‘Our reinforcements are finite, but I fear the enemy’s are not,’ Draigo said. A diseased, taloned hand reached for Azrael’s face, but the Grey Knight separated it from its owner’s arm before it could do any damage. The next swing of his blade opened the daemon’s guts, maggots spilling to the ground in a sickening shower. ‘If we cannot get those portals closed, all this will come to naught.’
High above the battle, the four sorcerers continued to weave their debased magicks under the watchful eye of Abaddon. If the recent turn of events had given him cause for concern, he wasn’t showing it.
‘Leave it to me,’ Strike said, breaking off from the two Space Marines and clearing a route with a wide sweep of his flamer. Giving short bursts of his weapon to keep the horde at bay, he crossed the hundred metres or so between him and the Baneblade that had accounted for the Bloodthirster, using the tanks advancing on the delver-stronghold as cover. Other Imperial Guardsmen had the same idea and, behind each one, he found Catachans pleased to see that their leader was not only alive but in the thick of the action.
Reaching the slow moving Baneblade, he clambered up the skirt, his feet finding purchase on the huge rivets holding it in place, and crawled over to the turret. Heaving himself up to the hatch, he banged on it with the butt of his flamer. Almost instantly, the hatch popped open and a familiar face greeted him along with the business end of a laspistol.
‘Good to see you, Brigstone,’ Strike said dryly. ‘I was beginning to think you were going to sit out this entire war.’
‘Sorry about that, chief,’ Brigstone replied, helping the colonel down into the tank. ‘We couldn’t get the damn voxes to work. I think we’re being jammed or something. Been sat twiddling our thumbs on an island in the middle of the ocean for months.’
‘What made you come back now?’ asked Strike. The interior of the Baneblade was almost identical to that of Traitor’s Bane, minus K’Cee’s enhancements.
‘We saw drop pods coming down on Pythos Prime and figured it for a liberation force or more enemy troops. Either way, with dry season starting it meant we could get the tanks through the jungle. Hooked up with a couple of mechanised brigades we ran into on the way down. Said something big was going down at Mount Dhume and they were headed here to help out.’
‘Well, you took your time about it.’ Strike’s tone relaxed.
‘Would have been here sooner, chief, but we ran into a bunch of heroes up the road. Thought we were enemy war machines and decided to ambush us. Fortunately, they only took out a few track links but it cost us a good few hours getting them repaired.’
‘How many times do I have to apologise for that, commander?’ said a woman from out of the darkened rear of the command compartment. She stepped forward and Strike saw that it was Tzula. Filthy and sporting a few more scars than the last time he had seen her but most definitely the junior interrogator. ‘Hello, colonel. Still managing to find trouble, I see.’
‘Likewise,’ Strike said with a grin. ‘Are you alone?’ he added, his face becoming grim.
Tzula’s features hardened. ‘Huron Blackheart infiltrated a supply ship in the Imperial fleet and was planning to contaminate our supply line. He had a coven of sorcerers on board masking its presence and maintaining the conditions on Pythos for the daemons to exist in realspace. I’d guess from the rate they’re dying out there that Epimetheus’s mission to destroy it was a success.’
‘Did he…?’ Strike asked.
There was a long pause before Tzula answered. ‘I don’t know. He certainly thought it was a one-way mission.’
Strike nodded solemnly. ‘Well, if he did sacrifice himself, let’s make it count for something.’ He turned to the commander. ‘Brigstone, I have a new target for your guns.’
From his vantage point high up on the mountain approach, Abaddon looked on as his army of daemons was taken apart.
For kilometres in every direction, corporeal metal and daemon flesh clashed, artillery and armour pitched against tooth and claw. It was a sight he had beheld a thousand times before on a thousand battlefields across thousands of years, but very rarely had he presided over a defeat. The battle was still underway and the price exacted from the lackeys of the False Emperor was high, but millennia of experience cried out to him that the day was lost.
