Amongst the slave-soldiers, traitors and Chaos cultists, Kersh picked out increasing numbers of Adeptus Astartes, false prophets for the ravaging masses, and Ruinous warbands of blood-brothers who had embraced heresy together. Lost Angels who had fallen to the Blood God’s predatory temptations and indulged their base desire to kill over the Emperor’s need for them to do so. Space Marines who had forgotten themselves. Those who had regressed. Those who were now no more than agonising expressions of the savagery from which they were originally crafted. The Scourge favoured these with the Thunderhawk’s remaining wrath. With 1.00 calibre mercy, the Scourge ended their torment and that of their followers. The Goremongers. The Sanguine Sons. The mad Angels of the Thunder Barons. The renegade Red Heralds. The Cleaved. The Angels Apocrypha. The Brazen Guard. The bone-dusted Skulltakers.
They came at him undaunted. Furious at his mere existence. He was a warrior to be defeated. An Adeptus Astartes. A son of Dorn. One after another they tried to rush him, cleavering aside cultists, spawn and traitor soldiers to get to him. To earn his skull for the War-Given-Form. Kersh kept killing. The ivory of his armour became a blood-misted red. The heavy bolter muzzles glowed with the heat of incessant usage. A gene-bred monstrosity – some aborted, primogenerated abomination – charged at Kersh with self-loathing and fury. The bastard-breed wore scraps of armour and the colours of the Sanguine Sons, but was a half-botched attempt at demigodhood. Malformed, insane and unfeeling – the sorry creature soaked up the heavy bolters’ punishment and bounded on. The head shot that should have ended the beast was stopped by armour plating welded to its deformed skull, and it took everything the weapon had to punch through both metal and thick bone to reach what little brain the monster had.
As the abominate dropped and skidded past Kersh, the Scourge realised that the distraction had cost him. Three Angels Apocrypha had worked their way around the crashed Thunderhawk to surprise him from the other side. Helmless and sporting long hair and rapier-like blades that crackled with a dark energy, the Chaos Space Marines looked identical. Their skin was deathly pale against the sable blood-filth of their patched and studded plate. The renegades hissed and swept in with vampiric speed and appetite. Kersh barely had time to release his finger-cramping grip on the heavy bolters and slap a palm on his gladius hilt.
The first died without the blade having to clear its scabbard. There was a flash from the side of the first Angel’s head. He fell to one side and struck the gunship’s wing before falling and sitting in the grave dust. Half of his head had been burned out by a precision sniper shot. About the Scourge were the corpses of killers and cultists that Kersh couldn’t remember slaying. They too had the telltale head craters of Adeptus Astartes marksmanship. Up in the towers and steeples of the cemetery world city, a member of Squad Contritus had the Scourge in his sights and was watching his corpus-captain’s back.
The Angels were so fast that Kersh’s blade was still not free of its sheath as the second sped past his falling compatriot. He was met with an ugly kick from the Scourge. Reeling from the Excoriator’s boot against his chestplate, the Traitor stumbled some distance back. Throughout the body-piling carnage of the Scourge’s resistance, the Impunitas’s remaining engine had gone through the wretched and repetitive cycle of firing up and dying down. As the heretic Angel stumbled back into the rocket’s wake, the intense heat of the rhythmic burn set alight his hair and scoured the paint from his ceramite. His pallid skin melted from his skull, and as the engine built up to full intensity, sending a tremble through the crashed Thunderhawk, the renegade was lost in the air-scorching heat of the afterburner.
Kersh felt sudden and excruciating pain lance through his midriff. The third Angel Apocrypha had leant into a savage thrust, skewering his power blade through the Scourge’s stomach plate and though his side. As the Chaos Space Marine withdrew his rapier, Kersh let out a half-stifled howl of agony. The heretic seemed to enjoy the Excoriator’s suffering, until the Scourge drew his gladius out of its scabbard and the blade up across the Traitor’s face, wiping the spiteful satisfaction from it. With blood streaming into his eyes from the vicious gash, the Angel Apocrypha also failed to see the Scourge’s fist fly at him, the pommel of the sword held within it breaking the warrior’s jaw. The rapier vaulted for the Scourge again, but blood-blind the Angel struck wide.
