It’s just the fear talking. Ignore it. Grit your teeth.
Falka did; he gritted his teeth and clenched his hands into fists. He had reached the makeshift avenue of beds that led him to where Jynn was lying. Clutching one of the beds’ metal rails, barely noticing the catatonic figure seemingly paralysed upon it, he struggled on. It was like wading through an ice storm, only it was the phantoms in his mind and not the elements assailing him. Something lurked in the outer darkness of the infirmary, and it was slowly creeping towards him. Falka fought to maintain his tunnel vision, eyes locked on her and only her. She needed him, and he used that thought to galvanise him and reach Jynn’s bed. Even comatose, she had not been spared the horrors. Whether experiencing some nightmare brought on by the coma or feeling the shared dread that had affected everyone in the infirmary, Jynn was convulsing too.
Hands trembling, Falka managed to hold her down.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ he soothed, one giant hand keeping her still while he tenderly stroked her forehead with the other. No one came close. She and he were an island amidst the madness. His presence seemed to calm her but she was mewling in her coma sleep, reliving Throne-only-knew what dark moments embedded in her psyche.
Falka knew it was this deep-seeded fear that affected them, one so potent it could conjure the dead or render a grown man insensate. Without exception, the entire infirmary had capitulated before it. Perhaps all of Kellenport was lost to it? What if this were the end?
Falka rallied, forcing himself to focus on Jynn and getting her out of this alive.
‘Hold on,’ he whispered, clinging to his last shreds of sanity. ‘Hold on, for me,’ he repeated as the far wall of the infirmary was wrenched away in a storm of tearing metal and iridescent energy.
Men and women were thrown into the air by the blast. Some were shredded, cut in half by the wreckage of the destroyed wall. Falka saw others transfixed by jade-green lightning arcs, their bodies shuddering as they were rendered down to their scorched bones.
It happened so fast, experienced through fear-dulled senses, he barely reacted. But this was no apparition brought on by the terrible din droning throughout the infirmary; it was real.
Through the gaping hole where the infirmary wall had once stood, Falka saw out into the Damnos night and glimpsed two sickle-shaped objects arcing rapidly through the sky. It was the necrons; he felt it in his marrow. They had returned at last, just as he always knew they would.
The city was under attack.
Bodies had been cast everywhere. Some lay unmoving, either dead or too scared to move. Others, farther from the blast, had noticed the burly rig-hand and the woman he was protecting. Their faces looked feral in the half-light, barely human at all. Falka saw things glinting in their hands. They looked to him like blades: scalpels, knives and medical saws. He pulled out the laslock, brandishing it in the hope they would get the message and back away. To his right, another group had seen them and was advancing. They had just finished cutting into another coma victim, his blood still on their knives.
‘Cut it out,’ said one, drunk with madness.
‘Cut out the horrors,’ echoed another, and Falka was reminded of the scarab swarm, the one he had imagined nesting in his chest. They had seen them too, only they did not possess the strength of mind to realise they were not real.
The men and women converging on him and Jynn were lost. Waving a pistol at them would do no good.
‘Stay away,’ Falka warned one last time as the shadows behind them came alive again with the hulking skeletal figures. He squeezed Jynn’s hand, willing her to give him strength.
Falka fired, but the laslock went dead in his hand, its power cell drained. He calmly holstered the pistol, knowing the feral Damnosians would be on them in moments.
‘You can’t have her,’ he told them, scowling. ‘You’ll have to go through me first.’
‘Cut it out,’ said the leader of the mob, a simple clerk. He seemed not to hear Falka’s threat. ‘Cut it all out…’
From his position on the wall, Iulus swung around and tried to aim through his bolter’s scope. The skimmer was moving too fast, like a bullet, and banking as it sped over Kellenport, letting out a wailing dirge from its engines.
It was not alone, either. A second craft joined the first, both small enough to be fighters and armed with underslung weaponry. Iulus heard the wall guns answering the threat, and saw one lit up by a twin lightning arc spat from one fighter’s cannons. Both the emplacement and its crew were ripped apart and splattered over Kellenport’s cold stone with nothing in reply.
