An avatar of unending war, it roared with the unquenchable anger of a warrior god, and the blood of its slaughters oozed between its fingers, running in thick rivulets down the haft of its monstrous spear.
‘Abhor the witch,’ snarled Kul Gilad. ‘Destroy the witch!’
They heard the warning bells, but paid them no mind. Since the vox-horns had announced their entry to the Halo Scar ten hours ago, there had been a steady stream of warning klaxons, alarm bells and binary announcements. Abrehem, Coyne, Ismael, Hawke and Crusha made their way through the vaulted tunnels of the engineering deck towards the feeding hall. Their next shift refuelling the plasma engines was due to start in two bells, and the high-calorie gruel was just about all that would sustain them over the length of a backbreaking shift hauling the volatile cylinders of fuel on long chains along the delivery rails to the combustion chambers. Having so many muscle-augmented servitors on shift had made life easier, but the work was still punishing in its intensity. Burned skin, caustic fumes and torn muscles were the norm after only a couple of hours.
‘I’ll be glad when you can get us these cushy shifts,’ said Coyne.
‘You and me both, lad,’ said Hawke.
‘You hardly do any work anyway,’ said Abrehem. ‘Crusha does all your work and you get the servitors to haul most of the loads.’
The ogryn grinned at the sound of its name, still carrying the gunny sacks of contraband. The plasma pistol Hawke had finagled from the skitarii was in one of those sacks and Abrehem tried not to think of how much trouble they would be in if it was ever discovered.
Hawke shrugged, completely unashamed at his evasion of work. ‘I see myself as more of an delegator, Abe,’ he said. ‘A man who gets things done without needing to dirty his own hands.’
‘No, your hands are dirty enough already,’ said Abrehem.
Another siren went off, an insistent blare that sounded like the ship itself was screaming. Abrehem jumped at the sound, sensing on a marrow-deep level that this was no ordinary, everyday sound, that this was a warning only ever deployed in the worst emergencies.
‘I’ve not heard that one before,’ said Coyne. ‘I wonder what it means.’
‘Probably nothing,’ said Hawke. ‘Maybe a pipe in the archmagos’s toilet’s sprung a leak.’
The others laughed nervously, but they all knew there was something more to it than the normal run of warnings that sounded for reasons no one could quite fathom. This siren had a strident note of real danger to it, like it was modulated at a pitch that circumvented all rational thought and went straight for the mind’s fear response.
‘No,’ said Abrehem. ‘Something’s really wrong this time.’
Alarms sounded throughout the Speranza, high-pitched screams of violation that roused Cadians from their barracks, skitarii from their guild halls and Mechanicus armsmen from their rapid-response hubs. Throughout the ship, armed men and women snapped shells into shotcannons, clicked power cells into lasrifles and engaged the energy coils of implanted weaponry.
Tech-guard squads formed defensive cordons at the entrances to the great engineering halls where the legion of Ark Fabricati workers laboured on the downed Canis Ulfrica. Ven Anders dispersed the companies of the 71st to prearranged defensive choke points as Magos Dahan routed his skitarii through the corridors and chambers of the ship like leukocytes racing through a living body to destroy an infection.
The alarm that echoed through the Speranza was one that had never been sounded before, one whose frequency had been carefully chosen by the mighty ship’s lost builders for its precise atonal qualities that caused the most discomfort in those who heard it.
It represented one thing and one thing only.
Enemy boarders.
Screams and the whickering sound of alien gunfire echoed from the soaring walls of the plasma containment chambers. Cylinders of lethally volatile plasmic fuel swayed overhead, ratcheting along delivery rails like uncontrolled rolling stock heading for a collision at a busy terminus. Shimmering wychfire from half a dozen bright portals cast impossible shadows and brought a hallucinatory form of daylight to an area of the Speranza that had not known natural light since its construction.
Abrehem crouched behind a slab-sided mega-dozer, its iron track unit taller than ten men, and watched in horror as the invaders slaughtered the men and women of the engineering decks. Bodies lay strewn around the chamber, torn up like they’d been caught in an agricultural threshing machine. Their killers were aliens; but not the brutish, clumsy savages the daily devotionals ridiculed, but sculpturally beautiful alabaster and jade figures with their own graceful animation. They moved like spinning dancers, their strides smooth and their bodies always completely in balance. They carried flattened weaponry with elongated barrels that buzzed as they fired hails of deadly projectiles.
