by Guy Haley
‘Forward!’ screamed Felix again. He and his lead phalanx hit the river’s edge. The filth he was wading through rapidly rose up to his armpits. ‘Forward!’
The motive systems of his Aggressor armour pushed him on against the suck of mud. His part of the advance was driving into the worst of it, and the going became hard. It seemed Espandor itself wished to keep him captive and prevent his victory.
‘Forward!’ he cried again.
His voice became a growl matching the protests of his armour as he struggled against the drag of the mud. He went over the edge of the river bank proper, hidden by near two metres depth of liquid soil, and the mud suddenly deepened to his neck. Felix half swam forwards. A dead man bobbed to the surface with a sucking belch, his rotting head lolling on his neck. There were many dead there, decaying into the mud sea, their flesh becoming part of it. All were mortal human soldiery. The diseases the enemy spread hit baseline humans hard.
Felix found himself struggling through a reef of bones; liquefied flesh clung to his armour. He sealed his breathing grille against the stench and kept his eyes forward. Espandoria Tertio had been occupied by the enemy for months. Liberating it would repay these dead souls for their sacrifice in protecting it.
Keep your eyes forward. Look at what is to come, he told himself. The past is dead, the present nearly so. Only in the future is there life.
The unknown awaited them. Orbital pict-capture of Espandoria Tertio had been impossible through the thick clouds of flies that masked the city in all weathers. Other mechanical auguries met with the same lack of success. Psychic probing yielded only maddening visions for those psykers brave enough to try. Not even Lord Tigurius or Codicier Maxim had had any success. Mortarion’s clock would have to be found on foot.
More than a few senior Space Marines had opined that the population was long dead, and that the city should be levelled from the void. Guilliman had met with them all, and told them they were wrong. He had commanded a ground assault to clear the enemy away. He had given a speech condemning any man who would level an Imperial city while its citizens might be alive. Privately, he had confessed to Felix that the others could well be right. But the city must be taken, for they must be assured that Mortarion’s warp clock was destroyed.
Felix was not sure which factor was the most important to the primarch. Mortarion could withdraw his device anyway if the battle went against him. He was part daemon, so they said, and no longer bound by the universal laws. Guilliman had pulled medicae teams from across the sector to treat any of the city’s population who might have survived. The truth was there was little to choose between either as justifications for the battle. They were worthy aims. Guilliman wished to fulfil both. That was what anyone would have expected from the primarch.
At that moment, Guilliman awaited in orbit aboard the Macragge’s Honour, directing the operation and trusting to his ground troops to locate Mortarion’s device and broadcast a teleport locus to him.
What intrigued Felix was how the primarch explained his actions. Whichever he said was most important to him depended on who he was speaking to. In this way, the primarch directed the energies of his followers according to their own prejudices without actually lying to them. There were almost certainly other factors he kept to himself. This level of layered communication astounded Felix. Though he understood it well enough, he felt he was seeing something that had been in front of his nose for years. Guilliman often spoke of the Adeptus Astartes’ capacity for peaceful as well as martial endeavour. Felix thought he overestimated their capabilities. Grappling with the concepts of administration made him feel apish in mind, as if his brain were not truly made for it, even though the primarch assured him he was talented in that direction.
Maybe it was a matter of training. He had spent thousands of years preparing for war, and only five practising statesmanship. If the primarch said so, then it must be true. Even so, Felix had so much to learn. He was bewildered by the facility with which the primarch got people to do what he needed them to do almost without effort. If he could emulate only a tenth of what Guilliman did, then he could count himself worthy of being a tetrarch.
Felix dearly wanted to be the one to find the fallen primarch’s machine, and help deliver it to the Avenging Son. Destroying the Ardium clock had been child’s play compared to tracking this one down. Stopping its infernal workings would be an achievement he could understand. Then he might feel worthy of the honour bestowed upon him.
