Praxor tried not to think of the remark as facile. So much of what he knew, or thought he knew, had been tested on Damnos. Not all of it had survived the journey.
He looked below and saw that the rest of the battle force had returned. Sicarius was gathering them for something big, some fresh assault as he sought his prize.
Praxor chastened himself – such thoughts were unfitting for a Space Marine. He resolved to speak to Trajan at the earliest opportunity. He returned to the scopes.
‘They are like statues. What are they waiting for?
‘Perhaps they seek to gauge our next course of action,’ suggested Agrippen.
Praxor lowered the magnoculars again and looked at the Dreadnought. ‘Tell me, brother: how would Agemman have prosecuted this war?’
Agrippen’s reply was emphatic but neutral. ‘He would not have.’
‘Damnos would have been left to burn?’ Praxor was incredulous.
The Dreadnought fixed him with a glare from the vision slit in his sarcophagus. ‘It would have been made to burn.’
‘You think that Damnos is already lost?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think. I serve the Chapter. On this field of war, on this campaign, I serve Captain Sicarius. What I believe or what I know is immaterial; duty is what matters most.’
‘I am unworthy of that honour,’ Praxor admitted. ‘I do not see my captain’s mind and I doubt our purpose on this world.’
‘What do you doubt about it, brother?’
Praxor paused, weighing up his next words carefully, ‘These are a broken people. Imperial citizens, yes, but unworthy of that honour. It is hard to find accord with saving a people that does not want to save itself.’
‘Are you so sure they are without defiance? Courage?’
‘It is what I have seen, yes.’
Agrippen considered that for a moment, before saying, ‘Answer me this, brother: do you believe you are above these humans in some way?’
‘In all ways,’ Praxor said flatly.
‘Then is it not the duty of those lofty individuals to inspire and lift those beneath them so that they too might achieve some measure of greatness?’
Praxor wasn’t expecting that. The Dreadnought’s logic was hard to refute, so he didn’t try. Instead, he bowed his head. ‘Of course it is.’
‘There is more?’ Agrippen pressed. Praxor’s shame was not only at his discarding of the Damnosians’ right to protection and life.
He lifted his head. ‘I had thought you here to press Agemman’s interests and secure the pre-eminence of the First by undermining Sicarius. It was an unworthy belief.’
Agrippen was sanguine. ‘Your faith has been tested, that is all. It must be if it is to remain strong.’ There was no hint of reproach in his rumbling sepulchral voice. ‘As to the matter of Agemman, too much is made of this supposed rivalry. I trust in the wisdom and leadership of our Lord Calgar. Do you know why that is so?’
Praxor’s silence bade him to continue.
‘Because I have witnessed his courage and heard his words. Victory or death – one or the other awaits us on Damnos. I do not fear it. I do not let it concern me. It merely is. This is our duty. It is what makes us Emperor’s Angels. He will protect us and He will grant Sicarius the wisdom and guile to lead us.’
Praxor bowed his head again that such a noble warrior had deigned to share his wisdom with him. ‘Victoris Ultra, venerable one.’
‘Victoris Ultra.’
Servos whirring, gears grinding, Agrippen dismounted from the rocky spur and went to find Ultracius. He left Praxor to his thoughts and his duty.
‘What do you see, brother-sergeant?’ Sicarius asked a few moments later. He was done with the Apothecary and had come for a status report.
Praxor was looking through magnoculars at the distant enemy formations but the ice-fog was still thick. They’d reached the edge of Arcona City and were about to pass over its borders, if they ever moved again.
‘They are waiting.’ In spite of the weather, Praxor could see the massive phalanxes standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Their utter stillness was unnatural. Skeletal-faced, their eye sockets aglow, they reminded him of revenants. ‘Do we attack?’
Sicarius shook his head, ignoring the proffered scopes. Daceus was with him, carrying his captain’s battle-helm.
‘We will fall back.’
‘We continue to flee?’ asked Praxor.
‘A Space Marine does not flee, brother-sergeant,’ interjected Daceus. His bionic eye seemed to burn with indignation. ‘When met by an implacable enemy, he does not throw his strength at it until he is spent. He finds a way to bring the battle to his advantage.’
