Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Bring them down,’ he ordered, tracking the nearest of them with his bolter and opening fire.

  Khadi felt like screaming. She’d been screaming for real just a few minutes ago, yelling out her devotion to the Emperor like she’d never doubted anything about Him, His angels or His Imperium in her short life. Her fists had been up in the air like all the rest of them, clenched tight and ready for use in what was to come.

  Then the doors had opened, and hell had come through them.

  She’d run to start with, jostling with the others in Marivo’s unit, anxious to get to the front quickly and bring her weapon to bear. Everyone around her had been the same – bullish, eager, pumped with aggression and bravado and fragile confidence.

  She’d seen Marivo go first. He’d always been the keenest and the fastest. The encounter with the Iron Hands had reinforced his world view, restoring the confidence that had been briefly knocked by his injuries and the slaughter of the Warhawks. He’d bellowed with defiance, holding his lasgun in one hand while sprinting forwards with the rest.

  She’d stayed close behind him all the way in. The rousing words of the black-armoured giant had still been echoing in her mind back then. If she’d been a bit more wary, a bit more experienced, she might have guessed that she’d been manipulated, and that her battle-mania was at least partly induced, but the whole embarkation hall had been roused into a frenzy – thousands of soldiers, all of them desperate for nothing but killing, and that had a powerful effect.

  So she’d pushed herself as hard as anyone, maintaining her position in the company near the front, watching for the first sign of action with anticipation.

  It was the noise that had got to her first. In the confines of the tunnels, the din had been thunderous. The Iron Hands had crossed the threshold first, and the crash of their massive weapons unloading had sent a wave of ear-ripping energy slamming around the hall. Then the first ranks of mortal troops had charged through the breach, adding blinding volleys of las-fire. By the time the tanks had ground their way to the threshold, things had got truly deafening. Huge barrels had opened up in concert, blazing and thundering and filling the air with a choking smog of bitter smoke.

  Still she’d run, coughing and stumbling and trying to keep her weapon primed for use. The gates had drawn nearer, vast and intimidating, looking even more fearful as flames from earlier explosions licked up the huge columns on either side of them. She’d seen men go down around her, tripping and losing their precarious footing in the headlong rush. Those men had been trampled into the ferrocrete by the ranks coming behind them who could not have stopped running even if they’d wanted to. The entire army, company by company, had swept its way into the tunnels, and its dreadful momentum was by then utterly unstoppable.

  She nearly screamed first when the Warhounds unleashed their weapons. The report of the first Titan’s colossal arm-mounted guns lashed around the echoing chamber, and it felt like the entire hive spire was rocking on its foundations. Then the next one fired, and then the third – huge, blistering columns of preternatural energy, lighting up the eternal gloom of Shardenus’s underworld like the blaze of starship engines.

  She risked a quick look over her shoulder to see the Warhounds striding into battle. Seeing them in motion astonished her – awkward, tilting, stalking along like the daemons of legend and rumour, only they were daemons of iron and adamantium and as tall as hab-blocks.

  Khadi told herself then that they were on her side, that their anger was directed at the enemy, that their machine souls were blessed and sanctified by the Immortal Emperor and were therefore no threat to her. Still, they made her blood chill.

  She turned back, frantically trying to keep her place amid the rush and roar of the charging army. When her company gained the line of the broken gates she almost didn’t notice – her ears were ringing from the noise and her vision was blurred and streaked from the array of flashes, flares and explosions.

  ‘For the Emperor!’ someone cried, possibly Marivo. Then they broke across the barrier.

  Khadi nearly fell while clambering across the twisted and jutting mess of ironwork. She nearly lost her grip on her lasgun as she pushed her way past the burning remains of a troop carrier, its tracks still grinding even after the chassis had been turned into an empty shell of molten slag. She nearly broke her right leg falling down the steep drop on the far side, down into the pits where the grav-trains had once plied their ceaseless rotary journeys, and nearly blinded herself staring straight into the site of an incendiary detonation just metres away.

