‘Since we have been here, I have watched them, studied them and the effects of their weapons on our own. Only by building a repository of knowledge can we truly fight the necrons effectively. A better question though, brother, might be: why might such creatures be needed here in this remote region?’
Realisation came quickly and starkly to Brakkius.
‘There are necrons right here beneath us.’
‘I would estimate in their hundreds, but that’s not all the presence of the scarabs tells us.’
‘What else?’ asked Brakkius.
‘That they are waking up.’
‘Vox-comms are down,’ shouted Largo, scouting at the front of the squad.
Scipio called them to a halt.
Garrik checked Largo’s findings to make sure it was not just his brother’s vox that was malfunctioning.
‘Mine too, brother-sergeant,’ he reported, tapping the ear-bead embedded inside his helmet, but unable to provoke the unit into function.
‘Brother Auris?’ Scipio asked the Ultramarine consulting the auspex.
‘It must be the cave walls, some mineral interference. We’ll be free of it once we’re on the other side.’
‘What kind of scanner returns are you getting?’
‘Weak, brother-sergeant,’ said Auris. ‘But there’s a larger chamber up ahead. It’s possible we could receive an improved signal in there.’
‘This entire complex is large,’ said Garrik. ‘I have never seen anything like it, save for the old arcologies on Calth. It makes me question what it’s for.’
Scipio regarded him. ‘What it’s for? You don’t believe these caves are natural, brother?’
Garrik shone his luminators, casting the interior rock faces in pellucid white.
‘Look at the walls. They’re smooth, as if bored. No cave system is this vast, not all the way through. Where is the variation, the natural beauty? I see none of that here.’
Scipio saw that Garrik was right. So focused was he on getting a signal to Chronus or Agrippen back in Kellenport, he had neglected to pay attention to what was in front of his face.
The tunnels were – he hesitated, knowing the word he sought was not ‘man-made’ – machine-made, carved from the bedrock of Damnos. From what little he knew of the Vogenhoff region, it was extremely remote and had no mining operations. There were no cities, subterranean or otherwise, no settlements of any kind. It was far enough north of Kellenport to be uninhabited and yet these caves had seen the passage of one life form or another.
For a moment, Scipio considered what exactly the ice and rock of Damnos encrusted. Before the coming of the Emperor’s illuminance and the Great Crusade, some ten thousand years ago, the galaxy had been a lightless place. And it was old, so Imperial scholars and the alien eldar believed. Races far more ancient than man once ruled the stars. It was only logical to assume that some of them had lived on the worlds mankind had colonised. Perhaps some, those able to withstand the entropy of time and the elements, had never left.
The chrono counting down on Scipio’s retinal display was at twenty-eight minutes. They had used up over half of Vantor’s time getting this far.
‘Keep moving,’ he ordered. ‘And, scout,’ he added to Largo, who was leading them out, ‘stay close until we can restore vox.’
It took another six minutes to reach the cavern Auris had specified.
It was vast. Immense, in fact. Ice floes trickled down ribbed walls that rose up into a vaulted ceiling prickled with distant stalactites. Swathes of frost crunched underfoot, becoming bulwarks of ice where the floor met the walls.
An entire hangar of gunships would have no difficulty fitting inside the massive chamber, Scipio realised. But like the others, it was not the cavern’s sheer size that caught his attention, it was the strange vents in the floor.
There were hundreds, arranged in perfect symmetry, their wide necks tapering to a much narrower aperture at the end. Languid vapour was oozing from the mouths of these bizarre, unnatural formations. Encrusted with hoarfrost, a casual observer might have mistaken them for some genus of subterranean flora, but they were not remotely anything like that.
Scipio realised almost at once that the vents were metallic and distinctly alien in origin. The vapour spilling from their mouths was doing so downwards, carpeting the floor around them in a pale mist. He suspected this too was unnaturally produced, likely heavy in nitrogen or fluorine.
‘Tell me what you see, brother,’ he said to Largo, who had reached the strange crop of vents and was knelt down examining one of them.