‘We need to level the scales, Sergeant Manorian,’ asserted Sicarius. ‘A warrior has many weapons in his arsenal. This–’ he brandished his plasma pistol. ‘And this.’ He tapped the hilt of his sheathed Tempest Blade before gesturing to their surroundings, ‘but he must also use his mind and mould the battlefield into a weapon too.’
He paused, peering into the mists. ‘How close are they now, brother?’
‘Two kilometres and static. My lord, what are they waiting for?’
‘What else?’ Sicarius answered, and there was a hint of a smile in his voice as his eyes narrowed. ‘For their potentate, the one who wields power.’
Sicarius was right. Praxor looked back through the magnoculars and found the necron lord who commanded the army. He had just emerged in the throng. It was an ancient, terrible creature with age-tarnished trappings and a body of shimmering gold.
‘I think the wait is over, sire.’ He handed his captain the scopes and this time Sicarius took them.
‘So it seems. Tell me something, Brother Manorian, have you heard of the Battle of Thermapylon?’
‘I know a myth, from the days of the Terran battle-kings.’
‘Go on.’
‘Seven hundred men of warrior blood held the pass of Thermapylon against the numberless hordes of Xeruclese from across the sea. Their sacrifice allowed the army of King Vidus to muster and throw back the enemy, harrying them all the way back to the beaches where they made their berths, and burn their ships at anchor.’
‘And the seas ran red with their blood and the sand became as crimson night,’ added Sicarius, reciting from the epic poem that recalled the legend.
Praxor was briefly wrong-footed; he didn’t know his captain had studied the arts. But then it was military history, mythic or not, and Sicarius was an arch-student of war. It made a certain sense.
‘Do you know how they triumphed?’
‘With blood and steel, I presume.’
‘Oh, their blades were red as the dawn, brother, but that wasn’t how they engaged an army of five hundred thousand with seven hundred men. No, they achieved their goal because they knew the lay of the land. Every death was paid for by a hundred enemy soldiers. It was a battle of attrition that could only end in suicide but it wrested time from the hands of fate and used it to the king’s advantage. His army was ocean-borne and won a great naval victory against Xeruclese’s allies. Much of the details are lost to time but the message remains true and relevant.’
‘I am ready to die for my Chapter, brother-captain,’ said Praxor.
‘That is not what I mean.’ Sicarius returned the magnoculars. ‘This war can be won. But we need time. We need our tanks – Antaro would relish this theatre of war – and the Valin’s Revenge. I plan to get us that time and cut down the necron overlord into the bargain. But I do not plan on dying to achieve it.’ He turned, fixing Praxor in a gimlet glare. ‘My legacy is not yet at its end, and I would add more laurels to my banner.’
Praxor nodded. Sicarius’s defiance was stirring, even if he found his arrogance a little bitter with the casualties they’d already sustained.
‘Outside Kellenport, at the edges of the city wall, we will funnel the necrons into our own pass and there they will fall to our fury. Tigurius will have destroyed the Thanatos guns by then and Antaro can unleash his armoured fist
s.’
‘The necrons are formidable, my lord. They are not the hordes of Xeruclese, nor do they merely wield spears or travel in wooden boats.’
‘Indeed, but we carry bolters and are Adeptus Astartes.’ He turned to Daceus. ‘We make for the Kellenport outer marker,’ he said. ‘Signal Sergeants Ixion and Strabo to range ahead of us there and tell them to make haste. The necrons are moving.’
Both Strabo and Ixion came back to Daceus swiftly. The speed of the reply sent a tremor of unease through Praxor as did the veteran-sergeant’s grim face as he related the reply to Sicarius.
‘Request denied, sir.’
‘Explain, brother-sergeant.’
‘They cannot. There are forces coming from the east, from Kellenport. The necrons have us blocked in.’
Sicarius took his battle-helm without response. When he slammed it down against his gorget, there was a clang not unlike a death knell across the frozen quietude of the wastes. When the captain did finally speak it was with the grating cadence of his vox-grille.