Grabbing the Chaos Space Marine by the wrist and holding the crackling blade away from him, Kersh twisted the gladius around in his other hand before plunging it down through a ceramite patch on the Blood Crusader’s chestplate. The blade squealed through the weak spot, punctured reinforced ribcage and slid down into the Chaos Space Marine’s chest. Squirming the hilt around like an aircraft joystick, Kersh watched the Angel Apocrypha experience the blade twisting through his innards. Black blood gushed up and out of the sides of the doomed warrior’s mouth. Releasing him, Kersh allowed the weight of the warrior’s plate to carry him to a gasping death on the cemetery world earth and free his blade.
A grunt from the Anarchan Razorbacks was suddenly beside him, attempting to beat him with the stock of a shotgun, while a stitch-faced pirate raider – with her mouth sliced into a frown – started blasting away wildly with a pair of autopistols. Clutching his side, Kersh despatched her with shearing economy and speed. He took a step towards the twin-linked heavy bolter but found himself distracted by the bodies being tossed into the air above the advancing mob before him. A cloven-hoofed beast of living plate was thundering through the cultist throng at high speed, its brazen bulk a seemingly unstoppable force. The quadruped’s long head sported a thick brass horn, sharpened to a cruel spike, while its eyes were windows to a volcanic fury. Its broad body was a clinker-built nightmare of layered bronze plate and shredded octagon-mail. The infernal beast cared for nothing, trampling slave-soldiers, gore-swiping Bloodsaken berserkers and barging aside armoured Red Herald Chaos Space Marines with its heavy metal heft.
Snatching his bolt pistol from its sporran, Kersh thrashed the trigger, sending round after round at the daemon beast. It was the definition of an easy target and getting easier with every cloven stride, but the rounds simply glanced pathetically off the living bronze hide. With the infernal engine just steps away, Kersh threw himself painfully to one side. The beast continued its relentless charge, furiously goring the underplate of the Thunderhawk’s wing, before surging on and smashing straight through the twin-linked heavy bolters. The metal monster cannonaded past. On the ground, Kersh watched the beast weather a hail of las-bolts from Charnel Guard fusils, stubgun and auto-fire, as well as the slash of Scout sniper rifle blasts from the towers and belfries. An advancing wall of metal and sparks, the beast continued along its juggernaut path towards the break in the battlement.
Kersh felt a tremble through his plate. The ground was quaking again. As he got to his boots, the corpus-captain watched hate-jubilant cultists roaring the hellsteed on, before they were struck and impaled from behind – left broken-backed and crucified across the horned heads of newly arrived beasts. The Scourge shook his head in silent disbelief, witness to a diabolic stampede. Soon there were more armoured chargers than Kersh could count, and the Excoriator found himself backing towards the doomed front line.
Unclipping a krak grenade, the Scourge took several further steps backwards. As well as the living metal beasts – in the absence of the heavy bolter’s relentless murder – renegade Angels, berserkers and the Blood God’s champions were leading the cult armies of the Cholercaust back at Kersh’s decimated section of the perimeter. With grim resolve, the Scourge tossed the unprimed grenade into the silent booster exhaust of the cycling engine. As he ran back towards Obsequa City he heard the grenade bounce and rattle around the inside of the jet mechanism. He heard the engine begin its final, fruitless attempt to re-launch the downed Thunderhawk.
As Kersh reached the havoc of the destroyed battlement and the mess the unstoppable metal monster had made of his remaining sentinels, the corpus-captain looked back. The Thunderhawk’s remaini
ng booster had built to a strangled screech. The engine fired. The grenade exploded. The wreck of the Impunitas shuddered. A staggered detonation rippled through the derelict craft: the engine, the fuel compartments, the ammunition stores. The gunship became a radiating blastwave of force, flame and armour-plate frag. Cultist soldiers were shredded where they stood. Renegade Angels and Chaos champions were cooked within their plate, and even stampeding daemon beaststeeds were knocked from their fleet footing and onto their clinker-constructed backs, where they remained, kicking out helplessly in a steam-snorting effort to right themselves.
Kersh found Brother Nebuzar dead – gored straight through by the rampaging bronze monitor train. The beast had ignored the irritation of las-bolts dancing off its hide and bypassed the remainder of the Charnel Guard, instead storming straight at the cemetery world city. As the brazen mount careened through the walls of chapels, hermitages and cloisters, bulldozing its frenzied way through foundations and keystones, towers began to topple and steeples fell in on themselves.
Looking back at the benighted battlefield, Kersh saw the Thunderhawk’s explosion die back to a flame-swathed wreck. The promethium-soaked mound of cadavers and daemonflesh upon which the crashed gunship had come to rest caught, and the Scourge watched the inferno race away in both directions. Within minutes Obsequa City would be surrounded by a furious ring of light and fire.