Auris joined him, scanning with the auspex.
‘Definitely inorganic…’ Auris muttered.
‘There are tracks here, too,’ added Largo, leaving his brother to his analysis and moving further into the chamber.
With Garrik on overwatch, Scipio went after Largo to see what he had discovered.
‘Two kinds,’ Largo continued, throwing the light of his luminator over a deep impression of what could only be a booted imprint made by power armour. ‘And here,’ he added, highlighting a second example. The latter were also recognisable.
‘Tank tracks,’ Scipio whispered, trying to put together what he was seeing into some form of logical order. ‘We are not the first Ultramarines to reconnoitre this cave system.’
‘Sergeant Egnatius’s tank company scouted into the Vogenhoff region,’ said Largo.
‘I heard of no reports of this cavern. Why would a veteran officer like Votan Egnatius not make mention of it?’ Scipio looked around. They were surrounded by a veritable field of vents. He and Largo were standing near the edge, but Auris was deep in amongst them conducting further scans. There were several others, colonising the entire chamber in perfectly rectangular areas.
‘Brother Auris…’ Scipio began, instinctively reaching for his bolt pistol.
‘Something is happening…’ Auris replied, intent on his analysis.
‘Brother,’ said Largo.
Scipio caught Garrik’s attention and signalled him to hold position.
Auris was peering down into the mouth of one of the vents. ‘The gaseous vapour is abating. I can see something inside it…’ He checked the auspex, before looking back. ‘Retinal analysis is inconclu–’
A dark mass was suddenly expectorated from the vent. It spattered against Auris’s faceplate, forcing him to drop the auspex and recoil.
Garrik was about to advance, but Scipio’s raised hand stopped him.
All of the vents had stopped fuming. Something was trickling down their fluted sides. No, not trickling… crawling.
‘It’s all right,’ said Auris, signalling the all clear. ‘Must have been some kind of blockage, probably from–’ He stopped with an abrupt jerk. A swarm of tiny insect-like creatures had penetrated his vox-grille, bored through the hairline gaps between his helmet and its retinal lenses. They had bypassed his gorget and were, even now, infiltrating his body through his mouth, ears and nose.
Hidden by the vapour cloud amassing around the base of the vents, Scipio failed to see the rest of the swarm until it crept beyond the edge of the field in an oily black mass.
‘Watch your footing,’ he warned Garrik, pulling Largo back a few steps and gesturing down to where the insects had begun to converge. ‘Auris,’ he shouted out, his voice echoing and hollow. ‘Brother!’ Scipio said more urgently when the Ultramarine did not immediately respond.
Auris was covered in the writhing creatures, but he made no move against them. Instead, he looked up slowly, straightening his body.
‘You should not have come,’ he uttered in a voice not entirely his own.
‘Ghost of Hera…’ hissed Largo, and carefully raised his bolter.
‘This is not your world,’ said Auris, ‘it never was,’ and shot Largo in the chest.
Both Scipio and Garrik o
pened fire a half-second later, killing a warrior they had once called brother but who was now lost to some terrible affliction neither could understand.
Auris went down amongst the vapour. His ident-rune turned red on Scipio’s tactical display, indicating a kill.
‘What just happened?’ Garrik shouted from across the chamber, sidearm still in hand. About twenty metres separated them, the width of one of the vent fields.
‘Stay where you are,’ Scipio told him. ‘Do not cross the vents.’ He went to Largo. Mercifully, the Ultramarine’s armour had taken the brunt of the shot but his ribplate could be cracked. ‘Can you walk?’ Scipio asked, acutely aware of the oily swarm creeping ever closer.
With some difficulty, Largo nodded. Scipio got him to his feet.
‘Soon as we are clear,’ he called to Garrik, ‘I want you to destroy this abomination.’
Garrik scowled. ‘With pleasure, sergeant.’
As he helped Largo around the field of vents protruding obscenely from the ice, Scipio realised the function of this place. It was a breeding ground, both for the minute constructs oozing from the vents and the unwilling slaves they created. Here they had peeled back another layer of the necron epidermis and found yet greater aberration.
