JAGHATAI KHAN WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS

by Chris Wraight

  Hasik saw a big nephilim xenotype rise up ahead, breaking out of the debris of a collapsing gun emplacement, its translucent flesh pulsing lime green in the fractured light. The air blistered and quivered, then tore open as its shriekpulse weapon emptied into the oncoming invaders.

  Hasik had reacted before the shock wave was even born, ducking down out of the likely impact cone and gunning into an attack spiral through the blown debris. Two rune flashes told him of riders caught in the molecule-shredding vortex, their bikes atomised and their bodies thrown into tumbling scrap.

  The xenos was a monster, a behemoth nourished on the anguished praise of thousands, rising more than four metres into the flame-swirled air, its aqueous mouth clamped open in a snarl. Its hide glistened with gristle-like rigidity from some species-wide metamorphic reaction, and at its feet came a stumbling army of semi-shock-blinded human infantry.

  It only took a microsecond.

  Gauge distance. Gauge velocity. Gauge mass.

  Hasik’s jetbike boosted at it, tilting almost ninety degrees to avoid a missile-damaged bulkhead before blasting into straight line hell-speed. The shriekpulse weapon scythed around expertly to blow the machine apart, but Hasik had already kicked himself free of the exploding saddle. Flying fast, he boosted clear of the spherical blastwave, pulling his guan dao from its straps in mid-lunge.

  He struck his target a fraction of a second later, driving the blade two-handed into the nephilim’s chest and carrying on through like a living weapon, already churning and twisting the long blade to rip out as much gut and spleen and stomach as possible.

  They tumbled together, thrown back beyond the gun emplacement and rolling down into the detritus-choked thoroughfare beyond. The nephilim roared, its innards half-torn free in a slick of pale grey fluids, its three-fingered hands scrabbling to swat its tormentor from its belly.

  The blade moves.

  Hasik hacked down, shattering the rigid armour shell.

  The limbs move.

  Then he was breaking clear, using the strength of his power armour to alter his trajectory, thrusting to one side to evade the xenos’ crushing fists.

  The centre moves.

  The pursuing jetbikes opened up with their heavy bolters, confident their master had done enough to get out of the way, and the reeling xenos disappeared beneath a thudding wall of mass-reactive explosions, swamped and drowned and gorged with them until it choked itself apart in a strangled whine of mauled and bolt-pulverised flesh.

  The rest of the squadron sped overhead, its work done, already hunting for more targets. Only one jetbike slowed, just a little, to scrape down to neck height. Hasik’s arm thrust up from the debris, catching the saddle of the thundering mount and hauling himself up to join the rider. Even as the bike surged back into full velocity he righted himself, standing beside the rider’s saddle, holding on to the roaring engine-platform one-handed.

  ‘A new way of war,’ voxed the pilot in Khorchin, a good-natured Terran named Righal.

  By then Hasik was laughing once more, swinging his gore-latticed guan dao around his head and leaning hard into the onrushing hurricane.

  ‘And a good one, yes?’ he voxed back, grinning savagely.

  FIVE

  Three hours after the assault commenced, the outcome moved beyond doubt. The city’s perimeter was demolished or burning. The interior glowed in a jumble of radiation and steadily expanding smoke plumes. Stormbirds strafed freely, driving towards the beleaguered city centre where three mighty cathedral domes, swollen and draped in psionic cabling, surged into the tortured skies amid a sea of unleashed plasma discharge.

  More Legion infantry were landed in the secured zones, and they pushed out rapidly from the dropsites, destroying remaining pockets of resistance and linking up to form preordained battlefronts. Tank squadrons trundled up hard-gouged fire lanes, their barrels superheated from rapid firing and their smokestacks belching. It was as if a noose of fire were rapidly closing about the shaken apex, unbroken and impenetrable.

  The last and greatest of the nephilim, colossal creatures bloated by the most extreme acts of adoration, withdrew to their final line of defence, taking those of their slaved troops who could still stand with them into the yawning precincts of the central sanctuaries. Motivated by the dregs of a fanaticism that had once led them to enslave the stars, the nephilim activated the rings of atomic-class explosives that would incinerate the cathedral foundations and turn the entire structure into a sacrificial offering to their imminently expiring god-caste.

