by Dan Abnett
'Faster!' roared Henricos, knowing that the void shield arrays would now be powering up.
The gunship swooped for the aperture, blasting through at a steep pitch, scraping the edges of the hangar entrance before shuddering to a fullstop and coming to rest on a violent bloom of downthrust. The sponsonmounted heavy bolters opened up, spraying in twin arcs from the ingress, raking enemy ships locked on the deck rails and shredding any crew caught out on the apron.
Disengaging his restraint cage, Henricos slammed the ramp release. 'Out, out, out!'
They spilled from the holds, accompanied by the howl of released atmosphere and the blare of alert klaxons. Behind them, the gauze of atmospheric containment fields finally slid across the shattered hangar entrance, now too late to do anything other than trap the infiltrators within the hull.
Hibou raced ahead, making for the hangar's inner doors. The Khan had a power sword with a florid dragon carved into its crackling edge. Henricos followed him with his bolter at the ready, scanning for incoming targets.
The first opposition came from the ship's mortal crew. They reacted quickly, forming up at the intersections of the corridors leading up from the hangars and laying down concentrated fire. All of them were from a hard world and had lived lifetimes of combat, so they performed admirably.
Yet it didn't help them. The White Scars were astonishingly fast, crashing aside the opposition before it had time to get established, whooping and yelling as they laid about them with their blades. Henricos had never seen them in action as squads before, and he could admire the seamless interaction between them a warrior would sway out of the way to allow another to fire, then dart back into contact, aware the whole time of the flight of bolterrounds and the whirl of steel around him.
'The flesh is weak!' Henricos roared, watching the enemy die, listening for the wet slap of flesh splitting and the echoing rip of the massreactive shells going off. That gave him pleasure, the first he had taken since the similar slaughter on the Vorkaudar.
The Scars joined him in viciousness. They hit recklessly, aiming for pain, and their cries were edged with something more raw than he had heard before. It was a kind of frenzy, with each kill seeming to spur them deeper into it.
They were the sagyar mazan, the penitents, and they fought like it.
Henricos and Hibou led them onwards, carving twin passages towards the command bridge. The pace quickened, and they stormed through crew halls and armouries, leaving a long trail of slicked blood behind them. The decks shook as heavy impacts rocked the hull the Talon firing, stressing the void shields and keeping the enemy crews busy.
The boarding party tore up through the levels, hurling grenades into choke points, charging through them with the fleshscraps still flying. The White Scars' armour became streaked with red splatterpatterns across the ivory. Henricos's own ironblack plate barely reflected the gore, though he was as steeped in it as the rest of them.
By the time they had reached the wide assembly chamber below the bridge, the real enemy emerged, pushing past their own battling crew to get at the invaders, issuing Cthonian killchallenges from brassedged augmitters.
The Scars scattered instantly, spreading out across the chamber's marble floor and racing for the cover of the supporting columns. Bolterfire crisscrossed the open spaces, shattering rockcrete and throwing a powder haze across the hall. Henricos thudded up against a threemetrewide pillar, feeling the stone of it tremble as the massreactives exploded.
He waited two seconds, letting his cover absorb the fusillade, before charging out again keeping low, trusting his armour to take the hits. By then the Scars were moving too, flitting like gorespeckled ghosts between the columns. They danced through an oncoming storm of bolterrounds, spinning as they came within swordreach to give their blades more speed.
Henricos lumbered by comparison, coming up against the bulk of a Sons of Horus warrior in dark, seagreen plate.
Both bolters fired simultaneously Henricos was hit on the shoulder, his enemy in the chest. The impact of the Iron Hand's round caused the greater damage, throwing the traitor back by a hand's width.
Henricos pressed in fast. He fired again, cracking his enemy's faceplate, then piled in with his gauntlets, punching rapidly and hard until he heard the wet crack of a breaking spine. As the warrior fell, Henricos grabbed his power maul finally something he could relish using and pressed onwards.