  She felt her heart hammering and her throat constrict. She felt her panic return, stiffening up her limbs and making her gorge rise and her pulse race.

  Ahead of her, the tunnels yawned away into the far distance, huge and criss-crossed with bright lines of tracer fire. Soldiers swarmed across the base of them like insects. The mass of men stretched from side to side of the enormous space, carpeting it in a sheet of glinting helmets. Rockets, mortars and lascannon blasts arced overhead, hurled down into the depths of the tunnels by the slowly advancing tank columns. Every so often the Warhounds would fire, and eye-watering bursts of energy would lance overhead, briefly outshining all else.

  Khadi forced herself to concentrate, to keep her feet, to maintain position. From far ahead she could hear the volume of screaming and shouting getting louder. Bolter rounds thudded in constant streams, drowning out the whisper-quiet discharge of the thousands of lasguns.

  Her mistake was to look up, out beyond the crash and press of battle and into the high vaults of the transit tunnel.

  Up there, high above the clash of mortal arms, things were in the air. They swooped down from the roof, laughing with voices like the massed shrieks of animals. Khadi caught glimpses of purple – like long cloaks rippling in the wind. She saw pale limbs flashing in the dark, far too long for mortal limbs. She saw curved scimitars, and long claws snapping.

  One of them looked at her. One of them, high up, sweeping over the battlefield like a twisted goddess of nightmarish legend, locked eyes with her for the briefest microsecond.

  In that moment, barely more than a thought-space long, Khadi saw what manner of creatures dwelt in the underworld of Shardenus.

  Then she screamed for real. She screamed until her throat was hoarse, dropping her weapon and burying her face into the slime and stink of the ground beneath her. She forgot everything around her. Her hands shot out, and she clawed at the ground, as if somehow she could burrow deeper and escape the terror.

  Around her, men did the same. She could hear them – weeping, raging, crying out like children.

  Dimly, like a memory of a dream, she heard Marivo’s voice shouting something out. He was still on his feet, then.

  It didn’t matter. She’d seen the nature of the enemy. She’d seen what was waiting for them. She’d seen the first fragments of the nightmare in the Capitolis coming for them.

  After that, nothing mattered at all.

  Clave Arx opened up with its bolters, blazing out across the darkness of the tunnels. All across the battlefield, the other claves did the same, letting rip with tight volleys of bolter rounds. For a few scant seconds, the daemons danced their way through the hurricane of projectiles, weaving around the lines of fire with staggering agility and poise. Some sped off into the heights, shooting skywards like loosed rockets.

  Others hurtled earthwards, spinning and tumbling into range with smooth, careless smiles on their deadly faces. They crashed to earth, rolling and skidding amongst the grappling armies and scattering men in all directions as they landed. Then the screaming began in earnest.

  ‘That one,’ said Morvox, breaking into a run towards the nearest fallen daemon and stowing his bolter. From long experience, he knew that blades would cut deeper than bolts.

  As one, the clave charged towards it. The daemon rose from the ground to meet them, hurling the broken bodies of mortal troops away from it with casual, whiplash movements. Blood sprayed after the tu
mbling corpses, fizzing hot and trailing with purple smoke.

  The daemon laughed. It was taller than the mortal men around it, shaped in the likeness of a human woman but with an unearthly purple sheen running across its skin. Warp essence flickered across its lilac flesh like quick-

  silver, catching the light and refracting it dazzlingly.

  It shouldn’t have been beautiful. Its legs were bent backwards like an animal’s and its arms terminated in huge, crab-like claws. Its long, straggling hair moved of its own accord, as if ruffled by the winds of unseen worlds. Its face was stretched into a thin, grotesque parody of a mortal woman’s beauty. Blood ran down its chin, spilling over the ornate armour that clung to its otherwise naked body.

  And yet it was beautiful. Even Morvox, elevated into an existence of pure violence, could sense that. The neverborn had been created from desire, and desire still lingered over it like the stench of death on a corpse.

