He watched with narrowed eyes as the gale overtook the battlefield and pressed in on the Ultramarines. Even the steel plate of a Leman Russ battle tank was no proof against the ghost-like necrons who phased through their hulls. Praxor could only imagine the horror of the crews within as they were slain.
The cobalt giants were unmoved, both by the storm and the futile plight of the armoured company. Slowly, the rattle of pintle-mounts subsided and the flash of muzzle flares decreased. Even the churn of turrets and the booming report of their cannons became silenced.
‘They are beyond our aid, brother.’
Standing at Praxor’s side, Trajan’s face was a grim and emotionless mask of sculpted bone as he placed a conciliatory hand on the sergeant’s shoulder guard.
Praxor wanted to shrug it off. Elianu Trajan was colder than the Damnos arctic wind. He let it linger, though, using the moment to observe the battlefield.
Kellenport’s defences were based on a series of three octagonal walls. Each was punctuated by several towers and fortified bunkers. Each had three gates: south, west and north. The east side of the city – and it was a vast megalopolis – was completely sealed off, its byways filled, its roads mined and razor-wired. Between each wall was a stretch of land. They had once been districts: commercial, residential, military and religious. Now they were ruins; ash and debris flattened in the necron advance, crushed in the sprawl of war.
From his Tactica briefings, Praxor knew the Damnos naval asset, the Nobilis, had bombarded some of these outer regions with torpedoes before it was destroyed by the artillery in the Thanatos Hills. The then lord governor had balanced the collateral damage against the severity of the blow it would strike against the necrontyr. No doubt it had bought them some time, and such desperate courage was hard to ignore – without it, the Ultramarines might have landed on a world already subjugated by the soulless machines. But ultimately, it had not saved them and condemned thousands to plasma-death.
Their charred corpses paved the roads and haunted the ruins now, despite the eager snowfall that sought to blanket them with its white veil.
To reach this point, at the threshold of the third defensive wall, Sicarius had led them on a killing spree. Large sections of the necron primary awakeners, as they were designated by Imperial codifiers, had been destroyed but nothing remained as testimony to it. This fact gnawed at Praxor, making him feel the death of Vortigan more acutely.
When we are slain, we stay dead. The necrons merely disappear. How do I know I am not fighting the self same enemy over and again?
Perhaps that’s why Trajan had singled him out for benediction first. It was the only reason Sicarius had attacked already – he desired the blessing of his Chaplain. Perhaps Trajan knew of Praxor’s doubts. He had a gift for it, he of the Black, spotting the chinks in a warrior’s armour of faith.
Praxor’s expression was firm. ‘I am resolved, Brother-Chaplain.’
The armoured company was all but obliterated from sight now. The small pockets of Guard fighting desperately around the vestiges of the city’s defences were gradually being eradicated by the meticulous enemy. Once they were finished with the humans, the necrons would focus their full attention on Second Company. Sicarius had been right to strike hard and strike swiftly.
Praxor heard the captain speaking as he was anointed by Trajan.
‘We stand as the lonely bastion, the last resistance of an Imperial world.’ He stared into the ever-expanding void of necron-fuelled night, his helm in the crook of his arm so his charges could see his noble countenance. His gaze was unswerving like steel, his purpose violent and obvious. ‘It was settled in the halcyon days of the Great Crusade, when gods walked amongst us, by our ancestors and the progenitors of our Chapter. Let us not falter in their sight, nor allow the blood they shed for Damnos to be in vain.’
He drew the Tempest Blade – a storm to match a storm – and singled out the necron lord in the midst of the lightning. Replacing his battle-helm, Sicarius growled into the comm-feed.
‘Follow me into the stygian night and let no fleshless horrors stay the fury of the Second. Victoris Ultra!’
The storm proper had reached them at last. It broke in waves of dense black cloud, roiling in a spectral wind. Lightning cascaded from the sky, emerald green and as unnatural as those who harnessed it. An otherworldly zephyr whipped at the captain’s cape and crest. It stirred the purity seals and oath parchments on his armour.
Sicarius charged. The Tempest Blade ignited with a fire redolent of older, greater days.