The assault was faltering. All across the front the Space Marines were slowing, caught by the sticky embrace of the ground. They had begun their run from the Imperial trench line gleaming, all their colours bright and clean. Now they were caked in filth, a uniform grey-brown. The mud was an unspeakable slurry, as much corpse flesh as soil and water. It came up to Felix’s breathing grille. His armour sealed itself against the mess. A chime warned him that his thermal vents were closed, drawing his attention to a pair of bars among a miniaturised display of many indicators. The relevant measure magnified itself, blinking urgently. Slowly but surely, the temperature rose. His reactor pack became noticeably warm. All his indicators for the battleplate’s fibre-bundle stressing were creeping out of their green segments into amber.
When the charge was mired in the river, the Death Guard opened fire upon the Space Marines. They had no choice but to endure it. Guilliman had sent the Space Marines forwards because mortal men could not breach the sea of mud. Now they must trust to their armour.
The battle cries and war hymns of the assembled brothers became grunts of effort. Bolt-rounds slapped into the thick morass. Only when the bolts reached deep into the mud did their mass fuses trip. The morass blunted their power, and the muted shock waves of their explosions quivered the mud. Huge shells lobbed by the Death Guard’s siege tanks fell, their watery explosions welling up bubbles and decayed body parts from the riverbed.
Across a battlefront almost ten kilometres long and in the face of heavy fire, five and a half thousand Space Marines struggled on.
In answer to the firing of the Death Guard, a suppressive bombardment set up from behind Imperial lines. Whirlwind rockets shrieked, heaving up domes of soil from the Plague Marines’ trench line. The enemy’s fire cut out temporarily from one quarter or another, but the trench systems snaked back far towards Espandoria Tertio, and the enemy were quick in bringing up their reserves.
The ground was a sucking sea. The sky was a messy exchange of heavy fire. Warriors died, obliterated by direct hits. A Space Marine, his livery obscured, sank below the surface and came bursting out again a score of metres away. Felix’s footing became unsure as currents tugged at his legs. The flow rapidly became irresistible and dragged the assault out of line. Felix’s high-level tactical datascreeds showed his formation becoming hopelessly dispersed.
‘Press on!’ he said. ‘Converge on my position when you can!’
To his left, Malcades forged through the currents unimpeded. He was singled out by the Death Guard, and a blaze of anti-tank fire came his way. Shells deflected from his sloping glacis and lascannons burned molten holes in his armour, but he could not be stopped.
There was no logic to the river flow; it looped back and tugged hard in unnatural eddies, spinning men about and dragging them under. The Space Marines pressed on against the river’s hindrance, foot by torturous foot, their squads mingling and separating, but always going forwards.
Felix approached the shore. Mounded banks of earth fronted the river. Filth-encrusted helmets stuck up from behind the enemy’s firing positions, many bearing single spikes. A plasma stream scorched the mud ten metres to his right, bringing up a wall of steam. A second shot decapitated the Primaris Intercessor slogging along nearest Felix: Brother Cleus, a member of the Second Company of the Ultramarines. His colours were obscured. Drab brown briefly become arterial red, and he sank from sight into the filth, his gene-seed lost.
Felix ra
ised his foot, put it down and felt nothing beneath. He lost his footing and fell with slow inevitability. The mud closed completely over his eye-lenses. It pressed against him in cold embrace. Not even during his many immersions in stasis had Felix felt such all-consuming claustrophobia. Muted explosions throbbed the liquid earth. A nearby detonation sent him staggering to the side; the stabilisation nozzles on his backpack were closed, the internal gyros of his boots confused by the delayed action of his fall. He stumbled, drifted. Heat alarms screamed in his ears. His position moved across his cartograph, until with a muffled metallic impact he connected with the leg of the mighty Malcades. The collision arrested his progress, and he found solid ground beneath his feet again. He was still submerged in the filth, and was forced to rely on his suit telemetry so he did not get turned about and lost. Using Malcades as a marker, he headed for the shore.
