Dawn Of War II

by Chris Roberson

  The youths exchanged uneasy glances, as Aramus turned to indicate Sergeant Cyrus, who stood behind him.

  'You will serve as a reserve squad, under the direct command of Chaplain Palmarius. Ideally your purpose will be purely defensive, but there is every possibility you may be called upon to come into close combat with the enemy.'

  Cyrus scowled, but remained silent.

  'The dangers that you face will be legion,' Aramus went on, 'there is no point in hiding it. But know this! Any that survive the coming days will have proven themselves more than worthy to join the Blood Ravens, and should you survive to return to the fleet, you will be welcomed as initiates to the Chapter with open arms.'

  Assuming of course, Aramus thought but did not say, that any of them did survive and return to the fleet - whether aspirants, neophytes, or Space Marines. It might be weeks before Captain Angelos's battlegroup arrived in the skies over Meridian. By the time he did, would there be anyone left alive on the ground to reinforce?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  APOTHECARY GORDIAN REGARDED the immobile, seemingly lifeless body lying atop the platform at the centre of the Apothecarion. If not for the faint rising and falling of Captain Thule's chest with his irregular, ragged breaths, it would be easy to assume that all life had fled, and that it was merely a corpse upon a slab. And even this small glimmer of life would not be possible without the aid of the tubes that snaked from Thule's bruised and bloodied nostrils to the respirator pumps operated by the medicae servitors.

  Despite Gordian's best efforts, Thule still hovered on the threshold between life and death. The antitoxin he'd developed had successfully purged the poisons that had nearly killed Thule on Calderis, but the damage done - by the toxins and by the physical injuries the captain had sustained at the talons of the tyranid - had been too severe. His implanted organs had been rendered all but inoperative by the shock of toxin and bodily trauma, and though Gordian had done everything he could to help the struggling organs repair themselves and the body itself, what little function he'd been able to recover was not sufficient. The cells released by the Larraman's Organ were so pitifully few in number that only the most minor of the captain's cuts and abrasions had begun to scar over and heal, with the majority of the wounds still gaping; and with the oolitic kidney still crippled by injury and the preomnor not operating at full capacity, infection had begun to set in, and the seeping wounds had begun to fester. The smell of putrefaction and rot pervaded the Apothecarion, stinging in Gordian's nostrils.

  With the assistance of the medicae servitors, and the various respirator tubes, blood pumps, and intravenous feeds that were connected to all points of Thule's body, Gordian knew that the captain could be kept alive indefinitely. But he also knew that, with so many of the captain's implants already shut down and more of them due to fail in short order, it would never be possible for Thule to regain full use of his body again. In fact, there was some question whether the captain could even be returned to full consciousness in his current state, with it more likely that he could continue to linger on in a perpetual dreamless fugue, hovering at the brink between wakefulness and unconsciousness just as he hovered at the threshold between life and death.

  Gordian could not help but be reminded of the words of the Apothecary's Creed, which he kept imprinted in his heart. Normally he recited the creed as he worked as a kind of litany, the familiar phrases acting as a sort of focusing agent for his thoughts, but it did not escape Gordian's notice that since he had begun work on Captain Thule after removing him from the sarcophagus in the skies above Typhon Primaris, that he had not once recited the creed, even silently in his own thoughts.

  The Apothecary said them now, aloud but in a voice so quiet it was scarcely above a whisper.

  'He that may fight, heal him.'

  Gordian ran his gaze along the captain's bruised and battered body, from the suppurating wounds to the massive contusions, bruises still raw purple, that might never grow sickly yellow and green as they healed.

  'He that may fight no more, give him peace.'

  As it was, Gordian could see no way that Captain Thule would ever be able to stand again, much less stand and fight. It was even possible that he would never regain conscious control of his broken body at all, a healthy mind trapped in a frame too badly damaged to respond.

  'He that is dead, take from him the Chapter's due.'

  Gordian glanced from the platform to the narthecium at the far side of the Apothecarion, and the reductor which lay upon it, primed and ready to use. Had he reached the stage where there was no other alternative but to give the captain the Emperor's Peace, and to take the reductor in hand?

