They had found themselves in the sickly green illumination of the reproductive chambers. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the chambers were slicked with mucus, oily and viscous to the touch, and the fouled air was filled with noxious vapours that would have killed them in a single breath had it not been for the enclosed circulatory systems of their power armour. At the centre of the chamber were the bubbling geno-organs that birthed the endless numbers of tyranids in the fleet, and lining the chamber were the cocooned officers of nightmare hordes yet to be born.
'We're getting nearer our goal,' Tarkus said to the others, who followed him in silence. 'With the offspring here, the norn-queen can't be far beyond.'
The others nodded, watching the green-hued shadows on all sides.
From the far side of the chamber came a high-pitched keening noise, followed by the appearance through a valve of another trio of shamblers, the acid of their burning spittle dripping viscously from their mandibles, the blades of their forelimbs scything menacingly.
'For the Emperor!' Tarkus yelled, brandishing his combat knife and rushing full tilt at the shamblers. 'For the Chapter! Only in death does duty end!'
ANOTHER OF THE aspirants, moving too slowly to avoid the lash whip of the carnifex's tail, was ripped in half by the barbs, his lifeblood pouring out, all but invisible against the blood-red hide of his body-glove.
'Faster, Emperor damn you!' Sergeant Aramus shouted, readying a krak grenade in one fist as Wisdom sang in the other. He'd ordered the aspirants to fall back, but the frightened youths had moved too slowly to avoid the carnifex's initial attack.
'Aramus, cover!' came the voice of Thaddeus as he threw a frag grenade at the carnifex's head. The shrapnel sleeted against the behemoth's carapace in the instant after the explosion, but it wasn't clear that it had done any damage at all.
Aramus couldn't help but remember Battle-Brother Durio facing off against the carnifex on Prosperon, what seemed a lifetime before. He hefted the krak grenade in his hand, and prayed to the Emperor to give him the courage that Durio had displayed.
'Fall back, I said!' Aramus called out, all patience lost. He knew only too well that bolter fire and las-guns and frag grenades would do little more than annoy a living war machine like the carnifex, but with a considerable amount of luck and the willingness for self-sacrifice a Space Marine with a krak grenade and good aim might well be able to bring one down. If he was but a few centimetres off in his delivery, though, he'd find himself imploded to a pulp and the carnifex completely unharmed.
There was nothing else for it. If he perished in the failed attempt to bring down the monster, then it would fall to Thaddeus to try his hand, and should Thaddeus fall one of the others would do the same, and so on, and so on, until either the carnifex fell or the Blood Ravens were wiped out, whichever came first.
He readied himself to rush forward, as soon as the last of the others were clear.
'Aramus, look skyward!' Thaddeus called, pointing with the tip of his chainsword at the heavens above.
Aramus craned his neck back, and saw a white dot flaring out of the grey sky, growing larger with each passing instant.
It was a drop-pod.
'But who…?' Aramus couldn't guess who might be aboard, with all of the Blood Ravens from the Armageddon already on Meridian. All except for Apothecary Gordian, Lexicanium Konan, and Techmarine Martellus. Had any of them been so foolish as to leave their posts, despite Aramus's orders, and employed one of the strike cruiser's one-way landing craft?
For the briefest moment, Aramus entertained the notion that it might be a drop-pod from Captain Angelos's Litany of Fury, and that the battlegroup had arrived in the Meridian system far ahead of schedule. But as the drop-pod plummeted out of the sky he could see the markings on its hull, the black raven with the teardrop of blood in its heart - it was a Fifth Company craft. So it had to be Gordian, Konan, or Martellus onboard. Unless…
As the craft thundered down to the ground, the carnifex reared back, screeching deafening defiance at the interloper, snapping its horrible talons in a martial display.
Mere moments after it had appeared in the skies overhead, the drop-pod landed with a deafening thud only a few dozen metres from Aramus's position, the Shockwave of the impact kicking up clouds of dust in all directions.
As soon as the pod had touched down, it cracked open, the five faces of its armoured exterior casing falling open like the petals of a bloom.
No Space Marines poured out, but instead a voice boomed from within.
'Blood Ravens! To arms!'