Beside him the sorcerer willing the kine shield into being faltered, the huge exertion too much for a body already wracked by the ravages of the warp. Unnatural smoke poured from the gaps in his ill-fitting armour and issued forth from his mouth, nose and tear ducts. Convulsing maniacally, the moisture in his body fled, his skin cracking and wrinkling like time speeded up. The warp barrier he had erected flickered and died, and his desiccated husk tumbled from the outcrop and turned to dust as it hit the hard ground below.
The other sorcerers looked at each other uneasily but continued with their ritual, not wishing to anger the Warmaster to whom their master had been eager to loan their services.
From the heart of the melee, Abaddon saw the turret of a tank traverse, the super-heavy taking aim in his direction. The commander of the Black Legion took this as his cue to leave, pulling a teleportation activator from a pouch at his waist and slipping his thumb over the trigger stud. This battle was indeed forfeit, and likely it would turn the course of the war for Pythos, leading to the ultimate defeat for the forces of Chaos.
It mattered not to Abaddon. To him the war was merely a distraction that would lead him to a far greater prize.
As the shell ejected from the end of the Baneblade’s barrel in a burst of muzzle flare, he stabbed his armoured thumb down on the activator. By the time the round hit, killing the trio of sorcerers and turning the promontory into a shower of debris, Abaddon the Despoiler was already gone.
The Battle for Stronghold 2761/b would last another thirty-nine hours. Azrael and Draigo fought it to the very last second.
Starved of fresh daemons to bolster their forces, those stranded on the material side of the veil became desperate and attempted to break through the rolling blockade of armour moving towards them. Wave after wave of the Neverborn fell to the Imperial guns but their kindred clambered over the corpses of the fallen, tearing and rending at the wall of steel. Free of the monsters clinging to their hulls, the Thunderhawks and Valkyries took to the air, picking off the daemons from above. The vital role they played in the battle saved many a tank crew, but the losses of Imperial armour were so immense that, a decade later, when an Adeptus Mechanicus team arrived to salvage the wrecks, casualties were measured in tonnage rather than numbers.
The enemy’s forces and spirits broken, the battle devolved into smaller conflicts. A pack of Tzeentchian lesser daemons broke through to the minehead and massacred the Mordians taking cover there. Balthasar and two of his Deathwing brethren led a combined force of Catachans and Mordians into the depths of the stronghold. By first light the next morning, not a single daemon still persisted in the darkness.
With air superiority re-established, Sammael hunted down any daemon foolhardy enough to venture off the ground. The deadly plasma cannon fitted to the undercarriage of Corvex was fired so often that it overheated and melted down within hours, necessitating a refit from the Dark Angels Techmarines once the jetbike was back on board the Rock. It would be six days before the weapon had cooled sufficiently to be worked upon.
Bereft of his mobile command centre, Strike, along with Tzula and Magrick’s adhoc squad, scoured the battlefield, targeting those daemons too nimble for the guns of the tanks. A new honour was added to the 183rd’s banner in the days following the battle commemorating their bravery and sacrifice. The colonel’s pride was only dented by the loss of Magrick who survived the Battle of Stronghold 2761/b but died of horrific injuries she suffered taking down a daemonette single-handed. Her fang would be ever present at Strike’s hip until the war for Pythos was over.
The two Supreme Grand Masters never drifted more than a few metres apart, matching each other kill for kill. Ideologically poles apart,
in the simple matter of slaying the foes of the Imperium, they were entirely attuned. The Imperial Guardsmen who were privileged enough to witness them fight that day would carry with them stories from war zone to war zone of the two killing machines who fought for nigh on a day and a half without pause, putting paid to creatures from beyond nightmare without fear nor mercy.
The last daemon to fall to their blades was an enormous bloated thing, its putrid form generating a miasma of stench and filth that clogged the filters of Space Marine power armour and stripped flesh from bone. With the Imperial Guard ineffective against such a foe, the entirety of the remaining Dark Angels and Draigo engaged the thing for hours, constantly hampered by the smaller daemons and plague golems that separated from the main bulk of the Great Unclean One. Its eventual demise came when a trio of Nephilim jetfighters unleashed their full complement of blacksword missiles, felling the titanic daemon. The two Chapter Masters struck simultaneously, the Grey Knight piercing its chest, the Dark Angel driving the Sword of Secrets through its skull. Leaping clear of the flailing horror, it played out its death throes as it melted into a bubbling pool of bubonic sludge, permanently staining the slopes of Mount Dhume.