‘Gather your battle-brothers, and have the other sergeants do likewise. We make our stand here.’ His tone turned belligerent as he drew the Tempest Blade and pointed towards the advancing horde and the necron overlord in its ranks. ‘Death or glory awaits us – I will welcome both.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Ankh was connected to all the mechanoids of the tomb. They were his workers, his messengers, his eyes and ears. Truly, he was the Architect. Most creatures of the universe – he had come to think of them as simpleton children when compared to the majesty and intellect of the necrontyr – beheld the necrons and saw only machines. They were so much more than that. Their science had fundamentally changed their race. It was so advanced that to look upon it would be to perceive what primitive cultures called magic. These humans, a race of barely evolved primates, were one such culture.
To serve the machinations of his lord, he would unleash ‘magic’ of a terrifying magnitude. He had activated a doomsday phalanx of monoliths. Through the multi-faceted eyes of one of his drones, Ankh had witnessed the destruction of one of his pyramidal engines. It had surprised him. Perhaps it was why the Undying wanted so desperately to kill this one. Was the genebred warrior really any different from the rest of his species? Certainly, he attired himself more ostentatiously than any of the other armour-clad savages. Immobilising the monolith was also a feat worthy of note, especially done single-handed.
Ankh had moved the others at his overlord’s command. The Undying wanted to see annihilation; the talons of the Destroyer curse had made their first incisions into his fragile engrammic sanity. Pre-eminent amongst these weapons of war was the Doomsday Monolith.
‘You desire destruction, my lord,’ Ankh said to the quietude of the tomb. Through the eyes of his creations he could see the trio of monoliths gliding into position; the nexus of energy between them had almost reached critical mass. ‘Then you shall have it.’
Ankh unleashed his ‘magic’.
‘Give me more. Break your backs if you have to, but bring those things down!’ Letzger was hoarse from all the shouting. Above the roaring thunder of the guns, he had to bellow to be heard.
His gun crews knew the drill, though. They knew that sweating blood was necessary and that their lives and the lives of their people depended on it.
Hel-handed boomed again, shaking dust from its foundations and sluicing debris down to the lower levels with every seismic explosion from its barrel. From the Thanatos Hills to the monoliths converging on the meagre defenders in the Courtyard of Xiphos, Letzger had changed targets. So far, his efforts to bring down one of the necron pyramids had been in vain. There was some kind of ethereal veil protecting them all. Shots that weren’t lost to the black void coiling around the machineries were otherwise absorbed by the living metal from which the monoliths were constructed.
The view down the Hel-handed’s crosshairs was not an encouraging one.
Letzger seized the vox-horn. ‘Leave ’em be and send a shell into the square.’ He rattled off a series of measurements, amending the cannon’s aim and trajectory. ‘And give those metal bastards a half-shell. Don’t want to crucify our Angels in the blast.’
Slamming the speaker cup down, Letzger was about to get settled on the scopes and watch the show when something bright blazed on the horizon.
Emerald light burned from some unseen source, forcing him to look away. He felt the heat against his skin and smelled his hair smouldering before the beam hit.
‘Merciful Emperor,’ he breathed as a green fire hit the Hel-handed and a god-weapon died.
Adanar felt the explosion before he saw it. He felt it even before the beam hit the Kellenport wall and tore the Hel-handed open. Letzger had been on that platform, the ornery old dog. After the emerald flash faded he simply wasn’t there any more; neither were his gun crews. The weapon was a twisted mess. There was little of it left. Most of the wall and the troops nearby, even those who had hunkered down on the lower level, had also been obliterated.
He turned to Humis, who had ducked behind the barricade. Part of the corporal’s uniform was on fire, ignited by the heat wave. Adanar was patting it down when he realised his own face was burned raw. It stung to the touch.
‘Throne of Earth,’ mewled the corporal. ‘We are all dead men.’
Adanar was getting to his feet. He’d only realised belatedly that he’d been knocked down – must have been from the void shields breaking. ‘We were dead men before now,’ he said, snarling at the pain in his face. ‘Yet here we are.’ He pulled his pistol. Something was materialising on the wrecked battlements amidst the fire-blackened debris of the Hel-handed.