Aramus recognized the voice, and felt hope flare within his breast.
'Knowledge is power!' came the altered but still unmistakable voice of Davian Thule, as the massive Dreadnought stamped out onto the dusty ground, the sound of its massive footfalls like pealing thunder.
'Guard it well!' shouted Aramus and Thaddeus in unison, raising their weapons on high.
No longer Captain Davian Thule, he was now and forever the Thule Dreadnought, the ultimate fusion between mechanical and biological, with the body of the fallen captain held in amniotic fluids and surgically implanted into the heart of the war machine. Standing three times as tall as a man, plated in thick adamantium and armed with a staggering amount of firepower, the Dreadnought was a mighty engine of war, the perfect union of biological and mechanical, the living embodiment of the Machine-God.
'Face me!' the Thule Dreadnought bellowed, turning towards the carnifex. 'Face Thule and your doom!'
Aramus found himself smiling, to his surprise. The return of Thule to the field of battle, whether under his own power or at the heart of a Dreadnought assembly, gave him hope that they might prevail, at last. If only they could hold out until Captain Angelos arrived…
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SERGEANT ARAMUS WAS tempted to simply stand and watch the massive war machine do battle with the tyranid engine of destruction, to bask in the glory of the Emperor's might, but he knew that the arrival of the Thule Dreadnought on the field of battle gave them a momentary advantage, not an easy victory.
This was no time to act the spectator. There was still work to be done.
'Knowledge is power!' the Thule Dreadnought repeated, unleashing the fury of the twin-linked autocannons mounted on his right arm while raising the power fist that grasped at the end of his left. Mighty pistons drove the Dreadnought's legs, and he took one step after another towards the carnifex, the destroyed buildings surrounding them echoing with the thunder of his footfalls.
The carnifex lashed out with its whip-like tail, but the barbs only rebounded harmlessly off the cast-adamantium of the Dreadnought's armour plating.
'Guard it well!' the voice of Thule boomed across the ruined city streets.
The carnifex lunged forward, the wicked talons of its forelimbs scything downwards, but in a lightning-fast movement the Thule Dreadnought reached up and grabbed hold of the carnifex's right forelimb with his massive power fist, and as the carnifex's left forelimb completed its arc to collide with the Dreadnought's shoulder, the Thule Dreadnought opened fire with his autocannons at point-blank range.
As carnifex and Dreadnought grappled, Aramus tore his attention away from the contest and back to the other threats facing them. In the wake of the carnifex had followed a host of raveners and hormagaunts who were racing over the ruined cityscape towards them, all of them directed by the thoughts of a zoanthrope who hovered behind them, the synapse creature governing the movements of all the others from a rearguard position of defence.
'Thaddeus!' Aramus called to his battle-brother, as transfixed by the sight of the glorious Dreadnought as he himself had been. 'The enemy is not yet finished with us.' With the tip of Wisdom he indicated the tyranids rushing towards them from the defensive ring.
Thaddeus raised his own chainsword, the blade whirring. 'And we are not yet finished with them, either.'
'Do you note the zoanthrope, brother?' Aramus asked.
Thaddeus nodded. 'It won'
t be easy getting to it.'
'Perhaps,' Aramus answered, a slight grin tugging up the corners of his mouth behind his visor. 'But since when did you prefer anything done the easy way?'
Thaddeus chuckled, and Aramus could see his eyes smiling through the eye-slits of his visor. 'Better to die in battle than of boredom, eh, brother?'
Aramus responded by turning to meet the onrushing tide, power sword raised high. 'For the Chapter.'
'For the Emperor,' Thaddeus responded.
'For Meridian!' Aramus shouted, rushing forward, bolter kicking in his right fist as Wisdom coruscated in his left.
'For Meridian!' Thaddeus echoed, ploughing into the interlopers with hellfire and chainsword.
SERGEANT AVITUS AND the rest of the Ninth Squad manned the eastern approaches to Zenith. Reports were coming in from all points of the defensive ring that the tyranid were increasingly the intensity and frequency of their attacks at least threefold, and the defenders were now sorely pressed to prevent interlopers from clearing the fiery moat and making it into the defended territory. Sergeant Thaddeus had gone to aid Aramus against the carnifex, while the other three survivors of the Seventh Squad had hurried off to deliver the two young aspirants to safety before joining the fray. As loath as Avitus was to ask another squad for assistance, though, he was beginning to regret letting the newcomers go, as even with a Devastator squad that was five Space Marines strong he was finding it all but impossible to keep the tyranid forces at bay.