With all foes vanquished, the Space Marines marched from the field of battle, the veneration and praise of their Imperial Guard allies sounding out across the Pythosian night.
‘Your stubbornness almost cost us this war. It is high time you saw reason and ordered an assault on Atika,’ Draigo said, his voice loud enough to be heard by the Deathwing sitting on board Roar of Vengeance waiting for it to take off.
Any common ground the two Supreme Grand Masters had found, any bond they had formed, had been left on the battlefield. Alongside him at the foot of the Thunderhawk’s boarding ramp, Azrael bristled.
‘Next time we’ll be ready for that tactic if Abaddon employs it again. It’s high time the Grey Knights saw action on Pythos instead of kicking their heels up in the fleet.’ That was the closest to an admission that the Dark Angel was wrong Draigo would get, even if Azrael had twisted it to cast the Grey Knights in a poor light.
‘And next time he’ll strike at a more remote stronghold inaccessible to the Imperial Guard tanks and negate that advantage. We have to stop being reactive and take the battle to Abaddon, starting with Atika.’
‘I brought my Chapter here in response to your call for aid to save the population of Pythos, not condemn it. While there’s still a chance that the citizens of Atika still live, I shall not risk a direct assault.’
‘That’s not an issue, my lord,’ said a voice unfamiliar to the Dark Angel. Strike and a dark-skinned woman dressed in Catachan fatigues, vest and bandana approached the idling Thunderhawk. ‘The entire population of Atika is dead. Or as good as,’ Tzula finished.
‘It is good to see you again, Junior Interrogator Digriiz. I had feared you dead,’ Draigo said. ‘My condolences on the loss of your master. He was a fine man and a great servant of the Golden Throne.’
‘Thank you, Lord Draigo. It is my wish to honour his memory by completing his mission here and destroying the Damnation Cache,’ Tzula said, bowing slightly.
‘And you have the… weapon, I trust?’ Draigo said.
Azrael cast a sideways look at the Grey Knight but was not drawn to enquire further.
‘I have, Lord Draigo,’ Tzula said, tucking her hand into the waistband of her fatigues and surreptitiously pointing to the hilt of the athame with her thumb.
‘This reunion is all very touching but if the girl has intelligence regarding the state of Atika then I wish to hear it,’ Azrael snapped.
‘As you wish, my lord,’ Tzula said, bowing to the Dark Angel before explaining what she had discovered in Atika. She spared none of the detail regarding the population’s fate, the plot to contaminate the Imperial rations and the coven hidden among the fleet. When it came to Epimetheus, she said as little as possible.
When she had finished, Azrael simply regarded her with a penetrating stare. ‘And this mysterious Space Marine? This Epimetheus. Where is he now?’
Tzula was about to say that she believed him to have perished in the operation to destroy the hijacked supply ship when Draigo intervened. ‘That’s hardly the issue here, Azrael. The souls of Atika are lost. Even worse, they have been ensorcelled and enslaved to help the Archenemy’s cause. There is nothing to hold us back. We must attack.’
Azrael looked to Strike who nodded his agreement with the Grey Knight’s assessment. The commander of the Dark Angels turned and stamped off up the ramp. When he reached the threshold of the troop compartment, he halted and spun on his heel.
‘Very well, but we do this on my terms and at a time of my choosing. Have your Brotherhood be ready for the assault on the capital as soon as I issue the command. You and your men too, colonel,’ he said before the ramp retracted and the hatch slammed shut behind him.
As Roar of Vengeance sped its way skywards back towards the Rock awaiting it in orbit, Draigo and Strike were already issuing the orders that would ensure Atika burned.
Interlude
826960.M41 / No Redemption. Geo-stationary orbit around Kylix, Pandorax System
Huron Blackheart materialised in the middle of the No Redemption’s bridge, a rush of displaced air and crackle of warp energies presaging his arrival. The Hamadrya slunk between his legs, its eyes glowing in the darkened confines of the Murder-class cruiser’s command deck. Several of the Red Corsairs present acknowledged Huron’s arrival but continued about their business without ceremony.