The others followed, ready to fight and die.
Praxor’s doubts, his misgivings about the indestructible foe, vanished in the face of Sicarius’s bravura and dauntless courage. Basking in the reflected light of a true hero, he cried out until his lungs burned and the air turned hot with bolter-fury.
They all did, every glorious one of them.
‘Victoris Ultra!’
Praxor stayed close to the captain and his Lions, using the resplendent glow of the blade as a beacon. He made to speak but the hellish wind robbed him of his voice. He tried again, bellowing to the Shieldbearers. ‘Keep to the sword.’
Upon entering the maelstrom, the comm-feed had died. It wasn’t wracked by static interference – it had simply ceased to be. A shroud had been cast over them and all within was deafening silence. Except it wasn’t, not quite. The wind whipped and billowed, so loud it shrieked. Voices, cold and mechanical, hollow and pleading, manifested on the chilling breeze. Flecks of earth and pieces of debris churned about in the night-black storm the necron lord had weaved.
A heavy flash overloaded Praxor’s retinal display as bolt-lightning forked earthwards in a jagged trajectory. One of the Lions was struck, lit up in cruciform like a human torch. He shuddered, emerald energy wreathing his body, before he crumpled in a smoke-drooling mess and never moved again.
Brother Halnior was dead.
A second bolt arrowed through the night and ripped a ferocious line in the blackness. It cratered the ground then leapt into Etrius.
A flare, magnesium-bright, saturated the storm cloud edging it in white. At its core was Etrius. The Ultramarine was lifted off his feet, the lightning tendrils like a puppet-master’s strings animating him jerkily.
A low foom battered Praxor’s auditory canal and he was pitched into the air with the sudden shockwave. Time slowed in that terrible moment. His arm, going to shield his eyes, moved as if through gelatine. His legs, flung away from the blast, moved with all the purpose of sodden sand struggling through the neck of an hourglass. Belatedly he realised Etrius’s spare ammo had exploded. It turned him into a fireball.
Hitting the ground hard jolted Praxor around and time rushed back, urgent and filled with smoke and agony. Hurrying to his feet, he tackled his battle-brother out of the inferno.
Etrius lived, but was barely able to nod as he left his ruined bolter behind. He pulled a bolt pistol from his weapons belt and nodded again to show he was ready to fight on.
But the lightning arc wasn’t done. Four more times it struck the earth, tearing holes in the ice and scorching the ground. No one else was felled by the blasts, but it seared battle plate and cut blackened scars into shoulder guards. The Ultramarines’ impetus had been slowed.
The wraiths detached themselves from the darkness as if it were an entity and they its cellular defences. Serpentine and sinuous, they advanced on the Ultramarines with a terrifying grace and fluidity.
‘Brother-sergeant.’ Krixous pointed with his mutilated stump.
Praxor followed it to where Brother Vandius valiantly upheld the company standard. The banner was stilled, heavy as if soaked with rain, though the wind raged around it.
Buffeted by the gale that failed to lift the Second’s banner but hammered everything else, Praxor urged, ‘Fight on, brother. Courage and honour.’
Something as close to fear as a Space Marine could experience tainted Krixous’s voice. ‘How is that even possible?’
&
nbsp; Trajan’s vehement dogma tore through the storm and his doubt. ‘Our glory is more than the hallowed cloth of a standard. It is blood and sinew, heritage and valour – virtues these soulless aberrations know nothing of. Wars are not won by cold machination and the calculus of metal. Victory is achieved through heart and flesh-made courage. We are Guilliman’s heirs, his noble sons. Honour his legacy!’
He held the crozius aloft and it burst into azure flame, banishing the darkness around it. Three wraiths recoiled from its brilliance, revealed in the shadows. Trajan brought the power mace down upon the skull of one, crushing it and sending the vile thing back to the unholy cradle that spawned it.
Praxor drove at one of the others, swinging his power sword in a lethal arc. It was a master blade, forged by the Chapter artisans, crafted from the purest metals and imbued with an indomitable machine-spirit.
