‘We are brought low!’ yelled Lysander as warning klaxons blared from every direction. ‘But when our guns are called upon, we shall rise!’
‘What senseless animal hunts us down?’ snarled Brother Skelpis, dropping to a knee and grabbing on to a wheel lock to steady himself. ‘Do they not know what we are?’
‘When do we board them?’ said Brother Drevyn.
Lysander had chosen his command squad because of their mix of aggression and discipline, the epitome of the Imperial Fists way of war. He also felt the urge to jump into the nearest saviour pod or shuttle and storm the enemy ship, and it took an effort to resist it. ‘Hold, brother,’ he said instead. ‘Man our post and do our duty. When the time for vengeance comes we will be the first in, that I swear.’
‘We shall hold you to that, captain,’ said Drevyn. ‘If it is as Langeloc says, if it is the Carnage…’
The Shield of Valour changed as it shifted out of the warp and into real space, violently ejected by the helm crew before its fields completely collapsed. The colours became duller, the light less bright, even the chill of the refrigerated air less biting, as if the senses were covered by a frosted layer that removed the mind a single layer from its surroundings. Lysander’s stomachs jumped with the lurch from one reality to another.
‘We’re out,’ gasped Halaestus. ‘Now we can fight.’
‘Helm report boarding torpedoes in the void!’ came Langeloc’s voice. ‘Boarding imminent! All crews armed and make ready to repel boarders!’
Spaceship crews dreaded boarding actions. There were few military actions that were more brutal, more unforgivingly random in the death they dealt. A Space Marine, however, was made for them – in once sense literally, for ship-to-ship combat was one of the roles the Emperor himself had in mind when he created the first generations of Space Marines for the Great Crusade. Drevyn whooped as Lysander led the way sternwards, through clouds of vented coolant vapour and gaggles of crewmen rushing to arms lockers and medical posts.
If the enemy were indeed aboard the Carnage, and it was their intention to board, the Imperial Fists had a far better fight on their hands than the Vorel would ever give them.
The Shield of Valour was battered and bloodied, but she was not dead yet. She was made of old stuff, structures and systems laid down in the millennia directly following the Horus Heresy, when the most powerful secrets of ship design had yet to be lost to time and ignorance. Her broadside guns, though off-centre of their target, blasted a fearsome volley into the forward sections of the Carnage, stripping away more hull armour and exposing silvery wounds underneath, where the spaces between hull layers were exposed. Raw, like bones with the skin stripped away, they bled vented atmosphere and torrents of wreckage like bright drops of chrome blood. This time the backdrop was real space, the bleak sanity of the vacuum and its speckling of stars.
The nova cannon on the Carnage was charging again. The Shield of Valour continued its painful slow pirouette out of its killing arc, but the Carnage was executing a feint. Its main weapon, the one with which it sought to bring the Shield to heel, was not a gun or a torpedo tube at all. It lay deep inside the spaceship, in the minds of the thousands of souls who made up its crew.
As one, a sacrifice was torn from their minds. Their memories, their loves and hates, the countless layers of their personalities, pledged to the dark gods of the Carnage’s masters. Five thousand cultists crewed the Carnage, with five thousand stories of sorrow, desperation and the promise of salvation. They had given everything they had to the gods to whom they had turned in their bleakest moments and pledged everything that was left, but none of them had truly understood what that meant. The sacrifice of their minds was guzzled up by the powers of the warp, syphoned through the ship’s archeotech according to pledges drawn up with countless petty gods of the warp.
In return, the warp reached through into real space. It could only do so by burning away the greater part of the spiritual energy drained from the crew of the Carnage, but that was the deal.
The space around the stern of the Shield bent and warped, forming a lens through which distant stars grew into wide smudges of cold light. Trails of debris were looped around and sucked back into the whirlpool sinking through spacetime behind the Shield. Glistening, slithering shapes writhed in the heart of the anomaly as the shape of the Shield itself lengthened and warped, a deeper darkness than the void spreading out to stain this patch of reality.
