Hammer and Bolter 5

by Christian Dunn

  Phalanx

  Ben Counter

  Chapter 6

  Molikor’s endless expanses of broken delta, islands of swampy grasses and gorse separated by the sludgy children of the planet’s great rivers, were a good place to hide. An entire nation hid there among the rotten trees and root cages, the odd chunk of rock eroded clean by the passage of the shifting waters. They had their strongholds among the mangrove swamps closer to the shore, where the biting insects swarmed so thick they could pick a man up off the ground, and the waters were infested with a thousand different forms of sharp-toothed creature. That nation, which called itself the Eshkeen, was as much a part of the landscape as the dour grey-streaked clouds overhead and the way the soft ground threatened to swallow up a power armoured foot. That nation had risen up in defiance. That nation had to die.

  Commander N’Kalo took the magnoculars from the eyeslit of his armour. His augmented vision was enough to tell him that the foe had no intention of making itself seen, and a closer look had confirmed it. Behind him the strikeforce of nearly forty Iron Knights Space Marines was forming a perimeter lest the enemy close in from an unexpected angle, the bolters of Squads Salik, K’Jinn and Tchwayo scanning the indistinct horizon for targets. Sergeant Borasi’s Devastator squad had left its anti-tank weapons behind and sported a complement of heavy bolters, perfect for chewing through forested cover and ill-armoured enemies. Though the delta could have been deserted for all the Iron Knights could see, the Devastators were still ready to deploy, weapons loaded and shouldered.

  ‘They give us good sport,’ said Sergeant Borasi, standing just behind N’Kalo. ‘It disappoints me so when the enemy show themselves too early.’

  ‘Would that this was mere sport,’ replied N’Kalo. ‘The Eshkeen revolt against the rule of the Imperium. Books of atrocities have already been written about their campaigns of violence against the Imperial cities of this world, and if Molikor falls the whole of this frontier could follow.’

  ‘Nevertheless, captain, I am reminded of the best hunting grounds of Seheris. Below the equator, where the great rivers of the Zambenar meet the oceans. I lose count of how many reapermaw tusks my bolter has won for me down there.’

  ‘Then the hunting will be good,’ brother,’ said N’Kalo, stowing the magnoculars in a belt pouch, ‘if it is a hunt you see unfolding here.’

  On Seheris, the home world of the Iron Knights Chapter, the unforgiving deserts and plains bred a thousand hardy peoples divided into tribes that treated the land as an adversary to be conquered. The Iron Knights were drawn from such people, and their wish to test themselves against an environment, as much as against a foe, never left them. They took pride in the fact that they fought in warzones which would have been deadly whether any enemy waited there or not – radioactive rock deserts, carnivorous jungles, archipelagos scattered across an ocean that seethed with sea monsters, and every other Emperor-forsaken place that a man could imagine. When the Parliaments of Molikor had requested help against a foe bent on exterminating the Emperor’s presence on their world, the Iron Knights had seen not only a task to be achieved to keep the Ghoul Stars Frontier intact, but the chance to test themselves against Molikor’s own dangers.

  Too often, thought N’Kalo, his brother Space Marines treated war as a sport. The fact that he could see beyond that had marked him out as commander material. That was why he had been sent here to Molikor, to oversee his eager battle-brothers as they killed every Eshkeen on the planet.

  Mile after mile, the Eshkeen drew the Iron Knights in.

  It was clearly their tactic. Even as he walked the paths laid out for him through the winding delta paths, N’Kalo knew that the enemy had laid on Molikor a trap to cut off, surround and butcher anyone the Imperium sent to fight them. He read the landscape like a book, like any Iron Knight would, and he saw the thinking behind every dammed stream and felled copse.

  The easiest path into the delta forests and swamps, where the Eshkeen surely waited, passed through two towering forests separated by a stretch of swamp where the shallow waters rushed over the sodden grassland. The soft-edged shadows, cast by a sun hidden behind the overcast sky, rendered this gap dark and its footing uncertain. The ways on either side were deep and difficult to traverse, and N’Kalo’s magnoculars had picked out the log dams on the distant highlands that had helped flood those regions to force any attackers to take the path between the forests.

  N’Kalo’s strikeforce reached the first shadows cast by the tallest trees. The forest was dense and tangled, an unmanaged mass of broken branches and diseased trunks, clustered around rocky hills that broke the surface of the marshes and trapped enough soil for the trees to grow. N’Kalo could see no sign of the Eshkeen, but he knew they were there as surely as if they were standing there in front of him.

