Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  The patient looked up at the window. His eyes widened and he tore one arm free, spiked chains stripping flesh from his hand and forearm, spilling entrails down over his thighs. He pointed straight at Lysander and screeched in laughter as if Lysander’s face at the window was the most hilarious thing he had ever seen.

  The surgeon turned around. His face was stitched closed, his eyes, mouth and nostrils sealed shut with silver thread. He put the scalpel to his eyelids and cut the threads, and his bloodshot eyes opened to see what the madman was pointing at.

  The other cultists turned. They, too, were tearing their eyes open, this time with their hands. Muffled cries of outrage reached Lysander as the cultists drained out of the chamber, leaving the sacrificial victim coughing up ropes of bloody phlegm as he shuddered with laughter.

  Lysander hurried down the alleyway, away from the cultists’ chamber, towards where the alley opened into a larger space shadowed by the overlapping roofs of the buildings surrounding it. Cultists burst out into the alley as Lysander ran, accompanied by a screeching note from a reed instrument blown like a hunter’s horn.

  Cries and screams came from every direction, from the buildings around, from the rooftops and the basements. Lysander burst into the square and saw the flagstones were covered in spikes, and celebrants of the festival were writhing there, puncturing and tearing their skin. Other bodies lay dead or unconscious, bled white into red-brown stains around them. More bodies were impaled on spikes that jutted from the walls bounding the square, their faces locked in expressions of exhilaration and ecstasy.

  Lysander looked for ways out. Behind him, the stitched cultists were rushing down the alleyway. More were streaming in from other entrances to the square – dancers in leather and steel, performers in featureless masks, celebrants with strips of skin removed forming patterns of scab and open wound. Countless flavours of the city’s damned, brought to join in the hunt.

  He was a part of the festival. He was the entertainment. He was not an intruder at all – he was one more attraction, a part of festival season, another way to honour the city’s lords.

  The spikes bit into Lysander’s rag-bound feet. He held the heavy book in one hand with the other ready to punch or grab.

  More cultists were watching from balconies overlooking the square, shouting encouragement or leaning over fascinated by what was about to unfold.

  A scream went up, a signal. The cultists rushed at Lysander in a mass, a multicoloured tide of them streaming at a sprint. Their eyes were rolled back as if in the grip of a religious revelation. Some fell, trampled into the spikes.

  Then, suddenly, they were within arm’s reach.

  A Space Marine was not like a normal soldier. A soldier was a man, and a man was safest the further away from the fighting he was. He knew not to rush into the fray, and to cling to what safety there was on a battlefield, out of sight or in cover. But a Space Marine knew that he was safest in the midst of the battle, where an enemy had to take him on face to face, because that was the way a Space Marine was created to fight.

  Lysander dived into the mass of cultists. He hit them like a missile, scattering bodies. He drove the heel of a hand into a jawbone, felt a neck snapping back, and brought the book around like a club into the press of bodies.

  The gap he had opened closed. Scarred or silk-wrapped bodies crowded around him, constricting him. He ducked down, felt them close over him, and erupted out, throwing bodies over his shoulders. He struck out again and again, jarring impacts running along his arms as he pounded at the cultists swirling around him.

  He threw one to the ground, into the spikes. He grabbed another by the hair, hauled him off his feet and swung him into the crowd, scattering more bodies. The training of a thousand sparring circle sessions took control of his muscles and he did not need to think to strike out with an elbow or a heel, to crack open a cultist’s face with a headbutt or shatter a knee with a downwards stamp.

  But there were so many of them. They were still trying to force their way into the square. Some were leaping down into the crowd from the balconies, whooping with excitement to join the adventure.

  One leapt onto Lysander’s back. Then another was there, too, arms wrapped around his neck, trying to weigh him down. They piled on top of him, clambering over one another and trampling the fallen into the spiked flagstones. Lysander threw one aside but there were so many on top of him now. His knees buckled under them. Hands and fingers were clawing at his eyes and mouth. He gritted his teeth and pushed against the weight but it was like trying to shove a mountain aside.

