Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  Impossible detail reached Lysander’s eye, time and distance meaningless through the lens of the warp. He could see the shattered continents, splintered like broken glass, slowly swallowed by oceans of decaying gore. Gashes in the crust laid the mantle open, seething and bubbling with heat. Endless rotting badlands rolled around half the world, broken by mountains of bone.

  And he saw the fortress. A great black steel jaw breaching the border between the broken continent and the lands of rot, its teeth enormous towers and its jawbone a rampart of gnashing spiked rollers. The semicircle bounded by the fortress wall was studded with a thousand fires, each one manned by a thousand labourers. Black and yellow banners hung from the battlements and the watch was held by more Iron Warriors, each one a nightmare of archaic pitted steel.

  In violation of time and space, the structure of the Dancing-Place of the Lesser Gods melted and reformed into a bridge span linking its pocket of the warp with the fortress. Light years were compressed and warped as the Iron Warriors clamped a set of chains around Lysander’s wrists and ankles, and dragged him behind them onto the bridge. It was of tarnished gold and rust, worn by thousands of years’ worth of marching feet. The fortress loomed closer and Lysander could make out the filthy ragged vultures that roosted in its spires and fed on the labourers who collapsed at the forges. In the forge fields below, enormous segments of armour and gun barrel were hauled out of the fires by hundreds-strong mutant gangs. Daemons shambled among them – loping monsters of the Blood God with red skin and slavering fangs, writhing flesh-knots, drooling sacks of pestilence, shadowy things that slithered into the bodies of the dead and walked among the living, eye sockets burning with purple fire.

  The Iron Warriors, it was said, called no single Chaos God their patron, and instead were pledged to them all. Lysander’s fevered perception made out the hallmarks of many gods, from the bloodstained spiked rollers grinding away beneath the battlements to the ecstatic agony of the mutant labourers driven to dance in the flames. He could smell the fires and the cooking flesh, he could hear iron against iron and the ringing of the forge hammers. The lens of the warp magnified it all, filling his head so full of appalling sensation that there was no room left for sane thought.

  ‘Look up, Imperial Fists!’ said the Iron Warriors leader, and in spite of himself Lysander did so.

  Above him was the orbital space of this world, choked with vast reefs of gnarled coral. Spaceship hulks hung there trapped, the coral grown over them so only the odd stern or sensor mast broke through the encrustations. The awful distortion, which brought the fortress beneath into such detail, rendered the whole orbit of the planet visible, the view arcing between horizons so maddeningly that Lysander feared the sight of it would throw him unconscious.

  He saw the Shield of Valour. It had been brought along the bridge behind them and deposited in the upper reaches of the coral maze. Fire bled weakly from the nova cannon wound in its side and its engines were gone, distorted and torn off by the reality-warping weapon deployed by the Carnage. Lysander did not know how the Carnage had inflicted such destruction, but he feared to imagine the magnitude of the blasphemy brought to bear to make such a thing happen.

  Through the reef loomed three great dark halos of battered steel, crunching through clouds of shattered coral. Lysander recognised ancient marks of space stations from illuminated histories of the Heresy, bristling with ancient guns and bedecked with the heraldry of the Iron Warriors. Three star fortresses circling the crippled Shield of Valour like scavengers on the wing.

  In silence, a rain of white fire streamed from the three space stations. In spite of all his training and discipline Lysander found his thoughts turned to a desperate prayer, begging fate to turn the fire aside from the Shield. He all but cried out aloud for mercy as the bolts of fire hit the Shield of Valour.

  The three Iron Warriors star forts poured their flame as one into the Imperial Fists strike cruiser. Secondary explosions rippled along the sides of the ship, billowing out huge sections of the hull plating. The image loomed closer, brought right into Lysander’s face by the warp-distortion, a willing presentation of the ship’s death.

  He could see the ship’s entrails laid open, the warren of corridors and hallways deep into its heart. Bodies tumbled everywhere.

