‘Good. I think you’ll be needing that soon,’ said the Space Marine. He helped her uneasily to her feet. ‘Can you walk unaided?’
‘Yes. The trauma should soon pass and you took it off clean so blood loss won’t be an issue,’ she replied before pausing. ‘Who are you anyway? I wasn’t aware of any Chapter operating on Pythos. Where are the rest of you?’ Tzula had fought alongside several Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes during her career, but was struck by how odd it was to find a Space Marine operating alone. The livery and markings of his armour were unfamiliar, but there was rumoured to be over a thousand Chapters scattered across the Imperium and, even as an agent of the Inquisition, she could barely name or identify a hundred of them.
The Space Marine did not answer, instead looking the junior inquisitor up and down.
‘My name is Tzula. Tzula Digriiz, junior inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus and agent of the Golden Throne.’
‘Zoo-ler,’ the Space Marine repeated uneasily.
‘It’s Tzula. T. Z. U. L. A. The “t” is silent,’ she paused again expectantly. ‘And you are?’
‘I am…’ He seemed to be considering his answer. ‘I am Epimetheus of the Grey Knights, Sentinel of Pythos and Keeper of the Seventh Seal.’
‘A Grey Knight?’ Tzula asked, surprised. ‘A Brotherhood is already here on Pythos. Thank the Emperor. I thought–’
‘As far as I’m aware, I am the sole Grey Knight on this planet.’ He halted, the crackling of his force halberd breaking the silence. ‘I do not sense the psychic spoor of any of my brethren on this world, just the presence of the Archenemy. With the final seal broken, it is only a matter of time before the Damnation Cache bursts open. Come, junior inquisitor. We have work to do.’
‘I don’t understand. How can you be here on your own? And your armour? How did it get into such poor condition.’
‘The time for answers will come later,’ Epimetheus said, starting off along the stone corridor at pace. ‘For now, we have a world to save.’
913959.M41 / Hangar Level, Imperial Command Centre. Olympax Mountains, Pythos
‘What the hell happened here?’ Strike bellowed to be heard above the sound of engines spooling down as he strode along the exit ramp of the Valkyrie. The floor of the hangar level was carpeted in fallen rocks and dust, and otherwise airworthy craft were dented and scratched, cockpit windows crazed and shattered. Men and women frantically dashed about attempting to clear landing spaces for the Valkyries hovering in a holding pattern at the hangar entrance.
‘There was an… incident, chief,’ Thorne answered sheepishly before explaining the events of recent hours.
‘And the girl, the traitor, she’s still in the base?’ Strike asked after hearing Thorne out. He knew that the major would be giving himself a hard enough time about being duped by Brandd; admonishing him about it would serve no purpose now.
‘I think so, yes. The other inquisitor, the loyal one I mean, Tzula. She took a squad after her.’
‘The tremors? Was that the final seal being broken?’
‘I have no idea. If it was, we probably would have known about it by now, don’t you think?’
A commotion from the hangar bay opening drew both men’s attention. Recently landed pilots and disembarked troops alike were staring and pointing into the distance towards Atika. Strike and the major jogged over to see what was happening for themselves.
‘It’s the hive, chief. It’s on fire,’ a pilot, still dressed in full flying gear, told him.
Unnatural smoke billowed up into the sky and over the jungle canopies, vast plumes of blackness spiralling sharply in all directions growing ever greater in volume.
‘Pass me your magnoculars, Thorne,’ Strike asked. The major lifted the cord attached to the eyeglasses over his head and passed them to Strike. The colonel looked through them in the direction of the planetary capital. When he removed them a few moments later, the colour had drained from his face.
‘That’s not smoke,’ he said, fighting to keep the emotion from impinging on his voice. ‘It’s daemons.’
Chapter Six
913959.M41 / Imperial Command Centre. Olympax Mountains, Pythos
The Xerxes support craft unleashed a volley from its rocket pod, each missile unerringly finding its target and blasting the daemon out of the air. The thing’s serpentine body ruptured and its leathery brown wings tore and holed, sending the beast spinning towards the ground. Another Xerxes altered course in a gravity taunting motion and finished it off with a single shot from its multi-laser, gore streaking the flyer’s hull as it flew through the space vacated by the now dissipating warp entity.