‘Are they eldar?’ said Coyne. ‘Pirates?’
‘I think so,’ answered Abrehem. ‘But they don’t look much like pirates.’
The token force of skitarii assigned to the engineering space were still fighting, filling the chamber with booming blasts of shot-cannon and hot streaks of las-fire. A dozen or more were already dead, picked off by cloaked shapes that moved through the shadows like ghosts, or cut down by darting figures in brilliant blue war-armour and guns that shrieked as they slew.
Abrehem ducked as a spinning fragment embedded itself in the track unit beside him, a perfectly smooth disc of a material that looked like polished ceramic. Its edges thrummed with magnetic force and the edge was clearly sharper than any blade Abrehem had ever seen. They hadn’t wanted to come here, but a series of irising doors, dropping containment shutters and skitarii barricades had forced their path through the bowels of the ship and brought them into the middle of a firefight.
‘Bloody stupid this,’ said Hawke. ‘You don’t go to battles. You avoid them.’
‘I don’t think we had much choice,’ said Abrehem. ‘It was either this or get stuck out in the tunnels.’
‘At least there we wouldn’t get shot at.’
‘And maybe we’d have been stuck there for days and starved to death.’
Hawke glared at him, unwilling to concede the point, but Abrehem knew he was right; it was stupid to have come here. Hawke knelt beside Crusha and rummaged through the gunny sacks, as Coyne peered through the cogs, wheels and gears of the tracks with his mouth open in shock. Like Abrehem, Coyne had never seen an alien creature, and the sheer strangeness of these invaders was keeping the worst of their fear at bay for now.
‘Kill them?’ said Crusha, and they all looked over at the ogryn. It was the first thing Crusha had said since Joura.
‘Thor’s teeth, what’s with him?’ asked Hawke as the ogryn stood and balled his hands into fists.
‘Pycho-conditioned responses are kicking in,’ said Abrehem, seeing Crusha’s primitive augmetics come alive with activity. ‘He’s conditioned to react to the smell of blood and the sound of battle.’
The ogryn’s body visibly swelled as intra-vascular chem-shunts pumped combat-stimms into his powerful physiology, and muscular boosters juiced his strength with enough adrenaline to cause instantaneous heart failure in an ordinary man.
Once, Abrehem would have been terrified at being next to a battle-ready abhuman, but right now it probably wasn’t a bad idea to have an angry ogryn nearby.
‘Get down, you big lummox!’ snarled Hawke, as Crusha took a step into the open. ‘They’ll see you!’
Hawke’s words were prophetic, and through the guts of the mega-dozer’s track unit, Abrehem saw a group of the killer aliens in form-fitting ablative weave the colour of ancient bone turn the burning red eye-lenses of their jade helms towards them.
‘Shitting hell,’ he swore as the aliens bounded towards them behind a hail of the screaming discs.
‘Run for it!’ shouted Hawke, dragging one of the gunny sacks behind hi
m as he fled.
Abrehem didn’t need telling twice, though he had no idea to where they would run. But where they were running to seemed less important than what they were running from.
A sound like breaking glass exploded around them as the discs tore through the tracks of the mega-dozer, ripping hydraulic lines and shattering vital components that rendered the vast machine useless in the blink of an eye. A tumbling fragment took Coyne in the back, tearing a bloody line from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. He stumbled, shocked rigid by the sudden pain, and fell to his knees. Abrehem saw a fragment of a sharpened ceramic disc embedded in the meat of his back and bent to remove it. The edges cut his hand as he pulled it out, and blood welled from a deep gash on his palm.
‘Imperator, that hurts...’ grunted Coyne as Abrehem hauled him upright. Blood soaked Abrehem’s hands as he and Coyne staggered down the length of the mega-dozer. More whickering gunfire and ricochets chased them, but amazingly none of it touched them. Abrehem looked back over his shoulder.
‘Crusha! Come on!’ he shouted, seeing the ogryn wasn’t fleeing with them.
