None of that mattered, for he had fulfilled the order given to him by Heriat at last.
Penetrate the Capitolis, he’d been commanded. Find out what’s in there, report back with visual records. We need to see what’s waiting for us inside.
He hadn’t been able to send visual records. For a long time his instruments had been deaf and mute, and he’d been crawling silently though the dark like an insect. Only the final resort, the devastating explosive core that every Talica operative had implanted in their chest cavity, had the capability to achieve that goal. Only that device had retained the power to blow open the walls of the Capitolis and expose the horror within.
And so, even in his dying scream, a sliver of satisfaction penetrated Valien’s consciousness. He knew, as he died, that he had reported back as best he could. He knew that if any loyalist troops still fought their way towards the Capitolis they would now be fully aware, in exact and terrifying detail, just what was waiting for them inside.
It might not have made up for his many sins. Nothing, perhaps, could have done that; but it was a contribution, a small act of penitence.
In a way, it was restitution. In a way, it was enough.
Chapter Nineteen
Telach felt his mind flood with visions as soon as the explosions broke out. He didn’t need to let his mindsight roam free – the images crowded into his waking consciousness in a mad, overlapping rush.
All of the Librarians felt it. He could see his three Codiciers – Nedim, Malik, Djeze – reeling from the sudden deluge. Even the non-psychic battle-brothers responded.
Daemonspoor. Huge, huge daemonspoor.
Telach lifted his power staff high, and pure warp lightning licked along the shaft. Anticipation surged through his body.
‘No time remains,’ he said, turning to Rauth. ‘Forget the mortals – we must fight this.’
Rauth hesitated, caught between his stated course of action and the sudden change in events.
‘What do you see?’ he asked. ‘Tell me quickly.’
Telach’s hearts were already thumping hard, fuelling his body for the imminent fighting ahead. Now that he knew the nature of what awaited them in the spire, all room for debate had ended.
‘A rift,’ he said. ‘A gateway between realms. It is almost open. This world stands on the edge of damnation – we have not been fast enough.’
Still Rauth hesitated. Telach felt impatience rise up in him. He knew why Rauth resisted giving the order – the Imperial forces were in disarray, riven with discord and rebellion. Even if all of Nethata’s forces had been committed to assault alongside them, their chances of taking on what waited for them beyond the portals were slim. Even Iron Hands couldn’t kill that fast.
Khatir ignited his claw-flamers with a flourish.
‘Is there any other way, Librarian?’ he demanded.
Telach looked squarely at him.
‘There is not,’ he said. ‘Whatever else happens, I am going up there.’
Just as he was about to stride off towards the gates, a crackling comm-signal broke through on the command channel. Even with the destruction of the shielding surrounding the Capitolis, it was faint and broken. All those in the primary clave picked it up.
‘Priority signal for Clan Commander Rauth from Commissar-General Slavo Heriat of the 126th Ferik Tactical. Lord General Raji Nethata relieved of command due to insubordination. Remaining Galamoth and Ferik armoured divisions heading for deployment coordinates to follow in transmission 5-78, tactical outline appended. Bombardment to commence immediately. The Emperor protects the faithful.’
Rauth turned to Telach. As he did so, he ignited his power blade, and its ice-blue surface blazed in the dark.
‘So there is mettle in humanity yet,’ he said. ‘So be it. Open the gates.’
Telach immediately fed power to his staff. Warp essence burst out strongly, flooding the chamber before them with dazzling electric-white light. Each of the Codiciers did the same, sending snaking lines of energy lancing up towards the sealed portal.
‘Warriors of Raukaan!’ roared Khatir, striding up to the doorway with his arms aloft. ‘Now comes the final test!’
The claves responded instantly. They drew blades and slammed magazines into place. Many still carried horrific injuries, and nearly all had sustained damage to their armour plate. Of more than a hundred Space Marines who had entered the tunnels, less than seventy remained.
Telach felt the massive doors tremble. He had closed them with layers of wards against the daemonic, all of which took time to unravel. As the psychic barriers came down, he could hear the howl of the creatures on the far side. They were already clawing at the metal.
