‘The Imperial Fists are the same,’ said Lysander. ‘Dorn saw to it that our principles were strong enough to weather the ages.’
Lycaon did not acknowledge Lysander’s words. ‘And then came the Shield of Valour,’ he continued. ‘Then came Malodrax. And I do not know if the First Captain of the Imperial Fists, the one whose death was among the greatest tragedies the Chapter has suffered, is the same man who stands opposite me now.’
Lysander did not respond. He stared down at the scrimshaw in front of Lycaon, which had once been a finger bone of Brother Skelpis. Skelpis had been crippled, unable to fight, and he had died a helpless death that no Space Marine should ever suffer.
‘What do you have to say, captain?’ asked Lycaon. ‘Or have you nothing?’
‘When we leave Malodrax,’ said Lysander, ‘Thul will be dead. That is all I have to say.’
‘I pray that you are right,’ said Lycaon. ‘It was your intelligence that led us here. It is your experience that we hope will give us the edge on the surface. Much relies on you, Lysander, and you will be judged when it is all done. When we come to leave Malodrax, whatever has happened down there, we will know which Lysander the Imperial Fists name among their number. The Reclusiam stands apart from the Chapter, for even its heroes are not beyond our judgement.’ Lycaon handed the scrimshawed bone to Lysander. ‘You were down there with him. Carry him with you.’
Lysander took the finger bone, saluted, and left the cell without another word.
The coral had grown up over millions of years, encrusted around flecks of rock and debris in orbit around Malodrax. Tiny organisms had woven microscopic calcific shells around themselves, and gradually, as the millennia ground by, enormous reefs had built up that cloaked the world of Malodrax in a shield of jagged coral that rendered it impervious to any attempt to land.
Any attempt, that was, without a map. Crazed scholars had mapped the reefs and the intricacies of their movement. Captains had braved the reefs to reach the forbidden planet inside. Who had first come to Malodrax, and why, was lost to the infinite histories of the Scattering, when mankind flew heedlessly to the most distant stars. But someone, to the woe of all, had made it.
The Breaker of Darkness emerged from the reef scored and tattered, dragging its own train of wreckage, chunks of shredded hull and the bodies of crewmen floating in her wake. Wide gashes laid open the latticework of deck and bulkhead inside. Half the golden fist emblem on her prow had been sheared off. But she could still fly, and her cargo was intact.
With a flare of engines the ship changed attitude, presenting the heat-shielded prow to the upper atmosphere of Malodrax.
It took a force of will to look on Malodrax itself. Like a void against a void, it forced the eye away from it, something darker than black. If an observer could compel himself to look at it he would see a discoloured orb, its southern hemisphere mottled and decaying like a tumour, its northern half parched and broken as if hammered into pieces. Its northern pole burned with purple flame, and near the equator an open wound oozed molten rock like infected blood. A tormented and suffering world, pulled apart by the unnatural forces that teemed on its surface, infested, befouled and rancid.
To this world the Breaker of Darkness descended, the flames of its upper atmosphere licking against the prow.
2
‘My captain was a brave man. He had served me for six decades as personal pilot, and then master of my fleet. The only time I saw him weep was when he condemned his ship to the atmosphere of Malodrax, knowing she would never rise from that toxic cauldron of hate.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
In the cool of the Shield of Valour, Lysander knelt to pray.
The ship was old indeed. It still bore the patina of Mars, deep red speckles on the blueish steel of her bulkheads and decks. Cold vapour clung to the floors and rippled down the walls. The archeotech engines, supplied by plasma reactors more efficient than any made for eight thousand years, required a deep chill to function and the whole ship was refrigerated.
Lysander’s silent prayer came to an end. It was one he had spoken to himself so many times before that it was as natural as strapping on his armour or the weight of his hammer in his hand. He asked the Emperor and the spirit of Rogal Dorn to lend him strength and wisdom. And he prayed for his own strength, because a Space Marine had to rely on himself above all. His soul cleansed, his mind rigid with faith, he stood and turned to face his battle-brothers.