Along his section of the perimeter, the corpus-captain saw cultists and slave-soldiers thrashing in the flames. He saw a hammer-wielding Thunder Baron stride through the blaze in scorched plate as though it were nothing. The renegade Angel was followed by several lesser berserkers, who burst from the wall of flame at a sprint, flak and furs alight with the flesh melting from their cruel bones. They didn’t get far, the demented warriors succumbing to the firestorms they had become long before they reached the ruined battlement. The daemonherd would not, and could not, be stopped. Those monsters not caught in the initial blast had thundered on, shaking the ground upon which they stomped, shielded from the worst of the pyremound by their hide plating.
The corpus-captain had no idea how other sections of the perimeter had fared. They could have already fallen or – without crashing gunships and a daemon drove to worry about – have held against the Cholercaust’s murderous masses and madness. All he did know was that his vox had been a constant stream of messages and reports that he could barely hear above the rapid-fire cacophony of the twin-linked heavy bolters and Khornate battle-cries. Regardless of how his brothers elsewhere had fared, their first line of defence was about to fall. With the promethium holding the worst of the cultist furore back, but the daemon charge an uncontainable certainty, Kersh decided grimly that the battle wouldn’t afford him a better time to retreat. He set his vox to an open channel.
‘Fifth Company, this is the Scourge. The perimeter is breached. Prepare for close-quarters assault. Fall back to the city. Do it now.’
Chapter Nineteen
World Eaters
The abbey bell tower of the Black Ministry shook with the force of some distant calamity. Brother Omar of the Tenth Company watched dust fall from the belfry rafters. The Scout had been leant against a balistraria pillar near to the great wheels of the abbey bell. Omar followed the dust descending to the floor and settled his eyes on the empty space where his legs should have been. The incredible thing was that he could still feel them: the twitch of every muscle, the stretch of every tendon and the creak of thick joints and bones.
It had been deemed all but a miracle that he had made it back to Obsequa City through the immaterial incursion. He remembered little of his entry, but had been told the Scourge himself had dragged his bruised and bloody body to safety – well, most of it. The Scout didn’t recall the agonies associated with the loss of his legs, which he considered a small blessing. He was currently benefiting from morphia and augmetics left behind by Apothecary Ezrachi, with drips, lines and transfusion satchels trailing from the cauterised stump of his lower torso. The Scout still wore his battle-battered carapace vest and pauldrons, and rather than languish in some hermitage or with the Sisters in the Mausoleum vault, he had volunteered for any useful duty he could perform. With no little admiration and the assurance that he would make a fine Excoriators battle-brother, Silas Keturah gave Omar a pair of magnoculars and his own bolt pistol. The Scout was charged with spotting and vox-relaying observations from the bell tower straight to the squad whip himself. The reports had made grim listening.
‘Take that, you ugly son of a whore…’
Omar heard the whoosh of Scout Kush’s sniper rifle as the weapon spat out another skull-emptying bolt. Omar grunted. Kush was a despicable neophyte and a disgrace to the name of Demetrius Katafalque, but he had the eyes of a hawk and the murderous desire to see every shot go home. Omar had even spotted for the Scout with his magnoculars, drawing the sniper fire down on a warband of helmless screamers from the renegade Brazen Guard, and assorted degenerates attempting to rush Corpus-Captain Kersh in the wake of the Impunitas’s crash. Mostly, Kush had rested the sniper rifle’s long barrel against a balistraria pillar and plugged incessantly away, his eye to the magnoscope and a neat pile of powerpacks stacked beside his knee. ‘Come on, you Ruinous filth – stick your head out,’ the Scout murmured absently to himself. Kush fired. With a smirk of satisfaction and without taking his eye from the lens, the Scout ejected another spent pack and slipped another into the rifle’s breech from the pile.
Omar brought the magnoculars back to his eyes and surveyed the carnage on the city perimeter, which was no less horrifying in night-vision. Even from the bell tower’s vantage, the Scout only had a view of Necroplex-South and East. From the belfry it became obvious what the Excoriators’ problem would be. Sheer numbers. Wave after wave of slaves and cultist soldiers stormed from the distant darkness. They never seemed to stop, and ran full speed at the city along the lychways and clambered across funereal architecture of the burial grounds with contorted face of fury and frustration. Spread through their colossal number were armoured champions and renegade Angels sporting blades of wicked design and obscene dimensions. Omar had also spotted daemonkin and monstrous beasts from hellish planes of existence to bolster the Cholercaust’s already formidable assault capabilities.
