by Ben Counter
Further tales of the Space Marines
INDOMITUS
An Ultramarines novel by Gav Thorpe
• DARK IMPERIUM •
by Guy Haley
Book 1 – DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2 – PLAGUE WAR
SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR
An Emperor’s Spears novel by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
BLOOD OF IAX
An Ultramarines novel by Robbie MacNiven
• MEPHISTON •
by Darius Hinks
Book 1 – BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS
Book 2 – THE REVENANT CRUSADE
Book 3 – CITY OF LIGHT
THE LONG VIGIL
A Deathwatch anthology by various authors
KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE
An Ultramarines novel by Nick Kyme
THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL
A Blood Angels novel by Guy Haley
ASHES OF PROSPERO
A Space Wolves novel by Gav Thorpe
WAR OF SECRETS
A Dark Angels novel by Phil Kelly
OF HONOUR AND IRON
An Ultramarines novel by Ian St. Martin
APOCALYPSE
A Primaris Marines novel by Josh Reynolds
FIST OF THE IMPERIUM
An Imperial Fists novel by Andy Clark
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Order of Battle
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Part II
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part III
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘The Long Vigil’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
Order of Battle
Soul Drinkers Third Company
Command: Captain Quhya, Librarian Oxyath, Chaplain Visinah
I: Intercessor Squad Tiridates
II: Intercessor Squad Respendial
III: Intercessor Squad Phraates
IV: Intercessor Squad Utana
V: Intercessor Squad Naudar
VI: Hellblaster Squad Mihrab
VII: Hellblaster Squad Khosrau
VIII: Inceptor Squad Astyagon
IX: Inceptor Squad Karavad
X: Aggressor Squad Otanes
Imperial Navy
Assault Cruiser Suffering of Helostrix, Shipmistress Fyoda Bulgovash
Part I
PLANETFALL
Chapter One
When we prayed for deliverance, it was to an Emperor on Sacred Terra, light years removed in distance.
When the Emperor replied, it was in a voice of thunder.
– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance
Who are we?
It was a thought that came often to him. He never sought it out. It always surfaced when he was fully focused. His mind was so filled by the sleep-taught mechanics of war, of wargear rites and tactical sermons, that a part of him was free to do as it pleased, and it always came back to that question.
Who are we?
He was Brother Cyvon. He was Adeptus Astartes. A Space Marine, as the Low Gothic tongue had it. He was Primaris. So were the other battle-brothers in the hold of the drop-ship. Intercessor Squad Phraates, of which Cyvon himself was a member. Squad Tiridates. Squad Respendial. Epistolary Oxyath, the Librarian, ranking officer in the cramped drop-ship. They were all Space Marines.
They were Soul Drinkers.
But what did that mean? Who were they?
‘Five minutes, praise be,’ came the klaxon-like voice of the servitor-pilot. The upper atmosphere was buffeting the sides of the drop-ship. The lights and readouts dotting the walls of the troop compartment turned from green to red.
Twenty-five Soul Drinkers were strapped into the grav-compensators. The Imperial Navy craft had been refitted to accept their huge frames, some approaching ten feet in their full Mark X Tacticus armour, their bolt rifles – barely portable to an unaugmented human – clamped above their heads. Oxyath’s face was covered by the heavy psi-weave hood that marked him out as a psyker, while the others wore their helmets in anticipation of hard vacuum, environmental hazards or worse. Their thoughts were all the same, for they had gone through the same regimes of sleep-taught combat drills and bloody live-fire training. That way there could be no doubt or hesitation of action when the doors opened and the battle-brothers spilled into the war zone. All the same, except for Brother Cyvon’s question.
Who are we?
The retro-jets on the vehicle’s underside screamed open. The craft was slammed from side to side as it plunged through the planetary winds. Suddenly, it didn’t matter who the Soul Drinkers were.
‘Through this we shall be delivered,’ said Oxyath, his voice transmitted into every battle-brother’s vox-bead. ‘We are born into war, here we are complete. Peace is a prison and war is our release. Fight cold, fight fast.’
‘Landing, thirty seconds,’ blared the servitor voice. ‘Brace, brace. Praise be.’
Cyvon felt the grav-restraints tighten and the vehicle change its orientation, throwing its nose into the air as the rear engines fought alongside the retros to slow the descent. Metal creaked and pinged. The warning runes projected onto his retinas flashed amber as they registered the forces hammering against the drop-ship’s sides.
With a crunch of stone and steel, the transport was down. The grav-restraints snaked open and the Soul Drinkers grabbed their bolt rifles from overhead. The front ramp swung forward, admitting a swirl of dust and grit. Oxyath grabbed his staff from its sheath beside him and was the first to jump out of the opening. Through the dust, Cyvon was aware of rocky desert stretching out around a fortified structure of sheer walls. Mountains rose from a smoggy horizon in one direction, while the distance swallowed stony wastes in the other.
