by Dan Abnett
With a much lighter payload, the Sons of Horus missiles closed the distance between the two ships in the time it took the boarding forces to travel a hundred kilometres.
Little more than two hundred metrelong tubes filled with shrapnel, the countermeasures exploded and formed supersonic clouds of tumbling debris. The torpedoes had no chance to evade, their guidance systems locked until their terminal manoeuvres, and fully half were ripped open or sent tumbling off into deep space.
Battery fire engaged the rest and yet more were blasted to ruin before they got to within fifty kilometres of the Lupercal Pursuivant.
Point defence guns killed the rest as they executed their terminal dive.
Only one torpedo survived to penetrate the frigate's hull.
Avakhol Hurr, one of 18th Company's most feared breachleaders, was waiting for it with his bloodspattered warriors.
Not a single enemy warrior set foot on the Lupercal Pursuivant.
Realising he had been lured into the attack, Octar Uldin broke off immediately. The Gorgorex' s engines fired, but having drifted for so long, it took time to coax them to full power.
Time that the Lupercal Pursuivant did not need, having kept its engines hot to maintain the illusion of reactor cores on the verge of overload.
Marr swung the frigate around and let the multiple batteries on its prow and portside flank have free rein as it rapidly closed the distance to its prey. The hunted now became the hunter as slashing arcs of highyield lasers raked the Gorgorex s length.
Its voids were yet to ignite, and detonations marched across the dorsal armour, melting armoured plates to molten slag and explosively venting hull compartments to the void. Serfs and menials spiralled out, shockfreezing in an instant.
The Gorgorex shuddered in pain, but it was a vessel of the Iron Hands, proud and defiant. The voids finally lit as it took its wounding stoically, like a pugilist who knows he cannot win the fight, but will stay on his feet until the last bell.
Its engines flared, ready to push it from this onesided engagement.
Its rear quarters exploded as a flurry of torpedoes launched in its rear arc slammed home and detonated within the drive cowlings.
Swinging out from behind the moonsized asteroids that had covered their swift turns, Helicanus and Kashin effectively crushed any hope of the Gorgorex' s escape. Its engines vanished in an expanding plasma corona and oxygen bled into the void like glittering silver blood trails.
The two destroyers manoeuvred into close range. Their guns flayed its voids, collapsing entire quadrants of protection in moments before targeting its point defences. They pulled away with perfect synchrony as a shadow fell across the Gorgorex.
Angular and deadly, an assassin's blade over the face of the sun.
Lupercal Pursuivant hove to, so close that the space between it and the Gorgorex danced with borealis light as the remaining void envelopes overlapped. Generator vanes blew out in flaring surges of feedback. Space burned blue and purple and crimson.
A frigate of Lupercal Pursuivant's displacement normally had no capacity to launch strike craft, but its loading bays opened and three Stormbirds that had spent the voyage from Dwell chained to the deck now fell into space.
They rammed their engines to maximum thrust and powered towards the their stricken prey. Helpless, the crew of the Gorgorex could only watch and await the inevitable assault.
Hull penetration came two minutes later.
III
'DON'T THEY KNOW they're beaten?' said Scybale, ducking out from cover to fire down the transverse approach to the main axial. Return fire tore up the bulkhead behind him.
Shrapnel and flakes of metal drifted from the impacts, spiralling in the zerogravity chill. Behind them, a meltacut breach gusted with condensing air from the interior of the Stormbird locked to the Gorgorex s hull.
Half a dozen Sons of Horus fired back Marr's honour squad, positioned all around the hexagonal approach. The absence of up or down as relative terms was a benefit of combat in zerogravity.
The voxnet crackled as Cyon Azedine replied.
'Would you yield to an enemy who thought you beaten?' said the champion, his mortuary blade poised behind his combat shield. The Eye of Horus emblazoned upon it glinted with a web of frost in the voidchilled corridor.
'No, but I'm Sixteenth,' said Scybale. 'Even the Iron Tenth can't match that.'
'They appear to think differently,' said Azedine.