  The First Company spilled from the ship. They struggled to find handholds to steady themselves and keep from falling into the void. They had donned their helmets, and their power armour was proof against the void, but that was the only advantage they had over the unprotected crewmen. The Imperial Fists of the First Company were fighting on because they were Space Marines, but there was nothing they could do – the Shield of Valour was dead, dying behind them, and the star forts were pouring waves of fire into it with impunity.

  Space Marines were supposed to die in battle, the bodies of their enemies crushed beneath their feet. They were not supposed to struggle through the warp, crushed by spinning debris or frozen in the void. Not like this, hammered to dust by an enemy leering from behind the pict-screen of a space station’s gun battery.

  Then something within the Shield of Valour went critical, an ammunition store or a remaining plasma reactor pushed past its tolerances by the barrage of fire. A white blossom bloomed in the centre of the ship, expanding outwards in a shimmering sphere. It threw off flares like a miniature sun, flinging arcs of blue-white flame that sliced through what remained of the ship’s structure.

  Almost a hundred Imperial Fists, irreplaceable veterans. The crew and the ship were a grave enough loss, but the First Company of the Imperial Fists were among the best soldiers humanity had. And as quickly as it took for the explosion to reach from the heart of the ship to the tip of its bow, they were gone, extinguished, ash.

  Lysander’s head was wrenched back down. He got a glimpse of the other captive Imperial Fists being dragged along – they had seen it, too. They knew the enormity of that crime.

  They knew what the Iron Warriors had given them to avenge.

  The bridge through the warp bowed and shifted, the malformed planet ahead rushing closer. The Iron Warriors leader hauled Lysander another few steps and suddenly they were on the battlements, the Iron Warriors sentries saluting their officer as he passed. Lysander was dragged through armouries of bolters and archaic halberds, past shrines to obscure gods heaped with rotting offerings of severed heads and animal bones, beneath statues of beings so foul Lysander’s eyes refused to focus on them.

  This was a place built to withstand a siege. The stairways were too narrow for more than one Space Marine abreast, the doorways had gun ports and the floorboards could be pulled up to reveal a grid through which spears could be thrust into attackers on the floor below. No Imperial Fist was blind to such things, for Rogal Dorn had been a master of siegecraft and the brothers who called him their primarch all learned how a fortress could kill anyone trying to force their way in. While Dorn was a builder of fortresses, the Iron Warriors primarch, Perturabo, had been a besieger, to whom the mightiest fortification was just a puzzle to be unlocked. This fortress was a product of siegecraft at the same level as Dorn’s own, a vast and brutal deathtrap.

  The Imperial Fists were dragged down through the layers of the fortress. Lysander glimpsed Brother Skelpis, his face pale and bloody, trailing the gory stump of his leg, each arm held by an Iron Warrior dragging him along. He saw Brother Halaestus spattered with Drevyn’s blood, struggling against the Iron Warriors holding him, and Lysander knew Halaestus would tear himself apart rather than submit willingly to his Chapter’s enemies.

  Beneath the fortress, beneath the walls and the forges they encompassed, was another structure entirely, the seat of the Iron Warriors on this world protected by the fortifications above. It was shadowy and infernally hot, what light there was coming from yet more forges fed, it seemed, by the heart of the planet itself. Great shapes loomed in the vast underground hangars, half seen in the darkness, some still glowing from the heat of their forging, others moving like gia
nts stretching their limbs after waking.

  At the very heart of it was a crucible, a great spherical chamber half filled with molten fire bubbling up from beneath the planet’s crust, hot enough to scorch the lungs of an unaugmented man. It was accessed through a huge gate of iron, its two halves meeting at an enormous lock. A circular platform suspended over the fire held up a great anvil and from the domed ceiling hung countless weapons and segments of armour.

  Lysander’s senses had come back to him a little. His head still whirled but he could tell, even from here, that the pieces suspended over this great forge were masterpieces. They were sized for Space Marines, and among them were sections of rebuilt armour from marks long lost to the Imperium, power weapons matching size with balance, pieces inlaid with precious stones and metals as well as brutal machines created for industrialised killing.

