glance at Tsu’gan before he replaced his battle-helm. He paused a moment, bowing his head slightly, and seemed to be listening intently to some private instruction. “We should continue on together,” he said at last, surfacing from whatever discreet confabulation he had been engaged in. “The servitors in this section of the ship are dormant now, but we can’t know how long that will last and what other defences we might face.” Lorkar then turned on his heel, his warriors parting like a yellow sea to allow him through.
“Worse than Templars,” muttered Ba’ken to Emek, who was grateful that his battle-helm masked his amusement.
Dak’ir saw nothing humorous in it. The encounter with the Marines Malevolent had put him on edge. There was an air of frustrated superiority about them, suggesting they thought themselves uniquely worthy of the appellation “Space Marine”. Yet here they were faced with a progenitor Chapter. Such evidence was difficult to refute, for even the most zealous-minded. They had an agenda, of that Dak’ir was certain. And if that conflicted with the Salamanders’ mission, violence would surely follow.
The route deeper into the Archimedes Rex was conducted largely in silence. Before they had headed out after the Marines Malevolent, Brot
her Emek had examined the wounded Salamanders using what rudimentary medical craft he possessed and declared all injuries minor, and the recipients fit for combat. Mercifully, there had been no further encounters with the forge-ship’s guardians.
For now, it appeared that Lorkar was right — the servitors had returned to slumber.
Dak’ir sat beside an iron bulkhead in some kind of expansive storage room. The room contained numerous metal crates, caskets and munitions cylinders — all of which had already been ransacked. Dak’ir was sitting on one of the empty crates, methodically engaged in weapons maintenance rituals. He glanced up sporadically at the Marines Malevolent’s Techmarine, who was using breaching tools and a promethium torch from his servo-harness to prise open a sealed blast door impeding their further progress into the forge-ship. It was the first barrier of its kind they had discovered which wouldn’t open through a console or operational slate, suggesting the heart of the ship lay beyond it.
The other Salamanders were locked in similar routines to the sergeant. Once the room had been made secure, many had removed their battle-helms, taking the opportunity to be free of their stifling confines if only for a few minutes— for the Marines Malevolent’s part, any reaction to the Salamanders’ facial appearance was kept hidden. Pyriel was silently meditative, eyes shut whilst he channelled the reserves of his psychic energy and shored up his mental bulwarks to guard against daemonic possession. Tsu’gan paced impatiently, waiting for the Techmarine to complete his task. Dak’ir had learned the Astartes’ name was Harkane, though that was all the taciturn Techmarine had disclosed.
They had already deviated from Emek’s route. Sergeant Lorkar insisted that he and his combat squad had already tried that way and it was blocked. Harkane had mapped another course, and it was this which they now followed. Tsu’gan had been the most reluctant to accede. Pyriel’s order had made it impossible for him not to.
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