'Then it's time we disabuse them of that foolishness,' said Marr, hefting a widebarrelled weapon he'd appropriated from one of the support squads.
All cogs, coilwrapped condensing tubes and a tight ring of focus blades, the volkite caliver was a weapon more suited to lightly armoured targets, but it did have the advantage of being utterly lethal in confined spaces.
'Since when does a captain deign to wield a caliver?' asked Azedine, a man to whom the protocols of warfare were of paramount importance.
'When he wants the job done yesterday,' said Marr and depressed the griptrigger.
A searing beam of tightly focused energy shot down the transverse approach. It impacted on the far wall of the axial approach and exploded in a billowing cloud of caustic fire. Phosphorbright trails blazed with sudden, shocking intensity.
There were no screams in a vacuum.
'Azedine,' said Marr. 'Go. Now.'
Cyon Azedine spun out from cover, and his speed was something uncanny. Movement in low gravity was usually slow and painstaking, each step taken with magnetized boots.
Marr's champion had no truck with that.
Instead, he bounded from wall to wall, pushing off with limbs like coiled springs. He spun away from incoming rounds and, with a last pistonlike thrust from the ceiling, he slammed down onto the deck among the reeling survivors of the volkite blast.
His boots clamped the metal deck and his sword reaped lives. Sprays of blood hung like red archways in the air.
Marr released the volkite weapon and left it floating behind him.
'Let's go,' he said, and the rest of his honour squad followed him towards the enemy. Not that he expected to meet any resistance from here on in, since most of the ship's fighting strength had died in the void.
All through the enemy ship, breacher squads were converging on strategic targets: life support, reactor cores, engine spaces. The last thing Marr wanted was for the remaining crew to scuttle their vessel in spite. He needed it in once piece.
A starship had numerous routes through its superstructure, but only one to the command bridge.
And that target was Marr's.
By the time he and his warriors reached the main axial, Cyon Azedine had killed everyone there. Six bodies floated in the axial, trailing drifting slicks of vivid crimson. A blob of blood affixed itself to Marr's shoulder guard, painting his Legion marking in red.
He turned and moved up the axial towards the shuttered bridge interlock. Its defence guns weren't firing, which told Marr they were either out of ammunition or no longer functional. Most likely the latter, the arrogance of the Iron Hands leading them to believe they would never be boarded.
Crackling voices spoke of areas seized within the ship. Resistance was fierce, but minimal. Clearly this ship had been operating with something less than a skeleton crew.
That they had managed to fly it and fight at all was to be admired. Schematics overlaid the visor display within his helm, his warriors picked out in pale blue.
'Avakhol, bring your Breachers to me,' ordered Marr.
Moments later, he felt the vibration of heavy footfalls along the axial as a demisquad of Rukal Breachers approached.
Avakhol Hurr led them, a febrile warrior with a potent love of all things explosive. He carried a goresmeared thunder hammer, and his iron armour was a filthy mix of ocean green and rustcoloured stains.
A breacher never cleaned the blood from his battleplate and Hurr was no exception. He'd been a line warrior during the Jubal Secundus Liberation, but earned his command during
the bloody shiptoship fighting above Isstvan.
Marr jerked his thumb at the bridge access. 'Get that open.'
The Breacher sergeant nodded and hefted his thunder hammer.
'My pleasure.'
MARR STORMED THROUGH the ragged, cherryred ruin of the entrance to the bridge. The Rukal Breachers followed, fanning out with their shields locked and bolters levelled, ready to annihilate any resistance.
The bridge was empty.
Or as good as empty, it made no difference. A single fleshspare warrior stood at its centre, locked to the deck and with a photonicedged war scythe. A dozen servitors flanked him, armed with a mix of clubbing weapons and tools adapted to form rudimentary firearms.
An Iron Father, if Marr wasn't mistaken.
The machinery around him was smashed and cratered, ruined beyond repair and useless. Deliberate sabotage to keep whatever data this vessel's logic engines had once held from falling into enemy hands.