The ship twisted violently and Lysander was thrown against the wall. A crewman fell past, the corridor he was heading for suddenly wrenched into a vertical shaft. He heard the man’s body breaking as he fell. Then the gravity shifted again and was gone completely, Lysander spiralling away without any force to hold him down. He grabbed the frame of a doorway as he drifted past.
‘Keep going!’ ordered Lysander. Brother Drevyn clambered up out of one of the side corridors that had suddenly become vertical. The rest of the squad were behind Lysander, propelling themselves along in the zero gravity with whatever handholds they could find. The freezing mist intensified and visibility was almost gone, Lysander still navigating sternwards by instinct.
He came up against a bulkhead door, large enough for two men abreast and solid enough to contain an explosion. It was set into the wall of the engine block, part of the reinforced cell separating the ship’s engines from the rest of the vessel. In times of crisis the engines and their crews were expendable, the requirement to contain leaks and fires from the reactors more important than the lives of those inside. It was the lot of the engine-gangs to be forsaken when the ship was in peril, and once the call went out for damage control stations they were on their own.
Lysander put a hand against the door. It bowed and rippled under his touch, the steel becoming pliable. From beyond it came a groaning and crashing, the sound of metal and equipment torn free.
‘We’re too late,’ voxed Lysander. ‘The engines are lost.’
‘Saviour pods online,’ replied the ship’s captain. ‘Abandon ship, Captain Lysander. There is nothing more for you to do on board.’
‘Emperor be with you,’ said Lysander, but Commander Langeloc’s reply was lost in the static and din.
It had happened so quickly. The Imperial Fists were ready to repel boarders, Lysander preparing to face anyone who tried to force their way into the engine blocks to destroy the reactors. Then, in an apparent heartbeat, the whole engine section had gone dark and the battle had transformed into something very different.
‘Brothers,’ said Lysander to the men of his squad. ‘The Shield of Valour is lost. Our duty is to get to the saviour pods and survive. Stay together and do not pause for anything.’
The bulkhead wall behind Lysander bowed away from him, and the sounds of destruction were replaced with the dense, ripping noise of reality itself tearing open. The bulkhead disappeared, the whole stern of the ship collapsing away from Lysander, plunging into an endless dark shaft lit by billows of plasma flame from the ruptured generators. The substance of the engine room, its turbines, generators, its crew of engine-gangs and tech-seers, were twisting and churning into a single twisted shaft falling into the warp like a great waterspout of liquid steel.
Lysander grabbed a shard of the deck that peeled up beside him. Brother Skelpis fell past and Lysander grabbed him by the wrist. Skelpis’s feet kicked out over the shaft as the flame billowed brighter, great plumes of vented plasma burning as hot as the surface of a star. In its harsh white light, crewmen were ground into red slivers and the shape of the enormous engine turbines were lost as grinding masses of deformed metal roared past.
‘This is our stand, brothers!’ cried Lysander. ‘We did not ask for it to come like this, but it has, and as Dorn at Terra we will face it like Imperial Fists!’
The maelstrom was reforming by the second, islands of turbines melting down into the churning mass, new forms reaching up in liquid spires, winding into new shapes in the chaos.
Gravity was shifting again, thi
s time to match the structure appearing where the engines and reactors had once been. The ocean of steel became a level floor, inlaid with swirling glass mosaics echoing the nebulae of the void in a riot of colour. A section of the floor sunk down, a pit ringed with stairways, and gold spiralled across the surfaces. From the gold rose the bodies of misshapen things, clothed obscenely in finery and jewels.
Daemons. Lysander’s soul recoiled. Men had gone mad just imagining that such things could exist, and where they found an unprepared mind daemons could turn a servant of the Emperor into a craven dedicated to the warp’s Dark Gods. They came in infinite forms – these were crouched and lolling, slack jaws hanging to the gilded tiles of their pit. Every one carried a musical instrument – a harp, a horn, a drum – and as one they struck up a terrible atonal sound that rose and fell like a heavy sea. Lysander’s stomachs knotted at the sensation hammering into him.