‘Deploy, tight, full cover,’ came Sergeant Phraates’ order through Cyvon’s vox-bead. His Intercessor squad followed the Librarian out of the transport. They were led by Phraates, whose red-painted helmet stood out against the purple of the Soul Drinkers’ armour and the grimy dark fawn of the dust.
They moved with coordination, speed and precision that men could not achieve. It had been ground into their minds over years of hypnogogic battle-rites and training-ground drills. It was a reflex action for Cyvon to follow Brother Sasan out of the ship, watching the left side as Sasan covered the right, the barrel of his bolt rifle hovering precisely in the
centre of his field of vision. He did not have to think to know that the rest of the squad was doing the same behind him, so no hidden sniper or lurking ambusher could take them by surprise.
He did not have to think, so the rest of his mind was free to think.
So this is Kepris, he thought.
The Keprian Reclamation was part of the Imperium’s grand work known as the Indomitus Crusade. Hundreds of wars, thousands of conflicts spread across the domains of man, all with the grander purpose of winning back what the Cicatrix Maledictum had taken.
The Great Rift. The catastrophic warp storm had ripped the Imperium in two. It was partly a stellar phenomenon, partly proof of vastly powerful enemies moving against humankind. In its wake, the Days of Blinding, to some the heralding of the end times, had settled over those worlds of the Imperium cut off from the authority of Terra. Some such worlds had fallen into anarchy and corruption. Others had starved or been overcome by environmental collapse. Still others had been seduced by dark powers that promised survival and prosperity in a time of disaster. They had died. They had suffered. They had turned traitor.
The Indomitus Crusade was the glorious, bloodstained process of winning back those worlds, and reknitting them into the fabric of the Imperium. Sometimes the flock returned with fanfare and gratitude, welcoming the crusade’s armies as liberators. Others had to be purged of their heretics before they could rejoin the Imperium. Yet others had to be conquered. Some, destroyed.
The Primaris Space Marines had been the reinforcements the Adeptus Astartes had needed to form the cutting edge of the crusade. They were the fruits of a grand experiment, the Ultima Founding. A concoction of the primarchs’ genetic material, preserved since the days when the Emperor still walked the galaxy, had been used to create a new breed of transhuman warriors in the laboratories of Belisarius Cawl. There were thousands of newly minted Space Marines to reinforce existing embattled Chapters, and even found entirely new ones composed solely of Primaris battle-brothers, thrown en masse into the Great Rift to win back humanity’s worlds.
Some of the Imperium’s wars burned brightly and ended swiftly. Others smouldered on for relentless years. Planets that were thought inviolably strong were lost to dark forces. Others were reclaimed from impossible odds by vast sacrifices of men and machines. Each war had many fronts, and each front could spread across multiple worlds. Battle groups and task forces drawn from every branch of the Imperium’s vast military were sent from one end of the Imperium to the other, touching every corner of mankind’s domain.
Amidst the bedlam, a planet was marked for reconquest. It was a psychological target, for it housed a collection of relics of the Imperial creed. To the Ecclesiarchy, whose preachers were lamenting the signs of the apocalypse, reclaiming such a sacred world and its treasures would provide a rare point of light in the overwhelming darkness of their sermons. With its deliverance, the confessors and cardinals could point not just to signs of the end of mankind, but to a sign of victory. That world was named Kepris.
The task of winning back Kepris fell to a newly founded Chapter of Space Marines. A Chapter bearing their name had won their laurels in the Age of Apostasy and countless campaigns before they succumbed to a fate that Imperial history had not recorded. The new Primaris were given the heraldry of that near-forgotten Chapter, and sent out to glorify their name once again.
They were the Soul Drinkers.
The clatter of impacts rang from the drop-ship’s hull as Cyvon jumped down from the ramp to the top of the structure’s outer wall.
‘Small-arms fire,’ came the servitor-pilot’s voice inside the drop-ship.
‘Thank the Throne!’ said Brother Sasan as Cyvon landed beside him. ‘Emperor save us from a cold landing zone!’
‘Cold and fast,’ voxed Librarian Oxyath. ‘We come down fighting.’
Cold and fast. It was partly a war cry, partly a principle of battle. The Soul Drinkers had inherited it from the lost Chapter that had borne their name. It meant the Soul Drinkers fought on the move, refusing to get tied down by the enemy. And while other Chapters revelled in mad butchery, like the Flesh Tearers or the Space Wolves, the Soul Drinkers remained aware and in control, despatching their enemies with a dispassionate precision. Little remained of the old Chapter’s history save that its brethren were fleet-based and specialised in boarding actions and rapid assaults. Their chosen way of war had been to attack swiftly and dissect the enemy up close in a rapid series of accurate strikes.
Kepris stank of propellant and rot. Through the gun smoke and dust, Cyvon could see that the walls surrounded a domed structure decorated with stone scrollwork and arched windows. The walls were swarming with figures aiming their guns up at the drop-ship or rushing to the turrets located at each corner, where heavier weapons were set up on mountings.