  ‘You cannot trap a Space Marine,’ said Sergeant Borasi over the strikeforce’s vox-net. ‘You can shut yourself in a room with him, but it is not he who is trapped.’

  N’Kalo halted the strikeforce at the head of the forest gap. On the other side was a stretch of open marsh, tempting for any force making for the coastal strongholds with nowhere for the enemy to use as an ambush. N’Kalo imagined the Parliamentarian commanders who had fallen for such a trick, before Molikor had requested the assistance of Imperial forces, and how they must have decided that it was acceptable to risk this one ambush spot to ensure they had a clear run at the enemy. How many of them had the Eshkeen killed, moulding the landscape into their ally? How many cavalry forces had wheeled in panic on just such a path, stuck with thousands of arrows and, later, riddled with bullets from captured guns, fired from an enemy so well hidden it seemed the forest itself wanted them dead?

  ‘Salik, Tchwayo, take the fore,’ voxed N’Kalo. ‘K’Jinn, cover the rear. Borasi, up front with me.’

  The strikeforce took up position in the mouth of the trap. Borasi’s Devastators knelt, heavy bolters covering their front arc.

  To an observer unfamiliar with the Space Marines, it would seem the Iron Knights were pausing in trepidation, making up their minds whether to continue down the narrow path laid out for them.

  ‘Open fire!’ ordered N’Kalo.

  The heavy bolters hammered out a dreadful cacophony as their fire shredded the edge of the right-hand forest, splintering tree trunks and sending clouds of spinning shards through the air.

  ‘Advance!’ shouted N’Kalo, his voice just audible over the din. ‘Advance and engage!’

  As the Devastators reloaded, the three Tactical squads ran for the forest, bolters spitting fire as they headed onwards. N’Kalo had his power sword in one hand and his plasma pistol in the other, and as the last splinters of tree trunk fell he caught the first sight of the enemy.

  The Eshkeen were heavily scarified, and wore strips of coloured cloth and leather wrapped tight around them to ward off the spines and stingers of the forests. The ridges of scar tissue that ran across their faces and bodies were high enough to be pierced with bones and thorns, and spikes were implanted under the shorn skin of their scalps. They resembled the figures from some primitive world’s visions of hell. Perhaps they modelled themselves after Molikor’s own myths, delving into their images of damnation to put fear into Parliamentarian hearts.

  The Eshkeen returned fire as best they could as they dragged the wounded and dead from what remained of the treeline. Autogun and lasgun fire spattered down at the Iron Knights, hissing in the damp ground or ringing off ceramite. The Space Marines did not slow and headed straight for the enemy.

  The ambush plan relied on the Space Marines staying in the open, thinking themselves unable to make any headway through the forest. Unfortunately for the Eshkeen, that plan, which would work horrendously well against the armies of the Parliamentarians, fell apart when confronted with an armoured Space Marine whose weight and strength could force him through the forest as fast as he moved in the open. Squad Salik reached the trees first and they did not slow down, shouldering their way between the
tree trunks, rotten wood crumbling under their weight. The Eshkeen screamed war-cries as the Iron Knights were among them, streams of bolter fire criss-crossing through the forest and slicing Eshkeen in half.

  N’Kalo felt, in spite of himself, a faint disappointment. None of the Eshkeen would get close enough for him to use his power sword. Already Squad Tchwayo were into the rapidly thinning forest. Men were dying among the twisted roots and falling tree trunks. N’Kalo would not take any heads today.

  N’Kalo himself had reached the trees. Bodies lay twisted and broken among the fallen branches. One was still alive, moaning as he tried to force himself to his feet, apparently ignorant of the fact he had lost one of his arms at the elbow. Others had huge ragged holes in their torsos, cut down by bolter fire aimed at the central mass. Another had the side of his head crushed by a bolter stock. N’Kalo stepped over them, glancing around for targets as Borasi and K’Jinn advanced behind him.

  Suddenly, N’Kalo could not hear the heavy footsteps and bolter fire of the battle-brothers behind him. He looked back, not wanting to slow his own advance, but he could not see them.

  ‘Squads report!’ said N’Kalo into the vox. Blank static was the only reply. ‘Report!’ he repeated, but got nothing.