  Had those explosives detonated, the blast radius would have been close to fifty kilometres across – more than enough to annihilate the entire frontline of combatants in an orgy of mutual destruction. Perhaps the xenos commanders calculated that the enemy would even allow them to do it, bringing a speedy end to a war that had already claimed a body count of billions.

  But the Khan had not sent his sons blindly into battle. The Legion had scoured intercepted audex lines for weeks, and the primarch had worked his xenolexicographers hard to tease out the full implications of the nephilim’s death-cult philosophy. This was combined with a long period of supra-orbital scanning of the urban layers, cross referenced with archived intelligence on culture and psychology taken from battle reports compiled by IX and XVI Legion strategeos. Scenarios were rehearsed, contingencies drawn up, capabilities analysed. When the time came, and Imperial troops were finally let loose onto Hoadh, there was little the xenos command could do that had not been foreseen.

  Thus was a final wave of Legion assets held back, poised on the teleportation chambers of the fleet in readiness for one final eventuality. As the regular troops closed in on the cathedral approaches, racing up the wide stairways with blades humming, the order was given, and warp coils snarled into life across twenty separate ship-borne transponders.

  In every atomic depot, Stormseers materialised at ground level and immediately swung into action, throwing stasis fields across the degrading containment units. One by one, the countdowns froze, and escorted teams of enginseers moved in to disable the neural connectors controlling the stockpiles.

  While the Stormseers destroyed the ring of atomics, a second phalanx of warriors a hundred strong transported straight inside the cathedral’s nave itself, materialising far ahead of the rapidly approaching Imperial battlefront to set themselves against the full concentration of remaining xenos. They were clad, as all the warriors of the Khan’s Legion now were, in ivory and gold, their Cataphractii Terminator plate still fizzing with warp residue and their long glaives snarling. Las-fire opened up immediately from all sides, filling the gloomy interior with hard flashes, but the rain of impacts skipped harmlessly from such heavy armour.

  Then the keshig, the honour guard of the primarch himself, responded. A stormfront of bolt-shells and volkite beams blazed out from the teleport locus, shattering arches and gouging stone. The Terminators powered into the attack, still highly mobile despite their formidable bulk, crashing into the enemy amid a wall of machine noise.

  The surviving nephilim hurried to engage them, surrounded by their strange auras of sonic shock and aiming their shriekpulse weaponry, but this was rank slaughter now. Their reality-ripping guns had negligible effect on armour plate designed to withstand the physical effects of void-boarding actions, and the Terminators crashed into the enemy in a ruinous wave of servo-accelerated violence.

  Their leader, a towering figure with a dragon helm, crunched up the wide steps towards the cable-draped altar, a long curved blade whistling around him in disruptor-spitting arcs. A blue-strobing nephilim strode to intercept him, but was dispatched contemptuously with a dazzlingly fast figure of eight from the flaring tulwar blade.

  The oldest and foulest of the nephilim, the patriarch of the adored, sat enthroned under the apex of the cathedral’s sagging dome, its seat a forest of glistening cables and neural fronds. The creature’s fish-like skin, slack with age and desperation, swelled across slippery armrests. Dozens of slaved atte
ndants shrank back against its obscene bulk as if for protection, their disbelieving faces hidden behind neuro-dermic masks, too terrified even to fire the effectual weapons they still possessed.

  The xenos rose tremulously to its huge feet, a swaying mountain of translucent flesh weighed down with a ceremonial cowl, its tiny black eyes sunk deep within folds of sweat-rank skin. Wearily, knowing the judgement of the galaxy had already fallen, it drew a long black blade, knapped and faceted. The air around it shook, disturbed by the sonic harmonics emitted from the weapon.

  ‘This will… damn you,’ the creature intoned in broken machine-Gothic through some kind of vox-translator box clamped around its jawline and trailing wet power plugs. ‘I lay… curse upon you.’

