The Chapters Due

by Graham McNeill

  “Not this time, my bonny,” he gurgled through a toothless, malformed mouth.

  He half-limped, half-slithered back to the blast shield covering the magazine chute at the rear of the Basilica’s upper tier. The vast cathedral was moving again, crushing the land beneath it as it advanced with inexorable inevitability. The flanking guns were howling for more ammo, crackling bursts of impatient binaric squalls.

  An armoured trapdoor in the armoured decking of the tier, the blast shield was secured by thick bolts and a heavy locking wheel. So vast was the door, that not even the enlightened Astartes who served the true gods could open it without specialised lifter equipment. Yet to Slav, lifting the door open was as effortless as breathing.

  He hauled the door open and looked down into the blackness of the Basilica’s interior. A powerful stench of nameless odours drifted up to him, a noisome mix of stagnant oils, sour milk and burned meat. To some it was unpleasant, but Slav had become used to it over the years he had served as crew. He never stopped to wonder what that stench might be. It just was.

  He heard a muffled thud of something heavy landing on the deck behind him, but didn’t pay it too much attention. There were always strange noises here, and it didn’t pay to seem too keen on what was causing them. Besides, the ammo elevator was grinding its way up the shaft, laden with fresh crates of copper-jacketed shells, high-yield energy batteries and concentrated promethium canisters.

  Then he heard the gurgling screams of the skull-faced things. Slav turned around, shifting his entire bulk to do so. He frowned. Things were not as they ought to be. For one, the guns on the upper tier weren’t firing. That fact was easily explainable.

  Warriors in black armour, like shadows come to life, were carving them up with gleaming bone-white claws of shimmering light. More were climbing over the high ramparts of the Basilica’s upper tier. Slav’s mind couldn’t process what he was seeing. How could they have climbed the sides of the Basilica? It was impossible for numerous reasons, not least of which was that its sides were blistered with defensive guns and it was behind the wall the Bloodborn’s masters had built.

  There were ten warriors, powerful and clad in armour of such blackness that they were like the basalt statues that stood at the mouth of the temple of the Encarmine Abyssal.

  These were Adeptus Astartes. The enemy. The hated. Slav’s blood ran hot, his stunted cognitive functions finally processing that he was faced with an enemy he could kill. He didn’t have to watch as the skull-faced gunners killed with the shells he delivered to them.

  He roared with hatred and lumbered across the deck, but before he had taken more than half a dozen steps one of the black figures turned and aimed a weapon with a dull black and non-reflective surface towards him. It spat bolts of fire, each one of them punching though his chem-bulked body and ripping bloody chunks of meat from his flesh. He felt the pain, but didn’t care. His nervous system was so dulled with implants and booster-drugs that his pain response was almost nil. He charged into the warriors, but they were slippery like the shadows he had first taken them for, easily evading his clumsy rush.

  Their claws slashed at him, pecking like carrion birds at a fresh corpse. Polluted blood frothed from his wounds, but he had enough to spare. Let them take all the blood they wanted, Slav would kill them all before they could drain him. His powerful limbs found one of the pecking birds and pummelled it with a fist like a boulder. The warrior flew back, slamming into the parapet of the upper tier and flipping over the edge.

  Something landed on his shoulders. A heavy weight and a sudden sensation of tearing blades and burning skin. The pain was meaningless, but he reached up to grasp its source. He felt his hands close on hard plate and squeezed, feeling it crack beneath his grip.

  Then, a pain he couldn’t ignore.

  Stabbing claws punched down into his neck, tearing down through the multiple layers of fat, muscle and sinew to the hard bone of his spine. He twisted his entire body, clawing at the black figure crouched on his shoulder and cutting him over and over.

  “Slav kill you!” he shouted, but then he felt one last white-hot snap, like stretched elastic pulled past its breaking point. He had a split second of tortured anguish before the snap rendered everything moot as the pecking bird’s claws finally sawed through his spine.

  CAPTAIN AETHON SHAAN dropped lightly to the decking as the hulking ogre mutant died, its spinal cord sheared between the bone fins of its shoulder blades. It had taken effort to cleave through the bone, and even then the creature had taken its own sweet time to die.