The riverbed rose under him. He felt the grind of a shingle bank lost in the mud beneath his boots. He forced his way out, his backpack emerging first, then his head, then the domes of his pauldrons. He strode forwards the last ten metres towards the trench line, the way becoming easier with every step, though he needed to use his auto-senses to see while gritty filth ran from his eye-lenses. The enemy homed in on him quickly, and let fire. Dozens of bolts sped at him. Most exploded on the protective energy field generated by his iron halo. Aggressor armour had been designed with boltguns in mind and the thick battleplate protected him from the worst of the bolts that got through. His heat vents opened, squirting mud. Air roared from them, and the temperature gauges shrank back to their normal size. Other warnings took their place as his energy field and suit were battered.
‘Forward!’ he roared again. A wailing machine bellow announced Malcades’ emergence from the mud. The Dreadnought came out of the river streaming filth from every plane of its armour, its rotary cannon already spinning up to fire.
Without waiting to see if any others were near him, Felix rushed at the enemy line. Bolts crashed against his energy shield. Nine strides – that was the distance. In the second that it took him to cover the ground, he activated the energy fields around his power sword and boltstorm gauntlet. They crackled spectacularly, the disrupters instantly baking the mud and sending it cascading from his weapons as beads of dirty glass.
‘For Ultramar!’ he roared. Selecting a target, he levelled the gun built into the back of his boltstorm gauntlet and opened fire. He drove the enemy back from the lip of the trench with his attack, bolt-rounds blasting divots of soil from the lip and whining off the corroded pauldrons of the enemy. Other guns joined his, in ones and twos and then in hundreds.
‘For Guilliman! For Ultramar! For the Emperor!’ the Space Marines roared.
Free of the tainted river, they ran into the fray. Thousands of guns replied to their battle cry, felling dozens of them in a firestorm of exploding bolt-rounds. The flower of Ultramar were riddled with shot and blasted apart. The first rank fell, then the second, but Malcades strode among the warriors of many Chapters and opened fire. His great cannon blasted through the trench lips, hurling the Death Guard into rotten chunks. The Space Marines surged forwards under the cover of his fire, leaping over the trench line and into the foe with the dull crash of power armour slamming into power armour.
As soon as the first lines of loyalists were into the trenches, the Death Guard’s fire discipline was interrupted, allowing hundreds more Space Marines to pour into the siege works unharmed.
Their disposition was in chaos. Felix’s ad hoc company was scattered across two hundred metres of earthworks. There was not a complete squad in that section. Without their brethren to work alongside or their sergeants to guide them, the Space Marine attack became a war of duellists, individual warriors picking their targets on a whim.
There was no time to regather his forces, so Felix fought alone. He crashed down onto a pair of hulking Plague Marines and was swallowed in the fierce clouds of flies that surrounded them. The insects rattled off his armour, obscuring his vision, but he saw enough of the enemy’s vileness. They were not so tall as him, being of the older gene-stock, but in every other way they were more massive. Monstrous things, bloated beyond the capacity of the human organism to sustain, somehow they remained alive. Their bodies bore many other marks of Chaos in the form of hideous mutations. One had a slobbering insect’s head in place of a human face; the other, tentacles for fingers. Felix drove the fly-faced traitor from the wall with a volley of bolt-rounds. Using the momentum of his fall, he punched the abomination in the face. Felix’s gauntleted fist flared. The traitor’s mutated head exploded into scraps that were snatched mid-flight by its attendant insects. The corpse fell down to twitch in the mud.
Its companion was hardier, fully armoured, though his plate was rotted through in places, and punctured with the thick tubes of phage-harvesters through which the ubiquitous flies crawled like bees in a hive. The traitor brought his plasma gun up to fire, the charging chamber blazing bright green as his writhing, vermicular fingers wrapped themselves around its trigger. Felix launched himself forwards, the superior systems of his Aggressor armour making him preternaturally nimble. He slammed into the hulking traitor, barely rocking him, but got in close enough to punch down and shatter the containment chamber of the gun. Plasma gases burst outwards. The resulting explosion sent them both reeling backwards.
