The Lost and the Damned

by Guy Haley

  False calm descended, peaceful and poisonous.

  A man, blood running from blinded eyes and blistered lips, burst from the fog. Katsuhiro fired reflexively at him, missing in his fright. The man was clawing at his face, his screams turning to gurgles. His shoulder clipped Katsuhiro hard as he ran by and the gas swallowed him again.

  Screaming came out of the fog. Not all of the troops had gas masks. Many that did couldn’t work them, or had equipment that was damaged. They ran about in terror. One with greater presence of mind turned over bodies for a gas mask, finding one, slipping it on just in time. Two men brawled over a mask neither had any hope of donning. Others tried to run, but fell, screaming froth from burning throats.

  Time slowed. Katsuhiro moved as a man underwater. Images of horror appeared as sheets of gas shifted like weeds in currents, each waft of poison opening a curtain on another scene of suffering. It seemed to go on forever, as awful things do, though according to Katsuhiro’s chronometer less than two minutes went by.

  The screams died as men died. Vapour drank the sound of the wall guns, squeezing them down to subaquatic thumps. Laser flash dispersed by the gas turned the rolling clouds into alien thunderstorms of yellow and brown lit by red lightning.

  A roaring scream sounded right over Katsuhiro. Glaring yellow appeared overhead, and a wash of heat blasted the poison fog aside. A huge metal ovoid bore right down on him. He was frozen, sure he would be crushed. Other men, revealed by the backwash of the descending pod, were close to breaking, but a giant in red stood among them, his bolter ready, shouting.

  ‘Stand firm, servants of Terra!’

  Their panic quelled, they held. A storm of tracer bullets ripped around the vehicle, puncturing it many times. Half its thrusters went out, and it tilted over, hurtling off into the wastes beyond the third defence line.

  It was only the first.

  A drop pod assault was an intentionally terrifying spectacle. The pods fell so fast they seemed to be upon the verge of destruction, only firing their retro thrusters at the last minute to slow their descent from fatal velocity. They smashed into the ground with a force that would kill an unmodified human outright, even one lucky enough to wear power armour. The noise they made was tremendous, like containers full of scrap metal slammed into rock. Explosive bolts went off in crackling bursts, and the huge petal doors fell down with metallic booms. There were hundreds of them, suddenly, crowding the sky, jets roaring, some exploding. The fury of the wall guns was cutting over the third line, streaks of bullets and las light almost close enough to touch, and all the roaring added to the havoc.

  More soft thumps overhead. More gas floated down. Different colours, copper-oxide greens and heavy yellows, powder reds and blues. Electromag munitions blew, filling the fog with crackling energy that earthed on the ceramite of the Space Marines in crawling displays of lightning.

  ‘Stand firm!’ roared the Space Marines, their deep voices pushed into inhumanity by the harshening of helmet voxes. ‘Stand firm!’ they shouted, and no one dared run.

  Katsuhiro had only an impression of the warriors disembarking from their pods before the thickening gas hid them all. Again so much transpired in so short a space of time, seconds maybe, but fearful years crawled by.

  He saw nothing in the murk, but the Space Marines’ auto-senses penetrated it easily, and they called out once again.

  ‘They come! Ready weapons! For the Emperor!’

  The Space Marines brought up their bolters to their shoulders and opened fire.

  There were perhaps two dozen Blood Angels on that section of the rampart, nothing compared to the massed thousands who had fought on alien worlds the length and breadth of the galaxy, and yet the report of their bolters firing even in such thin numbers struck Katsuhiro with terror. They barked like hellhounds out of ancient myth, each round the equal of another age’s cannon shot.

  Bastion 16’s guns raked past the rampart’s front. Katsuhiro saw large shapes collapse. The wall guns still fired over their heads at the drop pods. So much noise.

  The first of the enemy legionaries came out of the gas in a line, their own bolters firing.

  A human voice bellowed along the rampart. ‘Troopers of the Kushtun Naganda! Present arms!’

  Two men down from Katsuhiro a soldier was hit in the shoulder by a bolt-round. When the mass-reactive detonated, the man’s torso from his right shoulder to his hip ceased to be. A mist of blood joined the fog. The end of his left arm was blown clear; the right arm and the head, connected by shredded bridges of tissue, collapsed inwards.

