The Bloodborn swarmed through the conflict like ants in the midst of a battle between giants. These mortal warriors could not hope to best the Ultramarines in contests of skill or strength, but they mobbed them like hounds attacking a bear, hoping to drag their foes down by weight of numbers.
And it looked like it was working.
Uriel held the Ultramarines together in the face of a furious storm of blades and daemonic fury, but ultimately there was little that could be done to stem the blood-hungry tide.
Then the skitarii came.
YESYL TREJO HAD led the skitarii of Magos Locard’s expeditionary forces for nearly a decade, and had risen through the ranks for another twenty-two before that. In that time, his body had been augmented, up-armoured and weaponised thirty-six times. Little now remained of his original body, but he cared nothing for that. All that mattered was that he was bigger, faster, tougher and meaner than ever before.
He and a thousand warriors swarmed over the mud-slick western slopes of Four Valleys Gorge, a surge tide of screaming killers as outlandishly attired as anything in the army they charged. They wore a riot of gleaming plates buckled over engorged musculature, with alien pelts and skulls adorning the shoulder guards of their armour. Each man was a feral killer, honed with technological mastery and bred to be a superlative taker of lives.
Trejo’s steel jaw foamed with alchemical anger, the red mist of the berserker shackled to the rigidly logical thought processes of a Mechanicus warrior. For all its wildness, his was no rampaging mass of warriors. Mixed in with the skitarii were hundreds of Praetorians, tracked battle servitors armed with the deadliest weaponry known to the Martian Priesthood.
Streaming lines of vivid fire lashed the enemy flanks, tearing great gouges in the body of the Bloodborn. Banners telescoped from backpacks and a forest of firearms lowered towards the enemy, a mix of plasma weapons, rotary cannons and laser lances. Swords and axes blistering with blue light were unsheathed and implanted high-energy beamers unleashed a blizzard of energy and solid rounds that ripped through the Bloodborn in a murderous storm.
The enemy reeled from this sudden thrust into its vitals, but the Bloodborn were trained soldiers led by cool-headed officers, and they realigned their flanks to meet this new attack with commendable speed. They moved swiftly, but not swiftly enough, and Trejo’s enhanced tactical awareness immediately saw the weakest point of the new formation. He had no need to issue orders; a neural command unit linked his mind with the cortical subnet of every warrior in his force, and the fiercest warriors of his host smoothly moved into a lethal speartip the instant before they hammered home into the mass of enemy.
Stimm dispensers and adrenal shunts flooded their bodies with volatile chemical fuel, heightening aggression and reflex speed to levels almost the equal of the Adeptus Astartes. Screaming blades tore through the Bloodborn as the skitarii force smashed home, a mechanised host of savage fighters who killed without remorse, without fear and without pause. The wedge of skitarii punched deep into the Bloodborn, the fight a seething mass, thousands deep, that tore at one another with mechanised weaponry, unbridled ferocity and clinical precision.
The mud sucked and clung to his feet, and the rain washed his body of blood as Trejo hurled himself into the nearest mass of enemy warriors, las-rounds spanked from his armour and a solid round ricocheted from his jaw. He gave a bark of laughter, harsh and merciless, as he landed in their midst.
Trejo slammed his steel mask face into the nearest Bloodborn soldier, shattering the man’s skull as he shot another three dead with his shoulder-mounted plasma gun. His sword plunged through the chest of another as his weaponised arm barked and cut down another handful with explosive rounds. He let loose a howl as he moved deeper into the enemy ranks, his Praetorian escort blazing with rapid streams of solid rounds that hurled enemy warriors in all directions.
The dispenser on his other shoulder coughed a handful of grenades over the heads of the enemy in front of him, and he saw a pair of daemon engines vanish in a sheet of white-hot fire. Eye-watering squalls of dark energy shot skyward, and Trejo relished their deaths as much as he mourned the corruption and loss of once-proud mechanisms. The bloodshed raged around him, impossible to read without specialised vision implants, and Trejo knew his charge had torn a bleeding chunk from the enemy. He grimaced at the vulgarity of his viscerally biological metaphor. The Bloodborn fled before him, trampling one another in their haste to be away from his bloodstained glory. He laughed his harsh grating laugh as he watched them go. A vile machine squirt of corrupt binary made him spin as his sensor-sphere registered the presence of three daemon engines behind him.