The First Company stood to attention in the cathedral hall. One hundred Imperial Fists. They wore the white-painted armour trim and Crux Terminatus of the First. One carried the company banner, depicting Rogal Dorn, hammer in hand, straddling a crumbling fortress wall as traitors burned beneath his feet. It was hung with hundreds of battle-honours.
Lysander’s breath misted in front of him as he spoke.
‘Our mission is extermination,’ he began. ‘There is no word that suffices save that. Our mission objective is the extinction of a species. The Vorel are an immediate threat to the settlements of the Eastern Fringe and the only response the human race can make is to revoke their existence. I need not tell you of the hatred the alien must kindle in your hearts. You know full well the weight of the duty that carries you, as you carry it, unto death. You are men of the First Company and need no description of such.
‘What I will tell you is that for all that we live in an Imperium of a million worlds, for all our lives shall encompass but a speck of time in the ten thousand years of our history, missions such as this give us our chance to leave a mark on that history. The galaxy is vast, and even a Space Marine may feel his role in it is vanishingly small. But we shall leave that mark. The Vorel were, and when we finish, they will no longer be. No human will ever suffer their predations again. How few men can say that the galaxy has changed with their passing? We can, we men of the First and of the Imperial Fists. That is our blessing. That is the legacy of the Emperor and of Rogal Dorn, their gift to humanity. Give thanks as you bring humanity’s wrath to the Vorel. Praise their blessing as you anoint yourselves in xenos blood!’
The Imperial Fists of the First clapped their hands to their breastplates and cheered, a warrior’s salute. Lysander hefted his hammer, the Fist of Dorn, over his head, and the men raised their chainblades in response.
They had studied the Vorel during the two months they had travelled through the warp on the Shield of Valour. The Adeptus Mechanicus had speculated that the Vorel had evolved from the airborne predators of a prey-starved world and had come to dominate that world in a civilisation based on floating sky-fortresses and eyrie-cities. It was inevitable they would look to the sky for more meat to hunt, and inevitable that they would come into contact with humanity as their eyes settled on sovereign Imperial worlds.
It was inevitable they would be exterminated in response. The Space Marines would seal that fate. The Vorel, by one standard, were unfortunate. They dreamed of hunting the finest prey across infinite worlds, their civilisation coming to chase predators between the very stars – and yet they would be wiped out by the cruellest hammer blow from a species that hated anything not human. A Space Marine might comprehend such a point of view, but he had the mental discipline to set it aside and replace it in the forefront of his mind with the duty to wipe out the alien and preserve humanity’s rule over the galaxy.
‘To your duties,’ said Lysander. ‘Prayer and wargear rites. Make your souls ready today, for tomorrow the killing begins.’
The Imperial Fists saluted their captain and filed from the cathedral, the mist of their breath forming a pale haze in the refrigerated air. The cathedral was consecrated not to a god, as the common people of the Imperium conceived of the Emperor, but to the Imperial Fists themselves – to the spirit of their Chapter, the responsibility and power of a Space Marine. To the example of the Primarch Rogal Dorn, figurative and literal father of the Chapter.
Some would call it arrogant, Lysander thought as he looked up at the Chapter’s
fist symbol covering one wall, Dorn’s gilded statue standing before it. Those who said it, though, would have failed to understand the place the Space Marines occupied – at the pinnacle of the Imperium, and the front line against extinction.
Rogal Dorn’s statue shuddered as an impact rang through the ship. Lysander felt it through his feet, running up the segments of his armour.
‘Report,’ he said into his vox-link, opening a channel to the ship’s bridge.
‘We’ve taken an impact,’ came the reply from Commander Langeloc, the captain of the Shield. Lysander did not know her well, but she was valued by the Chapter as a dependable, if unimaginative, spaceship captain. ‘Starboard ventral. I have dispatched damage crews.’
‘Was it a meteorite?’
‘There was an accompanying energy signature. Could be a weapon hit.’
‘Bring the ship to battle stations.’
‘Already under way, captain.’