  ‘Ready!’ the human officer bellowed.

  Katsuhiro rested his gun on the rampart’s lip. Though the men were sheltered by the fortification, in most cases only their heads exposed, they were still being hit, still dying. The Blood Angels knelt, but they were so big their chests protruded over the defence line. Bolt-rounds blew on their armour, taking out chunks of metallo-ceramic from the plates. The enemy were targeting them in favour of the lesser men. Incredibly, so it seemed to Katsuhiro, one of the crimson angels fell, his chest a bloody ruin.

  ‘Aim!’ the officer roared.

  Katsuhiro did his best to ignore the carnage among his fellow defenders. He’d played his part in repelling six assaults upon the defence line; he’d been bombed; he was ill, hungry, cold and exhausted. But he had not yet faced Traitor legionaries.

  He struggled to draw a bead on the warriors coming to kill him. Just aiming at them seemed profane, somehow, a final inversion of how things were meant to be.

  Then they came from the fog, and terror showed a new face.

  They wore green-and-white armour adorned with images of death. Where the Blood Angels were crimson and glorious, these beings were debased, though they wore the same wargear and had been created the same way. Their battleplate was filthy, and streaked with dirt and rust. From their vision and breathing slits oily fluids ­dribbled. Black smoke poured from the exhaust vents on their power plants. They shuffled forwards without the Blood Angels’ grace, while preceding them was a stench of sickness, the collective illness of a hospice ward in time of plague distilled. They were dead men walking, and yet they would not fall.

  Autocannon rounds, bolts, lascannon shots and explosive shells fell among them. Armour shattered on their bodies. But if they dropped, they climbed back up. Katsuhiro saw one riddled with dozens of hits from the loyal Space Marines. Only when a bolt punched through his helm and detonated in his skull did the filthy giant collapse to his knees and pitch forwards into the mud.

  Katsuhiro drew a bead on a warrior advancing without his helmet. He was getting close, close enough to see wild, lidless eyes in a face as drawn as a skull and a black-lipped mouth forever set in death’s humourless grin.

  ‘Fire!’ the officer ordered.

  Katsuhiro squeezed the trigger. Hundreds of las-beams flickered through the fog. His own shot scored clean black through the slime weeping from the monster’s armour plates. But the guns of the mortals were of little use against legionary battleplate. Lucky shots to eyes and softseal joints might do some harm, but such wounds were nothing to the corrupted legionaries.

  A battle cry went up behind the advancing traitors, and foes more suited to Katsuhiro’s gun emerged.

  Through the gas, the lost and the damned charged the line again.

  Jaghatai Khan’s ordu were nearing the wall when the gas shells choked the sky. Dirty smoke rushed out, so thick his jetbike engines coughed when the intakes sucked it in. Guns boomed on both sides. He raced between the tracks of death, his auspex picking out the features of the ground in pulses of lurid green. The Khan was blessed with the best eyesight that could be engineered into a human being, and marvellous wargear to enhance it, but in that murk he was half-blind. Drop pods screamed past him, blasting shafts into the gas that closed quickly.

  He was close to home when a haywire shell, cast dow
n from orbit to blind the Palace’s machine eyes, exploded right by his jetbike. A pulse of electromagnetism so violent it made his armour scream shut down his engines.

  Like a javelin cast by the thunder gods of Chogoris, Jaghatai Khan’s jetbike plunged down. Its golden prow ploughed poison mist, then earth.

  The Khan leapt free at the point of impact. He rolled twice, using the momentum of the fall to launch himself back to his feet, where he skidded to a halt, tulwar poised to strike.

  He stood ready, every sense alert in the muffled battle zone. His warriors sped overhead. Guns coughed gently. Interference crackled in his helm, his communications useless in the electromagnetic bombardment.

  Then they came for him.

  The Great Angel watched the gases of the Death Guard envelop the defence lines, retreat momentarily under the blast of drop pod rocket motors, then surge back in, engulfing the top of Bastion 16 and banking high against the Palace walls. Throughout he kept his eyes forwards, following his brother’s progress. He watched the haywire shells crackle, and saw the Khan plunge into the gas banks as more drop pods screamed down from on high.

