The flesh is weak.
The weak shall be purged.
What remains is strength.
The hall had once been an embarkation hub for the transit tunnels running under the wasteland between the Melamar hives and the mighty Capitolis spire. Before war had come to Shardenus, it would have been swarming with workers, each destined for the heavy grav-trains that ran into the heart of the megapolis. In recent days the area had echoed with the crash and thunder of weapon discharge as Rauth’s forces had driven the last of the defenders from their positions.
The flesh is weak.
What remains is strength.
Now only loyalists remained. They stood in ranks of thousands all across the vast floorspace, company after company of them. Morvox could sense their exhaustion – the fug of stale sweat rising through the hall, a product of days-long combat in the stinking pits of Melamar. Some wore the olive-green of the Ferik, stained with blood and oil; others the black of the Galamoth Armoured. Irregulars from loyalist Shardenus units stood at the rear, still wearing their old pearl-grey fatigues. For all Morvox knew, the mortals he’d saved in Melamar Secundus were among them, ready to enter action once more on behalf of the Emperor.
Tank columns ran up the centre of the space, their engines idling and filling the air above them with fumes. Rauth had assembled hundreds of vehicles for the main assault, drawn across the entire width of the front line, lowered from the wasteland surface on industrial elevator shafts and sent roaring down the transit passages towards the muster points. Morvox knew that many more had been due to arrive – the second wave of heavy armour, commanded by the mortal Nethata. They hadn’t come, though he had no idea why.
Beyond the tank columns, towering high into the gloom at the back of the army, were the three Warhound Titans. More than anything else arrayed in that hall, they radiated an aura of complete dominance. They stood immobile, hunched on two backwards-jointed legs, weapons hanging low from broad, sloping shoulders. Their blunt heads, fashioned into the snarling muzzles of dogs, glowed with orange illumination from cockpit lights. They reared up over the troops below, standing sentinel, frozen into attitudes of poorly contained aggression.
The Mechanicus tech-adepts had barely been able to squeeze the Warhounds into the embarkation chamber’s precincts, even after thousands of tonnes of masonry had been demolished to give access from the surface and the full ingenuity of the Martian war machine had been employed to bring the sacred engines into the perpetual twilight of the hive underworld.
But there they stood, hissing steam gently from colossal limb-joints, issuing a low, thudding growl from their huge drive units. Once down into the enormous underground caverns, they somehow seemed more massive, more intimidating.
Morvox knew their names. Gaius Thyrsus, Quis Odio, Ferus Arma. He could respect such power. As a Medusan, as an Iron Hand, as a servant of the Imperium, he relished the sight of it.
The flesh is weak.
What remains is strength.
He turned his head back, away from the massed ranks of waiting soldiers, armour and war engines.
In the vanguard, surrounding him, were the Iron Hands of Clan Raukaan. Nine claves stood ready, each arrayed in night-black power armour and with their weapons held ready. Morvox’s own unit, Clave Arx, stood third from the left, as rigid and unmoving as all the others. Their red eyes glowed in the velvet dark.
In the centre was Clave Prime. Rauth was there, as were Khatir and Telach. Three subordinate Librarians stood with the clan commander, their dark blue armour wreathed in subtle flickers of aether-light. None of them moved. None of them spoke.
Huge doors soared up before them all, over thirty metres high and braced with thick bars of adamantium. The doors had been closed by the last of the defenders before they had retreated into the tunnels, then welded shut and braced with supporting buttresses on the far side. The Imperial aquila that had once adorned the door faces had been defaced and daubed with purple stains, but was still perceptibly there.
On the other side of those doors were the tunnels themselves, kilometres-long and crammed with defending troops.
Morvox felt his primary heart beating, long and slow. Despite days of near-constant fighting, he felt alert, aware, prepared. The task ahead would be the sternest test of Rauth’s strategy, and everyone assembled in the hall knew it.
+Warriors of Raukaan.+
The voice in his head was Chief Librarian Telach’s. Morvox knew that the same voice was being heard by every member of the clan.