  The dragon-helmed Legion warrior did not pause, or even glance at the fragile bodyguards, but launched himself into the monster before him. His first blow cracked the black blade; the second shattered it. The patriarch staggered backwards, stumbling against the throne and slipping on the bloody floor. Screams filtered up through the cathedral’s high vaults, repeated and augmented by the slaughter taking place in the neural-harvester chapels.

  The xenos staggered away from the onslaught, panting, for the first time at eye level with the vengeful leviathan of ceramite and gold that pursued it. The tulwar rose, casting a curved shadow across the monster’s thick neck.

  But it never fell. The last of the killing ended in the nave beyond, and the echoes of bolter-clamour slowly died away. Faint, strangled sobbing could be heard welling up from the depths, and from outside the giant walls came the muffled booms of ongoing ordnance.

  The patriarch focussed blearily on the tulwar’s edge and cracked a dry smile. ‘Thought it would be… your primarch. Would have… preferred that.’

  Then, from the base of the stairs, a final column of teleportation energy snarled into spitting life. From its glowing heart stepped a figure in immaculate ivory and gold. A heavy crimson cloak swirled about him, caught in the eddy of the locus beam as it snapped out of existence. He carried a naked dao blade, as long as a man’s height, engraved with ancient Khorchin battle-curses. His face was exposed – raw and severe, the bronzed skin as hard as iron and marred by the long scar that ran the length of his left cheek.

  When the Khan gazed at his enemy, there was an imperiousness there, a disdain that had been cultivated over years of similar conquests. He trod the wide steps at his leisure, never looking about him even as his assembled warriors bowed before him.

  The nephilim emitted what passed for a chuckle, and fluid cascaded down its chins.

  ‘So will you… do it, then? End it… here?’

  The Khan glanced at his dragon-helmed warrior. ‘Did it fight well, Xa?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Khagan.’

  ‘Then it doesn’t deserve the honour.’

  He turned away, even as the master of the keshig plunged his blade into the nephilim’s neck and hauled it out the other side, bisecting the joint cleanly.

  The Khan surveyed the site of battle. The blood was still hot, the screams were still audible, but already there was an impatience in him: to bring this war to its conclusion; to find the next one; to seek the harder test that would temper his still-bipartite Legion and hammer out its remaining imperfections.

  But it was done. There was something to report back to Terra, something that would no doubt please the Sigillite. Comms were already coming in from both Hasik and Giyahun – they had secured their final targets and were racing one another to reach the cathedral first. Yesugei had destroyed the last of the atomic stores and was now commencing the task of recovering any slaves who still had their minds intact. A hundred queries and requests for orders flashed across the Khan’s retinal battle-feed, almost all of which could be delegated to field commanders but gave an indication of the scale of what still needed doing.

  The Khan looked up, scanning across the high vaulting. Pods lined the walls, clogged with nutrient cabling. Many were smashed and glossy with burst liquids, but a few remained intact, cradling the foetal curl of human occupants. This building alone housed hundreds of such pods, slowly draining the energy from their occupants and feeding it to the soul-gluttons who had harvested them. The chapels and silos beyond would hold thousands more, row upon row, an industrial machine-city constructed around the delusions of the fearfully religious.

  You were lucky, Jaghatai… We tell you of Old Night and you barely believe us.

  Qin Xa drew alongside him. He had unsealed his helm and locked it to his armour, and now his calm, steady face looked out at the horrors shackled above them.

  ‘Initial assessment,’ the Khan said.

  ‘Three Terran contingents reached their forward objectives too slowly. They are still more thorough than us, though – this is something we need to preserve.’

  ‘Try to preserve everything, and we preserve nothing. I want unity of doctrine.’

  Qin Xa let slip a wry half-smile. ‘Unity?’ he asked.

  ‘You reported tracking locks prior to our assault. Are the augurs still getting those?’

  ‘No. But they may just be getting cleverer – our attention has been elsewhere for a while.’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe they are just a long way off.’

  ‘If so, more reason to be interested.’