It passed right through the creature as ethereal as smoke. The wraith resolved a moment later and its long talons cut Praxor’s bolt pistol in half as the Ultramarine made to fire. He cast the ruined weapon aside as his fist closed on a useless trigger and took his sword in a two-handed grip, feeding more power to its monomolecular edge.
‘We are defiant!’ he roared, mustering righteous anger. ‘The scions of Ultramar!’
The wraith was unmoved and attacked with whipcord, preternatural speed.
An instinctive parry warded one talon strike, a frantic block fended off a lash of the wraith’s whip-like tail. He had yet to strike a blow. Hard-pressed, Praxor fell back a step.
‘Only forward, brother-sergeant.’ It was Daceus. The formidable veteran was leading the line. He bellowed to the Lions, ‘Forge a path for the captain!’
Somewhere ahead of the wraiths was the Stormcaller. Sicarius meant to meet him in combat and do what he was born to do – end lives.
Daceus seized a wraith in his power fist, but it squirmed free before he could clamp his fingers together to crush it and was lost to the storm. To his right, obscured by the mist and shadows, Honourable Gaius Prabian fought with sword and shield like the Macraggian battle-kings of old. The Company Champion moved with relentless purpose, a match for any of the serpentine wraiths. He severed necks and sundered bodies, his mind and body as one, his weapons an extension of his martial will. As Daceus and Gaius Prabian drove them, the other Lions sent salvos of fire into the night, tearing the blackness to strips.
Sicarius advanced in the killing ground they made, slaying when he had to, searching for his prey when he didn’t.
In those few frantic moments, Praxor’s world contracted into microcosm where only his Shieldbearers and the Lions existed, surrounded by the night. Silhouettes ranged in the shadows still, bellowing oaths or yielding screams, but they were indistinct and phantasmal. Somewhere in the dark were Trajan and Agrippen. The faint corona of the Chaplain’s crozius was yet visible spitting righteous fire, while the Dreadnought was a hulking nightmare limned emerald against onyx-black with each lightning strike.
Of Brother-Sergeant Solinus and the Indomitable, there was no sign.
Praxor hoped they fought on still. Without his bolt pistol, he drew his gladius and battled with two swords instead. The wraiths still lingered at the edge of his vision, distracted by the march of Sicarius and his Lions. Perhaps the Stormcaller was reacting to an imminent threat to his life, such as it was, and recalling his revenants.
Brandishing his power sword, Praxor roared a challenge. ‘Here, machine!’
Twisting its head on a strange, segmented neck, the wraith regarded him as a predator to prey. Coiling first, like a snake, it attacked.
With his gladius Praxor batted away the first talon thrust, following up with the power sword and hacking off the necron’s wrist. A burst of shells from Etrius’s bolt pistol strafed its torso and skull-face, angering it.
Tartaron impaled it with a thrown spear of rebar he’d found amongst the debris. Somewhere along the line, his meltagun had been rendered inoperative. While the creature was still squirming, Praxor removed its head. Permanent phase-out was instantaneous.
Keeping pace with Sicarius and the Lions was a feat. When a second wraith emerged from the shadows, Praxor lunged – first gladius then power sword – to gain ground. Both blows missed but Krixous hammered it with a bolter salvo, steadying his aim on his ruined stump. Praxor carved the wraith open as it staggered, before Tartaron and Etrius each rammed a gladius into its neck cavity. It jerked once, the balefires in its eyes flaring with impotent fury, before phasing out.
Krixous had his eyes on the sky. ‘Emperor’s grace…’ he breathed, ‘Look!’
All eyes went to the heavens where dozens of wraiths swirled and twisted like the denizens of some black infernal sea.
Praxor levelled his gladius in an order to fire. ‘Bolters!’ he cried, and the air was torn apart by explosive, mass-reactive death.
Some of the wraiths were drawn by the attack, swimming effortlessly in and out of phase, with only the viridian orbs of their eyes a constant.
‘Hold them off.’ Praxor knew they must give Sicarius time to find and kill their lord. ‘By Guilliman’s sword!’
The wraiths engulfed the Shieldbearers. Talon-blades and tail-barbs became a ghostly blur as the necrons swept amongst them. Their rending tools cleaved and cut.
