– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
Lysander’s skin crawled as the smell of Malodrax hit him. Rust and smoke, and dried blood, heavy and metallic. It was a taste in his mouth, and he knew he would not get rid of it until he left this place again. Perhaps even then it would stay, the taste of metal and blood always on his tongue.
He jumped down from the shuttle’s embarkation ramp onto the parched, cracked earth. Waves of heat washed off it from the shuttle’s landing jets. First Sergeant Kaderic’s squad jumped down around him, bolters scanning in every direction.
The sky was the colour of copper. The clouds were a dark murky green. The earth was red-brown, dry and cracked, broken up into ridges and valleys from one horizon to the other. In the distance were shapes something like buildings, but lopsided and decrepit. Flocks of airborne predators wheeled in the distance.
And it stank. It stank like old blood. Lysander lifted the faceplate of his helmet and spat on the ground, like a ritual.
‘Secure, by sections!’ ordered Kaderic. The strike force had trained for the landing on the shuttle decks of the Breaker, and each Space Marine had his section of the perimeter to scan and secure. In seconds it was done, and within half a minute the shuttle doors were being hauled shut behind the strike force. Thirty-four Space Marines – Squads Kaderic and Gorvetz, and Chaplain Lycaon’s command squad, plus Brother Halaestus, Lysander, and Techmarine Kho and the Imperial Fist who served as Kho’s pilot. A pair of Land Speeders, rapid scouting skimmers under Kho’s command, had been dropped off by the gunships that accompanied the two personnel shuttles. The gunships had low enough orbital signatures that the chances were, no one on Malodrax was aware the strike force had landed.
The gunships, compact and sturdy Stormtalons, had fuel requirements too costly to guarantee they could function for long on Malodrax. The Imperial Fists had no friendly supply lines to count on and Lysander’s information on the planet suggested there was no abundance of fuel sources to capture. The gunships would be easy to spot, too, larger and less nimble than the Land Speeders that could cling to the terrain. The Stormtalons took off back for their berths in orbit – the strike force would have to walk.
Lysander spotted Halaestus. He was at his part of the perimeter, and looked back from his bolter sights once satisfied that his angle was clear. There was nothing that could be said, not with what had happened the last time Lysander and Halaestus had been on this world, not with Brother Skelpis not being there. Halaestus glanced at Lysander, but said nothing either.
‘Good choice, Lysander,’ said Chaplain Lycaon, looking around the valley. ‘Defensible and sheltered. When the gunships clear we will leave no silhouettes.’
‘We cannot stay long,’ said Lysander.
‘Indeed not. We move out once the Land Speeders are on the move.’
‘Keep a watch on the skies,’ said Lysander. ‘Most of the predators are just animals, but the powers of Malodrax have airborne spies. Daemons.’
‘Kho’s guns will keep us hidden,’ said Lycaon. ‘How keen is your sense of direction, now you are down here?’
‘We head north-west,’ said Lysander. ‘Two days’ fast march. The ground levels out closer to the fortress but we should still be hidden well enough. We may have to leave the Land Speeders once we get closer.’
‘The sergeants have misgivings about your plan once we get there.’
Lysander did not rise to the comment. Lycaon was testing him. That was why he led this strike force – for Lysander was the captain, the position was still honorary in practice. Lycaon was in charge down here. ‘There is no other way,’ said Lysander. ‘Either we take this path, or we leave Malodrax alone and our brothers unavenged.’
‘Then our duty is clear,’ said Lycaon. He spoke into the strike force’s vox-net. ‘Brothers! Brother Kho has the point, he will range ahead with our Land Speeders. The rest, keep good pace and keep our profile to a minimum. This world has eyes everywhere. Move out!’
The strike force came across the first war machine within the half-hour. They made good time even over the broken earth and through narrow crevasses, with Techmarine Kho always just around the next bend. The drone of the Land Speeders’ engines mingled with the thin whistling of the wind that hissed across the shattered landscape.
Lysander rounded the rock forming the next bend to see the Land Speeders hovering, the mounted guns trained on the hulk of rusting metal that towered just ahead.
