by Guy Haley
A forest surrounded Felix’s ship, but it was not the healthy place it was supposed to be. Yellow fog raced out through the hole in the dome, sucked away by the differential in air density. Flags of it streamed from between blackened branches festooned with slime. At such rare heights, Macragge’s sun shone without the impediment of clouds, but though Nurgle’s work had not yet poisoned the sky, the strength of the sunlight was stymied soon after entering the hole made by the Overlord, its beams becoming split and divided, lost amid the vapours poisoning the hive’s inner atmosphere. Winds blew briskly towards the breach, the fog’s twists forming screaming faces as it was sucked out into Ardium’s upper troposphere.
The park’s paths were overrun with rotting profusions of sickly vegetation. Trees had swollen into twisted giants, their shapes corrupted into menacing silhouettes in the murk. People had been overcome by the swift growth and incorporated into their seeping trunks, the change happening so swiftly that it appeared they had no time to flee. Their limbs were trapped in wooden prisons, and their bodies hardened by lignacious intrusion. Only their eyes, moist and wide in skin like bark, had movement, and they were wild and full of madness.
From behind these rotting bowers, the enemy – bloated Heretic Astartes in filth-brown armour, their plate cracked and dribbling polluted fluids – fired at the emerging Primaris Space Marines.
Felix took up station behind a broken statue of an ancient Ultramarine hero in the dome’s centre. Bolt fire cracked off its chipped body. A mat of slippery vines carpeted the paving and seats around, blending what had been an open, circular area into the diseased jungle of the park.
‘All squads, advance. Secure the landing zone,’ he ordered.
The Overlord opened fire with the heavy bolter turrets fixed on its lower wing surfaces. They thundered out fire, the passage of the bolts themselves enough to saw down swathes of diseased plant life. They exploded within wood made soft by overgrowth and rot, spraying sodden pulp everywhere. The dome juddered with the explosions, and Felix looked dubiously at the ground, half expecting it to shear and fail.
Outside the algae-speckled armourglass dome, another Overlord roared past, the backwash of its quintuple engines shaking the entire park. The fabric of the dome was as corrupted as the plants within it; its metals were rusted, and the armourglass, a substance that could persist for millennia in the most hostile environments, was pitted with incipient corrosion.
‘We are going to have to get out of this deathtrap immediately,’ Felix voxed to his sergeants and officers. ‘The park is close to collapse.’
His warriors voxed back their understanding.
‘Overlords Adriaticus and Scion of Ultramar, find somewhere else to land. This structure is unsound. Overlord Jove, take off – we cannot risk losing you. Stand by to extract upon my order.’
‘Affirmative,’ replied the Overlord pilot. Lascannons spitting fire still, the ship’s wing-tip engines screeched, pivoted downwards and forced it up and back through the hole it had created in the dome. The park shook, showering the strike team with flakes of rust and stringy, black leaves.
Felix did a rapid scan of the dome. There were twenty or so Death Guard in the park. Bolt-rounds were being traded back and forth between them and the Primaris Intercessors, while roaring plasma streams burst from the Hellblasters’ guns, to be answered in kind by the Death Guard’s own special weapons troopers.
The Aggressors stomped forwards, their Gravis-pattern armour protecting them in the teeth of the Death Guard’s fire. They returned fire as they advanced, rockets shrieking from their backs on needles of white heat. The loading mechanisms in the weapons clunked repetitively as they replenished their racks from the Aggressors’ internal ammo stores. Plumes of fire billowed from their flame gauntlets, drenching everything with burning promethium. The diffuse air’s oxygen content was low and the wood was wet, but the tenacity of the promethium fire was such that soon tranches of the corrupted woodland were smouldering, helped by the blast-furnace roar of escaping atmosphere, and greasy smoke joined the yellow fog in its hurried exit through the dome breach.