A brood of gargoyles wheeled overhead on leathery wings, the air filled with the sound of their horrible keening screeches.
'Squad, eyes up,' Avitus called out, swinging up the barrel of his heavy bolter and targeting the nearest gargoyle.
To his right, Battle-Brother Barabbas fired his melta gun at another of the hellbats, while Battle-Brother Pontius unleashed the hellfire of his heavy bolter, and on his left Brother Safir with his heavy bolter and Brother Elon with his melta picked their targets and fired.
The first barrage from the Devastators sent five of the hellbats plummeting to earth in a death-spiral, but more than a half-dozen remained, swooping down towards them with fleshborers and bio-plasma weapon-symbiotes spitting death.
Brother Safir's heavy bolter hit an empty chamber as his magazine ran dry, and the hellbat diving right towards him knocked him clear off his feet with its raking claws. As the gargoyle beat back up into the sky, though, Brother Elon spun and caught it with a blast from his melta gun, burning off one of its leathery wings entirely, leaving nothing but a charred stump. Its lone wing flapped uselessly as it plummeted back to earth, shrieking in impotent defiance.
It wasn't until the last of the gargoyles had crashed to the ground, and Safir was once more on his feet, loading a new magazine into his heavy bolter, that the squad realized that the gargoyle brood had been merely a diversion, to distract them from the beast already halfway across the fiery moat and closing fast.
It was a hive tyrant, a massive bonesword in one forelimb and a lash whip growing from the other, a venom cannon affixed to its mid-limbs. And in its wake followed its retinue of tyrant guards, ferocious living shields with no eyes of their own, blind and guided only by the psychic power of the synapse creature they protected.
Avitus could not say if this was the same tyrant who had forced them to fall back from the last firebreak, the same tyrant guards who had smashed the life from Battle-Brother Gagan, but in the end it didn't matter. If he could not have his revenge against the one tyrant, any other would suit his vengeance just as well.
'Pick your target and fire at will,' Sergeant Avitus shouted, the machine-like buzz of his augmetic vocal cords even more pronounced than usual. 'But the tyrant is mine!'
LIBRARIAN NIVEN RAISED his force staff overhead, and with a prayer on his lips unleashed the Storm of the Emperor's Wrath on the onrushing tyranids, his psychic power battering against the mindless creatures of pure appetite and instinct.
It had been too long since he had been in combat, Niven knew. He had inspired the Blood Ravens on Calderis, but even then the injuries he'd sustained on Kronus had kept him from fighting at his full strength. And the damage he'd suffered at the hands of the orks on that desert world had kept him from throwing himself into battle on Typhon Primaris against the offspring of the Great Devourer. Now, on Meridian, it seemed that he had regained his full fighting prowess, and there was nothing that would stop him from carrying out his duty.
Chaplain Palmarius was a short distance off, his crozius arcanum in his hands, leading the surviving aspirants in their blood-red bodygloves.
'Fight on!' Chaplain Palmarius shouted to the assembled aspirants, as they fired at the rippers who swarmed underfoot and the hellbats that wheeled overhead. 'The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium!'
Only four of the aspirants who had come down from the strike cruiser Armageddon remained, the other eleven having fallen to the tyranids, but they had been joined by the two young Meridian natives whom Sergeant Thaddeus had brought to Zenith in his flight from the east.
'Do not pause to mourn the fallen,' the Chaplain called out, seeing that some of the aspirants kept casting glances at their former companions, who now lay bloodied and lifeless on the rubble around them. 'No man who died in the Emperor's service died in vain.'
Librarian Niven regarded the two Meridian youths. He had scanned them on their arrival, and found them to be free from taint or mental weakness, and as Battle-Brother Kell had said in delivering them they did appear to fit the aspirant profile. Niven had worried on first seeing them that they were not long for this life, though, as after their travails in enemy-held territory the two youths had looked half-starved and ready to collapse at any moment; but after being given a small measure of water and a bite to eat they had rallied. Picking up the weapons dropped by the fallen aspirants, Phaeton with a lasgun and Phoebus taking up a combat shotgun, they were now ready to stand against the tyranid monsters.