By then the noise in the hall was hammering, a mix of vox roars and explosions. More Sons of Horus charged in, adding to the lattice of shellfire.
Henricos's mind suddenly shifted back to Isstvan the last time he had faced the XVI Legion in numbers. He remembered the desperate stands on the ridges at the edge of the depression, watching as waves of the enemy advanced, the bloody dust kicked up into a boiling cloud of rage.
He was hit again, a boltround smacking into his knee joint before exploding against the covering plate, and he staggered in the charge. A traitor got close to him with a chainaxe, and Henricos whipped his crackling maul around to block the challenge. They were coming in from all angles now, pushing the boarding party away from the hall's far end and driving them back towards the exposed centre.
'For Ferrus!' he bellowed, lashing out and driving the maul deep into his enemy's neck before kicking the choking adversary aside and launching himself at the next. They had to keep the momentum up, break through to the bridge before they were dragged into a drawnout melee, or the chance would be gone.
By then the Scars were fighting with an almost berserk energy, their battlechallenges more like screams. Henricos saw a Sons of Horns legionary literally torn apart by two of them, his body sliced at the armour joints by whistling bladework. The Warmaster's own were just as vicious a few metres away, an ivory battlebrother was dragged to the deck, his back broken and his helmplate smashed.
Henricos limped over to avenge the kill, but was slammed to the ground by a bolt impact, the third to hit him. He skidded over, his armour scraping against the marble. He made to rise, and only then realised what damage had been done blood was cascading down from his stomach, foaming around the ragged edges of the hole in his armour.
He spat, furious at the setback, and switched to his bolter, snapping the muzzle up to fire. But his vision blurred from pain, and he missed the target. An enemy legionary sprinted towards him, swinging a power axe around his head to generate the downforce for a killing strike.
Henricos tried to rise, to get his maul up to block the blow, but he never got the chance. A White Scars legionary smashed into the charging traitor, blocking him bodily and sending them both careering across the deck. They rolled together, hacking madly, until the White Scar managed to pin him. With a deft twist, he plunged his curved sword deep into his enemy's gullet, ripping upwards to tear out his throat. Then he was up again, falling back to Henricos's position, drawing a bolt pistol and firing out into the throng.
'Khan…' acknowledged Henricos, still struggling to rise.
Hibou crouched beside him. 'Can you fight?'
Henricos snarled, knowing the answer but unable to get the words out. He would be lucky not to bleed to death where he lay. 'The bridge… is within range…'
That, technically, was a lie. The assault had stalled, and the bodies of four White Scars lay motionless across the chamber floor. The rest were falling back towards his position, pursued by twice that number of Sons of Horus.
Hibou kept firing, trying to slow the oncoming traitors. 'I do not think so. We will end more of them yet, though.'
Henricos reloaded his bolter and took aim. As he did so, the entire chamber rocked, as if buffeted by a hull breach.
For a moment he dared to hope that the Grey Talon had broken through the void shields, though the thought did not last long the ship did not have the weaponry, and even if it had there were no more troops aboard that could have turned this battle.
'Die well, brother,' he snarled, taking aim at an advancing group of Sons of Horus and opening fire again.
He didn't expect his shots to do more than hinder their inevitable onslaught, but his shells seemed to multiply in midflight, hitting the targets in a whole volley of massreactive destruction. The advance crumpled to a halt amidst a roiling wave of explosions, sending the Sons of Horus reeling backwards.
Startled, Henricos looked around, and only then detected the acrid tang of teleport discharge. Seven leviathans in Terminator battleplate stalked out of disintegrating warpfrost spheres, clad in a mix of Gorgon and Cataphractii suits, laying down a heavy curtain of fire from twinlinked bolters and combimeltas.
Their plate was black, pitted with bare metal scratches, the edges picked out in white. He saw Medusan emblems on the pauldrons cogs, fists, skulls. They were all clans he recognised, ones he had fought alongside or been rival too, including his own Sorrgol, bearing the wrenchandcog sigil, just as he himself wore.