Two of his Praetorians exploded and the third was hacked in two by a chainblade as long as two large men. A titanic daemon engine reared up behind him, four metres tall and crafted like a giant metallic scorpion. Its tail lashed over its back and he swung his sword up in time to block the downward slash of its lightning-sheathed stinger. His blade spat bright sparks and a squall of discharge.
His shoulder gun punched a bolt of plasma into its guts, and a looping coil of machine parts and cabling flooded out in a wash of cauterised metal and plastic. The beast seemed not to care, and another machine slammed a metal leg into his side. Trejo felt his reinforced ribs shatter. Pain balms flooded his system, not swiftly enough to spare him the agony of jagged metal puncturing his plasteel lung, but quick enough to keep him on his feet. He rolled aside as the third machine came at him, and he cursed as his internal heat gauges told him his plasma gun hadn’t yet cooled down enough to fire safely.
“The hell with that,” he said and fired a sustained burst anyway.
Four blue-hot darts sawed through the machine’s body, and it blurted its mechanical death scream in a hash of binary. Scalding steam vented from the plasma gun and three of its coils exploded, bathing his shoulder in searing plasma. His armour melted under the intolerable heat, and he staggered away from the machines as they came for him.
A furious blizzard of gunfire bisected a daemon engine, and Trejo flinched as a burning piece of shrapnel sliced the skin of his forehead. Blood spilled into his eyes and the giant scorpion engine roared with daemonic fury as a blaze of gunfire enveloped it. Sparks flew from its armoured carapace, but this only drove its unnatural rage to new heights.
Trejo backed away, and felt a sudden presence beside him. Only a split-second reading of its Imperial biometrics kept him from cutting it down with his sword.
He wiped the blood from his eyes and saw it was a woman in a dark stormcoat, its long tails whipped by the wind so that it looked as though she wore a billowing cloak of midnight velvet. Her hair was pure white, blown out behind her in a howling wind that had nothing to do with the unnatural storms conjured by the enemy.
Imperial storm-troopers flanked her, shooting the daemon engine with implanted weaponry at least the equal of that carried by Trejo’s skitarii. He didn’t recognise the insignia on their shoulder guards, but the multi-spectral grafts in his eyes saw the invisible electoos beneath the woman’s skin.
“Inquisition,” he growled.
She heard him even over the thunder and drums and rain, meeting his augmetic gaze with ice blue eyes that brimmed with barely-contained power. She said a single word that sent a jolt of fear into Trejo’s flood-stream.
“Malleus,” she hissed.
She carried an ivory staff veined with green like marble, and jabbed it towards the daemon machines. “Keep them away from me,” she said. “It will make your job easier.”
Trejo racked the arming mechanism on his implanted arm-cannon and nodded, unwilling to speak to an agent of the holy ordos any more than was necessary. He summoned more Praetorians and skitarii huscarls with a terse data burst as two storm-troopers with long barbed mancatchers pushed a pair of chanting acolytes towards the woman.
Swathed in robes belted with knotted silver cords, their heads were bare to the elements. Rain poured over their shaven scalps and ran down their upturned fac
es like black tears. Trejo saw their eyes were sealed, sutured and las-burn closed, and collars of cold iron crackled and fizzed with chained energies about their necks.
He backed away from the woman as the collars popped from the acolytes and a biting metallic flavour flooded his mouth, filling it with acrid saliva. He spat, but couldn’t get rid of the taste, and sent a coded squirt of data to his warriors to keep away from this witch woman.
The scorpion creature loomed over her, but she didn’t flinch.
She spared Trejo a quick glance as her staff flared with aetheric fire.
“Best keep your distance,” she said, her eyes weeping blue fire. “This won’t be pretty.”
VAST GEYSERS OF molten earth erupting skyward announced the emergence of the drilling rigs Locard had warned him about. Uriel had felt the thunderous tremors of their imminent penetration of the ground, but wasn’t prepared for the sheer violence as they burst through. Like enormous artillery strikes, the ground heaved and bucked before finally imploding downwards as the supporting bedrock was pulverised.