‘We will take them with speed!’ cried Khatir, sounding as eager for the fight as he ever did. ‘Advance! Pause for nothing! Destroy all in your path! Show no restraint!’
Telach unbound the last of the wards. A great, echoing crack ran down the length of the gilded doors. The shrieks of the daemons rose in volume, and the bronze surfaces buckled.
Rauth strode up to the portal, taking the position of honour. In one hand he carried his storm bolter; in the other his shimmering power-blade. Clad in his heavy void-black Terminator plate, he looked immense. Clave Prime formed up around him, each warrior massive and silent.
Telach could feel the pent-up energy coiled inside them all. He knew what was about to come.
The Iron Hands had fought in the manner of their Chapter doctrine – cold, methodical, remorseless. Now the urgency of the task had become fully apparent, as had the scale of the abomination before them.
Such straits demanded the casting-off of fetters, the abandonment of control. Only rarely did the sons of Manus abandon their meticulous way of war and adopt the ancient rage that lay deep in the gene-heritage of all the Adeptus Astartes.
When that happened, there were few forces in the galaxy capable of resisting it: ten thousand years of anger, of rage, of bitterness, all concentrated into a single, machine-augmented storm of vengeance.
Now the storm was coming. Now Shardenus would face the wrath of iron.
Telach crashed his staff onto the ground, shattering the rockcrete. Above him, the massive doors burst open with a booming crack. Sheets of aether-light rushed out, spinning into the dark. Lightning snapped across the widening gulf as the heavy doors ground slowly inwards. Shrieks and screams echoed from within.
‘For the Emperor!’ roared Khatir above the gathering tumult, sending gouts of vivid flame streaming high into the poisoned air.
And then, for the first time since the bloody campaign had begun, the Iron Hands responded. The sound of their massed battle-cry, hurled up defiantly into the vaults, was deafening, outmatching the screams of the neverborn, outmatching the low grind of the opening gates, and echoing through the bowels of the Capitolis like the coming of the gods themselves.
For the Emperor! they cried, sweeping up to the portal in a tide of darkness, charging into the maelstrom with murder in their eyes, blood on their armour and death kindling on their blades.
Morvox ran hard. A Space Marine in full battle-plate was a huge object weighing many tonnes; at speed, his momentum was formidable.
He leapt through the portal at the head of his clave. Seven of them remained from the fighting in the tunnels, and two of those – Gergiz and Kozen – carried serious injuries. They all ran at the same pace, hitting the ground hard with heavy armoured treads.
Beyond the gates, the Great Stair snaked away into the preternatural darkness, winding around a core of solid granite. It spiralled upwards, immense and majestic, curling like a massive python about the structural core of the hive spire. That core was gigantic – over sixty metres in diameter and lined with basalt pillars and mammoth iron bracings. Eyeless angels perched along its width, gazing sightlessly out over the enormous vaults. The Stair swept upwards around the core, vanishing into a dark haze as the marble-lined steps wound ever higher. It was surrounded on all sides by a vast gulf of emptines
s, breached only by a web of flying buttresses and high arches that spanned it, branching out and forming a sprawling lattice linking the stairway to the rest of the hive. On the far side of the abyss, the vast inner walls of the hive spire stood, shrouded in shadow and smoke.
The Great Stair had once been an empty place, clothed in darkness and disturbed only by the whispers of adepts shuffling from intersection to intersection along its immeasurable length. Now the warp itself burst out from the walls at all levels. Enormous growths snaked down from overhanging gargoyles, luminous and clutching. Screams echoed down from the high places, bouncing and refracting from twisting structures of living, weeping metal. Blood swilled down the stairs, frothing and boiling as the Iron Hands crashed up through it. Angry, violent lights wheeled and flickered in the vaults above, turning the echoing spaces into psychedelic, hallucinatory nightmares.