On the south and east perimeters, at least, the Excoriators had fared reasonably well against the Blood Crusaders, flak and fevered flesh being no match for the Angels’ boltguns. The Charnel Guard and hastily recruited Certusian militia did their part also, the kill zones before the battlements a hailstorm of light, lead and gun emplacement fire. The Blood God’s warped champions and renegade Adeptus Astartes – using slave-soldiers as meat shields – closed the gap and created havoc for the perimeter. Their deity-pleasing antics and the brutal insanity of their assaults tested the nerve of the Guardsmen and cemetery worlders, and where Skulltaker Space Marines and berserkers breached the line and scrambled up through the firepower onto the scree battlement, massacres unfolded. The real problem, as Omar could see from the bell tower, were the daemon monstrosities the Blood God had bequeathed the Cholercaust, blessed manifestations of Ruinous destruction and murderous power crafted in corporeal form.
On the Necroplex-East perimeter, Omar had watched Brothers Damaris and Judah hacked to pieces by a small horde of bloodletting arch-fiends with hell-red hides and smouldering blades. Daemon engines of dark metal and diabolic soulfire sliced and pounded their defective way up through the defences and Epistolary Melmoch’s Charnel Guardsmen. A charging herd of armoured steeds had smashed through the Scourge’s section like a spooked drove of grox, scattering his sentinels and forcing them to abandon their posts and emplacements. Omar had spotted a possessed Salamander – bearing the mark and scale of the renegade Dragon Warriors on his warp-tormented form – cut through the Sisters of Battle supporting Brother Simeon, and just about everything else on the southern perimeter.
Worst of all, the Scout had witnessed the merciless decimation of Second Whip Azareth’s sec
tion by what could only be described as one of the Blood God’s own. A mighty horned daemon, standing many times taller than an Adeptus Astartes and hate-wrought from ancient enmity, had appeared out of the night like a colossus. Where it walked, the ground shook beneath its cloven hooves. Its wings hung about its massive shoulders like the plate shielding of a battleship, and in one huge claw it clutched a flint axe, roughly hewn in its entirety from daemon world bedrock. With the razor edge of the weapon, the primordial beast swept the necroplex and battlement, ripping through scores of cultists and Charnel Guardsmen with equal indifference and creating small lakes of spilt blood. The monstrous greater daemon jangled with brass plate, mail and chain, and bawled its unquenchable fury from eyes, anger-flared nostrils and a snarl-retracted mouth, which glowed with the elemental fires burning within.
Omar watched cemetery worlders flee before the great beast, only to be cut down by another rubble-grazing sweep of its axe, while Second Whip Azareth stood his ground. The Scout’s heart beat with Chapter pride as the Excoriator took the fight to the furious behemoth, dwarfed by the size of the beast and the carnage it effortlessly created. Omar looked on, sickened, as a Space Marine disappeared beneath one of the beast’s brazen hooves, brought down by the monster as though he were nothing more than an irritation.
The Scout thought the gargantuan daemon might simply stride across the battlement unopposed and begin levelling the city with its primeval weapon and crushing fist. That was until the battle-scarred shape of the venerable Gauntlet had swooped in, drifting about the monster just out of reach of its building-cleaving axe. The gunship’s heavy bolter fire danced off the greater daemon’s hide, prompting the beast to cloak itself in the mighty expanse of its leathery wings, until the Gauntlet slammed a Hellstrike missile into the horror. The beast fell back, knocked from its hooves by the force of the explosion. Hundreds of the Blood God’s slave-soldiers were crushed beneath its ancient form, and hundreds more were thrown from their feet by the quake of the monster’s descent. Shaking its appalling head, a wing blast-shattered and aflame, the daemon had scrambled furiously to its feet. The pilot of the Gauntlet expertly gained altitude, keeping the Thunderhawk out of the flint axe’s considerable reach, while at the same time drawing the enraged beast away from the city. Like some reptilian death world predator, mindlessly consumed with the pursuit of its prey, the greater daemon trailed the venerable Gauntlet, its battle-ire continually stoked by the annoyance of the gunship’s heavy bolters, the burn of its lascannons and intermittent flooring by the Thunderhawk’s Hellstrike missiles.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 203