  ‘There,’ he said. He pointed with the Spear of Telesto into the gas. ‘The moment is at hand. Our foe blinds our communications, but you must find me. My brother, my brother! To the aid of my brother!’ he shouted.

  Without waiting for confirmation from his men, Sanguinius spread his wings and threw himself from the top of Bastion 16 into the deadly fog.

  Khan of Khans

  Courage’s reward

  Brothers at war

  Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus

  The Khan was alone and the enemy saw immediately what a prize was within their grasp. Hundreds of Mortarion’s sons closed in from the fog, boltguns blazing. His armour sparked with impacts; for the moment it withstood the assault, but even his panoply was not immune to concentrated fire. The Warhawk lived by one rule of war above all others, one learned the moment his adopted family were slaughtered by the Kurayeds, and borne out in his war against the Palatine on Chogoris.

  Attack was the strongest form of defence.

  The Khan fought with silent fury, charging into the ranks of the Death Guard with his tulwar spinning in a blurring figure of eight. He crashed into them without slowing, his sword cutting them down. Ceramite was atomised by the blade’s disruption field. Viscera spilled onto the earth. Polluted blood showered him.

  Through his armour filters he smelled the corruption upon Mortarion’s sons. Theirs was sickness of flesh and soul. They fought slowly, without the finesse of other Legions, but the doggedness they were known for had been intensified by their fall into darkness, and no matter how many he killed they pressed at him without cease.

  In the thick of them he was safe from the firestorm they unleashed; hand-to-hand combat was on his terms, not theirs. The Death Guard favoured disciplined lines and overwhelming close-range fire to bring down their enemies, taking whatever they received in return with grim stoicism. The Khan refused them their preference, leaping among them, barging down ranks before they formed. He fought unpredictably, throwing off the offensive of his foes, who rightly guessed he wished to regain the Palace. Though he rushed them and pushed them back, or cut diagonally through their formation, always the pattern of his movements took him closer to the defences; if he was forced to take fifty steps away from the walls to throw them into disarray, he would take fifty-one back.

  His fury would have inspired a thousand bards had any been able to see it. The fogs made his fight a lonely struggle. Hidden from all knowledge he faced the Death Guard alone, his vox and locator beacon jammed by haywire ordnance. The enemy died by the dozen, for not one was the match of a primarch. But though he fought like a god of old, he was but one being against an army, and not even the sons of the Emperor were tireless or supplied with infinite battle fortune.

  The first cut to break through his armour came after his fortieth kill. A son of Mortarion lunged at the back of his knee while he was engaging four to the front. The weapon he sought to slay a primarch with was a simple combat knife, but perseverance pushed it through the armoured ribbing of the joint seal. The Khan felt the blow as an angry, hot sting, and the attacker paid for the injury with his life. The Khan smashed backwards with his tulwar’s pommel, his Emperor-given strength caving in ceramite perished by rot and the greening head beneath. He bellowed in anger, slashing across at transhuman chest height to drive back the assailants to his front. Three of them died in a storm of disruption lightning, their innards laid open to the chemical fog. A fourth lost his left arm, a fifth took a blow to the head that spun him around and knocked him down. The Khan would have finished him, but he was reaching instead for his damaged left knee, trying to pull out the knife lodged in his suit. At the first attempt his fingers slipped off a blood-slicked hilt made for hands smaller than his. His second attempt was foiled by a renewed attack.

  The knife penetrated seven centimetres into his flesh, no more, interfering minimally with the bones of his joint. He had suffered far worse from deadlier weapons and fought on. Trusting to his engineered physiology to blunt the pain, he pressed forwards, but as he did so, he felt the strength running from his body along with his unstaunched blood.

  Another Death Guard died, then another. Explosives were raining down on him now from the enemy side, seeking him out, as the XIV Legion shelled their own troops in their lust to slay a primarch. The Khan wondered if Mortarion saw his battle there, and grimly ordered his death whatever the cost to his sons. There was a soulless pragmatism to the act typical of the Lord of Death.