A shooting spume of rock and dust exploded outwards as four conical snouts emerged from beneath the ground and the Shockwaves of their arrival flattened everything for a hundred metres in all directions. The one nearest Uriel ripped upwards through a burning supply station, its iron skin blackened, dented and scored after its journey beneath the surface. Superheated steam vented in scalding jets from its sides, boiling alive those unfortunate enough to be too close.
The tunneller reared up like a missile emerging from an underground silo, throwing off clods of rock and dirt and dust as it leaned like a foundation-sick tower. It wobbled for a moment, before passing its centre of gravity. The tunneller fell slowly and without grace, slamming into the ground with a thunderous reverberation of metal on stone as it demolished the vast supply station. “Quick!” shouted Uriel. “Before they debark!”
The Ultramarines had turned to meet this new threat at the appearance of the skitarii. Leaving a token force of Space Marines to bolster the flood of Defence Auxilia soldiers, Uriel led the Swords of Calth and the Firebrands towards the tunneller. Raking blasts from the guns of the Black Basilica were gouging great holes in the defence line, and its main gun was pounding the walls of Castra Occidens with murderous bombardments that had already flattened one portion of the wall and would soon reduce the entire fortress to rubble. Lex Tredecim had not yet entered the fight, but Uriel wasn’t surprised. The Mechanicus were loath to commit such precious items of technology to battle without overwhelming support, and Locard, for all his past affiliation with the Ultramarines was still, first and foremost, a priest of Mars.
The rain was dispersing the clouds of steam and Uriel’s guts tightened at the sight of the yellow and black chevrons on its leading edges. There could be no mistaking the brutal practicality of the Iron Warriors iconography, and he felt a knot of apprehension at the thought of coming face to face with Honsou once again.
One of the tunnellers exploded as a particularly accurate salvo of armour-penetrating shells ripped through its armour and blew it apart from the inside. The pressurised air of its interior caught light and vaporised its occupants in a raging firestorm that left nothing but ashes and fused bone in its wake.
The assault doors blew down with a dull bang and deployment ramps extended to the ruins on the ground. Raking blasts of las-fire blistered the side of the tunneller and a missile exploded against its armoured plates. A company of Defence Auxilia were closer than the Ultramarines, and a captain in a white cloak and bronze breastplate led a charge of blue-jacketed soldiers onto the ramp to meet the invaders.
Assault launchers fired and swept the ramp with whickering blasts of fragmentation bursts. The captain was the first to die, shredded to torn scraps of meat, and a dozen others perished with him. A secondary wave of explosions tore up half his company and the rest fell back amid streams of gunfire from automated turrets.
Squads of enemy infantry poured from the interior of the underground transport, but they weren’t Iron Warriors. A hybrid mix of traitor Astartes and xenos mercenaries fanned out onto the soil of Calth, firing as mismatched an array of weaponry as Uriel had ever seen. He recognised carnivorous kroot mercenaries and yet more of the Bloodborn, but leading the assault were warriors from at least two Chapters of fallen Astartes.
“Emperor’s mercy,” hissed Livius Hadrianus at the sight of them, “I see them, yet I can still barely believe such a thing.”
First down the ramp were warriors in the blood-red armour of the same berserkers they had fought on Tarentus. Librarius records had identified them as the Skulltakers, a renegade Chapter last seen in the vicinity of the Ghoul Stars. The Claws of Lorek in their tiger-striped armour advanced behind them, firing into the Defence Auxilia as they came. Deadly accurate bolter fire turned men into hollowed-out sacks of blood, and the berserkers scooped up handfuls of viscera as they charged past glistening piles of remains.
“The Emperor has forsaken them,” snarled Brutus Cyprian, hefting his boltgun and slamming home a fresh clip. “And don’t speak of mercy this day.”
Uriel’s warriors were itching for this fight, but even as he drew a bead on the lead berserker, he knew this assault made no sense. Sudden, devastating surprise attacks were just the kind of shock tactics the Space Marines excelled at, so why send such dross as xenos mercenaries to do the job?
