Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

‘Not unless they breach our line, First Sergeant,’ replied Lycaon.

  ‘Then I pray one of them does,’ said Kaderic. ‘Almost as much as I pray they all fall to our guns first.’

  The alpha shrieked again, and this time the sound was echoed by the all the predators as one. The alpha dived out of cover and scampered across the no-man’s-land before the barricades, followed by the entire host of creatures.

  Thousands of them charged as one. Lysander saw in that moment the great variety of their shapes – some bulky and apelike, others slithering like snakes or loping like attack dogs. They varied from rodent-sized to two or three times the size of a man, all armed with every natural weapon evolution could come up with – claws, clubbing tails, mandibles like mouthfuls of blades.

  Kaderic gave the order. A volley of bolter fire hammered into the horde. Countless fell. Bolter fire exploded among them, blasting off limbs and ripping bodies open. Lycaon gestured to the men of his squad and they joined Kaderic’s men at the barricades, lending their own bolter fire.

  Gorvetz concentrated on the biggest. The plasma cannon, once held by the fallen Brother Kalanar, was now in Gorvetz’s own hands, blasting fat bolts of white-hot plasma that spitted right through the largest of the predators. Kho took Dorn’s Dagger a few metres above the ground and rattled off cannon fire into the thickest mass of the enemy.

  Lysander felt almost detached, as if he was watching from far away. It was almost mesmerising to watch the tide of the enemy surge closer, and yet come no closer, because as soon as they reached bolter range they fell. Those behind them surged into the gap, were cut down, and were themselves replaced. It had an inevitability about it, as if he was watching the tides or the movement of the stars.

  Lycaon took aim and stuttered off a volley from his own bolter. His crozius was slung on his back, as if he knew he would not have to use it here. His shots threw a couple more dead down into the mass, which was building up like a rampart of shredded corpses in a ring around the encampment. ‘There is no battle here,’ said Lycaon, with scorn in his voice as if he blamed the enemy for being too weak to be a worthy fight.

  Lysander knew Malodrax better than the other Imperial Fists there. He may not have been an expert – not knowledgeable enough to write a book about the place as Inquisitor Golrukhan had done – but he had witnessed the cruel will of the planet and Lycaon’s comment stirred something in his memory.

  Through the carnage the alpha lurched, shot through with a dozen bolt-rounds. It flopped to the ground in front of the corpse rampart, dragging itself along on shattered arms. A heavy bolter stuttered fire at it from Squad Gorvetz and it reared up as if in defiance, but instead of a letting out a final howl it fell back down silent and dead.

  The alpha’s death was the signal. The ground shuddered and pitched to one side. Lysander fell to one knee, and saw Halaestus tumbling off his feet by the barricades. A sound like thunder rumbled up from beneath. Then the ground dropped away entirely, an avalanche of pulverised earth accompanying Lysander down into a deep pit beneath the encampment.

  Everything was darkness and noise. An awful stench, again with that note of familiarity, hit Lysander in the face – rot, ashes and long-dried blood.

  He came to rest buried, and pushed around to make enough room to dig himself out. For a moment he was back in the heap of bodies in Shalhadar’s city the last time he had been on this damned planet, struggling to breathe.

  He made enough room around himself to claw at the earth in front of his face. Half a minute later he had broken out of it and was unearthing himself. There was just enough moonlight struggling down from above to see by.

  He was in the centre of a great crossroads of warrens, with tunnels leading off in all directions. Shed skins, effluent and trash were gathered around what part of the floor wasn’t buried by earth from the collapsed ceiling. Lysander hawked out a mouthful of spit and soil.

  He still had his chainsword with him, but his bolter was buried somewhere. He aimed a mental curse at himself for being disarmed in the presence of the enemy. He would have to practice penance on the Phalanx for his sin, if he ever saw the corridors of that space station again.

  He could see no other Imperial Fists but he could hear them, calling out to one another from elsewhere in the warren. Lysander forced himself all the way out of the drift of earth and tried to get his bearings. He could have tumbled down a sloping tunnel and come to rest a long way from the site of the Imperial Fists encampment.

  He tried the vox. ‘Lysander here,’ he voxed on the command channel.

  ‘This is Lycaon,’ came the reply.