The scene was still transforming. The ballroom floor spread out around the daemons’ orchestra pit, walls soaring up alongside it, curving silvered columns meeting overhead to describe a great dome open to the endlessness of the warp. Meteors shot past, trailing burning clouds of souls lost in the warp and condemned to hurtle through its reaches forever. Incandescent clouds boiled out of nothingness and hardened into bright diamonds of young stars, bursting into dark red flame as they were forged, grew old and died in seconds as if to flaunt the plasticity of time in the warp.
Daemon-giants were forged into the walls, enormous barrel chests and massive crushing hands restrained by the layers of gold and marble that held them. Their jaws gnashed and fingers clenched as they fought to escape, but they were part of the entertainment here, mighty lords of Chaos enslaved and turned into mere decorations for this monument to the warp’s opulence.
The song roared up a tone and Lysander dropped to one knee, the sound a wall of mental noise trying to shut him down. A man would have broken down and curled up on the floor – or, worse, danced to their tune, writhing and spasming until his body came apart with the fury of it. Lysander glanced at Brother Skelpis lying on the floor beside him – Skelpis’s jaw was clenched and blood ran from his nose and ears. His eyes were bloodshot, the strain of staying conscious and sane rupturing his body.
These Imperial Fists would follow him. They were his squad, men chosen because they would not falter even in the face of the foulest provocation. Lysander planted a foot, cracking the glass tile beneath it, and forced himself up to his feet. He was bowed and shaking, but he was upright. He would not kneel to this, no matter what might face him.
A fountain of marble and glass spiralled up from the floor before the orchestra pit, and from it flowed a torrent of molten gold. Trapped souls writhed through it, their faces distorted with pain as they flowed from one bowl to the next, their crying out mingling with the music in terrible harmonies. The gold spilled over the last bowl and crystallised into scuttling things like golden crabs that glinted as they scurried, a host of tiny daemons underfoot.
The madness of it would have been enough. This was not a place in reality but of the warp, conjured from the mind of some madman who had given his imagination over to the powers of Chaos. It was one heretic’s tribute to the warp, where the rantings of a diseased mind might become reality. But that was not the only danger that would face Lysander and his squad. It was not an accident that the Shield of Valour had fallen to this fate. The warp had been waiting for her, and for the Imperial Fists.
Grand doors congealed from the blazing finery of the walls. They burst open and from the glaring light behind them emerged a host of shapes, ugly where the ballroom had its terrible beauty, brutal where it had grace in its madness. Even in silhouette Lysander recognised a make of power armour such as had not emerged from a Mechanicus forge for thousands of years, since the days of the Heresy ten thousand years before.
Lysander knew his duty. He raised his bolter and loosed off a round. In the assault on his senses his aim was off, and the shot blew a shard of gold from the wall behind the lead figure. Lysander held down the firing stud and half the bolter’s magazine thundered off.
Space folded, and the leader of the newcomers was suddenly shifted out of the firing line and right in front of Lysander, an arm’s length away. Lysander knew before his eyes focused on him what he would see.
There was an awful inevitability about that dark gunmetal armour, similar in form to the Imperial Fists own power armour but of a more ancient and baroque make with exposed cabling and bulky reinforcement panels. He had known, perhaps even before the figure had entered, that he would see the yellow and black warning stripes at the joints and on the knuckles of the wearer’s enormous clawed power fist. Lysander knew the story of the markings – they were added by the first tech-priests to test the armour. They had been kept by the wearers to remind all onlookers that this was gear for war, not show, brutal and functional like the men inside.
‘Iron Warrior,’ spat Lysander.
The Iron Warrior knocked Lysander’s gun hand aside. The brothers behind him jumped up to fight, for they knew their duties too. An Iron Warrior had to die. Lysander had been chosen for the diplomatic mission because he was able to compromise his hatred, if those were his orders, but this was one hatred that could never be permitted to die down. Dorn himself had decreed the Iron Warriors to be blood foes of the Imperial Fists, and every time the Chapter had crossed paths with them that decree had been proven correct.
The Carnage was part of the Iron Warriors fleet in which they had fled justice after the Horus Heresy. It was as much an enemy as any Iron Warrior, and the Imperial Fists had sworn to destroy its like as well as the Iron Warriors themselves. But when the time had come, when Lysander had been put face to face with that ancient machine, the Carnage had won.