  ‘Lord Thul!’ cried the Iron Warriors leader, removing his helmet. Beneath was revealed a pale and pocked face with jet-black eyes and a cruel twist of a mouth. Black hair clung to the scalp. ‘We have returned! The scryers told the truth. We found the dogs of Terra, and praise the pantheon, they are destroyed! And more than that. For the continuation of our Legion, we bring these ones to you alive!’

  Over the anvil stood a figure taller than any Space Marine. It was encased in armour so gnarled and jagged it looked like it had accrued over thousands of years rather than being forged by any hand. Beneath it somewhere was an ancient mark of armour, but Lysander could not recognise it from any of the illustrations he recalled depicting the days of the Horus Heresy. The shoulder guards were masses of grinding cogs and pistons and its weight was supported by pneumatic rams that hissed as the figure turned towards the crucible entrance.

  ‘Your return was well omened, Captain Hexal,’ said the creature that had been called Thul. Its voice was thick and deep, welling up from inside the armour like the crucible’s fires welled up below. Its face was a mass of corroded steel with two large clouded lenses for eyes. A single air hose ran down the centre of the face and spurts of greasy smoke surrounded Thul in a filthy halo. ‘And you.’ The lenses turned to Lysander. ‘Would that I could make you understand why you are here. That you could see through our eyes, we who were abandoned by the same Terra you swear by. But I can see by your face, by the hate in it, that no words of mine can ever sway you. I can see that honour is not for you as it is for us.’

  ‘Do not speak of honour,’ spat Lysander.

  ‘As I said,’ replied Thul. ‘Hexal, this one’s weapon.’

  Hexal motioned forward one of the Iron Warriors, who handed Lysander’s hammer to Thul. ‘This is the Fist of Dorn,’ said Thul weighing the weapon in his hands, feeling its weight. ‘A relic from the age of the primarchs, no less. Then you are Captain Darnath Lysander of the First Company. A man much feted by the lords of his Chapter. A future Chapter Master, some say. How distant that fate looks now. You and this hammer have much in common, captain. They are both in my possession, and they will both serve in my armouries one way or another. Hexal, you have brought a corpse with you, I see?’

  ‘But one,’ said Hexal. ‘I knew we would value prisoners over the dead.’ Lysander knew they were referring to Brother Drevyn and the mention of his battle-brother on their lips made his skin crawl.

  ‘Good. Bring it to the observatory. Isolate the others. Bring the captain to the sanatorium. He is the greatest risk. Best he is processed immediately.’

  Hexal’s Iron Warriors hauled Lysander off his feet again.

  ‘I will see you at Dorn’s side!’ cried out Brother Skelpis. ‘At the end of time! At the final battle! I will see you there, my brothers! My captain! At Dorn’s side!’

  ‘Still they understand so little,’ said Thul. ‘They think they are to die.’

  The great doors of the crucible were hauled shut behind Lysander as he was dragged off into the depths of the fortress.

  Lysander’s senses had returned to him by the time he was wheeled into the sanatorium’s anatomy theatre. He had been stripped of his armour and chained to an operating slab, which had been pushed into the observatory by a gaggle of hooded, hunchbacked creatures that stank of corrosive chemicals and machine oil. Their faces, half-glimpsed, were of grainy grey skin wrapped around elongated snouts, like animal skulls inexpertly covered in spare flesh. Their fingers ended in hypodermic needles and medical saws.

  Lysander was looking up at a glazed blister rising above him, the glass dome clouded as if by cataracts. Half-glimpsed shapes were assembled in audience beyond him like students awaiting an anatomy lecture. Perhaps, Lysander thought, that was exactly what they were.

  Lysander fought against his restraints. He knew they would not give, but the principle of it forced him to move. A Space Marine was a prideful creature, Lysander could not deny that, and his pride was inflamed. He had been unarmed, unmanned, his armour stripped away. Mutant hands had clawed at him as they pulled the armour’s segments away. The uncleanness clung to him, and the eyes looking at him beyond the glass were unclean, too, as if whatever they saw became defiled.

  He could see cracked tiles, stained and filthy, hung with cabinets of deformed bones and shelves of rusted medical implements. The hunched creatures shuffled around him.