  The Khan sheathed his long blade, unused in this action. Since its forging it had been employed only sparingly, a weapon reserved for a threat worthy of it.

  ‘You can conclude this, I trust?’ the primarch asked.

  Qin Xa gave a final glance at the racks of pods, the foul machinery of essence-extraction and the morbid corpses of the soul-gluttons.

  ‘It will all be destroyed,’ he said, with some feeling.

  ‘Not a stone left of it,’ the Khan agreed, marching down the long nave. ‘Not a single one left alive.’

  ‘Our first sole conquest, Khagan,’ called Qin Xa after him. ‘In the shadow of no others now. Cause for pride, perhaps?’

  The Khan kept walking.

  ‘Not yet,’ he muttered, his boots ankle-deep in blood and muck. ‘Not by a long way.’

  The fires took a long time to die down – Hoadh’s sun set, but the difference in ambient light level was almost imperceptible due to the volume of ash in the atmosphere.

  Every city of the nephilim was located, taken and razed. Hunter-killer teams of Legion warriors were dispatched into the depths of the steaming jungles, shadowed by flights of augur-stuffed flyers. The last of the xenos’ void fleet was blown apart before making the jump into the warp, and squadrons of Legion frigates prowled deep into the system’s depths to seek out enemy remnants and stand guard on the Mandeville points.

  The huge bodies of the xenos were transported to pyre-zones and immolated in heaps, scrutinised the whole time by the emchi apothecaries and enginseers from the fleet. Initial hopes that significant volumes of slaves could be freed proved overly optimistic – most were too damaged even for safe reuse in servitor duty, and so were euthanised in long, dreary cavalcades before being consumed by the same massed infernos.

  That duty was hated, causing localised insubordination from some elements of the Imperial Army regiments. When asked to issue punishment, the Khan demurred. ‘It’s to their credit,’ he told Giyahun. ‘Get them back into their ships. Give this task to the Legion.’

  So it was that, slowly, the Imperial Army units were withdrawn from combat, consolidated, then lifted back into the waiting orbital haulers. The remainder of the mop-up work was done by warriors of the ordu, better equipped to survive the plentiful array of booby-trapped vaults and hab-units as well as the grim task of mass culling.

  A few humans did survive, though – recent arrivals to Hoadh, some even plucked from xenos transports before they could be unloaded into the empath chapels. Yesugei was assiduous in hunting them down, sparing as many from the furnaces as he could. The healthiest were questioned, their confused responses recorded by Legion archivists and prepared for dispatch to Terra.

/>   One of them, a man calling himself Elias, was judged strong enough to be taken before the Khan. Being brought into the presence of a primarch, even for an undamaged human, could induce extreme reactions, so hopes for genuine elucidation were slight. Still, after treatment, Elias’ vital signs had recovered to within almost normal parameters, and he seemed willing enough to meet his liberator. Yesugei came with him, and the meeting took place amid the ruins of a secondary empath chapel some distance from the burning central complex.

  The Khan removed his helm, locked it to his armour and folded his arms. Elias stood before him, flanked by Legion guards, looking beyond pathetic – a skinny, stooped invalid with hollow eyes.

  ‘What was your origin world?’ the primarch asked him.

  Elias looked up, for a moment too awestruck to form words. The Khan waited.

  ‘My origin world… Pelessar, lord. Pelessar.’

  The Khan glanced at Yesugei. ‘Mark for scrutiny.’ Then he returned to the cowering man. ‘What do you know of your captors?’

  Elias’ face flickered into a smile – the nervous, betraying smile of guilt or fear, or maybe excitement. ‘Captors? You mean, lord… I don’t know. They were not–’

  ‘The nephilim. The giants.’

  ‘Angels.’ Elias was grinning now, as if he couldn’t help himself. ‘Our angels.’

  The Khan’s expression tightened. ‘These places,’ he said, gesturing around them. ‘You would have been next.’

  Elias’ fragile gaze shot up to the smashed extraction pods, many still saturated with blood and fleshplug-lubricants. ‘We were the faithful.’ He began to look confused. ‘I don’t know why. It’s… hard.’