There was a squad of seven Plague Marines holding the exit to the park. They sheltered behind a black tree that had fallen over the path. More plants, slippery with decay, coated the block paving. Movement in the woods either side of the main path had Felix bring up his visual filters, his false-colour heat sense revealing more of the enemy attempting to encircle them. One of the Plague Marines was blasted backwards by the combined fire of an entire Intercessor squad. He remained upright as he was pummelled, his guts hanging in dripping loops from a new rent in his rotten plate. A Hellblaster spotted the traitor’s survival, and, with a quickly aimed stream of plasma, put him down for good.
‘Hellblaster squads Alpha and Beta – take out designated enemy squads on the flanks,’ said Felix, exloading the targeting data to his warriors. ‘Intercessor squads, prepare to charge. Aggressor squads, burn out the enemy blocking our egress.’
Away to the right, a ball of brilliant blue lightning burst amid the trees, shaking the failing dome with psychic thunder. Codicier Maxim held up his hand, rotating his fingers, and the thunderball turned with them. As he clenched his fist, the ball lightning collapsed with a second peal of thunder, taking with it all matter that had occupied the space, leaving a perfectly spherical hole in the diseased forest.
‘They are falling back,’ voxed Hellicus, one of his Intercessor sergeants. Unbidden, Felix’s cogitator projected the warrior’s name and vital signs across his helm display, highlighting his location on the cartograph projected into his eyes, along with status updates on his armour integrity and ammunition count. A combat-effectiveness estimate blinked a steady green at one hundred per cent capability.
‘We follow,’ said Felix. ‘Now!’ He ran out from around the statue and drew his power sword.
The Plague Marines fired as they fell back squad by squad. Their lumbering movements acquired a certain crispness as they withdrew, an echo of martial training similar to his own, and Felix had a glimpse of the warriors they had once been – not so very different to himself.
He blinked, and the semblance was gone. The Death Guard were twisted, diseased, far beyond human, deserving only of death. His power sword crackled, echoing his own hunger to strike them down.
Through rotten stands of dying trees the battle raged, the Ultramarines fighting into the teeth of the Death Guard’s withdrawal, the wood disintegrating into a vile slop when hit. The Primaris Space Marines were slowed by the terrain, while the Plague Marines did not seem to be, melting back into the mist which flowed like an endless river from deeper within the spire. The entrance to the skypark was ahead, its ornamental brickwork choked with evil-looking creepers and streaked with green tracks of moisture. Beneath the arch, dense mats of pulsating mushrooms grew, their stalks so woody that they jammed the park’s blast doors open, preventing them from closing. The last enemy squad was departing the dome, chased out by burning lines of plasma and swift bolts. They paused a moment, taking shelter behind the columns supporting the archway in order to give out one last volley while their fellows vanished into the murk of the Sighing Spire. Felix saw his chance.
‘Charge!’ he roared, and leapt through the mulchy growths of the park, running at full tilt towards the foe.
Bolts burst against his energy field and whined from his pauldrons. The bolts’ mass detectors, damaged by the contact, set off in mid-air, so that he ran through a maelstrom of fire and shrapnel. So many explosions so close to his head caused his displays to jump and his auditory suppressors to burr angrily.
The Plague Marines were unbelievably resilient. One was a burning torch, his body fat liquefying in the fire and fuelling the fire, but he stood firm, blazing away with his gun. Not one of them had weathered this fight unscathed, but still they fought on with cratered flesh and sundered armour. The plasma streams of the Hellblaster squads’ inc
inerators were the only sure way to slay these twisted Space Marines. The power of a sun vented as a glaring pike of superheated gas, the plasma shots melted through ancient ceramite and burned the Plague Marines from inside out.
A couple of the last Death Guard fell back, and they were subject to the concentrated firepower of Felix’s half company as they turned to leave. Though the enemy were quicker than they looked, they were not quick enough.
Felix charged with no thought for support. Tactical consideration was lost beneath a wave of hatred for these beings, who had damned their own species in exchange for false immortality and crumbs of power. He connected with the trailing member of the squad as they were pulling back. A few more bolts came his way, and then the Plague Marines surged in to engage him hand to hand as he caught their stragglers. Suddenly, he was surrounded by things worthy of nightmares: a warrior with the face of a toad, and another with his jaw missing and a long, scabrous tongue whipping back and forth from the hole. Their flesh was riddled with maggot burrows, and their armour corroded through to show leprous skin and open sores.