The White Scars reacted quicker than he did, joining the new assault, adding their speed to the advance of the Terminators. Henricos remained locked down by the shock of recognition.
We were all dead…
Hibou sprinted back into the melee, joining his brothers in the counterattack, crying out in the outlandish tongue of his home world. As Henricos struggled to regain his feet, cursing at the sluggish recovery of his flesh, a shadow fell over him. He looked up into the redeyed glare of a Legion deathmask. He might as well have been back on Medusa gazing up, stupefied, at the anonymous legionary he had thought was Ferrus Manus.
'Bion Henricos,' came the familiar voice of Shadrak Meduson, once captain of Sorrgol's Tenth Company, but now so much more. 'Ensure you do not die here. I will have need of you.'
MEDUSON HAD ARRIVED in the X Legion strike cruiser Iron Heart. The warship was many orders more powerful than either Grey Talon or the XVI Legion frigate which was named, somewhat ironically, the Inexorable Conquest so it had been able to render down the enemy ship's shields in two colossal broadsides. The Terminator bridgehead was just the start more troops were sent over in boarding rams, spilling into the narrow inner passages and clogging them with slaughter.
With such numbers, the assembly hall was quickly taken, followed by a swift and brutal assault on the bridge. The enemy, as could be expected, fought to the end, but it was Meduson who ended it, decapitating the ship's captain with a single savage swipe, mirroring the death of his genesire amidst the metallic choler of the assembled Iron Hands.
Hours later, the ship was secured. Five of the White Scars' killteam still lived, including Hibou Khan. Henricos came closer to death than he felt comfortable admitting, but the hated fleshcomponents responded to the challenge, aided by the knives of the Iron Heart's medicae teams.
By the time the last of Meduson's troops returned to the strike cruiser he was on his feet again, and was there when Meduson himself returned to the ship's council chamber. The room was hexagonal and of nightblack iron, rising up into a shaft like a foundry vent and filled with the grinding hum of engines.
'Henricos. You did as you were bid,' the warleader noted.
That was as much congratulation as he was likely to get from Meduson for staying alive. It already felt unusual, having grown used to the courtesy and deference of the Chogorians, to be plunged back into the blunt manner of his own Legion.
'It was an order,' said Henricos.
Meduson stood alongside four others two Iron Hands, a Salamander and a Raven Guard. It seemed that the hybrid army sent to Isstvan still endured, at least in scraps.
'Many clans,' said Henricos. 'Many Legions.'
'Forged into one. We are gathering in numbers again.'
Henricos could admire the sentiment. A nagging part of him thought it mistaken, but there could be no arguing with rescuers. 'Others of Sorrgol?'
'Jebez Aug lives, though I command the clan. Much has changed you will be told all these things. What of you?'
Henricos told them of the flight from Isstvan, the encounter on Prospero, and the penitents of the V. Shadrak Meduson listened intently, absorbing the data like a machine, scouring it for anything he could use.
'Then that was a ship of my Legion?' asked the Salamander, sounding genuinely interested.
'For a time,' said Henricos. Though it has been many things.'
'And the Khan remains loyal?' pressed Meduson.
'Completely. His Legion has mobilised for war. Even now he will be engaging the enemy.'
'But those you fought with they were traitors?'
Henricos paused. 'No. They were not.' He struggled to find the words. 'There was… insufficient data.'
Meduson did not look convinced. 'You vouch for them?'
It felt strange, to be defending Hibou and the rest, but now that they had fought together it was harder to maintain outright hostility. 'They are atoning.'
'So be it. If they can fight, I can use them.' Meduson looked at Henricos carefully. 'You can see what is happening here. The strands are being pulled together, winding into cords of greater strength.'
'And that is wise?'
'Why would it not be?'
Henricos glanced across the faces in the room: three of them ashen, one bonepale and another dark. 'While we hunt apart, we are hard to detect. And when we come together, we can be seen. We cannot defeat this enemy through strength
they have more of it.'