A crevasse ran along the ground either side of the dome, and its central portion had partially collapsed into the chasm, revealing the painted plaster and tarnished gilt within. Sections of the walls were in ruins. An Imperial aquila, painted on the remains of the dome, had been deliberately defaced with gunfire.
‘A shrine,’ said Cyvon.
‘Not any more, brother,’ replied Sasan. ‘Now, it’s a grave.’
Across the structure, the strike force’s other two drop-ships were swooping low, ready to make landfall. One of them was commanded by Captain Quhya, the other by First Sergeant Tiridates. Some way above them was the auxiliary lifter carrying the Soul Drinkers’ transport vehicles. Ideally the strike force would make its assault aboard Thunderhawk gunships backed up by Stormtalon ground-attack craft, but in the cauldron of the Indomitus Crusade no army had everything it needed.
This world had come into the gunsights of the Soul Drinkers Third Company. It would be enough.
The drop-ships dipped low over the shrine’s outer wall. Cyvon could make out more of the enemy now – they had no uniform and instead wore a jumble of civilian clothing and pieces of military fatigues. And there was something wrong with their faces.
‘This world has a greeting planned for us!’ said Sergeant Phraates over the squad vox. ‘Let us welcome it in turn!’
The rest of the squad – Sergeant Phraates, Arasmyn, Manuch and Pitamenes – dropped into close formation, covering every angle at bolter-point.
Cyvon’s bolt rifle was already in his hands and his finger over the trigger as his mind took in the battle he had suddenly joined. He automatically dissected angles of fire and routes through cover, the bloody mathematics of combat.
Autogun and laser fire streaked across the battlements. Shots rang off Cyvon’s armour. He swung instinctively into the cover of a bend in the battlements, snapping off two shots into the shape of an enemy looming through the dust kicked up by the drop-ships’ engines. He heard the thunk of the shells hitting the figure’s torso, and the wet crunch of the miniaturised warheads detonating inside.
The enemy wore a filthy orange boiler suit, that of a miner or factorum worker, with a bulky rebreather backpack trailing rubber hoses. It had an autogun in its hands. The bolter shells had ripped open the figure’s torso and it stumbled against the battlements, its brain not fully aware of the ruination done to its organs.
It wore a set of welder’s goggles. Beneath them, and beneath the grime covering the face, there was something very wrong.
The blood spattering the stone of the walls was the first Cyvon had shed on that world.
So this is Kepris, he thought.
A blue-white light lanced down from overhead and landed by the heavy weapons emplacements along the wall. It flared from the force weapon in Oxyath’s hands, illuminating the scene as the Soul Drinkers shot down the heretics rushing along the battlements to fight them. The Librarian swept the staff through an enemy trying to bring a heavy stubber to bear, and followed up with a thrust that impaled a second.
‘Draw in and move down to the interior!’ vox
ed Phraates. ‘By sections! Show them how the Primaris fight!’
Squad Phraates met up on the walls, by one of the stone staircases leading into the structure. The dust and smoke were thick enough to obscure the scene below but the gunfire and raised voices made it clear that the whole place was on alert, and swarming with foes.
‘Who are they?’ asked Cyvon. The nature of the enemy was as important to the outcome of a battle as Cyvon’s own. Knowing the capabilities of the foe was a weapon in its own right. The face of the enemy he had just killed rose to the surface of his mind unbidden, before he forced it down again.
‘They are dead, brother,’ replied Sasan. ‘What else matters?’
‘If your words were bullets, Sasan,’ growled Pitamenes, ‘this battle would be won.’
Cyvon followed Phraates, the sergeant distinguished by his red helmet with its white stripe of rank. Cyvon fell into formation covering the squad’s rear-right quadrant, the battle-rites drilled into them so thoroughly it was instinct that had each member taking his prescribed place. Phraates ran down the steps rapidly and the area between the walls and the shrine came into view. Several of the enemy were on the back of a flatbed vehicle with another heavy stubber mounted on it, and were firing the weapon up at the top of the far walls, where Captain Quhya’s drop-ship had disgorged its Soul Drinkers. Phraates leapt the rest of the way down to the rocky ground as the heretics began to turn, realising they were being assaulted from both sides.
Cyvon jumped, rolled to his feet, and fired as he ran. One shot blew the arm off the enemy trying to swing the stubber around. Another caught a trooper in the face as he charged at the Soul Drinkers, bayonet fixed to his lasgun. Two more rushed up behind him and Cyvon cracked the stock of his bolt rifle against the side of the first one’s head. He ducked and took the second man’s charge on his shoulder, straightening and throwing him over with his own momentum. A Space Marine was two or three heads taller than a man and the enemy fell far enough to crack his head loudly on the stone. Sasan shot the man through the throat to confirm the kill as Phraates leapt onto the vehicle and laid about him with his sword. A severed arm spun through the air, followed by a head, and the vehicle was suddenly denuded of the troopers who had crewed its gun.
