Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  Just for a second, Alvez saw the colonel’s expression grow rock hard at the barely veiled insult. Good, he thought. Perhaps there is a fighting man underneath all that decoration. We shall find out for sure when he learns of the coming storm. By Terra, it’s high time these people were reminded that the price of survival is paid in blood.

  ‘A good day to you, then, my lord,’ said the colonel, his tone slightly colder than before. Having been so bluntly dismissed, he saluted once more, turned and marched back to his men. When he had crossed half the distance towards them, Alvez relented and called out to him.

  ‘Colonel Cantrell.’

  The Rynnsguard officer stopped and turned. This time his eyes went straight to the towering captain’s face and stayed there. ‘My lord?’

  Alvez paused, then, pitching his voice so that Cantrell’s troopers could hear it clearly, he said, ‘Perhaps you and your men could do me a service after all.’

  The colonel’s face visibly brightened, and the chests of the Rynnsguard troops seemed to inflate.

  ‘Anything my lord requires. Anything at all.’

  ‘Provide a cordon,’ said Alvez. ‘Keep the public and the rest of the spaceport personnel at arm’s length while we prepare our ground transports. We shall be leaving for the Cassar as soon as possible. Have a direct route cleared for us. Set up barriers, do what you must. Co-opt local law enforcement if you feel it necessary, but I want nothing in our way between here and the Zona Regis.’

  ‘You will have it, lord,’ said Cantrell. ‘Is there someone with whom I can coordinate?’

  ‘Coordinate with my personal retainer,’ said Alvez. ‘Keep a vox-channel clear. Beta-channel, band four will suffice. His name is Merrin, and he will tell you all you need to know.’

  Cantrell accepted this information with a final bow, then turned towards his men and started snapping out orders.

  Alvez watched the Rynnsguard march off at double-time, then turned to supervise the unloading of his Thunderhawks.

  Had the politicians heard of his arrival by now? Almost certainly. They would be scurrying to make a great occasion of it, eager for the people to see them beside the Emperor’s finest. Blasted peacocks!

  There was a deep rumble and a clanking of treads from his right, and he turned to see his Land Raider armoured transport approaching to take him into the city.

  He walked off towards the massive machine, silently wondering just how long he had to get this city ready for the tide of foul xenos that was coming.

  Somehow, he knew it would not be long enough.

  Eight

  Zona Regis, New Rynn City

  Maia Cagliestra couldn’t recall being shaken awake since she had been a child of ten years old, but that was exactly how she met the world today. Groggy, her eyelids feeling like they had been tacked together, she struggled to get her bearings.

  ‘What… what’s going on?’

  When she opened her eyes, there was a moment of bright pain. Golden sunlight was already spilling into the room from the south windows. The heavy velvet drapes had been pulled back. Outside, the sky was blue and cloudless, a clear indication that the summer was on its way.

  Her chief lady-in-waiting was gently gripping Maia’s shoulders. She had stopped shaking them now. ‘You need to wake up, ma’am. We must get you ready at once. Secretary Mylos is already waiting for you on the grand balcony. I shall bring you breakfast there.’

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Maia. ‘And why are you waking me like this? You’ve never done that before, Shivara.’

  Shivara took her hands away now, but her expression was steely. She was a unique and formidable woman, and Maia trusted no one, not even Mylos, as much as she trusted her. Shivara was tall and beautiful and, under her form-fitting robes of white silk, powerfully muscled, though no less feminine in appearance for all that. Few people realised that Shivara was an off-worlder, not even Mylos. The woman was a sister of the Adepta Sororitas, trained from birth to be bodyguard and aide to those judged worthy of such protection. Planetary governors across the Imperium were protected by these deadly guardians. If something was bothering Shivara, Maia knew that she, too, had ample reason to be worried.

  ‘Please get up, ma’am,’ said Shivara. ‘Something unexpected has happened. The Crimson Fists have come to the city.’

  Maia sat bolt upright in her bed, dark hair tumbling down over her pale shoulders, a great smile spreading across her face. ‘They have? This is wonderful. Dare I hope the Chapter Master himself is among them?’