Down in the courtyard below, the Damnosian citizenry – runners, soldiers, militia, medics – were screaming in fear. Imagined terrors spilled from their lips as spectres of old friends or gratefully forgotten enemies came back to claim them for the afterlife. A battalion of Ark Guard sent to quell the sudden distemper had succumbed to it instead. To see them so unmanned would have disgusted Iulus once; now, he just pitied them and knew this enemy was merely beyond them. No human, as far as he could determine anyway, was immune. Only the Ultramarines seemed unaffected.
He raised his squad on the vox, following the arcing flight path of the fighters as they turned and wheeled. Hitting a flyer at that speed would be nigh-on impossible. They needed an advantage.
Iulus scowled. One had yet to present itself.
‘Immortals, gain the walls if you’re not already on them and try to bring these things down!’
Fortune might yet favour them. It was better than nothing, but not much better.
Staccato bolter fire echoed from the city battlements, muzzle flashes lighting the gloom and showing Iulus where his men had responded. But as the sergeant had predicted, the fighters were too fast and nimble. Hot tracer whipped through the air, but it was like chasing smoke on a gale.
Other squads joined the fusillade being levelled at the fighters and the sky ignited with explosions and spearing las-beams. The necrons ran the entire gauntlet without so much as a glancing hit. Atavian had marshalled his Devastators in the square but even the so-called ‘Titan Slayers’ struggled to get a bead on the rapidly moving craft.
The presence of the fighters was disconcerting. The Ultramarines had not encountered forces such as these before on Damnos. As he tried to chase one down through his targeter, Iulus wondered what else was in the necron arsenal, lurking below the ice.
Scythe-edged and menacing, one of the fighters broke off from its attack pattern and dived towards Infirmary Seven where Iulus had sent Kolpeck. With a burst from its guns, the necron tore the makeshift field hospital open and exposed its wounded to the elements and its further wrath.
Leaping from the wall, Iulus split rockcrete as he landed. Ignoring the gibbering bodies thronging the courtyard, he raced for the infirmary. Kolpeck had saved his life during the siege; he was not about to allow that debt to go unpaid by letting the man die in ignominy.
Having seen their sergeant so driven, Aristaeus and Venkelius joined him from the lower battlements.
‘Brothers,’ Iulus told them as they ran across the courtyard, careful to avoid the fear-gripped Damnosians, ‘they will be afraid, and almost certainly not themselves. Try not to kill them.’
Both Ultramarines nodded to their sergeant.
Upon reaching the terrified guards still manning their posts at the infirmary entrance, Aristaeus stepped up and subdued the men with two swift blows from the pommel of his gladius.
‘Like that?’ he asked.
‘There’ll be more inside,’ Iulus warned them both, ‘and in much closer confines. Put your weapons away.’
Aristaeus had his flamer, whilst Venkelius carried a missile launcher slung across his back. Both warriors had their standard bolt pistol sidearm and Ultramarian gladius.
‘And hold on to them,’ added Iulus, once all three had secured their arms. ‘Last t
hing we need in there is someone drawing your blade in the chaos.’
Iulus opened the infirmary gate with a hard kick. As they stepped inside, a hellish vista greeted them. Even the darkness could not hide what had become of the hundreds hiding within. Bloodied, wailing, clad in scraps and scuttling like beasts; the infirmary had become more of an asylum, and one in which the inmates were running amok.
Several were dead already, their bodies slumped and pooling blood. Skirmishes had broken out in places, whilst some of the victims turned their terror-fuelled anger against shadows or the inanimate. Fear-sweat drenched the air. Iulus detected heavy concentrations of epinephrine, norepinephrine and adrenaline secreted by the victims and expressed through the Damnosians’ autonomic responses. The heady chemical cocktail merged with the stench of recently spilled blood, exacerbating the terror felt by those inside the infirmary.
‘This is no hospital,’ growled Aristaeus, unable to suppress his combat instincts. ‘It’s a war zone.’ He slid a finger’s width of gladius blade out of the sheath before Iulus’s voice stopped him going any further.