+I have seen what lies beyond these doors. At the far end of the tunnels, where the tunnels meet the foundations of the Capitolis, the gates are still open. Through them spill creatures of the arch-enemy. Those gates are our objective. Any other considerations are secondary.+
None of the Iron Hands responded. Each absorbed the information silently, remaining as still as the air around them.
+Whatever Khatir says to them, the mortals will wither before the creatures in those tunnels. Let them wither. Reserve your wrath for the enemy. We must take the gates.+
An image of the Imperial Guard officer’s face – the one called Marivo – flashed across Morvox’s mind then. He remembered how hard the man had been fighting, how determined he’d been, how the blond hair had framed his eager eyes.
We are ready to serve, lord.
Morvox pushed the image to the back of his mind. Telach’s sending echoed in its place.
Let them wither.
‘Loyal fighters of Shardenus!’ roared Iron Father Khatir, a single voice in the immense space. He, alone of the Iron Hands, had turned fully to face the assembled war host, and his eyes burned red. His tarnished battle-plate glinted in the endless shadows of the Melamar underworld as if edged with faint lines of steel.
‘The test comes! Glory in it! Glory in what is to come!’
His voice resounded from the high places, amplified by war-vox relays in his helm. It thrummed up from the ground, echoed from the pillars, rushed out into the void beneath the enormous, unseen roof spaces.
‘Hate them,’ he thundered, raising his lightning claws high. His blades shot out, sheathed in fire. ‘Hate those who have sullied this place. Let your anger burn, let it make your blows strike true. With every stride you take, their corruption weakens. You shall be the instruments of Shardenus’s salvation. You will be the immortal heroes of this world!’
Morvox remained still. The words washed over him. He could hear a low murmur of assent from the men standing behind him.
He knew what was happening. Khatir’s voice, laced with subtle neuro-markers, would be stirring them. Their tired limbs would be feeling lighter. Their slack jaws would be tightening, as would the grip on their lasguns.
Morvox was hardly immune to the affect. He felt his heart-rates pick up. His blood flooded with adrenaline, primed to send him into full battle-readiness. All across his body, augmetic nodes ran final introspections, priming themselves to contribute properly to the totality of his killing power.
‘For those who have turned from the Emperor’s holy light, there is nothing but death!’ Khatir fed his claws with more flame. The rippling, blue-tinged tongues wrapped around the metal of his armour. ‘And beyond death, annihilation. For the traitor has forgotten the first and holiest truth: that the Emperor protects His own.’
At the utterance of those words – the Emperor protects – the ones that every child in every city on every planet across the boundless Imperium knew, the mortals stirred into a low growl of assent.
‘And those who die this day will be martyrs!’ thundered Khatir, curling one enormous claw into a fist. ‘Their souls will cleave to the Master of Mankind, joining in union with His holy presence. Those who waver, those who falter, those who retreat, they will be traitors, no better than those we have come to slay.’
The growl turned into a wave of angry muttering. The men were roused. Khatir’s neuro-oratory was doing its work. Morvox narrowed his eyes, impatient for the signal to adv
ance.
‘Take no backward step!’
Khatir clenched his other fist.
‘Show no pity!’
His eyes blazed.
‘Show no weakness!’
Flames raged across his ceramite, engulfing him and flaring like the corona of a dying star.
‘For the Emperor: death to the traitor!’
Death to the traitor!
The response was deafening. Men thrust their fists into the air, roaring out their defiance and hatred. They stamped their feet, and the echo of it lashed out like a blast-wave.
‘Death to the heretic!’
Death to the heretic!
‘Death to the witch!’
Death to the witch!
Khatir flung his arms out wider and fresh flames arced up high, writhing like the necks of dragons.
‘By He who rules in glory,’ he roared, letting his mighty voice reach a fresh, blistering crescendo, ‘follow me, and bring oblivion to them!’
His final words rang around the hall like the report of a nova cannon, vast and booming. Men surged forwards, chanting in unison, driven into a frenzy of bloodlust.