Garrik had backed up as far as the cavern entrance.
There would be no pressing ahead now. The entire cave system was enemy territory. They had to go back, and get airborne as quickly as possible.
‘Bring it down, brother,’ said Scipio. ‘Then fall back.’
Garrik nodded, having already shouldered his launcher, and released a fragmentation missile into the ceiling. Cracking ice followed in the wake of the explosion as a rain of brittle, razor-edged stalactites cascaded down onto the vents. The entire cavern shook, but not just with the force of detonation. The Ultramarines’ presence and subsequent attack had prompted a response. As the deluge of rock and ice crushed the vents, fissures were already splitting the cavern floor and walls. These were not natural clefts, but machine-engineered. Heat swept in from below, the heat of engines and subterranean power coils. Verdant light exuded through the slowly expanding cracks, melting the ice floes and liquidising the frost.
Garrik fed two more missiles into the vent field that had claimed Auris, just to be sure, stowed his launcher and then ran. He caught up to Scipio in short order, the sergeant having lagged behind to help Largo.
‘Brother-sergeant, what happened to Auris?’ asked the heavy weapon trooper.
‘I don’t know,’ Scipio answered honestly. Behind them the verdant light was growing, spilling outwards like the dawning of some viridian sun. It would herald the coming of the necrons Scipio now realised were buried below. If they had not reached the Gladius and got airborne by the time that happened, there would be no dawn for them.
A salutary thought penetrated his consciousness then – Damnos could not be saved. The only recourse left was to get everyone off-planet as quickly as possible, and the realisation of that fact at least provided purpose.
‘He fired on Largo,’ said Garrik, unnerved by what he had witnessed. ‘To see him taken over so quickly, so easily…’
Largo did not meet his gaze. He was concentrating hard on staying upright and ignoring the pain in his chest.
‘Something inside the vent infected him,’ said Scipio.
‘Infected him?’ asked Garrik, incredulous.
‘Turned his mind, I don’t know how. But he might not be the only one.’
‘If that’s true…’ Garrik let his words hang.
‘We must reach the Gladius,’ Scipio told them, ‘and hope that when we do Vantor is ready for immediate take-off.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PYRRHIC VICTORY
Chronus could not deny a deep sense of self-satisfaction.
Despite the necron surprise attack, the battle was his. Ultramar victoris!
From here they could use the victory as a staging ground, bring in the gunships from the Valin’s Revenge, bring in Rhino-mounted infantry and drive their assault deep into the heart of enemy territory. They would crush the necrons in their sleep, set charges around their tombs and purge this world in the name of the Emperor, reclaiming it for the Imperium.
He was not a man given to vainglory; what he did, he did for duty and honour, but these necrons were a singular foe he took pride in vanquishing.
The last of their resistance on the ice plain was fading. All of the arachnid constructs had withdrawn from the field, and the final few barges and arks were slowly being corralled by an unrelenting ring of Ultramarian steel. An android brain, however advanced, was no match for true will and human heart. And here was the evidence of that.
Both the Vindicators and Whirlwinds had removed themselves from the engagement and taken up bombardment positions again back on the ridge line. It was a needless contingency, but Chronus was wary of further rapid deployments courtesy of the necron phasic generators. With the withdrawal of the siege engines, that left the more manoeuvrable Predators and Raiders to chase down the more stubborn enemy elements, support vehicles acting as outriders.
Tesla-lightning and the verdant flare of gauss beams whipped across the battlefield, but it was desultory. A cohort of necron arks was bearing down on the Antonius and the other two tanks in its squadron. Chronus let them come on, pushing up to combat speed to draw them in. Over on the flank, he had the perfect answer to the necrons’ aggression.
‘Egnatius, bring in Stormwarden, Titus and Venator,’ he voxed. ‘Hammer them.’
An affirmation rune flashed up on Chronus’s retinal lens. Satisfied, he kept up the pace and checked the tactical display.