  Turning from the platform, Gordian crossed the floor to the narthecium. It would be the work of only moments to remove the captain's gene-seed, as Gordian had done in recent hours from the fatally wounded and recently dead Blood Ravens ferried up from the planet's surface on the Thunderhawks. Gordian picked up the reductor, turning it over in his hands. By staying at Thule's side for all of these days, he'd been neglecting his other duties, he knew, and though he had been able to retrieve the gene-seed from all of the fallen on Meridian so far, he could not help but feel that he had betrayed his Creed. What if those fallen Space Marines - Voire, Zach, Isek, Skander, Marr - had not been returned to the Armageddon in time for Gordian to remove their progenoids? Was Thule's life worth the risk of still more potential Astartes that might serve the Chapter for centuries to come?

  Was it that a company captain was of more strategic value to the Chapter than the rank and file Space Marines? Or was it a kind of hubris on Gordian's part, to think that he could hold back death?

  After so many years of dispensing the Emperor's Peace and taking the Chapter's due, had Gordian finally decided to stand fast, and say, ' No, not this one. This one will live…'

  Gordian hefted the reductor, and then turned to walk back to the platform on which lay the motionless body of Captain Davian Thule.

  'While his gene-seed returns to the Chapter,' Gordian said, quoting the Apothecary's Creed, 'a Space Marine cannot die.'

  Gordian raised the reductor over Thule's chest.

  'Without death,' he recited, 'pain loses its relevance.'

  He began to lower the reductor towards the captain's bruised and bloodied skin, preparing to open Thule's chest cavity and remove the precious gene-seed.

  'Hold!' came a voice from behind, staying his hand.

  Gordian turned. Techmarine Martellus stood at the open entrance to the Apothecarion, his augmetic eyes flashing in the low light.

  'What is Captain Thule's state?' Martellus asked, stepping into the Apothecarion.

  'The captain is lost to us,' Gordian said, indicating the body on the platform. He raised the reductor in his hands for the Techmarine to see. 'I am preparing to take the Chapter's due.'

  Techmarine Martellus came to stand beside him, looking down at the captain's body. 'Perhaps,' Martellus said in a quiet voice, 'there is another option…'

  FAR BELOW THE Armageddon, on the surface of Meridian, Sergeant Avitus stood at the edge of the scar he and his Devastator squad had burned in the landscape, peering across the gulf at the massed front line of the tyranid invasion force.

  'Sergeant?' Battle-Brother Barabbas said, at Avitus's side. 'Your orders?'

  Avitus watched the teeming hordes of tyranids, only a few dozen metres away. The firebreak that the Ninth Squad had cut from north to south still smouldered with flames, hot enough even to crack the chitinous carapaces of the tyranids.

  The sergeant removed his helmet and reached up a gauntleted hand to scratch at the side of his head, where augmetic met flesh. The itch was likely psychological, he knew, but he found some comfort in the act, even so. He remembered the battle aboard the hive ship, a lifetime ago, and the norn-queen that had left his chest, neck, and jaw a red ruin, too far gone for even the Apothecaries to repair. Seeing the massed tyranids now brought back the memory of that pain as though it had been only hours b
efore, and not decades.

  'Stand fast,' Avitus finally answered. 'The firebreak will slow them, but it won't stop them. Our orders are to hold them here as long as we can, then fall back to the next firebreak.'

  Avitus, Barabbas, Gagan, and Safir had remained at the firebreak once it was completed, while Battle-Brothers Dow, Elon, and Pontius withdrew and began cutting another such trench a few dozen kilometres nearer to Zenith. The plan was for the two teams of Blood Ravens, each comprising half of the surviving members of the Ninth Squad, to leapfrog one another, always cutting a new firebreak before the previous one was overrun by the enemy, thereby slowing the tyranid advance to the west as much as possible. With the reinforcements of Captain Angelos's battlegroup still days away, if not more, every additional day that the firebreaks were able to gain the defenders, every additional hour that the tyranid advance was slowed, only served to increase the chances that some of those who now huddled in Zenith might yet survive.