‘No weapons,’ he stated firmly.
‘Hand-to-hand then…’ uttered Venkelius, nodding to a group of manic-looking Damnosians who had reacted to the Ultramarines’ sudden presence.
‘And no killing,’ added Iulus as an orderly came at him with a surgical saw. Emitting a low grunt, he backhanded the man gently enough so as not to kill him, but still sent him sprawling.
Aristaeus deflected an IV frame swung at him by another, the metal bending around his armoured forearm before he planted the flat of his palm into his aggressor’s chest, flooring him.
Venkelius broke the arm of a third, a woman, using a deft elbow strike to shatter the bone.
‘Battle-brother!’ Iulus warned the heavy weapon trooper.
The woman had collapsed into a heap, clutching her broken limb.
‘She’s not dead, sergeant,’ Venkelius answered, mildly apologetic.
Iulus glanced sharply in his direction. ‘Pull your punches.’
Dispatching a second round of attackers, the humans so mindless with terror that they hurled themselves at them, the three Ultramarines advanced through the masses. When faced with the giant warriors, most of the Damnosians balked and fled. Others collapsed in foetal despair, willing the nightmare to be over. Iulus did not know what these poor wretches were seeing but if it kept them at bay he was not about to question it. Only the worst affected attacked, and these fools the Ultramarines dealt with swiftly, but not lethally.
As he fought, Iulus scanned the crowd for Kolpeck. He had locked the man’s image in his mind and would know it immediately.
‘There!’ he shouted to his comrades, who had spread out to cover more ground and subdue more of the truly insane. Iulus pointed to a nearby bunk surrounded by a clutch of blade-wielding men and women. At the heart of it was Kolpeck, an unconscious woman next to him. He was trying to protect her, roaring his defiance at the homicidal figures closing their net of sharp steel.
Ignoring his own orders, Iulus drew his bolt pistol and discharged an explosive round into the air.
The pistol report resounded in the infirmary, despite the terror-dirge. Several Damnosians in his path turned at the sound.
‘Step aside!’ Iulus bellowed, and the majority ran. Any stupid enough to stay were battered by the charging Ultramarine. He was just a few metres away. Out the corner of his eye, Iulus caught sight of Aristaeus and Venkelius converging on him. He also noticed the gaping hole in the side of the infirmary, and heard the necron fighter descending in front of it before he saw it.
Despite Kolpeck’s imminent peril, Iulus stopped and crouched, aiming at the cleft in the wall.
‘Venkelius,’ he said over the vox.
The heavy weapon trooper was also on one knee, bracing his missile launcher on his shoulder. Knowing his flamer was of little use, Aristaeus kept his brother free of interference.
With his warriors now in position, Iulus thought back to that advantage he had sought. The sickle-edge of the necron fighter came into view. It was moving slowly, hovering to get a better shot, and believing there was no threat inside the infirmary.
Iulus smiled when he saw the pilot’s glowing eyes.
‘Surprise…’ he murmured.
Pilot had broken off from his twin, enacting annihilation protocols extracted from his datastacks. One would distract, whilst the other would reap the maximum damage, both biological and structural. Pilot had reviewed and theoretically tested all potential tactics and had determined that splitting the ships was the most effective.
Though he did not understand or possess the capacity to appreciate the psychological effects of terror, Pilot could determine the logic path to this form of attack and the reduction in the overall combat efficacy of an entrenched enemy because of it. Based on experiential data contained within the stacks, he knew it would increase the success ratio of further attacks and that there was a direct and statistically significant correlation between terror attacks and the eventual capitulation of an enemy force.
The punitive tesla arc he had unleashed against the structure, thus making it more vulnerable, was therefore not only logical but also the most effective course of action his android brain would allow him to take.
Decreasing propulsion, Pilot brought his flyer into a descent pattern that would place all effective weapons within lethal range of the biological matter inside the ruined structure. He calculated he had time for a single salvo before a further delay would breach acceptable threat parameters. A data stream indicated his primary weapon was the pre-eminent choice in this scenario.