Brother Belthonis was dragged into the storm, the hard bangs of his bolter stolen on the air. Skewered through the torso and neck, Brother Galrion crumpled spitting blood. His vambraces shredded, Brother Hexedese screamed the primarch’s name as a spear-like tail punctured his plastron and he fell.
‘Form a shield around me!’ Praxor urged his warriors to rally, and the Shieldbearers closed ranks like an armoured laager, firing in all directions. They were an island of cobalt in a hostile black ocean surrounded by a shoal of pitiless killers. Images flashed before Praxor in the chaos: Daceus crying hell and fury; Gaius Prabian, colder and more clinical in his kills than the machines; Venatio, stooped over the body of Galrion. Through the blood-soaked blur, one resolved brighter than all the rest.
Sicarius…
The Grand Duke of Talassar had found his prey. He angled his blade, energy bleeding off the edge in a pearlescent haze. Answering, the Stormcaller brandished his staff. Alien sigils ran along the haft and it crackled with emerald lightning. Moments later, their weapons clashed in incandescent fusion. Above, the thunder bellowed in empathy. Every emotion, every blow and counter-blow was described in the storm-wracked sky.
For a machine, the necron moved more swiftly than Praxor gave it credit for. He caught only snatches through the frenzy of his own battle, but heard the lightning crack time and again. The duellists became shadows in the harsh light of its afterglow, lit in stark monochrome.
It lasted only seconds. With a shout of triumph, Sicarius cut the Stormcaller’s staff in half, sending a backwash of energy through him, and then decapitated the creature with the reverse blow. The necron lord’s head didn’t even have time to hit the earth before he disappeared, leaving behind the malicious resonance of his passing.
The storm went with him, evaporating as if carried on a strong wind, light replacing dark like a sudden breaking dawn. Lightning ebbed, thunder subsided. Even the wraiths melted away, returned to their master’s side. In the centre of it all was Sicarius. He leant on one knee, heaving breath into his body.
The lightning had struck him more than once – the smoke coiling off his scorched armour was testament to that. In spite of the obvious pain, he rose and with straightened back and head held high lifted the Tempest Blade.
‘Victoris Ultra!’
Relief and exultation blending as one glorious emotion, the Second – Lions, Shieldbearers, Indomitable and all – gave voice that echoed their captain.
Desolation surrounded them. And more than one of Guilliman’s sons had returned to their primarch’s side in the Temple of Correction on Macragge.
Vandius’s banner stirred again, rippling on an arctic breeze.
The necron va
nguard was defeated.
Though of exultant mood, a small kernel of Praxor felt hollow at the victory. Over half his squad were dead or maimed; Sicarius’s maddened rush at the enemy the reason for it. Solinus’s squad had suffered too, though not nearly as badly.
As he watched Apothecary Venatio add the gene-seed of Hexedese to that of Galrion and Vortigan, Praxor could not help but question.
‘Only in death, Brother-Sergeant Manorian.’
Trajan again, the ever-vigilant shadow of Second Company. ‘Duty is all we have, brother.’
Praxor nodded.
‘Yes, my Chaplain.’
At least Belthonis had lived, though he was badly wounded. He might walk, but fight? Given their position, he had little choice with either. Venatio would have to patch him up and make him last for however long he could.
Agrippen met the sergeant’s gaze, stoic and unreadable within the armour-eternal of his sarcophagus, and within Praxor felt an accord.
Suddenly the presence of the First on Damnos, Agemman’s watchmen, seemed all too necessary.
Act Two:
Salvation
Chapter Eight
Macragge, two years before the Damnos Incident
Praxor was enrapt as he listened to the senators’ endless debating.
Watching from a seat at the back of the auditorium, Iulus frowned and was glad of the concealing shadows cast in the wake of the late Macraggian sun.
Attired in robes of various hues and ostentation, he found the senators overfond of their own voices, prolix for the sake of it. Their arguments did not interest him. He had come for Praxor.
Helots roamed the hall, plying the officials with drink and sustenance, while lexicographical servitors dictated every spoken word on clacking scriptoria. The debate had been going on for several days. It did not appear as if any resolution were in sight.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 111