  Shivara frowned.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Maia, confused. ‘Their presence bothers you?’

  ‘Greatly, ma’am.’

  Maia was getting angry now. Her smile fell away. ‘I think you had better explain yourself. The sons of the Emperor Himself are here. I cannot understand your mood.’

  She threw off her sheets, swung her legs over the side for the four-poster bed, slid her feet into fine white slippers, stood and stretched her lean form.

  Her eyes went automatically, as they did every morning, to the great statue in the south-west corner of the room. It was cut from the purest white marble on the planet. Aurella’s Œdonis in Death. A masterpiece. If the Secretary of the Treasury knew how much Maia had appropriated from the palace funds for its purchase, there would be hell to pay. But she had been unable to resist when the sculptor, Ianous Aurella, had finally offered it for sale. Blackmailing the old man had been a difficult and lengthy process, but ultimately worth it.

  Shivara’s gaze followed that of her mistress.

  The figure, Œdonis, was as big as an Adeptus Astartes, and there was something about the face, some subtle nuance of expression or bone structure, that reminded Maia daily of the Chapter Master, Pedro Kantor.

  ‘What bothers me, ma’am,’ said Shivara, cutting across Maia’s thoughts, ‘is their numbers. They are here in company strength at least.’ She hesitated a beat. ‘Word from the spaceport has it that they have come prepared for war.’

  Maia tore her gaze from the statue’s broad sculpted shoulders. ‘For war?’ she said. ‘Don’t be preposterous. There hasn’t been a war on Rynn’s World for…’

  ‘One thousand two hundred and sixty-four years, ma’am,’ said Shivara heavily. ‘Meaning one is long overdue.’

  Nine

  New Rynn City, Rynnland Province

  Sergeant Huron Grimm could tell that his superior was in a dark mood, or rather, a darker mood than usual. Captain Alvez rode in the left side cupola of the Land Raider, Aegis Eternis, refusing even to glance at the cheering crowds which lined either side of Carriageway 19. Grimm knew this because, as befit the captain’s second-in-command, he rode in the vehicle’s right cupola, a position of no small honour. He was a veteran sergeant, a long-serving squad leader who had proven himself in battle a great many times. When Brother Romnus had been killed in action three years ago, Alvez had chosen Grimm as his new right-hand man, elevating him to the Second Company’s command squad, a decision generally well met by the rest of the company.

  Aiding the captain directly was a duty that Grimm relished, though the relationship between the two Space Marines remained strained at best. Their personalities were anything but similar. Grimm would do whatever his commander asked, naturally, but he found the tall Alvez to be a cold, self-isolating individual. Perhaps it had not always been so. It had occurred to Grimm more than once that Alvez might simply have lost too many good friends along the way. Such a hardening of the soul was not unknown among Adeptus Astartes who outlived many of the brothers with whom they had started service.

  Grimm had passed the Chapter’s selection trials one hundred and three years ago. He had earned veteran status, and the honour of painting his right gauntlet red, relatively early in his career, successfully leading a squad of ten men against a push by traitor armour units on 6-Edinae. Few brothers survived to serve two whole centuries: he knew, and from these the captains were drawn. They were the truly exceptional ones:
Alvez, Cortez, Kadena, Acastus and the like, not to mention the Chapter Master himself.

  Unlike Alvez, who clearly found the public’s adulation irritating in the extreme, Grimm accepted it. He allowed himself to feel the warmth that flowed from those smiles and tear-streaked faces. They were like children, these people; their experiences limited to shorter lives, their bodies limited by their relative fragility. Despite this, the Imperium was nothing with out them. What did it stand for if not their continued survival? It was why the Emperor had made His Space Marines at all.

  Young and old, the citizens of the Rynnite capital gazed up at him, waving and crying out as Aegis Eternis rumbled past, wide treads grinding the rockcrete surface of the wide lanes.

  ‘Hail the Crimson Fists! Hail the protectors!’

