by Aeryn Leigh
Under strict instructions to avoid use of projectile weapons and their own mortars, and instead purify the enemy with blade, hammer, and fire, thus preventing damage, his command screamed in righteous retribution. Poison gas would be too slow, nor would it train the acolytes in the cauldron of battle. Another round hit a section of roof, and a large section of mural fell, obliterating an entire squad of marines in billowing clouds of plaster and marble dust. The Inquisition forces went mad, and even as Sergeant Major Rodriguez bellowed orders to hold the formations, his army gave in to the voice of God whispering in their heads, and whips found nothing but empty air as the acolytes sprinted forward as if possessed.
Contact.
The front ranks of acolytes in those last few feet threw themselves forward in a brutal show of energy and utter abandon only to find themselves occupying empty air as the front maniple legions dispersed deftly, and before the acolytes recovered from their momentum the barest amount of violence required to kill reaped their souls.
The further the acolytes penetrated, they were in turn swallowed in greater numbers, beset on all sides in alternating blocks and as they fell their weapons were stripped and filtered to the rear legions coming up hard behind. Now, only now did the war horns of the First blast, a battle gift from the Viking King and the thunder they produced mirrored the whistling of mortar bombs falling on parabolic arcs into the midst of the Inkas and eighteen torturous months of captive slaughter and experimentation brought their harvest of hate onto the army with one God.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
A Phalanx Of Joints
The general sidestepped, and the sword whistled past her cheek, brushing the soft fuzz on her skin, while Versetti lifted her own weapon, the bastard sword opening the acolyte teenager's gut as they rushed past, entrails steaming, flopping out. The soldiers around her finished the last of the acolytes, and she felt the spirits of the First swell even though she knew the hardest pain was yet to come as now the incoming marines closed the small gap and Versetti took respite in those precious moments before the white wave broke upon them.
Men and women panted around her, as they walked backward, and the third line of manipulars swapped places, forming the new front lines, picking up weapons from the dead as they did so. Some picking up weapons where they had none, others upgrading from kitchen knives.
Five seconds.
The wave hit.
Shoulder to shoulder, man to woman, the First did not disperse. They held the line, solid blocks of skin, bones, boots, and steel, without roaring their battle cries nor screaming their hate, all to conserve the precious reserves of energy. Swords and spears stabbed, thrust out, as the manic Inka marines impaled themselves onto the checker board formations with such reckless fury the Republic soldiers had never before seen.
Across the breadth of the cathedral savage battles raged, as the might of the Inquisition army lost itself to the voices incessantly chattering in their minds and listened to their God. Attack, attack, attack! Kill the heathen. Purge the unclean heretics. Burn.
The First and Last fell back ever so slightly under the onslaught. For every marine they killed, another took their place, and another and another of the First fell. Yet the front squads stabilised, a phalanx of joints, and retreated no further. At the rear, the first archers under Merrion's command turned their attention to the twin, high prongs of elevated enemy bowmen throwing accurate fire down upon them from the high sides and so began the dual of longbows at three hundred paces.
Merrion dropped the last pair of mortar rounds and, picking up the longbow by his side, jumped up on top of the nearest statue foundation and loosed arrow after arrow into the myriad targets in front.
As the bow sang and he settled into a groove Merrion wondered about the enemy’s discipline, or more to the point, the complete lack of it. The Inquisition fell upon them as if one, unruly, on the generalised homogenised blob of barbarians, the entire army behaving contrary to all known Inquisition expectations. He shot off the last arrow in the quiver and lifted a fresh quiver, and that nagging feeling in Merrion's gut spoke to him that things were going too easy.
All too easy. From the stairwell entrance to his left, Merrion heard the echoed roar of an Australian.
Chapter Ninety
The Missing Battalion
Above them, the sounds and screams and explosions of the Republic army fighting for their very lives rolled down the spiral staircase and washed over them, and Laurie ground his teeth.
The commando team lay prone upon the stacked pyramid of tables, the penitent squad behind the barricade below, and Laurie fiddled with the catch of his MP 40.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The fear coiled tight around his stomach, as he waited, as they all waited, for whatever was about to happen.
This was how it was like back in the trenches waiting for the flare to shoot overhead, the signal to go over the top. Instead of hours or days of deafening artillery barrages softening up the enemy before another big push, just the sounds of men killing men echoed down. The muffled thump, thump, thump of Merrion firing the mortar prototype they'd found in Building Seven, the screams of those impaled and those about to be impaled, and the sound of his teeth grinding.
The seconds dragged on, then minutes. Then in front of them, down the back out through the mess hallway corridors leading to where the prison pit lay, now the screams and terror of mortal men. He looked at Griffin and Mick, then at Beowulf, who held one finger up to ward off talking, assuming any of them would talk as the sounds ahead intensified in volume.
Was it the hundreds and hundreds of the First still trapped dying? Gunfire, long streams of gunfire not even remotely in short, controlled bursts. The sound of submachine guns being held down until the entire clip emptied. Laurie realised he'd been holding his breath and forced himself to exhale. A faint passage of air, a breeze across their faces, fourteen feet in the air.
