[Tome of Fire 01] - Salamander

by Nick Kyme - (ebook by Undead)

  Out of the corner of his eye, Tsu’gan saw more dark phantoms sweeping silently through the night as the other combat squads moved into position. His own cadre of warriors arrived at his back. Brother Lazarus was foremost amongst them and nodded to indicate his readiness. S’tang was right behind him. His battle-helm, like his brothers’, was swathed in camouflaging ash. Honorious and Tiberon guarded the entrance, ensuring no enemy escaped. Silently, the other three Salamanders entered the redoubt.

  Two sentries waited within, Iron Warriors both, with their backs to them. S’tang would hold back, only intervening if needed. The traitors were standing stock-still, surveying the dark dunes beyond the redoubt.

  Death is upon you, brothers, Tsu’gan thought bitterly, noticing a battered but razor-edged storm shield leaning against the wall inside. His sheathed his blade silently, deciding not to sully the weapon with traitor’s blood, and took up the shield.

  Lazarus was poised to strike, his jagged spatha held in a reverse grip so he could strike downwards, aiming for the slim gap between gorget and cuirass.

  Tsu’gan was ready too, and battle-signed the order to attack.

  He leapt forwards, resisting the urge to roar a battle cry, and battered the Iron Warrior to the ground with a fierce, two-handed smash from the shield. The momentum of the strike carried Tsu’gan forwards. He dived on the prone traitor, pinning his arms with his knees and ramming the razor-edge of the shield into the Iron Warrior’s neck, cutting off his head.

  He turned to Lazarus. The Salamander was withdrawing his blade and wiping off the blood, which seemed oddly sparse. Tsu’gan put it down to the low light impeding his vision, but when he looked at his dead sentry he knew that something wasn’t right.

  There was almost no blood.

  He had severed the bastard’s neck; there should be blood — lots of it. Yet, there was almost none. Tsu’gan tossed the shield aside and lifted up the sentry’s decapitated head, inspecting the wound. It was dark and viscous, but didn’t flow. The blood was clotted. The Iron Warriors had been dead before they’d even entered the redoubt.

  “The guards were already dead,” he hissed into the comm-feed, patching in all combat squads and breaking vox silence.

  A slew of similar reports came from the other four assault groups. Each had entered their respective redoubt undetected and killed the sentries inside, only to discover the enemy was deceased.

  Tsu’gan rasped a reply.

  “Go to bolters.” The brother-sergeant scanned the dark through the redoubt’s firing slit and then the open doorway. Inwardly, he cursed. The Iron Warriors had drawn them in like neophytes, exposed their position. Racking his bolter’s slide, preparing to unleash death if he was to meet his end, he crouched down so he presented a smaller target. Then he waited.

  Several minutes passed in the silent blackness. No assassins came creeping from the dark; no kill-teams closed the elaborate trap they had set.

  The expected counter-attack did not materialise, was not going to materialise. For some unknown reason, the Iron Warriors had manned their redoubts with the dead.

  “They weren’t trying to lure us,” Tsu’gan realised, keeping his voice low. “They were deterrents.”

  “Sergeant?” Brother Lazarus hissed.

  Tsu’gan waved away the question. He had no answer to it. Yet.

  “We hold here,” he said. “We wait.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I

  Besieged

  Billowing ash clouds were dissipating slowly on the grey horizon. It was the last evidence of N’keln’s muster from the Salamanders’ encampment. Brother Argos had managed to release the land vehicles from the hold of the Vulkan’s Wrath. N’keln had taken the Land Raider, Fire Anvil, with the Firedrakes, his Inferno Guard and Chaplain Elysius aboard. Even Fugis made the journey. The Apothecary had considered staying behind to tend the wounded, but his place was by N’keln’s side and his brothers would likely need him in the coming battle against the Iron Warriors, so he had ventured back to the front line for the first time since Stratos.

  The rest of the Salamanders’ vehicles comprised four Rhino APCs that conveyed all three squads of Devastators and Brother-Sergeant Clovius’ Tactical squad. The captain had selected his task force according to firepower. He intended to breach the fortress walls at distance, rather than storm them. Devastators were well suited to that task, and since Clovius boasted both missile launcher and plasma gun in his ranks, he was an ideal fourth squad choice and occupied the remaining Rhino.