Each Land Speeder was a large enough vehicle to carry a crew of two Space Marines and an array of weaponry, with a nose-mounted assault cannon as well as the mounted guns, but each looked like an insect next to the enormous bulk of the structure in front of them. It resembled a siege tower, its sides clad in bands of rusting iron and hung with the threadbare remains of war banners. The desiccated remains of countless corpses were hung around the tower’s battlements like a shrivelled necklace, and many more had fallen into a drift of skin and bones around the enormous spiked wheels at the tower’s base. The tower leaned heavily to one side where it had apparently toppled into the valley, and its ramp hung open like a jaw studded with spikes resembling needle teeth.
A flock of airborne predators, something like winged lizards, shrieked as they flew from rusted holes near the top of the tower, alarmed by the approaching drone of the Land Speeders. They hacked and spat as they dissolved off towards the horizon, spiralling around the guns mounted on the top of the tower.
‘Do we go around, Chaplain?’ voxed Techmarine Kho. He was sat in the gunner’s seat of one of the Land Speeders, the articulated manipulator arms mounted on his backpack visible outside the lines of the cockpit.
‘We go through,’ replied Lycaon. ‘Watch our backs, Techmarine.’
The strike force approached the many openings around the base of the tower. It had sunk into the earth so there was no way under, but the partial collapse of the structure had forced open great rents in the steel, exposing the metal beams and darkness within.
‘What do you know, Lysander?’ voxed Lycaon.
‘These are proving grounds,’ replied Lysander. ‘The Iron Warriors make war machines. They pit them against one another across these lands, and those that survive are sent to join Black Crusades across the galaxy. This machine did not survive.’
‘These are plasma blastguns,’ voxed Kho from his Land Speeder, which was ascending the slope up near the guns that crowned the siege tower. ‘Would that I could get a better look at the induction coils.’
‘We have not the time,’ said Lycaon.
‘Of course, Chaplain,’ voxed the Techmarine.
Inside the tower was foul-smelling and dark. The floor was spongy underfoot and Lysander looked down to see it caked with dried remains, whether human or not he could not tell – a crust of parchment skin, stringy muscle fibre and brittle bones that crunched as the strike force’s squads moved through the gloom. The walls were plastered with it and twisted limbs hung from the low ceilings like stalactites.
‘What manner of obscenity is this?’ voxed Devastator-Sergeant Gorvetz.
‘Witchcraft,’ said First Sergeant Kaderic.
Lysander moved through the lower floor of the tower alongside Squad Kaderic. His augmented eyes could see through the dark but even so the place seemed fuzzy and indistinct, as if his mind did not want to acknowledge the sheer number of bodies needed to create the carnage in which the siege tower was steeped. He saw a fully-formed body in the centre of one wall, spread-eagled, the chest and abdomen pared open. He saw distorted faces and familiar bones – pelvises, vertebrae, femurs.
Lysander caught movement from the corner of his eye. A Space Marine’s peripheral vision was excellent but he couldn’t give the shape form as it flitted out of view. Lysander’s bolter was in his hand without him having to will it.
‘The multiplicity of hearts means cardiac arrest is not an issue,’ said a voice that knifed right through Lysander’s memory.
Lysander broke into a run. The voice had come from
the shadows up ahead, which clung to an archway leading deeper into the body of the tower. Lysander crunched through the bodies and through the archway, and in a shaft of light falling from a rupture in the side of the tower he saw a silhouette.
It wore ornate armour with curving shoulder guards, a high helm with just the gleam of twin eyeslits to suggest a face, and a wide cape hanging from one shoulder.
‘So restraint, not anaesthesia, is the only concern,’ came the voice again.
Lysander opened fire. He did not send the thought down to his trigger finger. The signal came from somewhere in the animal hindbrain that even a Space Marine’s training could not fully erase.