Griffin pulled the arming mechanism back on the Browning. Heartbeats. Then the Inquisition battalion hidden for so long ran pell-mell into the mess hall, their heads twisted this way and that trying to see behind them, and so it was they ran toward Laurie's team. A full Inquisition battalion of under one thousand men ran without heed or care straight for the barricade.
Laurie tipped his head at Griffin and the M2 Browning split the cavern mess with the roar of full metal jackets and Betty carved a huge butchers swath right through the battalion and yet still they ran. Twelve rounds a second spat out of the heavy machine gun then, over thirteen heartbeats later, ran dry and as the commando squad with Laurie yelling put up their own withering wall of lead from a dozen MP 40's. The damaged battalion smashed into the barricade, and as any holes or gaps in the structure became filled with the dying stuck remnants of human flesh it created an even easier ramp for those behind and soon the rushing wave reached the top of the barricade. Laurie found himself screaming along with Beowulf to let them pass and calling for bladed weapons only. Even the penitents moved out of the way as the bloodied Inquisition men sprinted around the pyramid of tables and reached the wide staircase heading to the cathedral. Axes, daggers, and swords slashed out at those running past, and as if in a stampede gone mad, the sizeable remains of the Inquisition battalion ran up the steps two at a time.
"After them," screamed Laurie, shuffling backward off the edge of the table and hurrying down to the floor, pointing at the penitent squad as he did so. The battalion would be running hard right into the rear of the First and Last but still over six hundred strong.
The assault team gave chase.
Laurie bellowed as hard as he could.
Merrion barely had time to reform the rear lines of battle before the running Inquisition marines stormed up the stairs and flowed in a straight line for the exit on the far end of the cathedral paying no attention to the casualties inflicted upon them as they passed. Merrion looked around for the general or Major Brutowsky but couldn't see them just as Beowulf, then Griffin, reached the top of the stairs a
nd came to a dead stop in front of Merrion. Moments later Laurie joined them, panting heavily. The ball of dread in Merrion’s stomach now blossomed into full outright panic.
What on earth could make Inquisition Marines break and run?
General Versetti stood amazed as the missing battalion ran straight into the advancing army and sowed seeds of discord all up and down the battle line as soldiers cried in terror the words "Daemons, Daemons!"
In that moment, the roar of battle faded away as Inquisition commanders tried to regain control.
Laurie bent over, one hand on his knees, the other holding a dripping sword. The fighting stopped. A massive cheer erupted from the First and Last, and Laurie heard Major Brutowsky give the order to press the attack. At the back of Laurie's mind, the edge of his senses, he heard cicadas. The snake around his stomach constricted into a tight wad of fear as out in front the Inquisition army stopped what they were doing and started screaming, hands and arms pointed upward. Laurie stood back up and craned his head backward and saw the image of his nightmares blossoming outward from the cathedral's mountainous cracks far, far, overhead.
At the edges of the bay the daemons crawled out of the surf and clambered up wooden jetties and stone piers, up anchor chains, up and over stone fortifications and every man serving their Emperor ran for their very lives uphill toward the sanctuary of their God, and those who couldn’t, died.
In the prison pit, what remained of the trapped First and Last fell and were ripped asunder by the relentless waves of monsters crawling out of their very own nightmares, and in death they finally found peace.
The daemons outside worked their way up the mountain, section by section, impaling, clubbing, or cutting every human that stood in their path as they too made a beeline for the mountain interior to rejoin their brethren. What remained of the Inquisition forces of the stronghold fled through the broken mountain doors as the daemons entered the courtyard.
As the unknown enemy advanced down, along the walls, up on the ceiling, every oil lantern was extinguished as they passed, smothered by long, spiderlike limbs.
The only light filling the cavernous room came from the stairwell down, and that flickered and faded, casting shadows hundreds of feet long, the air smothered with fear, sweat, and moans of the dying and wounded, hysterical screaming from the void.
"To me, to me," yelled General Versetti, as the general tried rallying her troops as the ceiling mural's empty spaces were finally covered in swarming black — monsters.
The fleeing battalion almost made it to the rear exit just as the crush of stronghold personnel slammed into them coming in the opposite direction and clogged the exit. The First and Last formed a defensive diamond ten rows deep, at its core the general and the major.
The assault team and the penitents formed a half-circle around the stairwell, their backs to the wall.
The dim light coming from below faded further, and the Inquisition became no longer visible.
Laurie looked into Beowulf's eyes, round with awe and wonder, then at Mick and the two shared one single moment.
"Been nice knowing you, short arse," said Laurie.
"You too, Old Man."
The black shapes dropped.
Chapter Ninety-One
Valkjur
Alien music blasted through the helmet in a steady almost industrial rhythm. Ella grimaced. A million possibilities, entire Universes of problems and solutions, yet it seemed, finding the gramophone off switch wasn't one of them.