The Death Guard should not have been capable of life, but they fought well, their bodies supported by the power of Chaos, their skills honed by ten millennia of war. A hatred to mirror Felix’s own flickered in the yellowed eyes peering at him through cracked eye-lenses.
Rusted knives jabbed at Felix, their dull edges blistering the paint of his armour where they scratched. Alarms howled at the pain inflicted upon the machine’s spirit. Bolters were thrown down and bolt pistols drawn.
Felix was not destined to die there. He was a Primaris Space Marine; he was a captain. He was armed and armoured with the finest wargear in the Imperium. A potent mix of loyalty and fury suffused him, as efficacious as the adrenal elixirs pumped into his body by his implants and his battleplate. Twin hearts hammering, Felix meted out death to the deathless. His power sword spat with droplets of cooking blood as he cleaved away limbs from flabby bodies, and he riddled with bolts torsos that decayed with the vigour of the grave while still alive.
‘For Ultramar! For the primarch! For the Emperor!’ he roared as he slew, his voice blasted at full volume from his voxmitter. He became one with the moment, every piece of his enhanced mind, body and wargear working perfectly together to turn him into a killing machine. He cut and parried with marvellous efficiency, so skilfully that even the prowess of these deadly veterans was no safeguard against his fury. Roboute Guilliman might talk of the Adeptus Astartes’ potential for peacetime activity, but war was what they were made for, weapons were what they were. The Emperor’s intention for Felix was clearer to him than ever before, and he did not care. If it were his destiny to be a weapon, so be it. He would spill blood until he could fight no more.
A dim awareness of others fighting by his side impinged upon his battle lust; a staff topped with a horned skull smote the last of the Death Guard, and then there were no more foes.
‘Do you feel it?’ asked Codicier Maxim. ‘Do you feel the power in this place?’
Felix panted hard, staring at Maxim with blank eyes. A tumble of meaningless data rolled down his retinal displays. The Aurora Chapter psyker placed the head of his staff against the centre of Felix’s chest. Along its length, the crystalline matrix glowed. Felix’s mind cleared.
‘Do not fall prey to the power of the warp,’ said Maxim. ‘The warp is at work here, so thin the barrier between this place and the empyrean has become.’
‘I have nothing but hatred for these things,’ said Felix, gesturing with his power gauntlet at the fallen Plague Marines. ‘I have fought against Chaos many times.’ Even as he said the words, he questioned his aggressive tone.
‘Then you are very much in danger. Its effects can be unpredictable. Do not expect your seducer to wear the same form as your enemy. It will use your mind against you in any way it can, and only when it has you snared will the power that wishes to rule this place make its play to tempt you into its own perverse twisting of reality. More life to kill your enemies, more flesh to withstand pain, so you might kill again, and again, forever. You are a warrior, so the Dark Gods will use your belligerence, your loyalty and your honour against you, no matter which of them you are unfortunate enough to cross.’ Maxim raised his staff and let its base thump into the mess of mutant plants at his feet. At his touch, they shrivelled back, revealing the filthy paving underneath. ‘You of the Ultima Founding are mighty warriors, but you still have much to learn. A century of war is poor preparation for the foes we must face.’
Standing tall again, Felix swallowed. With a trembling thumb he upped the output of his sword’s disruptor field to burn off the last of the traitor’s baked-on gore.
‘Then our intelligence is correct,’ he said. ‘This is the right place.’
Maxim nodded curtly. ‘The strength of the device is astounding. We must destroy it. Now.’
Felix shook off his battle fugue. He had never slipped so far from himself. He was on the verge of apology, but Maxim spoke first.
‘Be careful,’ he said, and strode on. Where the Codicier walked, the stinking mist shrank back.
Felix looked down the hallway linking the skypark to the main body of the spire. It too had a transparent roof, but it was so fouled with slime he might as well have been looking down a tunnel. His wargear’s inbuilt short-range auspex probed ahead, seeking foes in the gloom, but found none.