Half a dozen bolter shells ripped across the chamber. In the strobing light the interior was revealed – a chapel, the pews forged of shoulder blades and craniums lashed together with ropes of dried sinew. Severed hands hung in their hundreds from the vaulted ceiling, and on the altar at the head of the chapel sat a statue of some warp-spawned lesser god, squatting like a toad with a face that dripped with spiny tentacles. It held up four webbed hands with an eyeball in each palm. Stray bolter shots burst against its green stone, blasting chunks of its misshapen skull onto the floor.
The silhouette was gone, as if it had been nothing but smoke blown away by the gunfire.
Squad Kaderic stormed into the chapel behind Lysander, bolters sweeping every angle.
‘What have you seen, brother?’ demanded Kaderic.
‘Movement,’ said Lysander, lowering his bolter. ‘It is gone.’
‘Chaplain!’ came a vox over the strike force channel. It was Sergeant Gorvetz. ‘We are picking up phantom signals on the auspex scanner, but we may have found the source.’
The strike force gathered one floor up, where Gorvetz had found the origin of the signals his auspex scanner had registered. A great mass of brains, old and decayed but human in size and shape, hung from one wall like a huge bunch of rotting berries. A thin sheen of moisture covered them and each brain pulsed, almost imperceptibly, as if veins received blood from somewhere.
‘Tech-heresy,’ said Chaplain Lycaon when he saw the obscenity. ‘This must have been what controlled the war machine. Lysander?’
‘Without doubt,’ said Lysander.
‘Gorvetz!’ ordered Lycaon, and the Devastator-Sergeant needed no further elaboration. He ordered forward Brother Antinas, who carried his squad’s heavy flamer. The weapon was hooked up to a pair of fuel canisters on Antinas’s backpack, and required a Space Marine of Antinas’s training to carry and use while minimising the risk to his fellow Imperial Fists of such a weapon. The other Space Marines stepped back as Antinas sprayed the cluster of brains with a gout of flame, the burning fuel coating them and instantly causing them to shrivel away, their mass disappearing in the sudden yellow glare.
The darkness seemed to lift – not just because of the light, but inside Lysander. He saw in full clarity now, and the seething shadows that clung to everything receded.
‘Can you feel it?’ said First Sergeant Kaderic. ‘The shadows die away.’
‘We have exterminated a moral threat here,’ said Lycaon. ‘It will not be the first we find. Brothers, we move on. Kho! Are we clear on the far side?’
‘Clear, Chaplain,’ voxed Techmarine Kho in reply.
‘Then we leave this place,’ said Lycaon.
The strike force forged through what remained of the siege tower, sticking close as they forced through the far side of the tower, out among the spiked wheels embedded in the ground below.
Brother Halaestus sought out Lysander. ‘What did you see, captain?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Lysander. ‘And what did you see?’
Halaestus did not reply, and the strike force moved on out of the shadow of the siege tower.
4
‘An inquisitor must respect his acolytes. He must care deeply for them, as if they were members of his own family, for he has a responsibility for them that goes beyond that of a master and his underlings. But he must also be willing to pitch those acolytes into the worst peril that a human mind can imagine. Few can do it. Fewer still do not fall prey to malice, tossing aside human lives for amusement or to prove superiority. My acolytes, then, must sometimes be sacrificed in the name of something greater than any of us, but it is always with sorrow that I cast them into the path of danger. I trust that each understands that, when his time comes.’
– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
The fortress of Kulgarde was haunted. They were old ghosts, as ancient as Malodrax itself, and they remembered the times when the planet was not a deformed plaything of the warp. They remembered its beauty and purity, and the glee with which the dark gods despoiled it.
They clustered around Lysander like flies around decay. They sensed the desperation in him. A Space Marine was created to know no fear, but he could still recognise hopelessness when it came, he could still feel the black hole of a future cut off with no way to get it back. It was not fear that Lysander felt, but something equally cold. Every push against the restraints was a hollow gesture, every curse he voiced was like spitting into a bottomless pit.
He could see the ghosts of Malodrax now, hovering around the anatomy theatre. They were a hollow-faced, spindly species of xenos, wearing the tatters of finery that spoke of a proud and wealthy civilisation. Perhaps they were cousins to the thing that prepared to operate on Lysander now, a thousand generations removed, debased and enslaved by the lords who had taken over Malodrax after it fell.