‘For the Emperor!’ roared Morvox, giving in to the urge to cry out, to vent his fury and his violence. Once unleashed, the dam-break of emotion could not be pulled back. The long repression of his animal spirits had done nothing to degrade the primal fury he was capable of – it had only isolated it, smothering it with layers of cold, calculating restraint. Now that it had gone, his wrath rose up, choking in his gorge. He could feel his body respond strongly, spiked with a rush of adrenaline and combat-stimms. The urge to slay was so strong that he felt that his hearts would burst from it.
Horrors came down at him, careering down the stairwell with fangs drawn and eyes glistening. A grotesque mutant, its stomachs spilling open with writhing lengths of sinew-flails, barrelled into his path bearing a force-hammer. Morvox beheaded it with a vicious sweep of his chainblade and kicked its body away, barely breaking stride.
Snake-faced figures leapt from the distant walls, sailing through the hazy atmosphere on gauzy membranes, spitting venom as they came. Morvox charged into them as they landed, firing from his bolter with tight precision. Three went down before he came in blade-range, each one taken out with head-shots. Before the skull-fragments had hit the ground he was among the others, punching the chainsword out and dragging it round in huge, unstoppable arcs. Blood and viscera surrounded him like a holy aura, flying high into the clammy air as his limbs moved.
His clave were equally lethal. The Iron Hands powered upwards, sprinting forwards, crashing through resistance with blunt, brutal force, pivoting on heels and bringing weapons into contact with crushing, shuddering violence. They slammed into knots of squealing mutants, cracking them open, hurling them apart and dealing death with savage purity.
But mutants were not the worst of the dangers under the arches of the soaring Capitolis. The spire had been steeped in the baleful powers of the warp, and everything within it sang with hatred, malice and madness. Huge flagstones cracked and disintegrated with no warning, opening up chasms and hurling warriors down into hidden depths. Sorcerous flames blazed out of gargoyle-faces, catching even on ceramite armour and raging across it. Translucent creatures, studded with blood-rimmed eyes and curtains of flesh, sprang down from hidden caches between the soaring pillars, careering through the gore-streaked air and clamping on to the facemasks of warriors with hooked fingers. The winding core of the Capitolis had been turned into a maelstrom of spines, hooks, barbs, flails and toxins.
Morvox ran on, leaping over a rearing creature with glowing eyes, crushing its face with his boot. He spun around, unleashing a burst of rounds into the stomach of a lurching monster with six lashing arms before plunging his chainsword deep into its stinking folds of blubber.
‘Maintain speed!’ roared Khatir from far up ahead, his voice resounding strangely from the warped architecture. ‘Purge the unclean! Slay them all!’
Morvox didn’t need to be told. Every Iron Hand sprinted onwards, thundering through the obstacles ahead. Whenever one was felled, another took his place. As inexorable as the workings of some giant, many-sectioned machine, the sons of Manus lashed, crunched, crushed and cut their way higher, ever higher, into the screaming heart of darkness ahead.
And as they climbed, the broken soul of Shardenus responded. Hurtling down from the living domes of glass and adamantium, wailing with joy and fury and wheeling high above the shambling press of mutants, the daemons came, and in their wake came terror as pure, hard and eternal as diamonds.
‘Fire!’ cried Heriat, shouting through the vox as if that could somehow make the shells strike home stronger. ‘Fire at will! Bring them down!’
All along the line, a hundred Leman Russ tanks opened up, and the wasteland disappeared in a huge plume of dirty smoke. A fraction of a second later, a vast, rolling boom cracked out, echoing between the distant burning spires. Long trails lanced out through the air, straight as gun-shafts, before slamming into the soaring walls of the Capitolis.
The tanks had ground to a halt south of the precipitous spire walls and had deployed in a long semicircle out in the chemical-shrouded wasteland. Toxic mist swirled thickly all around the immense foundations of the mighty hive, and shells left long ripped lines in it as they roared off to their targets.
The colossal hive towered above them, dwarfing all else and filling their viewfinders, but it was already burning. Explosions at the summit had spread, dropping like flaming tears from the distant pinnacles. A massive gouge ran down from the top of the pyramidal structure, still burning at its edges, revealing the innards of the structure within. Like an insect nest broken open by searching fingers, the exposed levels swarmed with madness. Mutated figures, tiny in Heriat’s scopes, dropped from the open wounds in the structure, screaming as they plunged to their deaths.