  He sheathed his lightning claws and watched as his men finished the job of killing the enemy gunners. The task was inglorious but necessary, as time was now of the essence. It had taken them no small amount of time to work their way through the shell-cratered ruins, past the hordes of Bloodborn and daemon engines and over the wall.

  The daemon engines had been the hardest part, the time when they had come closest to detection, for the entities animating the hybrid machines perceived the world with senses beyond the mortal five. Shaan smiled at the thought of utilising only five senses.

  Fereld Laotz swung himself over the iron rampart, his movements sheepish as he rejoined his fellows after almost being knocked flying by the monster’s fist.

  “That was careless,” said Shaan. “When we return, assign yourself a measure of penance.”

  Laotz bowed. “How long, my lord?”

  “I leave that to you,” he said, knowing Laotz would assign himself the correct amount of penance, and a little more just to make sure.

  The matter of his warrior’s laxity dealt with, he turned back to the opened hatch at the rear of the decking. Revys Kyre, his senior sergeant, approached him, staring down into the ink-black shaft.

  “Drop the charges down and let’s be on our way,” said Kyre. “It won’t take long for the masters of this abomination to realise their guns have gone silent. A counterattack is surely only minutes away at best.”

  “I know,” said Shaan. “But who knows what’s down there; another blast door, an energy shield. Some infernal warpcraft protection. No, we need to do this the old fashioned way.”

  “You always want to do things the ‘old fashioned way’, captain,” grumbled Kyre.

  “Then you should know better than to try and dissuade me,” said Shaan, dropping into the darkness of the magazine chute.

  SHAAN FELL. HE fell until he felt as though he was falling into an abyss so deep that it had no bottom. That was impossible of course—the Black Basilica was no more than a hundred metres high, yet still he fell. The blackness was absolute, impenetrable and solid, like a living thing enfolding him in its warm embrace.

  He was used to darkness, but this sensation was unpleasant and alien. Shaan endured it until his spatial senses found solid ground. He tucked his legs under him and rolled as he hit an angled blast deflector, coming to rest on one knee with his lightning claws deployed. Reflecting traceries of energy illuminated the chute, a strangely angled shaft that reached up into impossible darkness, though its opening must surely be just above him.

  A pneumatic elevator was limned in blue white light, greased rails carrying it at right angles to the verticality of the shaft. It passed through a fire-lit opening in an iron wall, and a heavy adamantium blast shutter clattered downward to seal off the magazine from the outside world. Quick as thought, Shaan ghosted over the rails towards the shutter and leapt forward onto the rattling elevator platform, pressing himself flat and bringing his legs around as the shutter slammed down.

  He slid from the platform, finding himself in a wide chamber reminiscent of the hell-forges that had once held the people of Deliverance in thrall to their slavemasters of Kiavahr. In such a place had the Primarch Corax learned his craft as a silent killer, a hunter in the shadows. Bellowing furnaces roared and seethed with crimson light and the walls were lined from floor to ceiling, stretching for hundreds of metres above him in defiance of what logic told Shaan should be possib
le.

  Malformed lifter servitors and scabrous slaves ferried iron crates of munitions while hissing gorgon-like overseers in hooded cowls of black directed their labours. Enforcing the will of the overseers were black-armoured templars bearing crackling energy whips. Curved tulwars were sheathed over their shoulders and they screamed from faces that were composed entirely of vox-augmitters.

  Presiding over this hell was a monstrous face made up of cables and pallid flesh that seemed to have grown out of the far wall. Bloated and monstrous, what humanity was left to its features was blubbery and childlike. Screaming binaric hymnals spewed from its flabby lips and streams of polluted data streamed across the ceramic orbs of its eyes.

  Shaan took in this horror in a heartbeat, but there were no shadows to be found here and he was starkly visible in this sweltering munitions factory-cum-armoury-cum-magazine. The fleshy face worked into the wall let loose a screaming blare of binary and every denizen of this fiery chamber turned towards him. The templars howled with every one of their multi-cadenced voices and the gorgon priests extended hooking blades from the wide sleeves of their robes.

  As one they surged towards the captain of the Raven Guard.