‘Good shooting, Green Wing,’ Thorne enthused over the vox from the co-pilot’s chair of a nearby Valkyrie. Only a handful of the gunships returning from Khan’s Hold had actually made it into the hangar at Olympax before the daemonic assault had been launched, and many of the near hundred Valkyries had simply turned around to engage this new enemy, still overloaded with troops from their previous engagement. The quake-damaged craft had also been scrambled and with their numbers added to the Valkyries already airborne, over one hundred and fifty craft of varying patterns now filled the skies above the Olympax mountain range.
‘What are we dealing with here, Thorne? How many of them are there?’ Strike’s voice fizzed over the vox. With the comms tower out at Olympax, the colonel had boarded his newly refitted Hellhammer, currently perched on the lip of the hangar entrance, and was using it as a mobile base of operations.
The major looked out through a cracked section of cockpit. Less than a kilometre in front of the gunship formation, an angry black cloud roiled in the sky, flashes of warp energy and balefire picking out the spiteful teeth and claws of its constituent parts.
‘Impossible to say, chief.’ Another of the serpentine beasts forming the daemonic vanguard darted between a phalanx of Valkyries only to die screaming as door gunners ripped it to pieces with heavy bolter rounds. ‘All we’re encountering at the moment are the advance scouts.’
‘I’m getting everybody in the base out through the east entrance, but that’s going to take time. Keep them occupied for as long as you can, then split your formation to the four corners of the planet. Tell those pilots to head for any delver-stronghold that still remains in our hands and establish contact with other Catachan cells as soon as they can.’
‘We’re giving them Olympax?’ said Thorne, sceptically rather than dissenting.
‘They had Olympax the instant the sky turned black with daemons. If those seals were holding back a tide of warpfiends we have to melt back into the jungle and keep them occupied until somebody, anybody, arrives to reinforce us.’
‘But we don’t even know whether the astropath was able to contact the battlefleet, and Brigstone and the armour have probably been lost at sea. Help might not be on its way.’ The chatter of heavy bolter fire echoed from further back inside the Valkyrie. The door gunners had sheared a wing from one of the daemons and it flipped erratically end over end. Reaching out with a claw as it dropped, it raked the side of another gunship at lower altitude. The craft rocked precariously and, sensing easy prey, two more of the winged horrors pounced upon it before the gunners could react, tearing through armour plating like paper and casting the occupants violently down onto the mountains below before sending their craft down after them in a ball of fire.
‘We can’t think like that. We have to keep fighting and keep hope alive until there’s not a single Catachan left to draw breath on Pythos. And even then, if our sacrifice is so total that not a single soldier of the 183rd will be around to witness it, we have to believe that Pythos will be saved.’
The sky outside lit up as the front ranks of the aerial daemon army came into range and the Catachan craft commenced their assault.
‘I only hope I’m around to be proven wrong,’ Thorne said launching one of the Valkyrie’s hellstrike missiles in the direction of a host of flat, blue daemons that had separated from the main pac
k and were heading directly for him.
913959.M41 / The Tunnel System, Imperial Command Centre. Olympax Mountains, Pythos
‘Your arm?’ Epimetheus had stopped higher up the stone stairs and was waiting for Tzula to catch up with him. ‘Is it troubling you?’
‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘The opposite in fact. It feels like my forearm and hand are still there. Right now I have the sensation that I’m flexing my fingers and twisting my wrist, but that’s impossible of course.’
‘You’d be surprised. Brothers of mine who have lost limbs in battle claim that they’ve been able to feel the presence of a phantom limb even after they’ve had an augmetic replacement fitted.’
‘And where are they?’
‘What?’ Epimetheus said non-plussed. ‘The phantom limbs?’
‘No,’ said Tzula finally catching up to him. ‘Your brothers.’
‘I’ve told you, this conversation can wait. If the final seal has been broken and the cache is once again open, this entire planet is in peril.’ He turned to continue his ascent.