  Vargo and his Assault squad were the final element to the task force. His troops would make their way on foot, using bursts from their jump packs to keep pace. Once the walls were breached, Brother-Sergeant Vargo and his troops could quickly exploit the gap.

  Dak’ir was left back to maintain vigil over the encampment. Though he would rather have joined the task force, he knew his duty and respected the will of his captain. The other squads continued with their rotational duties of excavating the Vulkan’s Wrath, guarding the medical tents and searching for survivors. Naveem’s old squad spent most of its time within the battered confines of the ship, opening up sealed areas and exhuming the dead from their metal, airlocked tombs. Brother Gannon had taken temporary charge, though he was untested as a sergeant. Agatone was content to remain behind. There were the observances of ritual cremation to be conducted for Vah’lek, and he was keen to be present for them.

  These thoughts tumbled through Dak’ir’s mind like flakes of ash drifting from the far off peaks of Scoria’s volcanoes. As he stared into the grey void, the vista before him seemed to blend and shift…

  …once distant mountains loomed suddenly large and immediate, arching over Dak’ir’s head like crooked fingers until they touched and formed a canopy of rock. Ash, so ubiquitous before, drained away as if escaping through the cracks of the world to flee certain doom, and left solid rock beneath Dak’ir’s feet. He was in a cave. It reminded him of Ignea. A tunnel led down, down into the heart of Scoria where promised fire lurked, flickering against the walls like dancing, red spectres. They took him deep, these imagined apparitions, to the nadir of the earth where lava ran thick in streams and shimmered with lustrous heat. Pools of liquid fire threw murky, joyless light that seemed to cling and conspire instead of illuminate. And there, dwelling within a vast cavern and surrounded by pits of flame like balefires, the dragon uncoiled. Scales shimmered like spilled blood in the lava-light, its sulphurous breath overwhelming the reek of the mountain.

  Dak’ir was standing across from it. A tall pike was gripped in his gauntlet, and the lake of fire separated them. Hunter and beast eyed each other across the flaming gulf that ignited in empathy for their mutual anger.

  “You are my captain’s slayer.” The voice sounded distant and strange to him, but Dak’ir knew it as his own. It was a much a promise as an accusation.

  Rage lent strength to his body that he didn’t know he possessed, as Dak’ir leapt across the massive lake of fire to land crouched on the other side.

  Challenge given and accepted, the dragon came at him, a bestial roar ripping from a fanged mouth wreathed in black fire.

  Dak’ir cried out for Vulkan, and the primarch’s vigour steeled him. As the beast came on, its footfalls shedding rock and cracking stone, Dak’ir took the pike and drove it like a lance into the dragon’s belly. It screeched and the cave shook. It was a cry so full of wrath and agony that it levelled mountains and opened up the roof to a grey sky that was steadily turning red.

  Clawing, rending deep grooves into the stone, the dragon struggled. Dak’ir pushed. He drove it to the lake of fire, heaved it flailing over the edge and let it burn as the heat rose up to consume it.

  The dragon died, and in the haze and smoke of its conflagration it changed to become a man. His armour was red like scale, his mouth was fanged like a maw and he wore the defiled livery of a former angel who had turned his back on duty and loyalty, to embrace corruption. The body broke away, naught but
bones and ash, a frugal meal for the lake of fire. Then the world broke away with it. A great tremor wracked the earth and Scoria split. Columns of fire erupted like bursts of incendiary exploding from under the ash, and the mountain was swallowed beneath the earth. Dak’ir witnessed a world die, consumed by itself. Then the fire came to him, and he was burning too…

  “I sense doubt in you.”

  Arrested suddenly from the dream, Dak’ir flinched. He kept the reaction small, though, and barely noticeable. Until that moment, he had thought he was alone.

  “It’s not doubt, Brother-Librarian,” he replied coolly, shrugging off the remnants of his vision as Pyriel came to stand beside him.

  They were a hundred metres or so from the edge of the encampment, looking out across the dunes past the relentlessly pacing Thunderfire cannons and the hidden grenade belt beyond them. “More a lack of resolution. Something I can sense, but beyond my reach.”

  It wasn’t a lie. The instinct had been there throughout the dream, just subdued by his subconscious mind.