Then the charges blew. Whole lines of thermo-explosives went off at once, cascading down the centre of the colossal doors, showering the Iron Hands standing below them with debris. The crack and echo of the detonation rocked the doors, and one gigantic panel buckled inwards.
Morvox tensed, ignoring the detritus raining down around him, ready for the charge that would carry him over the threshold and into the tunnels beyond. Behind him, the mania reached new heights.
DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!
More explosives crashed out into the dark, blazing along the doors’ joints. From the far side, in the cavernous tunnels beyond, something like screaming rushed out.
With a final, rolling boom, the final batch of charges exploded, shattering what remained of the doors in an orgy of flame and magma. The entire structure dissolved into a crumbling, sliding, toppling mass of ferrocrete, adamantium and steel.
Behind Morvox, thousands strong, the war host of Territo surged towards the breach, hurling invective at the enemies they couldn’t yet see, desperate to rush through the walls of flame and into the unknown horror beyond.
+Now,+ sent Telach, giving the signal. +Now.+
Morvox broke into a run, bounding towards the smouldering remnants of the gate. All the Iron Hands did the same, responding instantly and accelerating to full speed. They swept onwards like onyx ghosts in the flame-licked dark, as silent as death-masks, power weapons shimmering amid the clouds of smog and ash, bolters primed and ready to bring death to the faithless.
The flesh is weak.
Morvox mouthed the words as he ran, feeling his boots crush the broken slabs underfoot. Beyond the vast maw of the doorway, under the cavernous shadow of the tunnels beyond, he picked out the first of his targets.
He took aim.
What remains is strength.
+Daemonspoor.+
Morvox suppressed the ghost of a smile when he heard Telach’s mind-voice. The Chief Librarian didn’t control his emotions as completely as the other members of the command clave, and his relish for the upcoming test was poorly hidden.
Morvox swung round on the ball of his foot and fired a bolt at point-blank range into a flabby-cheeked mutant. Before the spinning fragments of bone and flesh had fallen to earth he was already moving, striding through the ranks of the enemy and laying about him with his chainsword. The curve of the tunnels soared away above him, echoing with gunfire. His clave stalked alongside him, fighting in the calm, methodical way that was the hallmark of the warriors of Medusa.
The mortals they were up against had changed since the first days of combat. On the outer walls and in the upper levels of Melamar Primus the defenders of Shardenus had been almost fully human –faint mutation here and there had done little to break the pattern. Down in the tunnels, the full extent of the city’s corruption was becoming apparent. Some men had been turned into giants, bursting from their armour in folds of fleshy muscle. Others had been elongated, or given writhing tentacles instead of arms. Morvox had seen mutants with grotesquely enlarged jaws, or bulbous eyes like insects, or hooked claws dripping with luminous venom. In the flickering dark, lit by explosions and las-flares, they looked like the jumbled dreams of some insane vivisectionist.
The mutants felt no fear. They kept advancing forwards their attackers in steady, fearless waves. Some of them still carried lasguns, and fired them coolly and carefully, aiming for armour-joints and tank-tracks. Others wielded a bizarre array of alternative weapons – heavy multi-barrelled projectile guns, cutting blades like meat cleavers, whips studded with spiked balls of iron. Their eyes, nostrils and mouths glowed with witchlight, as if they were illuminated from within by vials of corpse-gas. Their stretched-tight skin was white, like porcelain, and laced with scars and sores. Some went helmetless, exposing bizarre tattoos and piercings across their twisted faces.
Morvox jabbed his chainsword into the gut of an oncoming mutant. He barely had time to watch the whirling blades carve their way through the plate armour before he’d swung his fist round and unleashed another bolt into the neck of an onrushing cultist. Then he withdrew the blade and lashed it upwards, just in time to meet the leap of a snake-headed warrior in close-fitting carapace armour. Every jab, parry or shot ended the tortured existence of another corrupted soul.