Pilot engaged the death ray’s capacitors, fed energy into its power coils so that by the time he had the optimum shot it would be fire-ready. But as his targeting matrices locked on the focus of his beam, new data cascaded over the old. Threat parameters dramatically increased, warning Pilot that additional, un-factored variables had suddenly intruded on the balanced equation he had just made.
Processing the appropriate responses in nanoseconds, Pilot took evasive action as explosive fire raked over the hull of his craft. It achieved no lasting damage, and it was only then, as another data stream describing an incoming incendiary washed over his visual feed, that Pilot ascertained the first attack had been a feint and this second attack was the one intended to destroy him.
Pilot had enough time to realise his miscalculation, to see his inevitable doom relayed in streams of unfeeling, undeniable logic, before the missile struck the coruscating tip of the death ray and tore him and his scythed craft apart.
Iulus clenched a fist as the necron flyer exploded. Venkelius had shot well, and would be recommended for battle honour. Mercifully, no other casualties were caused by the flyer’s destruction. Well acquainted by now with necron tactics, Aristaeus was already rushing over to the burning wreck but the necron inside was gone, phased out from irreparable damage.
The flamer trooper turned to the others, giving the all clear.
Through the gap in the wall, the Thunderstorm streaked past on screaming turbofans, engines flaring. Just before the gunship disappeared from sight again, Iulus saw it discharge a missile payload at a target beyond his limited field of vision through the ruined wall and knew it was engaging the second flyer. With the destruction of his wingman, Iulus assumed the surviving craft would disengage. That assumption was borne out as, slowly, the terror-dirge receded and with its abeyance some semblance of composure returned. The chill of fear lingered still in its wake, but the men and women of the infirmary were beginning to come around. Some blinked, as if waking from a terrible dream; others wept, appalled at what they had done or still coming to terms with the remembered nightmares of the past.
It was raw, the atmosphere choked with grief and regret, but at least it was sane.
Iulus reached Kolpeck at last. The man was slow to
come down from his heightened emotional state, and he battered at the Ultramarine at first, hammering impotently at the warrior’s chest with his fists.
‘Stand down, Sergeant Kolpeck,’ Iulus told him, holding the man to his chest, holding him steady and firmly. ‘Stand down.’
Like some of his fellow Damnosians, Kolpeck blinked – there were tears in his eyes, not of fear or sorrow but defiance – and looked up at his saviour.
‘Brother-Angel,’ he said, voice choked with emotion. ‘Is she…?’ Iulus released him and Falka Kolpeck began to turn around.
‘She’s alive, trooper,’ Iulus told him, nodding to the prone woman on the bed whom Kolpeck had been protecting.
Now the tears really began to flow, of relief, of hope, of desperation.
‘Thank the Emperor…’ said Kolpeck.
Iulus did not stay to watch. He summoned Venkelius and Aristaeus, and the three of them went back out into Kellenport to see what was left of the city defences and, more importantly, the resolve of its defenders.
Iulus placed little hope in the continued endurance of either.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BROKEN SWORD
With a grunt of effort, Scipio dragged himself out of the snow-choked hold of the Gladius. From a cursory look, the gunship appeared to be largely intact, although it had been badly raked where its hull had connected with the sides of the canyon and a large section of wing including most of the right-hand side was buried under churned ice and snow.
They had crash-landed in a rocky valley, the surrounding crags and slab-sided boulders edged with frost. In the middle distance as he rapidly surveilled the area, Scipio noticed a nest of caves. A ridge of ice-rimed stone led to the lowest mouth, which was large enough to accommodate an entire armoured column. Drifts were still descending, not as heavy as before, but swathing any tracks friendly or enemy that might recently have been formed in the snow underfoot. To the naked eye it would appear virginal, but Scipio detected heat traces and the oily remnants of fuel thronging the ice-crisp breeze. Something had passed through this way, but he could detect no further sign of it beyond these lingering spoors.
Damnos - Nick Kyme Page 40