Lysander felt himself shifting into the state of readiness, the physical and mental routines, of battle. The Imperial Fists of the First Company were doing the same, breaking off in squads to man the sections of the ship allotted to them in the event of an attack – important defence points like the apothecarion and the bridge, the fighter deck in case of evacuation or deployment on a boarding mission. Though it would be difficult to explain, it was a good feeling, a sense of purpose. A Space Marine knew battle. It was where he was designed to be.
Drevyn, Skelpis, Halaestus and Vonkaal were his command squad, his honour guard. Lysander had chosen them from the men of the First because they were solid and trustworthy. They made their way through the other Imperial Fists to join him before the image of Dorn.
‘We may be under attack,’ said Lysander as they approached, ‘so we will act as if we are. Halaestus! Lead us in the prayer.’
Halaestus bowed his head. Lysander did not insist on any one of his squadmates leading the rest in prayer, and instead selected them all equally. This time it was Halaestus’s turn.
‘The eve of battle burns bright,’ began Halaestus. For this occasion he had picked a lesser-spoken prayer from the corner of one of the Chapter’s works of collected battle-lore. ‘The sword and the bullet burn brighter. The shadow of the enemy looms dark. Our wrath and our sorrow rise darker. When the enemy soars above us, we will stride over him. When he goes far, we go further. When he kills we kill more, when he lives we live…’
The next impact threw Lysander off his feet. Rogal Dorn fell too, the golden statue snapping off at the ankles and crashing into the front rows of the cathedral’s pews. Slabs fell from the ceiling, the artificial stone falling away to reveal the chill steel of the ship’s structure.
‘Langeloc!’ yelled Lysander into the vox.
‘That was a lance strike,’ came Langeloc’s voice. Over the vox came sounds of commotion as the bridge crew reacted to the sudden impact. Someone was yelling for a medical team to attend the bridge. ‘We are pursued. Sensorium teams are trying to identify the enemy.’
‘What is our integrity?’
‘Major damage to the ventral weapon bays. Geller field fluctuating. We may have to drop out of the warp.’
‘Keep me updated,’ said Lysander. ‘We’re heading to our post.’
Lysander and his squad were slated to take up position where the main body of the spaceship met the engine block. The engines were one of the principal weaknesses of the Shield of Valour in the event of a boarding, for its plasma reactors were an eminently sabotagable design that could be the target of a suicidal boarding party. Enough damage to the reactors or their coolant systems could cause them to breach and vaporise half the ship. Lysander might be the commander of this mission but when the ship came under attack he and his command squad had their defensive duties just like everyone else.
‘Someone wants a fast death,’ said Brother Skelpis as the squad moved from the damaged cathedral sternwards. ‘And one they don’t deserve. Attacking the Imperial Fists in the warp is a very special kind of suicide.’
‘Is it the Vorel?’ asked Halaestus. ‘Can they do this?’
‘Unlikely,’ said Lysander. ‘But they have hurried their extinction if it is.’
The whole ship shuddered. Lysander braced an arm against the cold steel of the wall. Crewmen were running in every direction, damage teams with fire extinguishers, engine-gang men running to supplement the engine crews who must have already sustained casualties as loose gear and coolant leaks made the block a lethal place. ‘Report!’ voxed Lysander.
‘The sensorium crew has a profile,’ came Langeloc’s voice. She sounded in pain. ‘There’s only a forty per cent…’
‘Who is it?’ demanded Lysander. Up ahead a crew member supported another, almost dragging her along the corridor, trailing blood as he headed for the sick bay.
‘It’s the Carnage,’ Langeloc replied.
If you were to ask a spaceship crewman what was the worst thing that could happen on a ship, his answer would be ‘fire’. Unless he was one of the old guard, the voidborn veterans, ancient by Naval standards, who had indeed seen just about everything that might happen on board a spaceship and heard tell of everything else. In that case, his answer would be ‘the warp’.
A human mind could not properly describe the dimension that surrounded the Shield of Valour as it hurtled through the warp. No human tongue could describe it. The Geller field around the Shield kept it intact from the insanity of that endless ocean, but when that field failed (as happened in countless sailors’ yarns) the warp took the ship, plunging its crew into the sea of madness and warping the ship, its inhabitants and their souls into something different and awful.