  As he ran towards it, the daemon ripped the entrails free of the last of the mortal soldiers it had burst in amongst. The man, still alive and impaled on its extended claw, arched his back and cried out in agony before dropping heavily back to the ground. The daemon licked a length of stringy gore from its claw, turned to the approaching Space Marines, and grinned.

  Fierez got into range first. He fired a series of rounds from his bolter while still charging, each of them perfectly aimed at the creature’s head and body.

  The daemon evaded the bolts, flickering between them like a broken vid-pict image. It waited for Fierez to come to it, grinning all the while and opening its claws. The Iron Hand mag-locked his bolter, still running, and drew his power sword. The blade ignited immediately as the disruptor roared into life.

  Then he stopped, dead, arms poised for a blow that never came. Purple flames rippled across his armour, pooling in the joints and bursting out through his helm lenses. The daemon leapt atop him, squatting obscenely on the Space Marine’s static shoulders. With a theatrical flourish, it plunged its claw down, cracking open Fierez’s helm and burrowing deep within.

  A flash of aether-born light shot out, sweeping from the epicentre like the blast-wave from a void explosion. Fierez’s armour shattered, exposing both metal and muscle beneath.

  By then Morvox was in range, and he leapt towards the creature as bolter fire from his battle-brothers slammed out, pursuing the daemon as it bounded away from Fierez’s tottering form. The daemon skipped through the lines of fire, shifting in and out of focus as it danced around the lethal torrent.

  ‘Blades!’ roared Morvox.

  He would be next. He was closest, and fastest. The daemon knew it too, and looked back at him to gauge his mettle.

  For a split second, they locked eyes. The daemon’s were dark, like pools into the void. Morvox’s were semi-bionic and ringed with metal. Neither were remotely human.

  Then the daemon blew him a kiss, somersaulted high into the air, and swept down towards him with the light of killing in its ethereal face.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Valien heard the mortal’s whimper before he saw him. He crouched down, stilling his own breathing, letting his aural augmetics do the hard work for him.

  Twenty metres away, stationary, alone. Easy prey.

  Going slowly, silently, Valien crept forwards. He stayed low, almost on all fours, hugging the shadows. Semi-consciously, he withdrew his needle gun and switched the poisonous nerve agents in the syringes for paralysis inducers.

  His shoulder grazed against the low ceiling. The corridors around him were little more than service tunnels, tight and twisting. Valien knew he was inside the foundations of the Capitolis spire, though he didn’t know much more than that. He’d left the long transit tunnels behind, hugging their walls, diverting into the ancillary maintenance capillaries to slip past the huge armies that had been installed in the central caverns. After that he’d squeezed through a whole network of tiny feeder conduits, wrestling his stringy body through gaps that should have been big enough only for rats.

  The dark was almost total. His false-vision retina compensated, fleshing out the detail of his surroundings in lurid brightness. The nature of the structures around him had changed. Previously bare metal was covered with a thin layer of growths, many of which shone in the dark with a pale phosphorescence; others were painful to the touch, as if they harboured stingers under their pulpy surfaces. The air had become hotter and more humid; when Valien turned his environment filters off he could taste a trace of sweetness in it, like rotten fruit.

  Valien moved off, picking his way over pools of fluid on the floor. A few metres more, and he caught sight of the source of the sounds.

  The man had slumped against the tunnel walls, his head low and his hands hanging listlessly. The sobs that came from his open mouth were barely audible; just miserable accompaniments to his breathing. The mortal’s head was bare and he wore no night-vision visor. That made him practically blind, which was all to the good.

  Valien checked his proximity scanner for other signals, of which there were none. Then he sprang, leaping forwards and bounding down the tunnel like an animal.

  Amazingly, the man saw him coming. He pushed himself free from the wall and tried to stumble away. Valien caught him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him back. The needle gun fired once, twice in the dark, then withdrew.

  The man convulsed, shivering. His back arched and his hands clenched, then he went limp. He fell back into the position he’d been in before, his eyes staring and his open mouth slack.