  Women on both sides of the road, weeping openly, barely held back by the cordon of struggling Rynnsguard troopers, threw great armfuls of red and blue flowers in front of the column. The sweet floral scent was strong on the air, but it quickly became mixed with the promethium fumes from the armoured vehicles’ rumbling exhausts, and became altogether less pleasant.

  A waste, thought Grimm, to spend hard-earned money on flowers, only to see them crushed beneath the treads of a tank. It would keep the flower-sellers in liquor for a while, he supposed.

  Behind Aegis Eternis, the train of armoured vehicles stretched out, each painted in the blue of the Chapter, each proudly bearing the icon of a red fist in black circle. Their thunderous passage shook ornaments from sills and mantles as far as a kilometre away. Long cracks appeared in the windows and walls of the shining, white-painted hab-stacks. The people didn’t notice. They might grumble later, but a force like this hadn’t visited the capital in decades. It was a spectacle no one wanted to miss. The bars and inns would be filled with stories for years to come:

  I was there when they rode through the city.

  I saw their captain in the flesh, I did.

  Then the stories would be embellished over time:

  The great captain singled me out and waved to me, I swear it.

  One of them asked me my name!

  Why not? thought Grimm. Why should warriors not be venerated a little now and then? The fighting men of the Imperium dedicated their lives to war in the name of the Emperor. They brought peace to others with their sacrifice. So it was with the Imperial Guard, the Navy, the clandestine but powerful forces of the Holy Inquisition. Even the Ecclesiarchy had its fighters.

  Their blood was the coin by which the realm survived. War on the fringes kept the core safe. In such dark, dangerous times as these, with humanity constantly besieged by fiends on every side, people needed heroes to believe in more than ever. Grimm saw the importance of that. Could Captain Alvez not see it, too?

  Of course, the Space Marines represented so much more than just a military force. They were the closest living link to the Divine Emperor that these people would see in their lifetimes. All the toil, all the worship, all the coppers they put in the collection plates; the sight of just one Adeptus Astartes made the legends more real somehow. If the Adeptus Astartes were real, then the Emperor was, too. And if the Emperor was real, humanity could still dare to hope for its eventual salvation. His Divine Majesty would rise again and crush the myriad foe and, after so very long, there would at last be peace and security in the galaxy.

  Holier men than Huron Grimm called it faith.

  Eight decades ago, during a mission to hunt down eldar slave traders on Iaxus III, a young priest, slashed to ribbons and left to die in a burning Imperial church, had coughed out words to this effect as Grimm dragged him to safety. The priest hadn’t lasted long, his wounds flowing copiously, but Grimm had never forgotten the zeal in the dying man’s eyes.

  He had been humbled by it. Even a Space Marine could still learn valuable lessons from ordinary men, he knew.

  Looking down from the cupola, his gaze passed over a gaggle of well-dressed children practically screaming with delight as the ground beneath their feet shuddered and shook. Others waved frantically from the shoulders of their fathers, desperate to be acknowledged by the armoured giants they recognised from their storybooks and history lessons. Some, particularly the youngest, were terrified beyond words. Grimm saw a good many take refuge in the fabric of their mothers’ skirts, leaving little smears of nasal mucus there.

  A tiny malnourished girl, her orange rags marking her as an orphan from one of the city’s many workhouses, gazed up at Grimm with wide blue eyes. She didn’t scream, or shout. Neither did she smile or even cry. She simply gave him the smallest and shyest of waves. Grimm raised his own gauntleted hand just a fraction and returned the greeting.

  Without taking his eyes from the road straight ahead, Captain Alvez barked, ‘Don’t encourage them.’

  Nothing escaped his notice.

  ‘My apologies, lord,’ said Grimm.

  Alvez grunted. ‘I don’t care if the twelve lords of Terra are down there. Acknowledge no one. We are not here to entertain these fools.’

  ‘As you say, of course.’

  ‘And they are fools, Huron,’ Alvez went on. ‘Just look at them. So blindly, happily ignorant. Not one of them, not a single blasted one, judging by the gormless smiles on their faces, has stopped for a second to question why we are here. None have considered for even a moment that the presence of so many Space Marines must surely presage some terrible danger. Dorn alone knows what they think we are doing here.’