Progress down the tunnels ground to a crawl. The initial burst through the gates had been met by heavy return fire from the barricades beyond. The defenders had been well prepared and supplied with banks of fixed artillery. The Iron Hands had crashed through the first series of barricades, but more lines of defence existed beyond that, banked up every five hundred metres down the long transit route. The tunnels were huge, and the main routes were interconnected by many dozens of service tunnels, allowing bands of the enemy to loop back round and attack the flanks of the invading army.
Rauth’s elite forces cared nothing for that. The mortals were capable of soaking up the mutants’ counter-assaults, even if it meant them dying in swathes. The Iron Hands’ principal target was the far end of the tunnel, still kilometres away – the underground gates to the Capitolis. Enemy troops surged through that open portal, clogging up the tunnels with fresh ranks of horrors and replacing those who died under loyalist blades.
Just as they had done since the beginning of the campaign, the Iron Hands pressed on remorselessly towards that goal, heedless of anything else until the task was complete. Each clave worked independently, strung out across the full width of the tunnel, carving deep paths through the lines of defenders and leaving carnage in their wake.
Morvox strode onwards, kicking out with his armoured boot and shattering the chestplate of a struggling mutant on the ground. A brief space opened up before him, and he took the opportunity to make a long-range shot, taking the head off a lascannon operator working nearly fifty metres distant. An eyeless horror sprang up at him from the shifting shadows, screaming with inhuman bloodlust and scrabbling up at his helm. He disembowelled it with a casual sweep of his chainsword before jerking the weapon back round to punch through the torso of a raging mutant with lashing flails for arms.
‘Neverborn,’ voxed Fierez in warning, though his voice was barely audible over the whirr of his blades.
Morvox nodded, dispatching a dog-faced mutant with a bolter round and smashing another aside with the butt of his weapon. He’d already felt the same thing – a tang of anticipation at the back of his mouth, as if the saliva were souring. The hairs on his remaining flesh had risen, and his secondary heart had broken into a steady beat.
‘Stand fast,’ he voxed on the command channel. ‘We take them together.’
He’d barely finished speaking when the first of them appeared. It came down the tunnels like a howling wind, screeching as it came. Then more emerged, wheeling and diving like raptors. They didn’t register as targets on Morvox’s helm display – just patches
of distortion that his instruments couldn’t track.
His real eyes could see them, though. He saw their pale limbs thrash through the darkness, and he saw their long hair stream out behind their slender faces. He saw their eyes, glistening like jewels, and their long fangs flashing with silver light.
They looked fragile. For all the latent horror they carried in their wake, they looked as if they’d snap clean apart in the face of a well-aimed blade stroke.
Morvox knew how dangerous that impression was. The ephemeral presences were only half corporeal – their true nature resided in the miasma of the warp. They were daemons: immortal intelligences born from the liquid tumult of mortal emotions. Their temporary physical form could be harmed but their essence could never be destroyed, no more than the thoughts and desires that gave birth to them could be destroyed. They were immortal, eternal, spawned in the darkest recesses of the human imagination and imbued with the malice of infinite invention.
They hurled themselves out of the tunnels, wailing and laughing with fractured voices. Dozens of them had come, some holding hands like mortal children, others spiralling through the air with the grace of acrobats.
The daemons drove the mortals mad. Whether traitor or loyalist, the effects were much the same – delirium, screaming, dislocated laughter, paralysis, uncontrollable spasms. Their spoor was intoxicating, maddening, wholly irresistible and utterly hateful. Men ripped their visors from their faces as the daemons swooped towards them, and the expressions on their faces were both rapt and horrified.
Morvox watched the neverborn swoop and whirl, and felt none of that. The human capacities that would once have made him weak before such monsters had long since bled away. He could no longer suffer from the lusts and desires that they preyed on, nor could he feel the true impact of their baleful presence on his psyche. To the extent he felt anything towards them, it was disgust. They were the embodiment of everything his Chapter loathed – flesh, seductive and soft, coursing with rich, warp-spun blood and flushed with the promise of forbidden pleasures.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 228