  He was down to one knee. Spikes punctured the skin of his knee and shin. He slumped down, spikes pushing through the hand he put down to hold himself up. His face was pushed further and further down by the weight, the spikes spearing up towards his eye.

  He reared up, heaving a great drift of bodies off him. He was roaring as he did so, the effort threatening to tear his enhanced muscles off the bone. He gulped down a breath before the human ocean closed over him again and, suddenly, that air was crushed out of him, and he could not breathe.

  More were dying around him, their ribcages crushed or their skulls collapsed. He drove a hand upwards, out of the mass, shattering jaws and spines, but there was no room to draw it back in again. He was trapped. There was no way out. The light was cut off completely as the bodies heaped one on top of the other, as if to die in that crush was a religious observance, an honour these people were fighting for.

  ‘Enough!’ cried a voice from far above. The sound barely made it down through the groaning of the dying and the snapping of bones.

  The pressure suddenly relented. Lysander gasped down a breath and almost choked on it, for it was laden with a heavy, spiced scent that made his head reel. The struggling around him lessened and he was able to force a space around himself. He lifted one foot and let bodies roll in under him, pushing off them to drive himself upwards and out of the heap.

  The scent, like incense, was powerful enough to burn his throat. Lysander could feel his third lung struggling to filter out the toxins flooding the square. When he could see up into the square above, his vision was clouded by a clinging red-brown fug.

  The cultists, those who lived, had distant eyes with their pupils wide black pools, their jaws hanging open and their bodies limp. They flopped into inaction where they had been clambering over one another to get to Lysander. They were draped over the balcony rails, and even as he watched some were slipping into unconsciousness and toppling down onto the mass of bodies that choked the square. A low, sighing moan was the only sound they made now as if falling as one into a deep sleep.

  The buildings that bounded the square reached up into the distant skyline of the city. On one rooftop, clambering down by means of a set of spiderlike mechanical arms, was a humanoid shape. The arms were mounted on its back, into a rig that included two exhaust pipes from which was pouring the narcotic fog flooding the square.

  As it descended Lysander made out its details. It wore armour of steel scales, clinging to its form – a woman’s form, Lysander realised. She carried a double-headed halberd, each blade wrought into the shape of a dragon’s head, and her helm similarly bore a lizardlike mask with a mass of silver teeth.

  Lysander coughed and wiped a hand across his eyes to get rid of the residue. He pulled himself out of the mass of lolling bodies, and wrenched the book free. It was still the only weapon to hand.

  ‘I think,’ said the newcomer, ‘you have taken a wrong turn.’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Lysander. His hearts were still shuddering in his chest and his warrior’s instinct had not let go. He was still poised for danger.

  ‘Just curious,’ said the stranger. She descended on her mechanical legs, and landed deftly amid the bodies. Her mechanical limbs snickered up onto her back like those of a dead spider. She unlocked a catch on the side of her mask and it slid open, its panels folding into the scaled armour around her shoulders. Her face was long, pale and handsome
with sharp eyes and nose, thin lips, and short black hair swept back from her face. It was altogether far too human for this city. ‘I am the herald of Lord Shalhadar the Veiled,’ she said. ‘He would greatly appreciate knowing more about the stranger in his city. It is fortuitous that you come to us in the festival season or you would have been stopped at the gates, but now you are in you have my lord’s attention.’ She spread her arms to indicate the unconscious, broken and dead cultists piled up in the square. ‘And some would say that you owe him.’

  ‘I seek audience with Shalhadar,’ said Lysander.

  ‘So do millions in this city,’ replied the herald. ‘But they have not demonstrated a capacity for violence such as you, and so perhaps you will get your wish.’

  ‘Are you daemon?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she replied with a half-smile. ‘I am Talaya, Veiled One’s herald. My lord dispatches me to watch over his city and his people, and to inform him of that which I decide he would wish to know. He knew you were here before you passed through the gate. I was sent to watch, and my lord’s interest was proven sound.’