  But while the burning firebreaks were serving to slow the advance of the ground-based tyranid forces, it was becoming abundantly clear that the scarred landscape was serving as no impediment to other tyranid elements.

  'Spore mine!' Battle-Brother Safir shouted, as a fragmentation spore mine came whistling overhead, launched by the powerful muscle spasms of the biovore gunbeast that hunched on the far side of the firebreak.

  The trajectory of the frag spore mine was carrying it directly at Brother Gagan, who dived to one side as the mine exploded, its iron-hard shell splintering into countless razor-sharp shards that scythed out in all directions. Those that pelted against Gagan's body did little more than scratch the ceramite of his armour, but it was not just in their keen edges that the shrapnel posed a threat - the toxins that the mine carried meant that even the tiniest of splinters from a frag spore mine could, if it entered the body, give rise to lethal infection and, eventually, sepsis. Fortunately for Gagan his power armour was proof against the shrapnel, this time at least, and he regained his footing to fire a blast from his meltagun at the biovore.

  'Incoming!' Sergeant Avitus called out to the others, swinging up the barrel of his heavy bolter.

  There were more than two dozen of the creatures, perhaps even three dozen with more following behind, bat-winged monstrosities with weapons symbiotes slung underneath, a full gargoyle brood on the wing. They resembled nothing so much as gaunts with broad, leathery wings, raking claws, and barbed tails. The advance wave of any tyranid swarm, the gargoyles were not slowed in the slightest by the flames which licked the gouge in the landscape beneath their flight.

  Avitus and the others opened fire on the gargoyles, hellfire shells and melta blasts ripping into their leathery wings and hard carapaces. But even as some of the hardest-hit gargoyles pinwheeled down out of the gunmetal grey sky, other gargoyles returned fire, spitting borer beetles and bio-plasma blasts down at the Blood Ravens. One of the gargoyles dived into a strafing run, coming so low as to lash at Barabbas with its barbed tail, but while Avitus poured hellfire shells into the air around the beast its movements were too quick and erratic for him to score more than one or two hits against the gargoyle. The mutagenic acid of the hellfire shell was already coursing through the hellbat's body, but before it fell it would still be able to cover considerable ground, firing from its bio-plasma symbiote as it went.

  Some half-dozen hellbats rained down to earth, felled by the weapons-fire of Avitus and his Space Marines, but for every one that fell another four continued to fly, beating their wings on the wind, speeding towards the west and Zenith.

  'Stand fast!' Avitus called again, swinging his heavy bolter around and unleashing a torrent of hellfire on the tyranids beyond the firebreak. 'They'll cross, but we'll make them pay dearly for every centimetre of ground they gain.'

  KILOMETRES TO THE east of Avitus's firebreak, in the dark shadows beneath a hab whose inhabitants had long since fled, Sergeant Thaddeus and the survivors of Seventh Squad hunted the tyranid warriors who stalked the darkness in pursuit of them. The advantage of numbers was squarely on the side of the tyranids, any one of which was a match for a Space Marine but who in their dozens vastly outnumbered the six Blood Ravens of the assault squad. The Blood Ravens, in turn, were more heavily armed than the warriors, by and large, most of whom were equipped only with rending claws and flesh hook symbiotes.

  But in the close confines of the tunnels and corridors that ran through the warrens beneath the hab, the calculus of the conflict quickly took on entirely new dimensions and variables.

  With walls no more than a couple of metres apart, and ceiling not much farther from the floor, the vast numbers of tyranids could not throw themselves en masse at the Space Marines, helping to narrow the gulf between the sizes of the two forces. Unfortunately for Thaddeus and his battle-brothers, however, the walls and ceiling of the tunnels themselves offered an advantage to the tyranid, who were able to ascend the sheer walls as though they were ladders, and whose instincts made them especially adept at utilising tunnels to approach their prey. As a result, the Seventh Squad had not merely to watch the ground in either direction, watchful for an approach, but had to be aware of monsters scaling the very walls and dropping from the ceilings just above their heads.

  The presence of the two young boys, of course, only made matters that much more difficult.