‘And I’ve told you that I am an agent of the Most Holy Ordos of the Emperor’s Inquisition. I demand some answers.’
The Grey Knight stopped once again. +And who are you to demand anything of me?+ He did not bother to turn and face Tzula.
+I thought I just made that abundantly clear. I serve the Ordo Malleus, as do you.+
He turned to face her again. ‘Then you are either deluded, a very convincing liar or a lot has changed since I have been down here.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘I have never heard of this Ordo Malleus of which you speak. Nor am I aware of it having any ties to the Grey Knights or the Inquisition.’
It was Tzula’s turn to be non-plussed. ‘How long have you been down here?’
‘I’m… unsure. My implants were keeping me in a state of suspended animation. It was only the psychic wards I left in place that alerted me to the traitors’ presence in the seal chamber and roused me.’ His speech was becoming more normalised now, as if it was improving with practice. ‘What year is it?’
Tzula was taken aback slightly. ‘It is the nine hundred and fifty-ninth year of the forty-first millennium,’ she answered hesitantly. She did not need to be a psyker herself to sense that this information unsettled Epimetheus.
‘In that case, Tzula Digriiz of the Most Holy Ordos of the Emperor’s Inquisition,’ he said, climbing upwards again at speed. ‘I have been down here almost ten thousand years.’
913959.M41 / Imperial Command Centre. Olympax Mountains, Pythos
Blue flame engulfed the Valkyrie flying above Thorne’s in the formation, exploding it in a shower of twisted metal and human wreckage. It rained down on the craft below, unbalancing them as they prepared to unleash their weapons into the oncoming wave of daemons. The darkening sky filled with energy beams from over a hundred multilasers accompanied by the contrails of missiles launched from the gunships supporting the troop carriers. The front rank of daemons peeled off and broke, leaving the Catachan weapons to hit those arrayed behind them. In a roar of explosions and otherworldly screaming, nigh on a thousand daemons succumbed in the space of seconds.
It was nowhere near enough.
Those that had broken under the initial assault now regrouped and engaged the Catachan craft, reinforced by swift, spindly daemons who seemed to have no discernible way of keeping aloft other than dark pacts sworn to even darker deities. Some breathed warpfire, burning plasteel hulls as if they were made of dried wood and cooking off missiles from pregnant pods. Others launched wicked barbs from their mouths and other orifices, spears of solid flesh and iron-hard bone that impaled pilots and clogged engine rotors. Those with no means of ranged attack simply flew directly at the Valkyries and barged bodily against them, crashing them into others in the tight formation or diverting them into mountain faces. A pair of the flat, blue daemons wailed monstrously as they synchronised their assault on one of the Xerxes gunships, each one tearing off a turbojet as they launched themselves under its wings at speed. The craft hung ponderously in the sky for a second before dropping like a stone onto the mountain peak below.
And still the daemons came.
Like an industrial chimney spitting out toxic pollutant into the Pythosian dusk, the flow of daemons from Atika Hive was ceaseless – a morass of newly spawned malevolence ready to claim dominion over the material world.
As the Imperial Navy pilot at the helm of Thorne’s Valkyrie struggled valiantly to avoid the onrushing daemons, the major noticed a change in the pattern of the column spewing forth from the planetary capital. Where it had previously appeared to be a single mass, it had now broken up, daemons suddenly flying off like a shoal of fish dispersing once a predator got amongst them. Two vast shadows broke away from the silhouette of the hive city, massive compared to the daemons the Catachans were already battling, and faster with it. A palpable wave of panic spread through the enemy ranks. They scattered as if their very existence was under threat allowing Thorne and his men time to regroup.
‘Something’s happening, chief,’ Thorne voxed. ‘New targets have presented themselves. Big targets.’
‘I see them too, major. How long can you buy us? Strike responded. The vox-feed had grown choppy and distorted the colonel’s voice in a macabre fashion.
‘As much as you need.’ Thorne switched to the general channel. ‘All wings. New priority targets. Let’s take those big bastards down.’
Taking shots of opportunity at the fleeing minor daemons, the Valkyries resumed formation and gunned their engines towards the new threats. By the time Thorne realised his mistake, it was already too late.