The concept of attacking another ship in the warp was as impossible to comprehend as the warp itself. Time and space did not mean in the warp what they meant in reality – that was why the warp could be used for faster-than-light travel in the first place. But legends were passed between the old guard of the space lanes of opponents who would try just that, to dive from the warp’s black maelstrom to maul their prey when they were most vulnerable.
As impossible as it was, as insane as anyone attempting it had to be, that was happening to the Shield of Valour.
The enemy was a tarnished, age-pitted shark, its long nose knife-like as it sliced through the thunderheads of the warp and broke through the Geller field envelope around the Shield of Valour. The enemy ship was longer than the Shield but narrower, a sleek, acute-angled predator. Its flanks were serrated with sloping banks of gun batteries. Dorsal vanes crackled with power, drawing in the surrounding warp energies to power the nova cannon slung beneath the ship’s armoured prow.
The symbol carved into its flank, scored deep into the steel of its hull armour, was an open gauntlet. The heraldries of a hundred commanders covered the hull around it. Banners of segmented steel flowed from the sternwards batteries, etched with battle-honours in the languages of the warp.
The Imperium’s older battleships had machine-spirits that remembered old foes. The Shield of Valour was one of them. It recognised that profile, the prow coolant vents like narrowed eyes, the triangular flare of its stern engines like the fins of an undersea predator. It was known as the Carnage, and the Imperial Fists fleet had a particular reason to hate it.
The rear-firing guns of the Shield opened up, spraying the prow of the Carnage with enough fire to shred a smaller ship. The Carnage rode the fire, turning the denser armour on the side of its prow to absorb the worst of it. Explosions stripped off sheets of armour, throwing out a glittering cloud of debris. The enemy ship rolled onto its side, bringing the sternwards section of the Shield into the arc of its nova cannon.
The Shield responded, venting a great cloud of frozen gas from its coolant systems to lend strength to the thrusters that bucked its stern upwards, bringing the engines out of the firing arc.
The nova cannon fired. The dense yellow-white beam, as hot as the heart of a star, hit a glancing strike against the Shield’s stern. In the vo
id it would have been silent, but in the warp the sound was a very human scream, a sound of anger and jubilation, as if the Carnage were crying out in ecstasy to see such destruction brought to bear.
The two ships were within close range now, within the kill-distance of their defensive guns. Prow-mounted gun batteries opened up on the Carnage, peppering the stern of the Shield with explosive rounds that ripped through the sections exposed by the glancing nova strike. Clouds of vapour and flame sprayed from the gashes, throwing out fountains of debris that burned brightly for split seconds in the void within the Geller field. The Shield’s turret-mounted guns replied, everything sternwards of the ship’s midpoint blazing directly into the prow of the Carnage.
The Carnage did not care. She was built for murder up close.
The Carnage weathered the fire, angling for another shot. The nova cannon recharged, spilling waves of supercharged particles from the glowing aperture beneath the prow.
Every thruster on the Shield fired at once, tearing the ship around to bring herself out of the cannon’s arc. Debris rained against her, secondary explosions rippling through her hull. The Shield’s armaments were broadside laser batteries and torpedo arrays, and with a single decent broadside volley she could knock her assailant spinning into the warp, lost and out of control. It was her one chance, but thousands of years of naval doctrine said it would work.
The nova cannon charged. Another thirty seconds and the Shield’s broadside would be unleashed, and even the armoured hull of the Carnage would be blistered and torn by the thousands of impacts. Those thirty seconds never happened as the nova cannon fired again.
This shot was not glancing. It hit the Shield amidships, spitting her through on a bright lance of incandescent fire.
‘Brace for field collapse!’ came Langeloc’s voice through the din of the impact. ‘We’re coming out of the warp! All hands brace!’
Lysander had felt the nova cannon hit home and he had heard the sound, like an impossibly loud tearing of paper, of the energy beam shredding the steel of the Shield’s internal structure. He knew war, space war included, and a hundred battles of instinct told him the damage was massive and catastrophic. It was a crippling shot, spearing the Shield right through and catching Throne knew what critical systems in its path.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 281