  ‘It was a trap,’ said Lysander. ‘They herded us into position and collapsed the tunnels underneath us.’

  ‘Dorn spoke no good of those who state the obvious, captain,’ came the reply. ‘What is your location?’

  ‘I don’t know, Chaplain. I’m on my own. I can hear others.’

  ‘We are regrouping just south of the encampment site, where several tunnels converge. Find others and make your way to us.’

  ‘Yes, Chaplain.’

  A voice in Lysander’s memory, perhaps from that man he had once been before he became a Space Marine, reminded him that he knew what the predators were, where they had come from, and what they wanted. It reminded him he had not told Chaplain Lycaon of this. Had he wanted to disbelieve it? Or was he ashamed?

  The stench rose. Lysander felt himself choking on it. Through the darkness loomed a shape that also had that terrible familiarity to it, a sagging mass of a torso, spindly neck and vulture head.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said the brood mother with a chuckle.

  The daemon’s face was smeared with blood and she dragged behind her the corpse of an Imperial Fist, his torso ripped open. His helmet had been torn off and his bloodspattered face was wide-eyed with shock and pain. Brother Kollus of Squad Kaderic.

  ‘Did you think you could come back to Malodrax and hide from me?’ the brood mother continued. Lysander saw she was bigger than the first time he had seen her, gorged on her young. Their foetal corpses dangled from her midriff, neglected and rotting. She was gnarled and armoured with scar tissue, and her red eyes gleamed. ‘I can smell you, traveller. I will never forget your tender scent. I would follow you through the blood ocean, across the Mountains of Glass, through the gates of Kulgarde itself!’

  Lysander took his chainsword in a two-handed grip. The brood mother stalked closer, swinging Kollus’s body playfully. Behind her, Lysander saw another Imperial Fist clambering in through a side tunnel, but he could not make out who it was.

  Time, he thought. He needed more time.

  ‘What are you on this world?’ said Lysander, squaring his feet and looking the daemon in its decaying face. ‘Vermin? The lowest of the low? Feeding on the filth that the higher creatures leave behind?’

  ‘You seek to anger me. I know no anger. I know no fear or joy or hatred. I know only passion, Imperial Fist. I know only the raw emotion of the warp. That you could feel it yourself! That you could revel in it!’ She was within a few paces of Lysander now, blotting out the moonlight from above. She leaned in close. ‘Stay with me,’ she said.

  A volley of bolter shots thudded into her side. The brood mother shrieked and lashed out with Kollus’s body in the direction the shots had come from, knocking aside the Imperial Fist who had jumped up from the cover of a fallen rock to take aim. She turned from Lysander and bore down on her attacker.

  In her other hand she held a weapon – a chainsword. The chainsword Lysander had given her in exchange for the way to the city of Shalhadar.

  The Imperial Fist rolled onto his back just as the brood mother raised the chainsword to bring it down and cut him in half.

  It was Halaestus, his ruined face defiant.

  The brood mother reeled back. ‘Oh, what hideousness!’ she shrieked. ‘Such ugliness!’ Her face was contorted with shock, and Lysander saw in her expression what he himself felt to look upon her.

  Lysan
der charged at the brood mother. He slashed at her and sliced through her arm with his chainsword before he slammed shoulder-first into her midriff. She toppled backwards, the atrophied remnants of her dozens of young looking up at him with the wide blank eyes of their dried-out skulls. He thudded on top of her and felt his hand sinking into her pocked flesh as he tried to push himself upright.

  The brood mother brought her chainsword – the chainsword Lysander had given her – up towards him. Lysander caught it against his own chainblade and the two screeched as their teeth ground against one another. Lysander was face to face with the daemon, and the stench of her was almost enough to knock him out.

  ‘Stay,’ she gasped.

  Lysander drew back his fist and plunged it into her face. Bone and teeth splintered. Foul-smelling gore spattered across his face.

  The brood mother was shrieking, half in pain, half in an awful cacophony of excitement, a gruesome ecstasy at Lysander’s touch. Lysander drove his fist down again and again and the brood mother reared up under him, throwing him off onto his back in the dirt. She clutched at her shattered face, sweeping around her at random with the chainblade.