‘Crusha fight!’ bellowed the ogryn, beating a meaty fist against its swelling chest. ‘Crusha kill Emperor’s enemies!’
Abrehem paused, reluctant to simply abandon the creature.
‘What are you doing?’ gasped Coyne. ‘Let’s go!’
‘Come on, you bloody idiot!’ shouted Hawke from the shadow of a blast shutter that had miraculously not sealed the deck off, leaving them a way out. Scattered groups of bondsmen were also running for the opening, ducking between heavy machinery and lifter gear to escape the slaughter. The shutter rattled in its frame, the mechanism trying to close, but for some reason unable to descend. It could drop at any moment, trapping him in the middle of a firefight, and Abrehem knew he didn’t have a choice but to keep going.
Blasts of weapons fire filled the space behind him. Abrehem didn’t dare look back and kept going, dragging Coyne’s increasingly limp body beside him.
‘Come on, for the Emperor’s sake!’ he yelled. ‘Help me out, Coyne! Stay awake and use those bloody legs of yours!’
Coyne’s eyes flickered open and he nodded, but blood loss and shock was turning him into a dead weight at Abrehem’s side.
‘Help me!’ he yelled at his fellow bondsmen. They ignored him, but then – seeing who was shouting – a few turned to help take Coyne’s weight. They grabbed his legs and his other arm, dragging him into the safety of the arched passageway beyond the blast shutter. Abrehem looked for Hawke, seeing him still frantically searching through the gunny sack.
Abrehem heard a roar of anger and pressed himself against the bulkhead of the juddering doorway. He glanced up to see the blast shutter cranking down a few centimetres at a time, as though fighting some unseen force that was keeping it open.
‘Abe, can you get that damn door shut?’ shouted Hawke.
Abrehem took a breath and sought out the door lock, but recoiled from the violence in the mechanism, a blood-red haze of data occluding it from any attempt he might make to interfere with its workings.
‘I can’t,’ he shouted back. ‘It’s jammed or something.’
‘Figures,’ said Hawke. ‘Aha! Here it is.’
Abrehem turned away from Hawke and looked back the way they had come.
Back at the mega-dozer, he saw Crusha surrounded by the eldar warriors. They filled the air with lethally sharp discs, tearing chunks of bloodied meat from the ogryn’s body, dancing away from his ponderous fists with impunity. They moved with inhuman speed, darting in to slash at Crusha with delicate blades that looked far too thin to be combat-capable, but which sliced through the ogryn’s thick skin with energised ease. They were like mutant dockside rats attacking a drunk stevedore, too small to bring down their prey alone, but working together...
One eldar moved a fraction too slow and caught a clubbing blow to its helm that staggered it. Even as it righted itself, Crusha gripped the warrior’s armoured tunic and slammed him into the mega-dozer, breaking every bone in his flimsy body.
The bloodied ogryn roared in triumph and hurled the body into the mass of his attackers. Most spun away from the corpse missile, but a handful were knocked flat by the impact. Crusha was on them a second later, stamping one to paste and breaking another’s neck before the rest could rise. Its fist swung out and caught an eldar warrior who’d dared approach too close to put its gun to the ogryn’s neck. The alien was hurled ten metres through the air, landing in a crumpled heap that told Abrehem his spine was a concertinaed mess of shattered bone.
The other eldar backed away from Crusha, now realising it had been arrogant to get close to so powerful an opponent. Abrehem waited for them to open fire, but the volley of razor discs never came. A second later he saw why.
A blurred shape, like a figure moving too fast to be seen with the naked eye, rounded the edge of the mega-dozer. Abrehem’s enhanced optics made out the contoured outline of a shimmering ghost, a graceful form of lithe perfection that carried a long sword with a blade of palest white. Armoured in azure plates and with a plumed helm crested in red and gold, the sublime warrior flickered in and out of view as its image was splintered and thrown out around it in a haze of mirrored light.
The figure spun and danced around Crusha in a series of stepped images, each moment where Abrehem was able to perceive the figure like a snapshot of motion caught in a strobe light.
And then it was over.
The dance was ended and Crusha was on his knees, blood gushing from a series of lethal cuts that had opened every major artery in his body. He looked suddenly small, like an idiot child brought low by scholam bullies. The sublime warrior made one last spinning leap and Crusha’s head flew from his shoulders, severed cleanly by a single, perfectly balanced strike.