  Valien squatted before him, and gave his prey a good look.

  The man wore Administratum robes, though they were so dirty and ripped it was hard to tell what his function had been. From the look of him, he had once been relatively handsome, with the smooth and hairless skin that only came with expensive rejuve treatments. He had thin lips, a high forehead and a hooked nose; perhaps aristocratic blood, or he’d just fancied looking like someone born to a high station.

  No longer. Even with the colour-distortion inherent in his augmetic vision, Valien could see that the man’s skin was almost pearl-white. Lesions ran from the corners of his mouth down to his throat. Pustules clustered at the edges of his eyes, and they glowed in the dark just like the spores that clung to the tunnel walls.

  The man’s eyes glared at him, held open by the paralysing agents coursing through his bloodstream. Valien was good at reading men’s expressions, a skill he’d honed carefully in his years in Talica, and he had no trouble working out what his victim was thinking.

  The man was deranged by fear. He was not just scared of Valien – he was terrified of everything. He had the look of someone who had been hunted for a good while, someone for whom the entire world had long been transformed into something utterly unrecognisable.

  Valien rolled his shoulders, relaxing muscles that had been held tense for a very long time.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  The man didn’t reply. He stared back, and a line of sweat trickled down from his temple.

  Valien adjusted his needle gun, and a fresh syringe slid out from the firing mechanism.

  ‘You have nothing to gain by not talking,’ he said. ‘Though you still have a few things to lose.’

  Valien reached forwards and pressed the needle into the man’s throat. The man winced, and tears of pain started from his eyeballs. His pupils were heavily dilated – unnaturally so, which perhaps explained why he’d been able to see Valien coming.

  Valien withdrew the syringe and rocked back on to his haunches.

  ‘You now have loquazine in your system,’ he said. ‘You will feel a compulsion to talk; do not fight it. I ask again, what is your name?’

  The man resisted for a moment longer. Then something seemed to crumble inside him. His eyes went dead.

  ‘Venmo Kilag,’ he said, speaking with some difficulty through stiff lips. ‘Master of Ledgers, class tertius, Capitolis.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Adept Kilag?’

>   The man called Kilag shot out a despairing look. If his hands weren’t paralysed, he might have buried his face in them.

  ‘Escaping,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t got very far,’ said Valien.

  ‘No.’

  Valien smiled.

  ‘Where were you trying to get to?’ he asked.

  ‘Anywhere,’ the man said. ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘Anywhere but the Capitolis?’

  ‘Of course the Capitolis.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  Kilag’s face creased up, despite the powerful dampening effect of the drugs.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, still looking terrified.

  Valien lost his smile.

  ‘Just answer the questions,’ he said.

  Kilag’s eyes lost focus, as if he were drifting off into some kind of reverie. What little light remained in his fatigued eyes dimmed further.

  ‘We didn’t know,’ he said, hardly audibly. ‘We didn’t know. They looked like they always had done, right up until the end. Holy Throne, I–’

  Kilag shuddered miserably.

  ‘I have seen terrible, terrible things,’ he said.

  ‘We all have.’

  ‘Months ago,’ Kilag said. ‘For a while, none of us noticed. We knew the governor’s staff had changed. Someone new had arrived – what was his name? But it was all so, so… routine.’

  Valien flexed his fingers idly. He toyed with the idea of jabbing his fingers into the man’s eyes, just for the sensation.

  ‘You were lazy,’ Valien said. ‘Corruption was among you for months, spreading from world to world, and you chose not to see it. You turned your faces away.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kilag, and another tear ran down his smooth cheek. ‘We did, we did. Oh, Holy Emperor, we were all to blame!’

  ‘Tell me of the Capitolis.’

  Kilag’s hands began to shake.

  ‘The walls,’ he said, his voice weak. ‘They have put… things in the walls. We were all changing, subtly changing.’

  He looked down at his hands. Sores were visible across his palms.