  ‘And now you will take me to your lord,’ said Lysander, ‘to hand me over and be rewarded. Is that not so?’

  ‘It is not quite that simple,’ replied Talaya. She walked across the bodies towards Lysander, looking him up and down. ‘But I will take you to the palace, which is further than you would make it on your own. Everything after that is up to you.’

  ‘Then I see no use in dallying here.’

  ‘Of course.’ Talaya picked at Lysander’s cloak, which still clung to him, sodden with blood. ‘But you’re not going anywhere looking like that.’

  9

  ‘I wonder when it was that I became a heretic. I had always been taught that it was like flipping a switch. One moment passes to another and suddenly one is corrupted and irredeemable, a single definite thought or deed shunting one onto the path of the unrighteous. But when it happened to me, it took the better part of a century. I cannot say when my soul’s purity left me, or what the cause was. I became a heretic without realising. Perhaps that it why it is so insidious, and why only one with such willpower as I can be permitted to even skirt the shore of that dark ocean.’

  – Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan

  The Imperial Fists honoured their dead when they were safely beyond Shalhadar’s city, and when they were certain the city’s forces would not force them to battle. They found a depression in the broken ground, like a sunken amphitheatre, perhaps a shell crater from an ancient war or the sinkhole from a collapsed warren of tunnels beneath the ground. One Imperial Fist from each squad – Kaderic, Gorvetz and Lycaon’s own squad – stood as lookouts. The rest gathered in the centre of the depression, where were laid out the three who had died.

  Brother Fornis was of Lycaon’s squad. His helmet had been removed and his face was calm, as if in the kind of sleep that was a rare luxury for a Space Marine. A single sharp-edged cut, like a slim dark triangle, in the breastplate of his armour was the only sign of injury – but the daemon’s blade had cut through one heart and his spine, and his system had broken down even as he fought on from the ground.

  ‘Let us commend Brother Fornis to the legacy of Rogal Dorn,’ said Lycaon over the body. As a Chaplain he had given these rites hundreds of times before, standing over the body of a fallen Imperial Fist. ‘There is no death so final that it can rob us of our place in the eternal war against the enemy. There is no fate so grave that it erases our duty. Brother Fornis was among the finest shots in the First Company, and his mind was as sharp as that of any soldier. He did his duty and honoured his primarch and his Emperor. Nothing more need be said of a member of the Adeptus Astartes. He has left this battlefield, but there will be another.’

  Two more dead were from Squad Gorvetz. Brother Metzian was the Imperial Fist devoured by the sphinx at the palace gates. Only the upper half of his body had been recovered and lay there on the ground truncated at the waist in a mass of gem-like hardened blood. Metzian’s helmet stayed on, for it was split down the middle and his face beneath it was a ruin. Brother Kalanar, lying beside him, had died in the palace as Gorvetz was besieged on the upper levels by a host of daemons. Daemon claws had ripped into his back and gutted him. From the front, scatters of red wounds on his face and rents in his breastplate told a muted tale of what had happened to him. Beside Kalanar lay his plasma cannon, its casing still discoloured with the intense heat of its firing.

  ‘Kalanar and Metzian were as true-born brothers,’ said Sergeant Gorvetz. ‘Though we all are brothers, yet as we trained and fought I saw in them a shared purpose beyond our duty as soldiers. When the enemy pressed in on us, the brothers of my squad could turn to Metzian and Kalanar and know that in them lay strength of purpose enough for all of us. Kalanar knew joy of battle when he brought the righteous fire. Metzian was a contemplator, a student of battle and its extremes. There were never two sons of Dorn less alike, and yet there were never two who so embodied our strength. They are gone from this battlefield, but there will be another.’

  Techmarine Kho stepped forward and knelt by the bodies. One of the mechanical arms mounted onto his backpack cycled to a fine blade tip and reached down to open up an incision in Fornis’s throat. In the absence of an apothecary in the strike force, the task of harvesting the gene-seed of the fallen rested with Kho. Brother Gethor, who piloted one of Kho’s Land Speeders, stood behind Kho holding the sample jars which would hold the gene-seed for transport back to the Phalanx star fortress and the Chapter.