A tiny symbol popped up in the bottom right corner of her vision, pulsating red. She looked at it and once more tried to open it only using her mind, concentrating so hard her breathing stopped. It didn't open. Instead, other alerts popped up in the shape of a pair of lungs blooming orange. Ella forced herself to start breathing and the image faded from view.
Verdammt. She fought the urge to stomp her foot and unleash the frustration of trying to control an interface that accepted input via eye control, sound recognition, and the power of thought. Her rudimentary grasp of Norse language thus far had unlocked the main menu and basic functions — in theory at least, for she hadn’t yet moved the suit at all. Not one damn centimetre.
And this entire time the awareness, the presence of being in the shadow of the great white figure. What was it? Who was it? Did somebody control it like the armour she was in? So many questions and almost no answers.
Ella closed her eyes and for the millionth time tried to awaken from this living nightmare. The anger and rage rose, heating her blood and she started breathing regularly, in rhythm of the music's beat and the thought popped into her mind. She focused, and with her eyes still closed, imagined her left arm swinging out and her right foot lifting and then her left, walking down the steps and into the graveyard and with her eyelids still closed, swung the long warhammer at the nearest target, ducking under the long outstretched bony limbs, and caving its head in with a single blow. Only now did she open her eyes and find the reality matched her imagination. Ella Gruder took control and let her intuition run free.
She felt like God. Using the field of corpses, she jumped, danced, ran, and swung the hammer as if practising in a martial arts military training ground. She avoided any contact at all with the dried, desiccated cadavers and as she did so she looked at the graphical representation of her suit and its right arm and a little symbol of jagged teeth. She willed it into being, and the two-foot-long sword covered in little teeth embedded into the suits forearm erupted into life with the barest feeling of vibration. Ella Gruder laughed, as for the first time in millennia, the chainsword powered up and cycling at a Gott knows how high rpm held her right arm out parallel to the ground cut a monster’s torso in two.
She stopped, and reversed the process, shutting down the toothed weapon. All around her, bone dust hung in the air. The music pounded. With a thought, she turned it off. Now she tried that flashing red symbol and it swelled open, occupying the entirety of her vision, then past that as everything else disappeared and she stood in one vast three-dimensional representation of the world. She stood at the epicentre of the sphere. Pulsating out from where she stood were constant waves of blue, just like the energy wave she saw first entering this hall. Radar. Just like radar. But rather than looking down the two-dimensional display, everything was shown and could be rotated this way and that, zoomed in or zoomed out.
Her mind boggled. Such technology could barely be conceived. Ella gazed upon the planet called Elysium. With her heart in her mouth Ella concentrated on the mass of glowing orange dots. She dived toward the surface of the world with such speed Ella experienced vertigo thinking any moment she would smash against the earth and found herself looking upon the section of mountain called the Emperor's Lair.
Inside it swarmed with orange, electronic monsters. The aliens.
Right where her friends were. She had to help them. She closed the tactical map and found the dragonfly dagger hovering directly in front.
"We need to help them," she said in what she thought her best Norse. The dragonfly flitted up and down for a moment then headed back to the centre dais and Ella followed, each of her footsteps a mushroom cloud of dust. When she reached the top of the throne she kept moving, past the chair, to where the dagger hovered at the rear wall underneath the immense leadlight window.
There was nothing but smooth polished stone. An instant later, outlines of large blue rectangles formed. "Open," she commanded.
From out of seemingly solid stone drawer after drawer eased out and Ella took in the plethora of large, ugly weapons sitting in moulded supports. She looked at the dagger. It shrugged. A cascade of information swept across her display as she looked upon each weapon in turn, and Ella could make very little sense of it.
They didn't have time for this. She swept her head left and right, then reached out for the weapon directly in front of her. Her arm stopped midway as the pole on the battle hammer retracted into the body, telescoping upward, and all by itself the suit holstered the h
ammer onto the side of its left leg and with a single smooth motion continued upward, lifting the five-foot long weapon shaped like a torpedo with a hole-in-one end, hefting it with ease.
"Now what?" she said. "Do I walk there?"
The weapon cases retracted into the stone and the dragonfly pointed its tip at the rear of the throne chair. Ella turned around to see a wide hatch open and heard gears whirring and couldn't help herself sprinting over and grinning like a maniac.
Before her, looking suspiciously like something she had test flown not long ago, yet completely so far advanced it made her past prototype aircraft seem utterly prehistoric, stood a smaller version of Me-163 Komet but with most of the belly fuselage scooped out, and moulded to say fit, comfortably, the back of a suit of power armour.
Her power armour.
Standing vertically upright, stubby short wings extended, drop pods either side. And the trailing edge of the wings resembled metal feathers, cool to the touch, like one giant eagle.
Ella bounced up and down, her footfalls slabs of granite hitting concrete.
"Valkjur," said the suit. "Ready?"
Ella walked slowly backward and into the embrace of the metal wings and heard a satisfying click. In the top left section, the display showed the outline of her suit and the wings, both flashed blue. All good. She walked to the edge of the elevated platform, in front of the God’s feet, facing the tunnel entrance clotted with the dead. The dragonfly docked in her arm.