  The forest was seething. It was alive. The Eshkeen were barely recognisable as humans now, slipping in and out of tree trunks, their flesh merging with the mossy wood. They slithered along the ground like snakes, limbs as flexible as liquid, and slid into the ground before N’Kalo could take aim. They flitted overhead, birds on the wing.

  ‘What witchcraft is this?’ demanded N’Kalo. His power sword hummed into life and he slashed about him, felling the trees on either side as he pushed on. ‘A Space Marine fears not such devilry! He knows no fear!’

  The forest warped around him. Trees bowed in and hands reached out of the earth to snare his ankles. N’Kalo fired at movement, his plasma pistol boring a glowing orange channel through the foliage, but he could not tell if he had hit anything. Everywhere he cut left and right, forging on through the path he hacked. He called for his battle-brothers, but there was no reply. Faces were leering from the trees now, blood welling up from the ground. The sky, where he glimpsed it through the writhing branches overhead, seemed blistered and burned, as if some malignant energy was forcing its way down towards him.

  N’Kalo slammed into an obstacle that did not give way to his weight. He stumbled back a pace and saw another horror. A Space Marine from the waist up, a mutated monstrosity below, insectoid legs tipped with vicious talons, reared up to spear N’Kalo’s torso. The Space Marine was no iron Knight – his armour was painted purple, with a gilded chalice on one shoulder pad, and the high aegis collar of a Librarian.

  N’Kalo slashed at the apparition with his sword. The mutant brought up the haft of an ornate axe to turn the blow aside. Without seeming to move the mutant was upon N’Kalo, its weight bearing down on him, legs forcing him back onto one knee. One insect leg snared his sword arm and the other batted his plasma pistol aside.

  The forest was shifting again, this time back to normal. N’Kalo could hear his battle-brothers’ voices filling the vox-net.

  ‘Fall back!’ came K’Jinn’s voice. ‘Regroup at the far side!’

  ‘I have brothers down!’ shouted Salik. ‘Forming defensive!’ Bolter fire hammered away over the vox-net, volley and counter-volley shearing through the trees.

  The mutant kicked N’Kalo’s sword aside.

  ‘What are you?’ gasped N’Kalo. He struggled to get free, but the mutant was stronger even than a Space Marine.

  ‘I am the truth,’ replied Sarpedon.

  The fortresses of the Eshkeen were cunningly wrought so as to be invisible from the air. The finest siege-wrights of the Imperium could not have strung out fortifications of wooden stakes and pit traps with such subtlety, seeding the approaches to the dense coastal forests so that attackers on foot would find their numbers thinned out well before they came within bowshot of the fortress walls. The fortresses themselves were built on two levels, the first hidden trenches and murder-holes on the ground, the second walkways and battlements in the trees overhead. The canopy was thick enough to hide them, and the short distances between them were made deadly with tangles of cured razorvine, layers of dried earth concealing stretches of sucking mud, and even nests of forest predators herded into position by the Eshkeen. Two Parliamentarian forces had driven this far into Eshkeen territory and none of them had been seen again, save for a couple of messengers permitted to live so they could explain that the Eshkeen were not impressed by the glittering cavalry regiments and sumptuous banners of the Parliamentarian armies.

  The fortresses backed against the sea, although it was difficult to tell where the sea began. Mangroves formed layers of root canopy over the murky waters, infested with Eshkeen fishermen who found their harpoons were as adept at picking off soldiers wading out of landing boats as they were at spearing fish. The shallow waters and hidden reefs were enough to dissuade all but the most glory-hungry admiral from attempting a landing there. Unfortunately for the Parliamentarians they had once possessed such an admiral, whose ships now lay a few hundred metres from the shore where they had foundered, their men trapped there for months before starvation and Eshkeen snipers had seen to the last of them.

  These defences, as formidable as they were, would not have stopped a force of Space Marines determined to enact justice on the Eshkeen. The Iron Knights, however, had not been given that chance.

  The first N’Kalo saw of the Eshkeen stronghold was a ceiling of wooden planks and plaited vines. He struggled to move and found that he was not bound. He was high up in the air, the structure around him built into the thick, gnarled trunks of the mangroves. The humid air had a faint tang of decay, the smell of fallen plant matter turning to watery sludge, mixed in with the salt breeze off the sea. Eshkeen were everywhere at watch, eerily still as they scanned the approaches with their bows or guns to hand. N’Kalo saw, for the first time, their women and children. Some of the sentries were women, and a gaggle of children crouched in a doorway watching N’Kalo with a mix of fascination and fear. They were scrawny in a way that only growing up outside civilisation could explain, tough and sinewy, with painted skin echoing the scarring of their elders.