Lysander’s body tensed, his spine arching, as the circular blade bit into his sternum. Pain meant nothing, but weakness did, and as his body was mutilated he would lose the strength that made him a Space Marine.
‘You will witness shortly that a Space Marine possesses two hearts,’ said the xenos leading the demonstration from the viewing gallery. ‘The multiplicity of hearts means cardiac arrest is not an issue, so restraint, not anaesthesia, is the only concern.’
The surgeon peeled back a patch of skin from Lysander’s sternum, revealing the slab of bone that made up his internal breastplate. It was made of fused ribs, created among the bone and muscle changes caused by the action of the gene-seed organs. The circular saw was withdrawn and the alien now wielded a long, sharp blade, like a stiletto with a double edge.
The alien aimed the point down at one of the joins in the breastplate, where two plates of bone joined. The blade was forced down into the joint, the blade twisted to force it open a little. Blood flowed, obscuring the white bone.
Lysander drew in his breath in a sharp hiss. His arms were manacled above his head and he forced his head round, trying to find some way of getting at the lock holding his wrists. He could almost reach it with his teeth, but the lock was just beyond his reach and he couldn’t touch it without dislocating his neck. And what if he could? He couldn’t bite through it. If he could reach it he would try, but he knew it would do no good.
Black pits of eyes looked down at him. The ghosts were watching as intently as the mutants and the xenos in the viewing gallery, as if this was the only entertainment they had in their half-lives.
Lysander had to try. That was its own reward. He would make them work at killing him, and he would fight to the end.
The blade was drawn up his chest. He felt it paring the skin away. Here and there it juddered as it met a particularly dense patch of bone.
It was almost at Lysander’s throat.
‘Removal of the internal breastplate,’ the lead xenos was saying, ‘will reveal both the organ tree and the seat of the progenoid gland. The fabled gene-seed, seat of a Space Marine’s prowess. In all the galaxy there is nothing so valuable, there is no weapon so potent.’
With a tiny metallic sound, the blade snapped off its handle. The surgeon hissed annoyedly and turned to a rack of implements behind it to find a replacement.
Lysander forced his head forwards. He could just see the blade sticking out, just below his collarbone.
His neck muscle
s strained as he bent his head further. His windpipe was compressed and he could not breathe. He felt the sharp metal against his lower lip and closed his teeth around the broken stub of the blade. Wrenching his head back, he pulled the blade from his chest, the sliver of pain he felt there a welcome reminder that he still lived.
The ghosts looked on. One tilted its head a little, as if in curiosity. Another opened its mouth, revealing the black void inside, perhaps in surprise, perhaps that species’ equivalent of a smile.
The blade slid into the manacle’s keyhole. The key would be simple, the manacle made for strength not complexity. A child could pick it. Lysander told himself this as he forced his head around to twist the shard of metal in the lock.
It wouldn’t budge.
The surgeon looked back round, its eyes and nose-slit widening in alarm.
The metal twisted. The lock snickered open.
Certain assumptions could be made about a xenos which was largely humanoid. For instance, very few such creatures could live without whatever organ was protected inside its cranium. A Space Marine knew this, because he had to possess all the knowledge necessary to make him the most efficient killer of any foe, including a xenos of a previously unknown species.
Lysander put this knowledge to use when his newly freed hand closed around the surgeon’s throat and lower jaw. He squeezed, his augmented strength giving him a grip powerful enough to splinter the alien’s jawbone. Its upper jaw cracked and its face distorted and narrowed.
The alien struggled in his grip, flopping around from its neck. Lysander crushed its throat, his hand now balled into a fist, and dashed the alien against the ground.
Shrieks rose from the viewing gallery. The alien orator leaned against the smudged glass, and Lysander could make out the stylised, inhuman features of its faceplate, the emerald eyepieces and the dark-green marbled substance of its armour. Lysander met the alien’s gaze.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 284