  The fog swirled with the rain of fire, lifting to reveal a horde of warriors in dirty white and green. A hotness spread from the piercing knife, infecting his blood with a fever. Incredulous, the Khan fought still, but the touch of worry grazed his heart. Never in all of his days had he been ill, but he instinctively recognised disease in him. He was human, after all, on some distant level. His bones ached like ice, and his flesh blazed like the forge. Sweat dripped from his brow. He looked around at his brother’s corrupted sons, and wondered what awful pact had been agreed to make them so, and give them the power to sicken a primarch.

  ‘Mortarion! What have you done?’ he shouted.

  There was no answer.

  His body warred with the infection of the knife. Wellbeing came and went as the knife’s poisons overcame each trick his engineered physiology deployed. He scrabbled for the knife again as fought, his great tulwar burning through the air to obliterate yet more of the traitors, but he could not take enough time to pull the knife free. It was so firmly embedded, and too delicate for his fingers to easily pluck out.

  A surge of bile rose in his throat. His limbs shook. He was slowing. The enemy were gathering closer, like the pack hunters of ancient Earth’s steppes, closing in on the great beasts of those times.

  His next blow was weak enough to be turned aside. Arms clad in algae-green gauntlets grappled with his forearm. With a bellow of anger he wrenched himself free, and stood for a moment unmolested, before they surged forwards, hacking and stabbing with more diseased weapons, and dragged him down.

  The Khan of Khans ends his days, he thought, not upon the sea of grass in one final, glorious charge, but dragged down and butchered in the mud.

  They wrestled with him, their filthy knives dragging grooves into his ceramite. They tried to get at the joints in his arms, groin, legs and neck, crawling on him like vermin. He threw them off, once, twice, but the third time was an exhausted heave. His body burned with disease, and his strength left him.

  A creature of unclean gods – they were no longer the Emperor’s work – brought forwards a huge, rusted axe for the executioner’s stroke.

  ‘I am Jaghatai Khan!’ he shouted, the passion of his words driving them back. ‘I am Jaghatai Khan, loyal son of the Emperor, and I have ridden well.’

 
The axe swung up to its apex, and hung poised on the cusp of descent. It never fell. The legionary bearing it fell backwards, his headless corpse pulled over by the weight of his weapon.

  Jetbikes cut through the gas, and the air was filled with the sound of engines and Chogorian voices.

  ‘The Khan! The Khan! To the Khan!’

  A warrior of the ordu leapt from his steed, the speed of his fall turning him into living ordnance that ploughed through the grimy ranks of Mortarion’s brood. The warrior was brought to an end as he attempted to rise, hacked apart by a flurry of rusted, dull blades, but he had done his work; his genefather was free.

  The Khan erupted from the pile of Death Guard, his tulwar flaring again with the lightning of its energy field. This time, he firmly grasped the knife hilt sticking from his leg. This time, he wrenched it free.

  The source of contagion removed, his body redoubled its efforts to purge the sickness. The disease fought with a traitor’s hate to undo his cellular biology, but the light of ancient knowledge shone from every curl of the Khan’s genecode. Defeat was inevitable.

  Still weak, still shivering, the Khan went back on the offensive.

  ‘My ordu! My ordu! To me! To me! Chogoris calls! Ride to me!’

  Flights of jetbikes streaked overhead, twin boltguns tearing into the foe. Putrid organs ruptured in rusting armour, and they fell. Land Speeders banked around, vaporising the Death Guard with their meltaguns, and hammering them to pieces with heavy bolter fire.

  Now the sons of Mortarion turned their attentions outwards. Away from the Khan, they formed their lines and opened up, weight of fire accomplishing what aim could not. Jetbikes were shot from the sky to gouge tracks of flame and blood into the horde. Warriors punched from the saddles were pinned down and slain.

  The Khan abandoned his dancing feints and misdirection, pushing instead directly for the wall.

  The fog parted.

  Between him and the Palace, a company of Death Guard formed three lines, all presenting bolters. Some fell to bolt or shell fire from the wall, but their ranks closed up as each warrior died. Behind them seethed Horus’ damned mortal followers in uncountable number, most half-dead from the gas already, but driven on by hate.