  Grimm couldn’t argue with that.

  They will think of it, sooner or later, he thought. And then we’ll have a panic on our hands.

  Two hundred million people on this world. Two hundred million lives in the balance. He’d seen what the orks did to the helpless. He’d seen the horrors they perpetrated.

  Thinking of this, he turned his eyes to look for the workhouse orphan again, but someone had shoved her to the rear and she had disappeared behind a dense forest of adult legs.

  An image appeared in his mind, and his brow furrowed in furious denial. He gritted his teeth. In the image, he saw the girl looking at him again, but her blue eyes were lifeless. Her blonde hair burned as he watched. He saw her flesh crisping and realised she had been spitted. She was being cooked over an open fire. He saw a massive ork, a black-skinned warboss of prodigious size, pull the spit from the flames and sink his tusks into the meat, devouring her as if she were little more than a snack.

  It was no idle daydream. Grimm had seen the evidence of such abominable crimes all too often on other ork-blighted worlds.

  ‘In Dorn’s name,’ he growled quietly, ‘not here. Not while I draw breath.’

  Despite the roar of the Land Raider’s engine and the rattle of its wide treads, the captain had heard him.

  ‘You wish to say something, Huron?’

  Grimm shook his head.

  ‘Not really, my lord,’ he replied, but, after a heartbeat, he added, ‘Only that, if the Waaagh does come to Rynn’s World, I swear I will turn the Adacian red with ork blood!’

  The captain absorbed this comment without turning his eyes from the road ahead. The armoured column was approaching the Ocaro Gate now, its white stone towers rising tall and proud against the deepening blue sky of mid-morning. Beyond the gate lay Zona 6 Industria, the only manufacturing zone through which the Crimson Fist convoy would have to travel to reach the Cassar. There would be fewer people on the streets there. The industrial zones were for working in, not living. Not unless you wanted to die young, riddled with toxins and disease.

  ‘The Waaagh will come, Huron,’ said Alvez as the massive Ocaro Gate groaned open to admit them. ‘When it does, know that you and I will turn the seas red together.’

  Ten

  Rooftop of the Great Keep, Arx Tyrannus

  Kantor gazed out over a sea of cloud through which the black peaks of the surrounding mountains rose like claws. The sky above was deep azure, just like his armour, and the sibling suns were bright, but they were not warm. Up here, on the roof of t
he fortress-monastery’s tallest structure, it never truly got warm. The technical crews servicing the anti-air batteries at each of the rooftop’s corners wore their thickest raumas-wool robes. Even so clothed, they could not work up here for long. The air was so thin that they required rebreather masks or they would pass out and eventually die.

  The thin air did not bother the Chapter Master, of course. Nor did it bother the captain at his side, Selig Torres of Fifth Company. The two Adeptus Astartes could endure long periods up here with little discomfort.

  Ordinator Savales had been unable to persuade Torres to await the Chapter Master below, but Kantor didn’t mind. Here above the clouds, with the freezing wind buffeting you, was as good a place as any to talk about the darkness that approached this world. Torres had sought him out because he was in opposition to the way the Chapter Master was handling the threat of the Waaagh. He had made his stance clear at the last session. Now he stood in silence at Kantor’s shoulder, unsure of how to begin. That was unlike him. Kantor had known the acerbic, outspoken captain for over a century, and knew well enough when he had a point to make.

  ‘Best speak freely, Selig. Do not change your ways now.’

  Torres stepped forward and turned, angling himself towards the Chapter Master so that he could look him in the eye. Kantor saw that he was not smiling.

  ‘How sure are we, my lord,’ said Torres, ‘that this will all play out as expected?’

  Kantor thought about that. The council session late last night had been more heated than any other in his memory. Some of the captains, Torres foremost among them, were calling for more forces to be put into space to be used as boarding parties. What was the point of keeping the Crimson Fists on the ground, they argued, if the orks would have to fight their way past a major blockade first? Surely the best use of the Chapter’s warriors was to send them to the very front line where they could assault the ships of the ork leaders and assassinate them?