The warrior looked up from his killing, and Abrehem felt its distaste at the act. Not at the killing itself, but that it had been forced to wet its blade in the blood of so a crude an opponent. He met the cold, warlike stare of the warrior and felt the icy calm of its perfectly distilled martial skill. This was a warrior who embodied death in its purest form.
The contact was broken, and the eldar warrior’s form blurred into shimmering silver light as he ran towards the stubbornly open shutter.
‘Oh, crap,’ said Abrehem. ‘We need to go. Right bloody now!’
Kul Gilad’s gauntlet slammed into the flaming daemon, and he felt the heat of its molten body through the heavy plates and crackling energies of his fist. Iron buckled and dribbling spurts of blazing ichor oozed from the cracks like light-filled blood. The avatar roared and brought its blazing spear around in a crushing arc. Encased in Terminator armour, Kul Gilad was too ponderous to evade, and he leaned in to the blow, taking it on the curved plates of his shoulder guard.
White heat of the hottest furnace imaginable cut through ceramite and the Reclusiarch bit back a cry of agony as he felt the skin beneath char to blackened ruin. He stepped away from the daemon and unleashed a stream of explosive mass-reactives at point-blank range. Most ignited before they impacted on the creature, their warheads flashing with premature detonation in the intense heat that surrounded the monster. A few shells penetrated the brazen plates of its body, but the furnace of its interior destroyed them before they could explode.
Tanna’s shouting voice echoed in his helmet, but he had not the breath or time to answer the frantic cries of his sergeant.
The daemon creature towered over him, and Kul Gilad felt his own anger rise to match the star-hot gaze of burning, eternal fury that blazed in its alien eyes. A storm raged around him, a swirling hurricane of light and unnatural energies that spat and bit with searing discharges. The vast plates of his armour were proof against that lightning, but the bridge crew were not so fortunate.
He could hear them dying around him, flensed to the bone by the witch woman’s lightning storm or slaug
htered like livestock by the green-armoured warriors. He’d seen none of them fall, but their sudden silence was proof enough that they were all dead. The eldar witch was at the heart of the storm, her slender body englobed by a radiant halo of power.
Her bound daemon came at him again, quicker than anything of such bulk and monstrous fire should be able to move. The weapon it carried danced in the heat haze surrounding it, sometimes appearing to be a vast sword, sometimes a great war-axe or a screaming spear. Kul Gilad batted the weapon aside with his power fist and stepped in to deliver a thunderous hammerblow to the creature’s midriff.
‘All-conquering Master of Mankind, be pleased with this war’s tumultuous roar!’ he sang, his voice booming from the vox-grille of his helm. His fist broke an armoured plate, and magma-hot gouts of its inner fire poured over his fist. Kul Gilad ignored the searing pain and drew back his fist to strike again.
A flash of red and a burning pain in his gut told him he’d been hit. The bridge spun away from him and he felt himself leave the deck. He slammed into a support stanchion, feeling it buckle with the force of impact. Bones broke inside him, and his body surged in heat as its self-repair biology went into overdrive.
He fell, slamming into the deck with force enough to dent the plates.
‘Reclusiarch!’ said Tanna, and this time Kul Gilad paid heed, knowing it would be his last chance to speak to his warriors.
‘Sergeant,’ he hissed through blood-flecked spittle. ‘Get to the Speranza. Go now and never look back.’
‘What is happening up there?’ demanded Tanna urgently. ‘We’re disembarking from the Barisan and coming to you.’
‘No,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Get to the Speranza. Now. This is my last order and you will obey it.’
‘Reclusiarch, no!’
‘Until the end, brother,’ said Kul Gilad softly before severing the vox-link.
Smoke billowed around him and he pushed himself to his feet, lifting his gauntlet-mounted storm bolter and loosing another burst of shots. The daemon stood over him, and this time his shots appeared to wreak some harm. It reeled from the force of his barrage and threw up a red-gold arm that bled light into the air and smoked with sulphurous yellow fumes. Kul Gilad’s visor scrolled with danger indicators.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 37