‘One of the Emperor’s pretty new sons!’ the traitor gurgled. The words were only just comprehensible. He cast down his broken weapon and pulled out a filthy knife. ‘Oh, what rewards would be mine if I could turn you to the primordial truth!’
Felix attacked immediately, swinging his power sword down in a thrumming arc. He pivoted as he did so, putting all his considerable weight and the power of his armour into the attack.
The Plague Marine laughed. The heretic’s size belied his speed, and he deflected Felix’s sword with his blade. The shock to Felix’s arm was immense. The weapon was small, a combat knife of a type carried by Space Marines since the day the Emperor first set them loose on the galaxy. It was corroded, rusted right through near the hilt. It should have shattered. The power of the impact alone should have sent the Plague Marine staggering back. That was Felix’s intention: to come in close, to unbalance and finish the traitor. Somehow, his enemy remained upright, his weapon whole. Unclean power was in the knife and its wielder. Felix’s power sword was flung back, a fresh nick in its blade. From this mar, a tracery of rust and blackness spidered across the metal. The Plague Marine stood firm as old rock.
‘I have been fighting the long war for ten thousand years and more, little soldier,’ said the Plague Marine. ‘It will take more than a reckless blow like that to fell me.’
The traitor struck. Felix raised his gauntlet, pumping shots into the Plague Marine’s torso. Several of the bolts penetrated the crumbling battleplate and exploded in the traitor’s swollen chest, but though he coughed and gurgled he did not fall.
The Plague Marine slammed into Felix, and both of them fell backwards. A rusty hand closed about the tetrarch’s throat. The plague knife descended, the dark power infused in it tingling Felix’s skin as it pierced the energy field of his iron halo and rushed at his face. With his forearm, Felix smashed the blade aside, and drove the quillion of his power sword through the Plague Marine’s left eye-lens. The traitor reared back. Felix followed up with a blow from his fist. The disruption field shattered the traitor’s chest-plate, and Felix’s hand punched deep into his chest. Stinking matter spattered all over him. The traitor hung dead on his gauntlet, but Felix let fire with the built-in bolter to be sure, blasting out the traitor’s back and causing his smoking power unit to explode with a crackle of green electricity.
For a second, Felix’s eyes and auto-senses were blinded by the insects as they attacked him, seemingly raised to a fury by the Plague Marines’ deaths, but they fell twitching shortly after, suddenly expiring en masse.
Heavy bolter fire ban
ged out behind him, very close. Felix spun around, ready to fight again, only to see a mud-caked squad of six Genesis Chapter Centurions covering his back. Their guns ceased fire. Four Plague Marines were slipping to the ground, multiple holes in their bodies weeping fluid of unhealthy hue. A meltagun fell into the thick muck in the trench from the hands of the lead traitor.
The sergeant of the Centurion squad saluted Felix, raising his massive powered fist and the underslung heavy weapon to his forehead.
‘You have my thanks,’ said Felix. ‘If you had not intervened, my life would be over.’
‘We are all brothers under our colours, lord tetrarch’ said the sergeant. ‘Every one of us is a son of the primarch. I would brave the jaws of the warp to secure your life, my lord. In your office, the great days are born again. We stand united against the old enemy.’
Felix quickly scanned the scene. Imperial Space Marines were coming over the edge of the trench all along its length. The Land Speeders had completed their mission further behind enemy lines and had turned back to strafe the trenches. His view was restricted; Felix could see no further than the nearest bunker. For the first time since he had reached the trench, he paid attention to his tactical displays and called up a cartograph. Tactical data was being broadcast without interference to the battlegroup. Felix scanned an overlay of the trench system. Small knots of Plague Marines were holding out nearby.
‘Where is your captain?’ asked Felix.
‘We cannot reach him,’ said the sergeant. ‘We became separated from our company in the advance. Tracking their locator beacons in this environment is proving hard.’
‘Exload your identities to me.’
The sergeant did so.
‘You are of the Fifth Company?’