But Marr had seen how much information could be retrieved from supposedly irreparable machines by the techsorceries of the Mechanicum, and knew something of value could probably still be extracted.
'I am Octar Uldin,' said the Iron Father. 'Which of you dogs wishes to die first?'
Marr almost laughed.
'You and I? We fight an honourable duel to the death? Is that what Shadrak Meduson is teaching you now, even after Arissak?'
Even a warrior with so little flesh left to him couldn't help but react to the name of the X Legion's new saviour.
'He teaches us that however we die, it will be with honour,' said Uldin, dropping into a fighting crouch with his scythe held to one shoulder.
'No,' said Marr, 'It will be screaming in agony when we torment what little flesh you have left, beyond anything even you can stand.'
He turned away.
'He's all yours, Azedine. Make him bleed, but don't kill him. The Warmaster will want him alive.'
THEY WERE WAITING for Marr when he returned from Dwell, as he'd known they would be. They'd denied him the Warmaster, but what had they expected him to do? Sit meekly by and accept the judgement of those he knew to be wrong?
That wasn't the XVI's way of doing things.
It wasn't his way of doing things. Not any more.
The Stormbird's engines growled as they powered down, hissing and steaming in the rain. Dwell's atmosphere was paying the inevitable price for a ferocious war fought in low orbit. Numerous spacebased gun batteries and drydocks had finally come down, and the sky over Tyjun was lousy with distortion. Actinic thunder boomed over the mountains and electrical tempests danced on the horizon. The smell of wet plascrete and foaming ocean water was strong. Rain battered the ground and the outer hull of the gunship.
Marr, Scybale and Azedine stood at the top of the assault ramp as a strobing sheet of purple lightning lit the Stormbird's interior.
'This could be bad, yes?' asked Azedine.
'It could be,' agreed Marr. 'We embarked on an unauthorised mission, took ships without the express consent of the Warmaster. Yes. This could be bad.'
'But what we learned,' said Scybale, 'from the very presence of the Iron Hands, from Uldin, that's got to count for something. Otherwise, what was the point?'
'That's what I hope,' said Marr.
'This could be bad,' repeated Azedine, wrapping his too delicate fingers around the hilt of his mortuary blade. 'They could strip us of our rank. Our position. Our honour.'
'They could do a lot worse than that,' said Scybale. 'You've seen some of the changes in the Legion, the things Erebus brought with him, the old Cthonian ways coming back. I'm not saying I'm against that, per se, but some of those ways were left behind for good reason.'
Marr straightened his spine. 'We're delaying, and we're better than that. Come on.'
He set off down the ramp, finding not four warriors awaiting him, but five. Four he'd expected, but the fifth…
Horus Lupercal, the primarch.
Encased in glossy black plate of colossal dimensions, he was a titan amongst giants. The glaring eye on his breastplate seethed in amber, the dark slit at its centre seeming to regard Marr with utter indifference. A pelt of resinstiffened fur mantled Lupercal's shoulders, the long fangs of its upper jaw splayed over one curved shoulder guard.
He held Worldbreaker in one hand, as easily as Marr might carry a slender data wand. It was of cold iron, its weight unimaginable. His other hand was bladed with reaper's talons, a tearing weapon as far beyond the power of a lightning claw as a legionary was above a mortal soldier.
But it was his face, a face that was both beautiful and cruel, that drew Marr in. A face that was the fountainhead of the Legion. Hadn't their renaming after Xenobia simply affirmed what they all knew?
Every one of the Mournival called themselves true sons, as did Marr, but they were pale imitations of the Warmaster's perfection. Only Aximand, with his terrible surgical rebirth, came anywhere close to the essence of the Warmaster.
Only now did Marr realise just how terrifying that was.
He dropped to one knee, Azedine and Scybale following his lead a heartbeat later.
'Sire,' he began, but the sensation of great weight on one shoulder stopped him from saying more.
Worldbreaker rested on his armour, kept from crushing him only by the Warmaster's great strength. He held the enormous, ultradense mace at full extension, a feat none gathered there could match.