Necrons.
The first of the men inside Kellenport died without realising what killed them. Their faces were still etched in terror as they turned to ash.
Adanar loosed off a shot that struck a steel skull in the jaw, making the mechanoid jerk its neck. It didn’t stop it from flaying the Ark Guardsmen in front of it.
‘Turn and fight!’ the commander raged. He was further away than he remembered and his right leg hurt with all the fires of the warp.
Slowly, the troopers below the battlements started to fight back. A sergeant was even shouting for order before a gauss-blast reduced his head to a greasy memory. He toppled, his neck wound cauterised, before someone else took his place.
Humis was running alongside Adanar, dodging the stray emerald beams and vaulting chunks of rubble. The platform wasn’t that far, the enemy even less so. ‘They must have used a weapon on us,’ he said. There was a hollow sound in his breathing, as if he had a punctured lung. Perhaps he had. Humis didn’t complain, though. ‘It must have been powerful to cut through the shield.’
How were they even functioning? Adanar had no clue. They’d been punched across the battlements, caught in the blast wave – he knew that now. Somehow they’d stayed on the wall instead of being pitched to their doom, but they were both hurt.
Following their commander’s example, more of the Ark Guard got up from their posts and joined Adanar and Humis. There weren’t that many necrons on the wall yet; there was still time to block the attack.
‘And now they’re phasing in their raiders to finish the job.’
Adanar didn’t talk. He assumed Humis needed to or he’d realise what they were doing and flee, or lose what scrap of sanity he had left.
A half-glance below revealed the Space Marines and some of the conscripts were exchanging fire with the mechanoids assaulting the square. The necrons obviously didn’t possess the capacity to phase all of their troops onto the walls or they’d already be overrun. Silently, he wished the Angels luck. It seemed an odd thing to have to do. Over the last few hours, the Emperor’s avengers had seemed altogether more human than Adanar had ever given them credit for. It was to the good and the bad, he supposed.
He was running past a vox-officer when a gauss-beam jagged out and took the poor swine in the gut. His innards were dissolved to
atoms and he slumped with a gurgle. Adanar crouched behind a broken crenellation, taking cover for the first time since the surge towards the gun platform. Hot, green energy flashed overhead as he stooped for the fallen vox-cup. A few seconds later, Humis was right there with him. The man had blood on his collar from where he’d been coughing. Adanar boosted the vox-signal as high as it would go and yelled into the cup.
‘This is Commander Adanar Sonne. All forces to the gun platform on the east wall. Repel the enemy at all costs.’
The barrage lessened as more troops joined the effort of dislodging the necron invaders, and Adanar was on his feet again. He patted Humis on the shoulder, indicating they needed to get going, but the corporal didn’t move. When he looked back, Adanar saw the pallor of his face and the glass in his eyes. Humis was dead.
He carried on.
Las-beams were hammering the necrons now, who didn’t bother to seek cover or retreat. They merely advanced, implacable as death.
Something was happening up ahead. He thought he recognised a desperate figure fleeing from the mechanoids, taking several squads with him. Adanar’s fists clenched when he realised it was Rancourt. The cowardly worm was trying to save his own skin but had opened the trap the Ark Guard had forged around the raiders.
He wanted to shout, to tell them to turn back, but he was too far away and the din of gunfire was too loud. Instead, Adanar carried on. He was racing to his doom, and he knew it. He didn’t care. This was the moment he had been waiting for. At last he would know peace. He couldn’t just throw his life away, she wouldn’t like that. But this was different. Adanar’s sacrifice might save the lives of those Rancourt had endangered. His only regret was he wouldn’t get to see the bastard suffer for it.
Just a few more metres and he’d be on them. He nearly tripped on a corpse. The poor wretch had been sliced in two by a necron beam. Though hard to tell, Adanar knew it was Kador and that Rancourt had bolted when his bodyguard was slain.
The locket-charm around his wrist dug into his skin where his arm was blistered by the terrible emerald flash. Adanar tore it free and gripped it in his hand.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 126