  Brother Halaestus shot her through the throat with his bolter. Her head toppled to the side on its broken stalk. Halaestus punched three more shots through her throat and upper chest.

  Insensible, blind, the brood mother flopped onto her front and writhed through the dirt, mewling and spluttering as she groped through the filth.

  Lysander clambered out of the refuse pit and took one of the side tunnels, gauging his direction and striking out for what he thought was the site of the encampment. He could hear bolter fire up ahead, and by the time he reached the knot of Imperial Fists fighting alongside Lycaon the brood mother’s offspring lay in heaps around them, shot down or cut to pieces.

  ‘Captain Lysander!’ said Lycaon. ‘You are late to the fight, alas.’

  ‘The daemon who leads them is laid low,’ replied Lysander. ‘Just behind me.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘As good as. A good dose of flame will see to it.’

  The Imperial Fists regrouped and forged through the tunnels to the brood mother. She writhed and squealed pathetically, like a whipped animal. Sergeant Gorvetz ordered Brother Antinas forwards, as he had at the war engine, and the result was the same. Antinas drenched the brood mother in burning fuel and the flames of her pyre reached up through the fallen ceiling and into the sky. She shrieked in the flame and clawed at the air above her, her flesh boiling away and only a deformed skeleton left to tumble into the mass of burning debris.

  Lysander found Sergeant Gorvetz as the Imperial Fists watched the brood mother die. ‘She killed Brother Kollus,’ said Lysander.

  Gorvetz watched the fire leaping high for a moment, even as the last remnants of the brood mother’s shape crumbled away. ‘This thing killed him,’ he said. There was no emotion in his voice.

  ‘I could not stop her.’

  ‘Her?’ Gorvetz rounded on Lysander. ‘Her? You know of this creature?’

  ‘She was spoken of,’ said Lysander. ‘A daemon, called the brood mother.’

  ‘Filth upon the day we came here,’ spat Gorvetz. ‘This is no place to leave a good brother behind.’

  The fire was dying down, the fast-burning fuel feeding a hot but short-lived flame. Lycaon walked through the burning detritus closer to the ashes and scorched bones that remained of the brood mother. He poked around in the debris, bent down, and came up clutching the scorched length of a chainsword. Golden paint still clung to it, and to the clenched fist symbol of the Chapter.

  ‘Brother Lysander,’ said Lycaon. ‘You left your weapon in your foe.’

  ‘It’s not his,’ came a voice from across the chamber. Brother Halaestus walked forwards, the dying fire flickering its orange glow across the patchwork face that had so horrified the brood mother. ‘It’s mine.’

  On the way out of the warrens the moon sank in the sky, as if it were drowning the petrified forest in spite. The few surviving young of the brood mother scurried away from the remains of the battlefield, where they had been scavenging on the carrion of their dead around the crater where the Imperial Fists barricades had been. Kho’s pair of Land Speeders patrolled overhead, taking pot shots at the larger creatures that did not flee at the first sound of booted feet on the ashen ground.

  ‘Where did she find it?’ said Halaestus. He had walked up behind Lysander, waiting until they were out of earshot of the rest of the strike force. The other Imperial Fists were securing the immediate perimeter, making ready to move out.

  Lysander tried to read Halaestus’s expression. He had always been steadfast, rarely emotive, a reliable and trustworthy soldier. Now there was even less to see of the man he knew, the new sections of his face artificial and dead.

  ‘Brother?’ asked Lysander.

  ‘You know full well. My chainsword. How did the brood mother get it?’

  ‘The Iron Warriors took our gear at Kulgarde,’ said Lysander.

  ‘And how did my blade make it into the daemon’s hands?’

  ‘How do I know?’ snapped Lysander, a little too sharply. ‘Thul bartered it with her. One of the fortress’s scum stole it and pawned it away.’

  ‘To a creature that followed us and ambushed us? Two connections between you and the brood mother, Lysander. She has a weapon from one of your squadmates in her hand, and she sought out an army that includes you.’

  ‘Do you intend to accuse me, brother?’ said Lysander, forcing his voice level. ‘Of what?’

  ‘Accuse you? No, captain. Just state facts. Brothers are dead and your footprints are all over the world that claimed them. Just facts.’