That was a question for another time, and he pulled the trigger. A berserker dropped, the side of his helmet blown off, but it was the last shot Uriel would get.
The berserkers fell upon the Defence Auxilia in a frenzy of chopping blades. It wasn’t a fight, it was a slaughter of children before a rampaging tide of killers. Though scored, dented and ill-kept, the armour of the Skulltakers was proof against most weapons the Defence Auxilia could bring to bear at close range. Revving chainaxes tore off mortal arms at the shoulder and ripped through pelvises and spines with equal glee. Blood sprayed and guts were spilled to the ground, mixing the death-stink of opened bellies and bowels.
“Squads, brace for firing,” ordered Uriel.
Petronius Nero said, “Captain, the risk of collateral damage is high.”
“I know,” said Uriel. “But the Auxilia troops engaged with the Skulltakers are already lost. Death at our hands will be a blessing upon them.”
Nero nodded and pulled his bolter tight in against his shoulder.
“All squads, fire!” shouted Uriel and a wall of bolter fire hammered the ongoing slaughter. A handful of berserkers dropped, as did many of Calth’s defenders. It pained Uriel to give such an order. His whole life had been spent in the defence of humanity, but what he had told Nero was true; this was a far easier death than any the berserkers would offer.
The Swords of Calth ran towards the enemy survivors as the xenos mercenaries began spreading out and the Claws of Lorek pushed into the ruins.
Pasanius ran over to him, the black rain streaming from the dulled metal of his arm. His flamer tank was dented with bullet impacts and the burner nozzle was sticky with oil-dark blood and skull fragments.
“Where do you want the Firebrands?” asked Pasanius.
“I want you and Clausel to hook right,” said Uriel. “Keep those kroot contained. If we lose them, we will forever be looking over our shoulders.”
“Done,” said Pasanius, loping off with his fist raised to shoulder height to rally his squad.
Uriel turned towards his standard bearer. “Ancient, make sure none of those bastards gets anywhere near our banner,” he said.
“Not while I draw breath,” Peleus assured him.
Uriel nodded. “Let’s go,” he said.
GUNN SLAV WORKED the chain to the magazine, hauling on the rusted block and tackle to raise another crate of shells for the gatling cannon on the starboard cliff of the Black Basilica. His hunched back and grossly swollen shoulder muscles gave him a simian stature that kept him from the battle lines, but made him an ideal loader for the diabolic guns. I
t was a task he relished, for it allowed him a chance to strike back at the Imperium that had cast him out as a mutant and wanted nothing more than to see him burn. His physique was massively out of proportion, twisted and ungainly, but incredibly powerful and enhanced by muscle boosters and a hissing, pneumatic lifter harness.
It had been so long since he had escaped from the gibbet outside Confessor Malachai’s temple that he no longer remembered how long he had served in the armies of the Eternal Powers. He remembered the long flight into the wilds of his home world and the baying of his hunters, but beyond that, there was little other than their vengeful shrieks turning to terrified screams as the star warriors descended from the skies to butcher them.
He’d almost died too, but one amongst the star warriors had seen a use for him, and he had served them with absolute loyalty ever since the day they had reduced his home world to a smoking wasteland. His old name was a thing to be shed, like a diseased skin, for it was an Imperial name. His masters hadn’t deigned to give him a new one, and simply called him gun slave. In their guttural accent, the second part of his name was rendered as Slav, and that had become his new identity; one he bore with perverse pride.
Cowled in dark robes, he moved back and forth across the upper ramparts of the Black Basilica with a shuffling gait. The thunder of the clouds and the hot rain were a benediction upon him, the booming echoes of drums the sound of joy unfettered. It was his duty to ensure that every one of the Basilica’s tier guns was supplied with ammunition.
He clamped his misshapen fingers around the edge of the ammo crate and dragged it towards the blackened machine creatures that were as much part of the guns as any of its moving parts. Skull-faced, gibbering things, they leered at him as he eased the gleaming belts of shells into the clattering feeder breech. Each shell was as long as Slav’s forearm, touched by the gods of the warp and an instrument of vengeance. The breech snapped shut, nearly taking off his fingers, and Slav grinned.
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