  N’Kalo sat up. The children squealed and scattered. He was in a barracks or communal living space, full of empty beds. He could not see his weapons, but his armour had been left on.

  He touched a gauntlet to his face as he realised his helmet had been removed. No wonder the children had fled. The burns he had suffered long ago, which he had chosen to hide under the knightly helm of his Chapter’s commanders, must have made him look even more of a monster than any other Space Marine.

  ‘Commander N’Kalo,’ said a too-familiar voice. N’Kalo jumped to his feet as the mutant from the forest entered.

  ‘Where am I? What of my brothers?’ demanded N’Kalo.

  ‘They are safe. I cannot permit them their liberty yet. They will go free soon, as will you.’

  The mutant Space Marine was armed with his power axe and a bolt pistol, and N’Kalo had not been a match for him when he had his power sword. Unarmed, he did not fancy his chances against the mutant. Better to talk and wait for the right time than to throw his life away trying to fight here, when he was bound to fail. ‘And you did not answer my question. What are you?’

  The mutant shrugged. It was seemingly too human a gesture for such a grotesque creature. ‘I am a Space Marine, like you. Well, not exactly like you.’

  ‘You are a witch.’

  ‘I am, if you prefer that term. I am Librarian and Chapter Master Sarpedon of the Soul Drinkers. And we are similar in more than just bearing the arms of the Adeptus Astartes. We are both, Commander N’Kalo, students of justice as much as of war.’

  ‘Justice? My brothers have fallen at your hand!’

  ‘Fallen, but not dead. My Apothecary is seeing to them. Two have bolter wounds and anothe
r was felled by a chainsword. Though they will not fight for a while, the three will survive. They are being held at ground level, below us, watched over by my battle-brothers. Sergeant Borasi gave us a great deal of trouble. He should be commended for his spirit, misplaced though it is. He owes us several broken bones.’

  N’Kalo had heard of the Soul Drinkers. Like the Iron Knights, they were successors to the Imperial Fists, with Rogal Dorn as their Primarch. N’Kalo had never met any of the Soul Drinkers but he recalled they were famed for their prowess in boarding actions and that they had won laurels during the battle for the Ecclesiarchal Palace during the Wars of Apostasy. N’Kalo and Sarpedon should have been brothers, not just as Space Marines but as sons of Dorn.

  ‘Why do you oppose us?’ said N’Kalo. ‘We are here doing the Emperor’s will!’

  ‘The Imperium’s will,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘Not the Emperor’s.’

  ‘And I suppose you, a mutant, one who has raised arms against my brethren, is the one doing the Emperor’s will?’

  ‘Looking at it that way,’ said Sarpedon, ‘I can understand your doubts. I do not believe, however, that you know the full story of what is happening on Molikor.’

  ‘And you are going to tell me?’ spat N’Kalo.

  ‘No. I am going to show you.’

  N’Kalo saw his brothers guarded by a ring of Soul Drinkers. The Iron Knights had been disarmed but, as Sarpedon had said, few of them were hurt. A Soul Drinkers Apothecary was operating on the wounded leg of one sedated Iron Knight – all the rest were conscious and, led by Borasi, started up a chorus of plaudits for their commander and insults hurled at Sarpedon as soon as they saw N’Kalo. A couple of the other Soul Drinkers were mutants, although not as dramatically malformed as Sarpedon. One had an enormous mutated hand, and N’Kalo wondered what other mutations were hidden beneath their armour.

  It was a strange feeling to be led, not quite a captive and not quite an equal, through the Eshkeen forest by Sarpedon. N’Kalo’s soldierly mind sized up every chance to attack Sarpedon, drag him down to the ground or stab him in the back with a fortuitous weapon snatched from a nearby Eshkeen, but Sarpedon had his own warrior instinct and every opportunity was gone before it began. If he had a weapon, N’Kalo thought, he could kill Sarpedon and, if not complete his mission, at least rid the Imperium of this enemy – but even with a bolter or a power sword in his hands, could he beat Sarpedon when he had been defeated before?