  “That there is something here, beneath the ash, that we are just not seeing,” stated the Librarian.

  “Yes,” said Dak’ir, looking for him to extrapolate, uncertain why he himself was so surprised at Pyriel’s prescience. The Librarian kept his gaze on the horizon, inscrutable as rock.

  In the absence of further explanation, Dak’ir decided to go on.

  “Ever since we made landfall, after the crash, I felt as if I was… being watched.”

  Now Pyriel turned to regard him. “Go on,” he said.

  “Not the ash creatures that attacked us,” Dak’ir explained. “Not even an enemy as such, just something… else.”

  “I have felt it, too,” admitted the Librarian, “A glimpse of a consciousness unknown to me. It is not the mind of a xenos that I feel. Nor is it the taint of Chaos exhibited by the traitors Brother Tsu’gan has found. It is, as you say, ‘else’.”

  The Librarian stared at Dak’ir a little longer, before turning back. “Look out there,” he said, gesturing to the grey horizon. Dak’ir did as he was told. “What do you see?”

  Dak’ir opened his mouth to speak, when Pyriel raised a hand to stop him.

  “Think carefully,” he advised. “Not what there is, but what you see.”

  Dak’ir readjusted and looked hard. All he saw was ash and spires of distant rock crested by dark clouds, and a grey horizon smudged with umber and red where the volcanoes vented.

  “I see…” he began, but stopped himself to truly open his eyes. “I see Nocturne.”

  Pyriel nodded. It was a small movement, near undetectable, but expressed his satisfaction elegantly.

  “That is what I see also. Beneath the layers of ash there is rock. The volcanoes have been venting for so long and so continuously that the grey flakes have made this place a grey world, with darkling skies, bereft of life. The oceans, for I believe the deep basins in the ash deserts were once large water masses, dried up long ago. Underground tributaries might still exist, but I doubt they’re enough to support significant life. Scoria, I suspect, was once much like Nocturne, only more advanced in its geological cycle.” Pyriel stooped and placed a hand against the ground. He beckoned Dak’ir to do the same.

  “You feel that?” the Librarian asked, closing his eyes, shutting out smell and sound, focusing purely on touch.

  Dak’ir nodded, though he had no way of knowing if the Librarian had seen or realised his affirmation. There was a tremor running through the earth, faint but insistent like a pulsing vein.

  “Those are the last heartbeats of a dying world, brother.”

  Dak’ir’s eyes snapped open and he stood. The recent vision came back at him, and he wondered briefly if somehow Pyriel had seen it, had looked into his mind and perceived his very dreams.

  “What are you saying, Librarian, that Nocturne will suffer the same fate?” The question came across more petulantly than he would have wanted.

  “All worlds end, Dak’ir,” Pyriel answered pragmatically. “Nocturne’s demise might be millennia from now, it might only be a matter of centuries. I wonder if our progenitor brought us here to see something of our home world’s fate.” His eyes flashed with cerulean fire. “Is that what you’ve seen, brother?”

  Seismic thunder erupted from the crash site before Dak’ir had to answer. Both Space Marines, even several hundred metres from the quake, were staggered by it. Then they were running, heading for the swathes of ash pluming into the air as the Vulkan’s Wrath shifted and sank. A hundred metres from the ship and the Salamanders were engulfed by a grey cloud that struck their power armour in a gritty wave.

  Dak’ir had rammed on his battle-helm, snapping on his luminator as he cycled through the optical spectra to best penetrate the murky explosion of ash. Pyriel needed no such augmentation. His eyes blazed like blue beacons in the darkness, more piercing that any lume-lamp.

  “There,” he said, barely raising his voice and pointing towards the dark shape of the strike cruiser’s hull. Dak’ir heard him perfectly, and saw vague silhouettes through the ash storm. Some were moving about, others lay huddled with their heads down.

  “Ba’ken, report,” the sergeant shouted into the comm-feed.

  Crackling static returned for a time, but as the billowing grey wave began to disperse, the bulky trooper’s voice came back.

  “A seismic shift, brother-sergeant. The entire ship moved with it.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Just minor injuries. I pulled back the excavation crews when I felt the vessel beginning to move.” There was a pause, as if Ba’ken was gauging what he should say next. “You’re not going to believe what it’s shaken loose.”