A figure in battle-damaged Terminator armour, patches of black and yellow still evident beneath the red betraying his former allegiance to the Scythes of the Emperor, approached him. ‘Shall we prepare the fleet to make for Pythos, Lord Blackheart?’
‘Not yet, Remulus, though the way the war for the planet is turning, we will be needed there before long.’ The Hamadrya melted into the darkness as Huron strode forward, casually tossing his axe to the deck. From the shadows twisted, mutated things emerged squabbling over which one of them would transport the precious thing to their master’s arming chamber. ‘I need to speak with Abaddon immediately.’
‘As you wish,’ Remulus said signalling to a human member of the crew to carry out their master’s bidding.
Blackheart addressed some of the other renegade Space Marines, former Astral Claws and his most trusted lieutenants, but trust was a commodity rarely traded among their number. He briefly appraised them of the fate of the Lamentation and issued orders for the next phase of the Red Corsairs involvement in the Pythos campaign while they brought him up to speed with the intelligence they had been receiving from the death world. After several minutes, Remulus interrupted them.
‘We’ve been able to reach the Warmaster, Lord Blackheart.’
Huron dismissed his captains and followed the Terminator over to a flickering hololith, a diminutive facsimile of Abaddon being broadcast from the surface of Pythos.
‘If you’ve only contacted me to gloat about the failure of the ambush at the mine, I shall wipe you and your renegades from the face of the galaxy with such totality that even the footnotes of history books will neglect to remember you, usurper.’ The threat in Abaddon’s voice was backed by a confidence that left none who heard his words in any doubt of their veracity.
‘Far from it, Abaddon. Considering that you have no interest whatsoever in holding the planet, the…’ Huron paused, knowing that if he selected his next few words incorrectly he would likely be dooming the Red Corsairs to a blood feud with the Black Legion that they were not yet in a position to contest. ‘…limited success of your operation has probably extended the war on Pythos, giving you longer to find that what you seek. Or is who you seek more accurate, Warmaster?’
Abaddon smirked, a grin that had condemned a thousand worlds crossing his lips. ‘And what would you know of it, pirate?’
‘More than you think. I’ve found what you’re looking for and left him undamaged for you.’ It was Blackheart
’s turn to grin now. ‘Better yet, I know how you can capture him.’
The hololith flickered, the image of Abaddon briefly cutting in and out. When it resolved again, the Warmaster’s body language had relaxed, his tone conciliatory.
‘Tell me more, Blackheart.’
Part Five
Chapter Fourteen
085961.M41 / Atika Hive, Pythos
Grigor Mittel set down the lump of ore he had carried up from the bowels of Atika and turned to repeat the journey. He did not know, nor care, how many times he had done this before, nor did he have any concept of how long he had been doing it for. Under the possession of the plague zombie virus, he merely existed, held somewhere between life and death to carry out the whim of others.
His body had deteriorated during his long months of servitude, but he had not noticed. Fingers were missing on both hands, the skin on his chest had worn through to bone and the flesh of his cheek was torn, a ragged hole through which his yellowed teeth poked. His clothes, like those of the others who laboured under the curse, were threadbare and frayed, leaving him almost naked, but Grigor did not feel the cold deep down in the mine tunnels. He could no longer feel anything at all.
Something brushed past his arm causing him to stop. He looked to his side to see a woman, though Grigor could no longer distinguish gender just as he had no gauge of age or race, shamble past him. He looked at her, for a fleeting moment experiencing a rush of recognition. She too stopped, turning to meet Grigor’s gaze. Their eyes locked, dead stares regarding each other vacantly until, barely perceptibly, the corner of her mouth turned upwards a fraction. It was a smile, but Grigor could no longer recognise it as such.
The moment was cruelly ended by the lash of the overseer’s whip, gouging flesh from Grigor’s back and snaking out to rip the woman’s hand from the end of her arm. Grigor started to move again, not out of fear or pain but from some base imperative that told him the whip meant move. He stepped over the woman’s severed hand, looking down as he did so to see a slim band of metal wrapped around one of the fingers.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 339