Moving preternaturally quickly for something with wings, the first shape collided with the lead Valkyries before any of the others could react. One moment, three gunships were taking point, the next a crimson blur barrelled through them turning them to scrap, a trio of fireballs the only evidence of them ever existing. Once the flames had cleared, the Catachans got a clear look at what had wreaked such bloody havoc.
The colour of darkest blood, the behemoth hovered in front of the Imperial position goading them to attack, every beat of its powerful leathery wings generating turbulence that swung the stationary Valkyries roughly from side to side. In one hand it wielded a double-bladed axe, thick with fresh ichor from where it had carved a path through its weaker cousins. In its other, it gripped the handle of a long, barbed whip, the thong of which seemed to be made from the same material as its wings. Curved horns sprouted wickedly from its forehead and plates of thick brass armour etched with heretical symbols that stung human eyes to gaze upon them hung over its shoulders, chest and thighs.
‘Skullrender,’ Thorne said down the secure line to Strike, his voice a frightened whisper. It was rare for any veterans of the Catachan regiments to return to their home world, rarer still to be breathing when they did come home. Some of those veterans, the ones whose psyche was frayed a little too much and whose anecdotes fell just the wrong side of fanciful, would speak in hushed, feared tones of an entity so bloodthirsty that entire battalions had committed suicide in their barracks rather than face one. Others in the Imperium had different names for this particular classification of warp entity but those who knew of such matters – scholars of the forbidden and the esoteric – called them Bloodthirsters.
‘Emperor preserve us,’ Strike replied. ‘Do what you can, Thorne, we only need a few more minutes.’
‘Understood, chief,’ Thorne said, regaining some of his composure. He switched back to the open channel before bellowing, ‘Concentrate fire!’ Over a hundred weapons answered his call, enough firepower to level a small city in the blink of an eye, all trained on one target. Except their target was no longer there.
Thrusting upwards, the Bloodthirster flew in a wide, vertical arc, tucking in its wings at the apex and diving down upon the Catachans packed so tightly below. As it hit their formation, it lashed out with whip and axe si
multaneously, slicing one of the Valkyries in twain while spinning another into the side of an identical craft. Three more blazing wrecks cascaded down upon the thickly forested valleys below.
In the weeks since Abaddon’s invasion of Pythos, Major Eckhardt Thorne of the Catachan 183rd had seen many strange and diabolical sights, but what he witnessed next was the most bizarre of all.
Despite being almost the same size as the Bloodthirster, the second dark shape had ended up in the midst of the Valkyrie formation without anybody seeming to notice. Looming large through the cockpit window, Thorne could quite clearly make out the spindly, purple form of a feathered, bird-headed daemon. Its frame was the equivalent of its counterpart but the bulk it wore upon it was barely half that of the Bloodthirster. Instead of armour it wore robes of fine cloth that constantly changed colour and texture in a mildly hypnotic way. In place of a whip or axe it carried a staff of ornate crafting that terminated in a crescent moon shape inset with a living, blinking eye.
It opened its mouth to speak, revealing numerous sets of tiny fangs within its beaked mouth and uttered a single word that made Thorne’s ears bleed to hear it. Without any physical interference or act of violence being perpetrated upon it, the Valkyrie alongside Thorne’s simply fell apart, reduced to its constituent parts in mid-air and exposing its occupants to the effects of gravity.
The daemon smiled and turned its attention to Thorne’s craft.
It had just opened its mouth to speak when a sonic boom sounded from somewhere back in the mountains. The thing’s eyes widened in horror right before the shot from the hellhammer cannon struck it, knocking it back in the direction from which it came.
‘I thought you could do with some help,’ said Strike over the vox.
‘But how–’
‘The inquisitor’s monkey made some modifications when he repaired the tank.’ Thorne could hear K’Cee protesting noisily in the background.
‘Got quite a range on it now.’
A purple shape whizzed over the cockpit canopy, only avoiding collision thanks to the pilot’s quick reflexes. Despite the daemon’s frail construction, the hellhammer shell had done little, if nothing, to impede it.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 320