'Yet there are things we can achieve,' said Meduson. If the challenge to his strategy irritated him, he made no sign of it. 'I have marked a soul for destruction and I have bound the warriors under me to this cause. If we do no more than this, it will have satisfied honour.'
Henricos did not much like the sound of that, but knew better than to press the matter. If Meduson was motivated by vendetta than that would at least be purpose, and he himself had been working without that for too long.
'Count yourself fortunate,' Meduson said. 'You were fated for death on that ship. Now you will fight on.'
Fortunate. Of course.
'But it was not fortune that brought you,' said Henricos.
Meduson snorted a dry laugh. 'So you worked it out.'
'The sensorghost, mirroring our every move. You were watching us.'
'Aug detected you. He recognised the Sorrgol searchpattern and replicated it, mimicking a scannerartefact, something we have done many times. Consider that your luck in this if he had not counselled us to wait and to observe, we would have destroyed you as a Sons of Horus vessel.' Meduson sounded amused. 'Aug admired the way you ran the algorithm, though he was disappointed that you did not investigate the ghost.'
Henricos felt the barb. The White Scar had seen it, and he had not. 'I was in error. I will learn from it.'
'See that you do. This will be a war of deceptions, and they are as apt to it as we.'
Henricos bowed. 'So what now?'
'Our fleet has another ship. We are used to the process now purge the crew, instate our own and add the guns to our arsenal.'
'You are rebuilding the Legion, brother?'
Meduson shook his head. 'No, but we are more than scattered clans now. That is the lesson here.'
'And if there is no Tenth, I guess you are no longer captain.'
'Warleader. That is all.'
Henricos could have commented on that. He could have remarked that there had already been an idea in which many Legions were subsumed under a single commander, with a title that was not so far away from this new one. He might have noted that this had not apparently ended well and that the parallels were worth noting…
Of course he did not do this. Meduson's quiet command was evident. The suicide mission that Henricos had willingly embraced was now part of something greater. He was no longer alone amidst the warriors of other Legions, and he had the chance to do more than petty damage to those he hated with such perfect clarity.
He should have been happy. That should have doused the anger that still burned through his every vein.
'Then you will join us,' said Meduson, in a way that was more observation than command.
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'On one condition,' Henricos replied.
Meduson looked at him warily.
'Name it,' he said.
Medusa's skies were never open. There were never starlit nights just the turmoil of toxinheavy vapour banks, jostling, boiling and murmuring in the dark.
He limped from the southern gate towards the citadel's heart. All around him the forges worked, tended by ranks of silent guardians with faceplates of beaten metal. Factory spires rose from the installation's twisted entrails, each one crusted with the panoply of the machine valves, intakes and conveyors. Between them were the great shafts, plunging away into the planet's core, welling up rustred from the violence unfolding in their deep wells.
He dragged his bandaged feet through streets thick with dust, his jaw clenched tight against the pain and the hunger. The walls were far behind now and he had not seen another armoured guardian, just mortals like him in black climate suits, all consumed by the spinebreaking labour of the forges. He had been told to enter, but did not know the way. Amidst the smog, the sparkspills and the biting cold, it was hard to see more than ten metres ahead, let alone locate the path to the citadel's heart.
He knew even then that this was the test. Others must have done what he was doing left the precarious safety of the clan landengines and stumbled over the plains towards the strongholds. Maybe most of them died on the way, their bones picked clean by the icy wind. That was the kind of selection Medusa specialised in, the one that made its children harder than adamantium.
He lowered his head, clutching his collar to keep the chill out. There was no point in peering ahead through the gloom, so he just focused on putting one foot in front of the other keeping his muscles moving in rhythm.
It must have been many hours before the ground started to rise and the path switched back between stairways of newcut stone.
Inner walls rose up around him, vaster even than those on the perimeter. He saw a great sigil made from polished slate a circular cog device, centred on a stylised wrenchhead. It was huge, more than thirty metres in diameter, and embedded in a cliff face of stone that seemed to tower up into the turbulent heavens themselves.