More explosions registered on his sensoria, this time coming from within the hive. Only one explanation existed for those readings – the Iron Hands had launched their assault from within. They were tearing their way up the heart of the spire, moving at astonishing speed. Heriat found himself wishing he could have seen them fight in there – the sight of Space Marines unleashed on prey was something that remained in a man’s mind forever.
‘Maintain fire-rates,’ he ordered, watching on his range of screens as the barrage repeated itself.
The cramped chamber rocked around him as Malevolentia opened up with its main cannon. Heriat watched the shell thunder out and crash into the walled flanks of the Capitolis. An entire section of metal and stonework crumbled into a dust-cloud of ruin where it impacted. More shells followed, blasted high by the Basilisks as they opened fire.
Even with aural protectors and inside the reinforced shell of the enormous vehicle, the noise was monstrous and unending. Shell after shell, round after round, mortar after mortar sailed through the air, punching lines through the curtains of ash and exploding against huge bulwarks of ferrocrete and adamantium.
The spire’s defenders – such as they were – initially seemed to have been caught off-guard. Many of their massive wall-mounted cannons had been destroyed in the opening flurry of fire, as if their commanders had been distracted by the cascade of destruction descending from above.
Now, though, the response had picked up. Lines of cannons on the parapets swung round and down, picking out the exposed formations of loyalist armour. White beams of las-fire and hammering torrents of heavy bolter fire scythed down from the burning ramparts, cracking into static Leman Russ plate and breaking it open. The Capitolis’s cannons were huge – as large as those that had been mounted on the outer perimeter – and each direct hit utterly destroyed its target. Heriat saw one group of three Basilisks taken out by a single shot, blasted to fragments of metal by the enormous fireball created on impact.
In standard military terms, the situation was hopeless. Heriat’s forces were exposed, out in the open, hidden only by clouds of toxic matter. A prudent commander would have withdrawn before the carnage overwhelmed him. A prudent commander would have demanded to know why the two Warlord Titans, the only things big enough to take on the spire’s enormous guns as equals, were standing immobile out in the wasteland and taking no part in the acti
on. A prudent commander would have done something, anything, to ensure his survival in the face of such withering, deadening fire.
But Heriat’s task was not to survive. Neither was it to destroy the spire from the outside – he had nowhere near enough firepower for that. His task was simple and specific. All his guns were aimed at a small fraction of the Capitolis’s vast expanse. His commanders zeroed in on their coordinates with ruthless efficiency, ignoring the havoc wreaked among their ranks and doing nothing to lessen the dreadful impact of returning enemy fire.
Heriat recalled the text of Valien’s last full dispatch to him. He’d replied to it, congratulating the agent on the work he’d done in recovering detailed plans of the Capitolis perimeter. He had no idea whether his reply had found its mark; he hoped it had.
Whether he’d known it or not, the data Valien had sent had been invaluable. The atmospheric filtration units studded high up on the walls were heavily guarded with massive walls of armour-cladding and surrounded by heavy weapon turrets. Their gigantic rotating blades were hidden behind adamantium mesh screens and set far back into the cyclopean flanks of the hive. They were well-guarded, well-hidden and there were dozens of them. Without Valien’s coordinates, destroying them would have been hopeless; even with them it was painfully hard.
But they could be taken down. Many units were already on fire, collapsing into ruin as the armour plate around them cracked and flexed. As they did so, the raw toxins of Shardenus Prime’s hellish hinterland were sucked up, churned around, mixed with poisonous fuel-fumes, then flushed directly into the deep innards of the hive via the capillaries and tunnels of the spire’s enormous circulatory system.
The Capitolis was a body, a single immense organism. Heriat was poisoning it.
A massive explosion rocked Malevolentia’s chassis as something detonated close by. Lines of dust ran down from the ceiling of the command chamber, spilling across a cracked pict screen and fouling the image. Scores of runes scrolled across the remainder, feeding him screeds of data on positions, fire-rates, damage taken and units lost.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 238