'The wise man learns from the deaths of others,' Chaplain Palmarius called out, smiting a low-flying gargoyle with the swept wings of the Imperial eagle that surmounted his crozius arcanum. 'Profit from their mistakes and fight on!'
Librarian Niven had been among those opposed to Sergeant Aramus's plan to use the aspirants in combat, fearing that the untrained youths were not ready for such a contest, but seeing the steely determination in the faces of the six youths now, he knew that Aramus's instincts had been correct. This struggle against the Great Devourer would test their mettle as well as any Blood Trials could, and any of the proud sons of Calderis, Typhon Primaris, and Meridian who survived the defence of Zenith would be welcome additions to the pool of Chapter initiates.
A ripper dived near to Librarian Niven, and he used his psyker abilities to move supernaturally quickly, moving a metre to one side in a fraction of a second and then driving his force staff into the side of the beast, ending its foul existence.
Since he had first accompanied Captain Davian Thule into the Aurelia sub-sector on the recruiting mission, Niven had been plagued by dark impressions which crowded the edges of his awareness, plaguing his thoughts. In time, he'd identified the lurking presence as the foul emanations of a hive mind, and later still as the dark thoughts of a hive fleet itself and of the norn-queen at its heart. Now, for the first time since arriving in Aurelia, Niven felt another presence, tantalizingly familiar, tickling at the edge of his awareness.
Librarian Niven glanced skyward. With the psychic interference of so many synapse creatures in close quarters his ability to extend his awareness through the warp was impeded, but he could not escape the impression that something was coming…
SERGEANT TARKUS STALKED through the arteries of the hive ship, alone. Brother Nord had finally fallen to a trio of shamblers who had ripped him limb from limb, while Brother Horatius had been bested by a creature which resembled a lictor, but was covered in oozing mucus instead of the diamond-hard chitin of the lictor's carapace.
Tarkus was all b
ut weaponless, now. In one fist he carried his combat knife, its blade gored on the foul ichor of the inhuman monsters who defended the hive ship, and in his other he carried his final krak grenade. His bolter was holstered at his side, spent and useless, but he could not bear to part with it.
He wished that there were some way to contact Admiral Forbes - or anyone else in the Aurelia Battlegroup, for that matter - to learn how the battle progressed, in the vacuum and on distant Meridian. He longed to know whether Sergeant Aramus and the others still stood, still defied the Great Devourer while waiting for the arrival of Captain Angelos and his battlegroup. But he had been unable to raise the Sword of Hadrian on vox ever since they had boarded the hive ship, and there was little chance that he would ever do so again.
Tarkus had fought and clawed his way ever deeper into the heart of the hive ship, fighting past the birthing chambers and unborn warriors, the pools of noxious bio-agents and the wombs in which future tyranid strains were even now being spliced and assembled.
Now, at long last, having forced open the valve that ended the last artery, he found himself in a massive chamber. Its ribbed walls rose like the vault of a cathedral, meeting high overhead, and the ground beneath his feet was yielding and slick, like the soft tissue of an internal organ. At the centre of the massive chamber, nearly filling it entirely, hulked the pulsating form of the norn-queen, mother of monsters, who dwarfed the dozens upon dozens of her misbegotten offspring who attended her on all sides.
Tarkus hefted the krak grenade, and tightened his grip around the hilt of his combat knife. He knew there would be no walking away from this fight.
'Come on, then,' he sneered, striding towards the norn-queen, heedless of the danger, 'let us end this, at last.'
ON THE COMMAND deck of the Sword of Hadrian, Admiral Forbes turned as Commander Mitchels approached.
'Any word?' Forbes asked. She'd tasked one of the ship's astropaths with attempting to monitor the progress of Tarkus's strike team through the hive ship, which was difficult given the interference in the warp generated by the fleet's hive mind, but had produced some small measure of success. So far they had been able to confirm that, at least, Tarkus still lived.
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