  Lysander grabbed Halaestus by the back of the neck and pushed his face close. ‘You have lost everything that makes a Space Marine into an Imperial Fist. Your thoughts are not your own. Stay them, Brother Halaestus.’

  ‘You think I have lost my mind?’ retorted Halaestus. ‘What did you do on Malodrax, Lysander? Answer us. What did you do?’

  Lysander let Halaestus go. Now the anger in Halaestus was clear, and a mania simmered behind his eyes that did not belong in a level-headed, disciplined Imperial Fist. ‘You are not yourself, brother,’ he said. ‘Back on the Phalanx, that will change. Until then I ask that you trust me.’

  Lysander walked back towards the bulk of the strike force, now approaching a long rise in the ground that formed a blasted ridge covered in the stone trunks of fallen trees.

  ‘I have not forgotten you saved my life,’ said Halaestus after him. ‘But there is only so much that buys. If you betrayed what you are, you will never fully leave this planet. You know that, Lysander! You know I speak truth!’

  10

  ‘My own brand of heresy is a common one. I am humble enough to admit that. What if knowledge was a weapon, I came to ask? Knowledge of the enemy, so warned against by the Imperial Creed, which could be a keener blade than ignorance? Instead of obeying the Creed I hoarded such knowledge and most sinfully of all, when I learned I was not alone, I sought the company of others who shared in my heresy. Thus was the name of Malodrax first passed to me, a world of daemons where countless secrets were waiting to become our mortal sins.’

  – Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan

  Lysander’s first sight of the sphinx was as it circled the pinnacle of Shalhadar’s pyramid, light shimmering through it as it came down to land. A canal surrounded the pyramid, stocked with iridescent fish that burst like fireworks when they leapt from the water. The only bridge to the palace led to the main gates, and it was in front of these gates that the sphinx came to land with a grace that should not have been possible for something of its enormous size.

  ‘Keeper of the gate!’ called out Talaya the herald of Shalhadar, from the other end of the bridge where she stood with Lysander. ‘Someone thinks himself good enough to stand before the Veiled One in audience!’

  ‘Wonderful,’ purred the sphinx, its voice a kingly rumble from deep i
n its barrel chest. ‘I was getting hungry.’ It padded a few steps along the bridge and brought its massive feline head low, peering at Lysander. ‘And is this it?’

  Talaya had brought Lysander to a tower of many chambers, most of them dark, smoky dens where citizens lounged in the grip of visions and nightmares brought about by braziers of smouldering narcotics. Among them were stands of antiques, including sets of armour, from which Lysander had been bade select a suit that fitted him. Most were made for men of normal size but Lysander had found a set of oversized full plate, lacquered red and scalloped like the shell of a sea creature. He had not taken the helmet, which was fashioned into an expressionless human face with an extra eye in the forehead, and instead went bare-headed. He had found a sword, too, a fine two-hander which a Space Marine could wield in one, carried in a scabbard of gold and emerald at his waist. He still carried Inquisitor Golrukhan’s book, held by a strap to one armoured thigh.

  ‘And why,’ rumbled the sphinx, ‘would my lord the Veiled One stoop to share a realm with such a ragged peasant?’

  ‘I have brought you this far,’ said Talaya to Lysander. ‘The rest is up to you.’

  Lysander walked onto the bridge, within a few steps of the sphinx. Its stained-glass wings surrounded it in a halo of colour, shimmering across the stone and gilt of its body. Its face had more of a cat about it than a human, its eyes bright and expressive considering it seemed to have been forged rather than born. A deep purr shuddered the surface of the bridge as its enormous chest rose and fell.

  ‘The Veiled One will see me,’ said Lysander.

  ‘Will he now?’ replied the sphinx. ‘How very certain you sound.’

  ‘I will pay what must be paid.’

  The sphinx smiled, showing its teeth. ‘I doubt that greatly, strange little thing. I doubt there is anything you have that I could want.’

  ‘You do not want anything, save to serve your master. And you will serve him by letting me through.’

  ‘Do you really want to go through the whole charade? You know I must kill you if you are found wanting. Not that I would wish for anything else, of course, but there are rules that must be followed. One of them is that you must know the consequences of standing before me. Throw yourself on your belly and beg me for mercy, with tears in your eyes, and you may withdraw.’