  Lysander watched with the other Imperial Fists as the solemn business was concluded. He found Brother Halaestus’s eyes in the gathering, but he could read nothing in that mutilated face.

  When the gene-seed was removed, the faces of the dead were covered and they were loaded onto the Land Speeders so they could be brought back to the Chapter and their bodies interred. The gene-seed was the priority – if the Land Speeders were lost then at least the gene-seed, on which the Chapter’s future rested, would survive.

  ‘Choose your best!’ demanded Chaplain Lycaon when the dead were stowed away.

  The funeral games, in a major campaign or when there was more time to observe them, might see every manner of martial competition – marksmanship, athletics, a dozen forms of duelling, and more. Here, when they had to be concluded in less than an hour before the strike force moved on again, there was only time for one such competition. And yet it was ill luck not to observe it, for the dead Imperial Fists had themselves observed many times the funeral rites of their own fallen brothers.

  From Squad Gorvetz, Brother Antinas stepped forward, handing his heavy flamer to the squadmate beside him. He stripped off the shoulder guards, breastplate, armguards and gauntlets of his armour, leaving him unarmoured from the waist up. Antinas’s cropped red hair contrasted with his pale skin, the surgical scars of his many augmentations still looking pink and raw. Of Lycaon’s veterans Brother Givenar stepped up. He was the largest Imperial Fist there, and the knotted muscles of his arms and chest were covered in incised kill-markings in the style of some of the Chapter’s oldest veterans. Each campaign he had fought was picked out there in scar tissue.

  Sergeant Kaderic represented his squad. He had kneeled before the Chaplains of the Imperial Fists and sworn never to back down from an honourable combat, echoing the oaths taken by the first champions of Rogal Dorn and those still taken by the rare individuals chosen to champion the Emperor on the battlefield. Such an oath was a bold statement even for a Space Marine, and the Chaplains told parables of those whose oaths had been learned and twisted by the heretical and corrupt, compelling brave champions of the Imperial Fists to fight impossible odds. To take the oath meant that the principles of courage and honour were more important than petty concerns like survival.

  The final competitor was Brother Gethor, his gene-seed duties done, representing Techmarine Kho, Halaestus, and Lysander – those members of the strike force who were not members of one of its three squad
s. Gethor was barely eighteen months out of novicehood, training under Kho to be elevated one day to the Chapter armoury and the training with the Priesthood of Mars to become a full Space Marine. He showed no trepidation even as he stood alongside three competitors far more experienced than him.

  Lysander found himself standing beside Chaplain Lycaon as the first competitors lined up, the spectating Imperial Fists forming an ad-hoc fighting ring.

  ‘You fear for Halaestus,’ said Lycaon, quietly enough that only Lysander would hear.

  ‘Fear is a word I will never use,’ said Lysander, ‘of myself or of another brother.’

  ‘But,’ said Lycaon, letting the word hang.

  Kaderic and Givenar were drawn to face one another. Kaderic scraped a handful of dirt from the ground and rubbed his hands dry with it. Givenar kneeled and murmured a prayer, fists held in front of him as if he were addressing them, imploring them to serve him as his wargear did in battle.

  ‘I cannot fathom what Halaestus has lost,’ said Lysander. ‘It is beyond my capacity to understand. It is rare that a Space Marine suffers so.’

  ‘Is he the same one you led as a squadmate?’ asked Lycaon.

  Lysander paused before he answered. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You must watch him.’

  Lysander looked at the Chaplain and realised in that moment that he did not know the man, not as he had known Halaestus and the other members of his squad. Perhaps that was what Chaplainhood meant – to stand apart from the battle-brothers of his Chapter, to make decisions that one too close to the men of the Chapter could not. ‘Of course,’ said Lysander. ‘I will stay close to him. I have known him a long time, and he will trust me.’