He voxed Apothecary Undine. ‘How many casualties?’
‘Twelve injured, three seriously. The others can fight on. No dead,’ came the efficient response.
Felix switched to company-wide vox-cast. ‘Form up,’ he ordered his strike force. ‘We proceed to mission site alpha.’
They advanced at pace into the Sighing Spire, eager to leave behind the creaking skypark and enter the palace. Similar dereliction awaited them inside. The wind continued to howl upwards, the spire acting like a giant chimney, and the fog thinned away. The Sighing Spire had been a masterful display of architectural grandeur, some might say arrogance. The spire imprisoned over three hundred metres of sky. The walls were an extravagance of arches all piled one atop the other, their openings glazed with armourglass, armourglass and other more exotic translucent substances. Within the panes were artful light sculptures, windows that – when struck at a particular angle on a particular day – would project an image with the phantom veracity of a hololith.
None would ever work again. Most were broken or buckled, casting fragments of their embedded imagery in ghastly fashion. Fragments of faces emerged without warning from the dark, and the Primaris Space Marines, battle-hardened and heroic though they were, fired more than a few shots at these unexpected phantasms.
‘Spread out,’ said Felix. ‘This level, level above, level below.’ Every command he gave was short and to the point. Verbal communication was inefficient. If his orders were sufficiently complex, he supplemented his voice with swift-pulsed data exloads. The company noosphere was alive with back-and-forth data-canting, giving Felix a tactical overview superior to those available to Space Marines not of the Ultima Founding.
Walkways bounded the drop every thirty metres. Four die-straight bridges, heavy with the thick gothic decoration common to the 41st millennium, crossed over the void at the first, fourth, seventh and uppermost level. Above the highest bridge was a hollow needle, six sided, its walls pierced by shaped louvres which, in cleaner times, made the high air currents of Ardium into heavenly musics. They had been joined by ragged holes rotted right through the fabric of the hive, and the songs they now lowed were as piteous as the calls of diseased animals. The cybernetic constructs that tended them hung dead and tattered from wings nailed to the walls.
The whole hive top oscillated in the screaming winds of the upper troposphere. Such places were designed to sway with the currents of air at that altitude and with any tectonic upheaval at the hive root far, far below, but there was a pained lurching
to the spire’s movement, and stronger gusts were accompanied by the screams of dying machines and the grinding of tortured metal. The floors were out of true, sloping further with each powerful wind-born judder.
Felix watched carefully through the borrowed pict-feeds of helm lenses as his men ran to cover doors to the turrets on the outside of the spire. They deployed expertly at the top and base of the access ramps that wound up between the spread floors, every angle of fire covered with plasma incinerator and bolt rifles. Felix sometimes wished for the tactical flexibility offered by older-style Space Marine squads, desirous of the heavy weapons capability they offered. But single-armament squads streamlined tactical choice and increased battle responsiveness, and the plasma incinerators of the Hellblasters were a good medium-weight compromise.
‘No sign of the enemy, my captain,’ voxed Sergeant Tevian, of the third Intercessor squad.
The middle bridge was their way into the Palace Spire, where their intelligence placed the device of the enemy. An arch greater than all the others spread over the bridge end, forming one end of a tunnel leading out of the Sighing Spire. A statement of power, its grandiosity had become deeply ironic. Its span hung with the shreds of failing phantom artworks, and it beckoned as coldly as a reptilian maw.
Felix glanced at the Codicier and the taller Lexicanium. Reading his actions accurately, Gerrundium spoke.
‘It is that way, captain. Close by the feasting hall of the hive governor. If we are to prevail, we must go through.’
Felix attempted contact with the other two subgroups of his strike company, and was rewarded with an earful of sawing static like the buzzing of swarms of flies. He cut out his strategic vox, tasking his battleplate’s cogitator to reactivate it the minute the lieutenants leading the others made contact.
‘Over the bridge,’ he ordered. ‘Squads Tevian and Hellicus cover. Hellblaster Squad Flavian behind Aggressors. Move out.’