'You've been busy, Tybalt,' said Horus.
'I have been fighting our enemies, my lord,' he said, keeping his head bowed.
'So I gather. Drawing up missions of your own and executing them with my ships.'
Marr finally dared look up, and a tremor ran down his spine as his eyes met those of the Warmaster. Better men than he had quailed before that iron gaze. Armies had laid down their weapons rather than stand against this mortal god. Yet even in the stormcloud fury he saw a glimmer of amusement behind this show of anger. Hoping he was right, Marr knew there was only one way to respond.
'I did, sire,' said Marr. 'To prove the broken warriors we left in our wake at Isstvan are no longer broken. They are organised, efficient. In contact.'
Horus removed Worldbreaker from Marr's shoulder.
'How do you know this?' he asked.
'Because he is going to tell me,' said Marr, rising and beckoning Avakhol Hurr from the Stormbird. The bloody Breacher and his fellow gutterkillers led Octar Uldin down the assault ramp, his neck clamped in the spiked collar of a mancatcher. Snapping sparks of electrical discharge burned the meat and metal of his neck, and his steps were stiff and ungainly as artificial nerves were stimulated with pain signals.
'One of the Iron Tenth,' said Horus. 'You took him in this system?'
'Him and his vessel,' said Marr. 'Lurking out by the Azoth Gate, keeping watch on our comings and goings and passing that information back to Shadrak Meduson.'
'You can't know that for sure,' said Abaddon.
'Can't I?' snapped Marr. 'While you were sitting on your complacent behinds, I took action. You were so sure of your own prowess that you never gave any other Legion credit for being as good, as resilient, as tough as us. Well, guess what? They are strong, and they are fighting back!'
Horus stepped in and took hold of Marr's shoulder guards, pulling him in tight to embrace him in a clatter of plate.
'Tybalt Marr,' he said as he released him. 'Truly you are a son of the north, the aspect of illumination, discovery, wisdom and understanding. As ancient Polaris was permanent, so too are you a symbol of the eternal.'
'Thank you, my lord,' said Marr, but Horus wasn't done yet.
'Yet the ancient peoples of Old Earth looked upon the north as a place of darkness, an aspect regarded with suspicion and, aye, even terror. The great Shakespire spoke of daemons 'who are substitutes under the lonely monarch of the north'.'
'I don't understand, my lord,' said Marr, as Avakhol Hurr forced Octar Uldin to his knees before the Warmaster.
'It means th
at you have been away from your brothers too long, I think,' said Horus, a single killing claw lifting Uldin's battered chin. The Iron Father's eyes were gone, plucked by Azedine's mortuary blade and now nothing more than sliced cables hanging down over his cheeks. 'That you have become the lone wolf, the hunter who works best alone.'
'What are you saying, sire? Exile?'
'No, but whether you are right or wrong, Tybalt, you will cost me dearly,' said Horus. 'If you are right, and Meduson is raising a storm in our wake, then I must send warriors to find him and kill him. If you are wrong, I must punish you for your disobedience. So which is it to be?'
'I am not wrong,' said Marr, certainty filling him.
Horus regarded him for a moment, as though weighing up which option would cost him the least. But that glimmer of amusement was still there, and Marr wondered if the others had seen it or even knew Lupercal had made his decision long before Marr's Stormbird had landed.
'Tell me what you want, Tybalt,' said Horus. 'Do you want to hunt down these 'Shattered Legions'? Root them from their shadowed lairs and drive them into the light? Destroy them?'
'I want to finish what we started at Isstvan,' Marr replied.
'Then you will be my hunter in the void. I will give you ships and warriors, weapons and power to do what must be done to end this threat.'
'My lord?' said Abaddon. 'The campaign…'
'Will succeed or fail with or without Tybalt,' said Horus, lifting his Talon and stopping any further discussion.
'I go to Molech, Tybalt,' said Horus, fastening his gaze upon him once more. 'Tell me what you are going to do.'
Marr stood tall and said, 'I'm going to bring you Shadrak Meduson's head.'