  'Forgive me saying, sir,' Brother Kell began, 'but perhaps we should just leave them behind.' Kell indicated the two boys, Phaeton and Phoebus, with the point of his chainsword. Huddled together at the centre of the ring of Blood Ravens, the boys were all but silent, neither whimpering nor sobbing though the tracks of tears were traced through the ash and dirt that grimed their faces, streaks of white against the night. 'They won't last long on their own, but with them tagging along we won't last long, either, and….'

  Thaddeus held up his hand, cutting his battle-brother off. There had been a time, perhaps, when the sergeant would have responded to such a suggestion with a wry quip, or with a dismissive jibe, but those times were now long past.

  'We are not leaving them behind,' Thaddeus said, eyes on Kell but addressing the entire squad. 'The next Space Marine to suggest that we should will find himself ''cut loose'', and Emperor help him when he faces the tyranids on his own.' He narrowed his eyes and glanced around, looking at the other five Blood Ravens who stood shoulder to shoulder, facing out into the darkness. 'Is there any confusion on this count?'

  The others didn't speak, but only flashed their assent on the runes glowing on Thaddeus's visor.

  'Good,' Thaddeus said, with a final sharp glance in Kell's direction.

  The squad stood at the intersection of two snaking corridors, deep beneath the hab. For seemingly endless hours they had made their way through the darkness, picking off the warriors who scurried over floor, walls, and ceiling towards them, emerging from hiding from time to time to ensure that the tyranids did not lose the scent. Originally the retreat under the hab had been a temporary measure, seeking momentary refuge from the overwhelming numbers of tyranid warriors swarming from the east, but the warriors were tenacious, and seemed determined to seek out and destroy the Blood Ravens, at any cost. Since their mission objectives were to locate and eradicate as many of the synapse creatures of the tyranid forces as possible, and since warriors were included in that number, Thaddeus had adopted the strategy of remaining in the shadows until they had eliminated as many of the beasts as possible, before emerging into the open once more to continue their hunt.

  It was as though the hab was serving as a trap for the tyranids, with the Blood Ravens themselves as bait.

  'Sergeant?' The high, piping voice of the younger of the two boys interrupted Thaddeus's thoughts.

  'Yes, Phoebus?' The boys were older than Thaddeus had originally assumed, the elder in his twelfth year, the younger a few months shy of his tenth birthday. Poor diet - if not borderline malnutrition - was doubtless the cause of their small stature, and Thaddeus could not help but be reminded of his own re
latively small size when he'd walked out onto the killing floor of the Blood Ravens outpost-monastery in Zenith, to compete in the Blood Trials.

  'Our mother is dead, isn't she?' the boy asked.

  Thaddeus was tempted to lie, to mutter soothing untruths in an attempt to save the youths from the pain of the loss, but looking into their eyes, bright in the low light of the lamps set in the ceiling overhead, the sergeant knew that he could never tell them anything but the truth.

  'Yes,' he said, his tone gentle but final. 'Unless she fled with the others, I'm afraid there is no chance that she still lives.'

  Phoebus was quiet for a moment, his expression thoughtful. 'And these monsters killed her, didn't they?'

  Thaddeus nodded. In their hours of tracking through the darkened corridors, backtracking time and again, they had found evidence of others who, like the two boys, had remained behind when the rest of the inhabitants fled to the west. But in each case, the tyranid warriors who hunted the Blood Ravens had gotten to these isolated holdouts first, and made short work of them. It was possible, for all that Thaddeus knew, that one of the mangled and mutilated bodies they had chanced upon had been that of the boys' mother, mangled beyond all recognition. He had originally assumed that she had fled with the rest, and damned her for abandoning her children, but was forced to admit that she might well have stayed behind, searching for the boys from whom she had gotten separated, moving through darkened halls and shadowed corridors and empty galleries in a fruitless search for her family, only to find her end at the talons and claws of the Great Devourer's own offspring.

  'Yes,' Thaddeus answered, after a pause. 'I'm afraid so.'

  Phoebus nodded, remaining silent, but his older brother straightened, chin held high and eyes flashing. 'Then I will kill them all,' he said, his tone strong and determined.

  Thaddeus reached out and put a hand on the boy's shoulder. 'Leave the killing to us, for now.'