Brother Skelpis jumped to his feet. Before his bolter muzzle was up, another Iron Warrior lashed out with a chainblade and sawed through Skelpis’s leg just below the knee. Skelpis toppled to the side, armour clattering, the glass mosaic floor cracking.
Everything was unfolding in slow motion. Lysander counted a whole combat squad of Iron Warriors, ten Traitor Marines, the remaining eight of them turning their guns towards Brother Drevyn. Drevyn did his duty by charging the Iron Warriors, drawing his own chainblade as he went, and was caught by a volley of fire that cut him clean in half at the waist and tore what remained into flailing shreds of armour and flesh.
‘Hold!’ yelled the leader of the Iron Warriors. ‘Thul will have them alive! Hold your fire!’
‘Better a corpse than in chains,’ said Lysander.
‘You will know what it means to be both,’ said the Iron Warrior, aiming a backhand at the side of Lysander’s head. Lysander’s mind was still ringing from the assault on his senses, still recoiling from the impossibility of the place that had coalesced in front of him, and his reflexes were slow as a drunkard’s. He brought up a hand to defend himself but he was much too late and the blow slammed into him. Everything was black for a moment and when it returned as before, Lysander was sprawled full length on the ballroom floor.
The Iron Warrior planted a foot on the backpack of Lysander’s armour, pinning him down to the floor. Another Iron Warrior, the one who had mutilated Brother Skelpis, kicked Lysander’s bolter and hammer away. Lysander hadn’t even been able to raise it in anger, such was the effect of this daemon-born place.
The other Iron Warriors were among the surviving Imperial Fists, disarming and knocking them to the ground. Skelpis fought on and an Iron Warrior stamped on the back of his head until he stopped moving. Another Iron Warrior wrestled Brother Halaestus and threw him to the ground, down in the pool of blood and gore leaching from Brother Drevyn’s remains. Brother Vonkaal was shot through the thigh and fell.
‘You killed one of ours,’ said Lysander. ‘We remember our fallen. Though it take ten thousand years, we avenge every one.’
‘Kraegon Thul will give you plenty more to avenge, whelp of Terra,’ replied the lead Iron Warrior.
‘You face the First Company,’ said Lysander. ‘We will scour you from this ship. You can never stand before us in battle.’
‘I’m not here to fight the First Company,’ replied the Iron Warrior. ‘I’m here to take you alive.’ He spread out his arms as if proudly showing off the insanity that surrounded him. ‘The Dancing-Place of the Lesser Gods,’ he said. ‘More ostentatious than my Legion is used to, but a place that will come at our beckoning and deliver us to our enemies. It disappoints me that you were so addled, Imperial Fist. I would have fought you champion to champion. Perhaps that will be the means of your execution when we are done with you, but that will not be for a while yet.’ The Iron Warriors leader turned to one of his squadmates. ‘Khaol! Inform the fortress that we are done here. Our haul is one captain, three battle-brothers and a corpse, all Imperial Fists. Have them make ready for our return.’
The Iron Warrior saluted and began relaying the order through a field vox, an archaic device of tubes and valves. The daemons in the orchestra pit changed their tune, the music now rising and falling like the waves of a stormy sea, the highs piercing and painful, the lows a bass rumble that made the whole cathedral blur as it shook.
The dome overhead peeled open. Darkness bled in. The gold turned to mottled brass, lit as if by a fire from far above. The orchestra pit was a shaft of blackness, the daemons cavorting through it as if they were breaking the surface of an inky ocean. Through the darkness overhead could be glimpsed a scattering of stars and among them one grew closer, a bloated red star near the end of its life, scattered with black sunspots and bursting out flares of red flame. Around it was a system of worlds, shattered and grey, any life on them long since drunk dry by the anger of their sun. But one world was different. Discoloured and foul, it had survived not because of some celestial accident but through a force of malevolence. So beloved was it of the warp’s gods that their favour sustained it and it could not die.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 282