The five Raiders had formed up and were taking the necrons on the left flank apart. Gnaeus had joined them in the Secutor Maximus, adding to their already formidable firepower with his Predator Destructor.
That left Chronus and Egnatius to destroy the rest.
‘Vutrius,’ Chronus called back to his gunner. ‘Keep that turret on them.’ Suppressing fire from the other two tanks in the commander’s squadron, The Vengeful and Hellhunter, wrecked one of the arks and sent it ploughing into the ice.
That left two. No challenge for Egnatius.
Stormwarden was leading the charge with Titus and Venator close on the front Predator’s heels. They had yet to discharge weapons. Three autocannons would make scrap of the necron vehicles.
Gauss fire hammered in on the Antonius and its fellow squadron members. An outriding Rhino was hit and went up explosively, showering The Vengeful with shrapnel.
‘Egnatius,’ Chronus barked down the vox, ‘what are you waiting for? Engage!’
Still the necron arks came on, slipping into an advantageous position as the Predators’ attack vector took them out of a forwards firing arc and presented their flanks and rear to the enemy.
One of the arks unleashed its main energy weapon. It struck the already wounded Hellhunter in the side, flipping the tank onto its roof where it convulsed explosively. Rolling hard, trying to manoeuvre back into a better firing position, the Rage of Antonius and The Vengeful left the sorry carcass of their destroyed squadron tank behind.
Scipio reached the cave mouth with Largo and Garrik close behind him.
What he saw in the valley below turned his determination into a sense of grim finality. The Gladius was gone, doubtless consumed by an undulating swarm.
The crash site was obliterated from view, overrun by diminutive necron scarab constructs.
‘There must be thousands,’ said Largo, slumping against a rock.
Behind them, the din of machine activation still sounded and the verdant glow of necron revivification intensified.
‘Can’t go forwards, can’t go back,’ uttered Garrik. He checked his ammunition. ‘I have two krak missiles and one fragmentation in my rack. How shall I spend them, brother-sergeant?’
Scipio drew his chainsword and planted it blade-first in the ice.
‘This is our ridge now. I have just claimed it for our Chapter. As sovereign territory of Ultramar, it is our honour-bound duty to defend it. Let the necrons come. They’ll find Ultramarines do not die easily.’
‘They won’t have long to learn that,’ said Garrik, gesturing to the scarab swarm that swept towards them like a dark cloud.
From deep inside the cave mouth came the hollow cadence of mechanised feet marching in unison. The first warrior constructs had awoken.
Scipio wrenched his chainsword free and drew his bolt pistol.
‘In my eyes, you are all heroes.’
Above them, the unmistakable burr of turbine engines could be heard as a very welcome shadow fell across the trio.
‘Guilliman’s blood…’ breathed Garrik, looking up at the descending form of the Gladius. For a moment, it stayed suspended in the air, Vantor watching them through the repaired glacis. Then with a burst of the gunship’s stabiliser jets, the Techmarine swung around to present the Gladius’s flank where Brakkius and an open side-hatch awaited.
Largo went first. Well harnessed in the flank gunner’s seat, Brakkius caught his wrist and helped him aboard. Garrik went next, leaving Scipio for last. Brakkius grabbed his sergeant’s shoulder guard as he came aboard and Vantor gunned the engines.
‘You’re late,’ he said, betraying not a trace of humour.
‘And you are very much alive, brother,’ Scipio replied. ‘A fact I find surprisingly pleasing.’
Brakkius clapped him on the shoulder in comradely fashion, but then added, ‘Where is Brother Auris?’
Scipio shook his head.
‘His duty has ended.’
Not lingering, Scipio went immediately to the on-board vox. Amplified by the gunship’s superior communication systems and now free of environmental interference, he was able to open a channel to Commander Chronus. He only hoped he was not already too late.
Chronus was incensed. From a position of certain victory, Egnatius’s defiance of orders had given the necrons a foothold back and endangered his engines into the bargain.
Damnos - Nick Kyme Page 43