  The grey dust had all but cleared, settling as a veneer across the plains as if it had never been disturbed, though the serfs bore the evidence of it on their overalls as did the Salamanders on their armour. The silhouettes through the ash proved to be Ba’ken and one of the excavation crews. Coughing and spluttering, the humans lay on their backs and gasped for air. Servitors stood alongside them, impassive and untroubled. Ba’ken left them and went to meet Dak’ir and Pyriel as they approached him.

  He was stripped out of his armour and wearing labour fatigues. Sweat-dappled muscles were still bunched from his efforts, and he carried a flat-bladed shovel in one hand.

  “Brothers,” he said, snapping a quick salute across his broad, black chest.

  “Just like being back home, eh, Ba’ken?” said Dak’ir.

  “Aye, sir. It puts me in mind of the rock harvest after the Time of Trial. Though it’s usually snow and ice, not ash, that I’m digging through.”

  “Show me what you’ve found,” ordered the sergeant.

  Ba’ken led them to where the Vulkan’s Wrath had clearly shifted during the geological event. A deep, seemingly fathomless chasm had formed between the edge of the strike cruiser’s hull and the surface of the ash plain. Languid drifts, motes of grey, trickled into it and were quickly lost from sight in the darkness. The chasm was narrow, but not so acute that a warrior in power armour couldn’t squeeze down it.

  “I can feel heat,” said Pyriel, peering over the edge into the darkness. “And the consciousness I experienced earlier, it is stronger here.”

  “You think there is something down there, brother?” asked Dak’ir, moving to stand alongside him.

  “Besides the chitin-beasts? Yes, I’m certain of it.”

  “How deep do you think it is?” Ba’ken leaned over to get a better look but the chasm was only lit by the ambient light for about fifty metres before the blackness claimed it. Even Astartes eyesight couldn’t penetrate much further. If Pyriel had any better knowledge, he was keeping it to himself.

  “It could run to the core of Scoria for all we know,” Dak’ir replied. “Whatever the case, I mean to find out.” He turned to Ba’ken. “Don your armour, brother, and meet us back here. I want to know what lurks in the darkness beneath our feet. Perhaps it will provide some answ
ers as to why we are here.”

  The lumbering forms of a vehicle convoy ground to a halt at the peak of the ridge. Exhaust fumes pluming smoke, their engines growled like war-hounds straining at the leash. N’keln and his warriors had arrived.

  Tsu’gan watched them from the redoubt, his view enhanced through the magnoculars. The sergeant had switched to night-vision, rendering the image before him into a series of lurid, hazy greens. Embarkation ramps in the Land Raider and Rhinos slammed down in unison, the squads within debussing as one coherent unit. Tsu’gan watched the Salamanders deploy in a firing line along the ridge, and cursed.

  “Close up,” he hissed, inwardly bemoaning N’keln’s apparent over-caution. “Your guns are outside effective range.”

  A few seconds lapsed before the firing began. Iridescent beams from the multi-meltas stabbed into the gloom in lances of red-hot fury. Missiles spiralled from the ridge, buoyed along on twisting contrails of grey smoke. Gun chatter erupted from the heavy bolters, pintle mounts and secondary arms. The heavy chug-chank, chug-chank of the Fire Anvil’s forward-mounted assault cannon joined it, building to a high-pitched whirr as it achieved maximum fire-rate. Blistering and bright, the storm of shells and lashing beams torn apart the darkness like a host of flares.

  Throughout the fusillade, the Iron Warriors hunkered down. Unwilling to commit themselves, they stayed out of sight, content to let the fortress walls weather the assault.

  The barrage persisted for almost three minutes before N’keln, a distant figure in the lee of the Land Raider’s rear access hatch, ordered a halt to allow the firing smoke to clear. It revealed little: just patches of scorched metal and the odd ineffectual impact crater. No breaches, no dead. The gate was still intact — the assault had failed.

  “Vulkan’s teeth, bring them forward!” snarled Tsu’gan, unwilling to vox in case the Iron Warriors were monitoring transmissions, overheard him and discovered his guerrilla force staked out in the redoubts.

  Even in the lull, the traitors didn’t act. Only when N’keln gave the order to withdraw and re-advance did the Iron Warriors show their strategy.