  The audience were not Iron Warriors, or at least Lysander could see none of them among the indistinct shapes. Lanky, huge-eyed things watched there, long grey fingers touching the glass. Mutants, or aliens, perhaps. Unholy things, gathered to learn at the feet of the Iron Warriors.

  Lysander was aware of a door opening somewhere behind his head. An elongated shadow fell over him. A greyish figure hovered indistinctly above him. Its eyes were large and without whites, watery black lenses set into grey skin. Its nose was a vertical slit and its mouth without lips, and its head was framed by a frond of tattered tendrils that looked like they were rotting in place. Discolouration ran down its skin, weeping from sores and pits in its flesh. A hand reached over Lysander, with three very long fingers.

  ‘The subject is human and yet not human,’ someone said. It was not the alien surgeon, Lysander thought. The voice was level and soulless, as if sleep-taught to someone who was not a native speaker. He thought it was coming from somewhere in the gallery.

  ‘Witness the external signs,’ continued the voice. ‘The surgical scars around the ribcage and abdomen. These are indicative of a systematic series of operations performed in strict sequence. Note the subcutaneous panels concealing the topography of the ribs. The Black Carapace, the final implant of the Space Marine, both armour plating for the central organ tree and a seat for the interfaces that connect the nerve-fibre bundles of the power armour to the subject’s own nervous system.’

  Lysander could make out the speaker, he thought. It wore elaborate armour, scalloped and bladed, its silhouette distinct among the shapes in the audience gallery. Its shoulder guards rose like the horns of a half-moon around its plumed helmet and its shape was obscured by the cloak that hung from one shoulder. A clawed gauntlet gestured as the speaker continued. ‘The Black Carapace lies outermost of the enhancements of a Space Marine, and is the final to be added. Thus the means of his creation can be observed by paring away the layers, as with an ancient ruin where the passing of the ages can be seen the deeper one digs.’

  Lysander did not care about the pain. He had suffered pain before. A Space Marine learned to set it aside, to recognise it as a signal from the body that could be interpreted and understood like anything else. It was the humiliation that dug deep, the knowledge that he would be a curiosity for these creatures, as if he were an animal dissected by some student in the schola progenium.

  That was not how a Space Marine should die. Not just unarmed, not just helpless, but being used as an aid to the enemy. Whatever these allies of the Iron Warriors were, they would learn a little more about their enemy in the Space Marines of the Imperium, and they would learn it from Captain Darnath Lysander.

  Lysander could not have ceased fighting his restraints if he
had wanted to. His teeth gritted and the muscles of his neck and torso stood out like coils of rope as he tried to bend his back, fold the operating slab in two underneath him, spring up and tear this place apart.

  ‘Note the muscular development,’ the speaker continued. ‘The result of the operation of the progenoid organ, the gene-seed, which we shall see in good time.’

  The gene-seed organ, the organ cultured from the flesh of Rogal Dorn himself, implanted in Lysander’s throat, that sacred flesh which made a Space Marine more than a man. Lysander’s bile rose to think the alien even knew of it. For one of them to hold it in his hands would be a blasphemy, the desecration of a relic, the despoiling of holy ground. But worse than that – if Lysander’s gene-seed was not harvested and returned to the Chapter on his death, it would not be implanted into an initiate to take his place. That speck of light, that part of the primarch, would be snuffed out forever, and the galaxy would be a little darker.

  If it was in his power, he would not let them. He would fight them to the end. Even if he merely blunted their needles or forced their blades to slip, if his every effort was nothing more than an inconvenience to them as they cut him apart, he would fight. It was his duty, and he would not die with his duty undone.

  A surgical saw whined and its circular blade descended over him, towards the scar that bisected his chest. Lysander’s joints cracked as he strained against the shackles holding him, and the audience leaned closer to watch as the first blood flowed.

  3

  ‘Upon landing, I instituted a strict moral quarantine over my acolytes lest this world have a baleful influence on them. In the days to come I would regret permitting some of them to join the landing party at all, for Malodrax erodes the principles of the mind as the shrieking gales erode its rocks.’