  SEVENTEEN

  BLOOD SQUIRTED AROUND the blade of Uriel’s sword as he tried to wrench it from the breastplate of a frothing berserker. He twisted the weapon, slicing off the warrior’s fingers as he pulled himself along the blade. Uriel had already cut one of the berserker’s arms from his body, but that hadn’t stopped him. Only the destruction of his primary heart had slowed him down, and even then the berserker’s second heart and distilled hate had sustained him.

  Silver flashed past Uriel’s head and Petronius Nero’s blade neatly lopped the berserker’s head from his shoulders. The berserker fell and Uriel slid his sword clear, pushing onwards through the rain and gunfire surrounding him.

  “Incoming!” shouted Ancient Peleus, jabbing a fist to the south-east.

  Uriel spotted it a second later. Streams of fire were converging on their advance from the tunneller’s automatic gunports. Explosive gouges punched up from the ground as heavy, pounding shells tore through the rock towards them.

  “Swords of Calth!” he shouted, angling his charge towards a derelict shrine with thick marble walls. He dived into cover as the shells sawed through, feeling the pummelling impacts even through a metre of stonework.

  Locard’s warning and the arrival of the skitarii had come on the verge of being too late.

  The Defence Auxilia were struggling to realign their defences to ring fence the threat, but it was too late for those units closest to the threat. With the plethora of shattered buildings and wrecked tanks, the Skulltakers and the Claws of Lorek had cover enough to reach striking range of three platoons of Defence Auxilia. They had torn through them in a matter of minutes, punching a hole through the battle line and exposing the guts of Four Valleys Gorge.

  Uriel had seen the danger and led his warriors into the fire of that crucible.

  It was a confused mass of tar-black smoke, howling fires lit by incendiaries and horizontal streams of gunfire. The ruins of this battle were an inferno as nightmarish as any conjured by the poets of old. Uriel risked a glance around the edge of an intricately carved quoin, and even with his newly implanted eye, it was difficult to make much sense of this fight.

  “What do you see?” asked Pasanius, leading the Firebrands into cover with the Swords of Calth, his flamer slung and his chainsword bared. His friend loved the primal destruction wrought by the flame unit, but relished the total destruction of a killing blow even more.

  “Hard to say,” said Uriel. “The Claws of Lorek have torn through the closest units of Defence Auxilia troops, and the berserkers are spilling out like termites from a kicked-over nest.”

  “Nice image,” said Pasanius. “What about the berserkers?”

  “Who knows?” said Uriel contemptuously. “They are attacking at random and killing whoever gets in their way. I cannot see what their plan is in order to devise a means of countering it.”

  “You’re assuming they have a plan.”

  “True.”

  “And the xenos? Where are they?”

  “Gathered in the ruined arboretum with the Claws of Lorek. I think.”

  “Our forces?”

  “Squads Nestor and Dardanus are shooting from the east and west, pouring suppressive fire onto the enemy. Protus are ready to launch a counterattack if I can figure out where to unleash them.”

  “And you have Zethus,” said the Dreadnought’s booming voice as it emerged from the smoke. Its power fist was smeared in blood that sizzled on its oversized chisel-like digits, and acrid smoke billowed from the slowly rotating barrels of its assault cannon.

  “Brother Zethus,” said Uriel. “I would value any tactical insights you might offer.”

  “Captain Ventris,” answered the Dreadnought. “Our Tactical squads have the enemy suppressed for now. The charging berserkers will soon force their fire to be redirected. When that happens, the Claws of Lorek will roll up the Defence Auxilia line. They must be broken before than can happen. Give them a target that will allow Nestor and Dardanus to pick of the berserkers.”

  “A target?” said Uriel.

  “Me,” answered the Dreadnought.

  Uriel nodded and said, “As always, brother, your subtle wisdom is a joy to behold.”

  The Dreadnought had no mode of expression other than its artificially rendered voice, but his humour was evident as his booming augmetic laughter echoed from the remains of the shrine.

  Zethus angled his sarcophagus down towards Uriel and said, “Be ready.”

  The Dreadnought reared up, and its assault cannon roared to life, the barrels spinning in a blur as its power fist blazed with killing light. Zethus didn’t move from cover, he moved two steps forward and smashed straight through the shrine’s walls with a thunderous jab of his fist. Marble blocks tumbled to the ground as he strode towards the swelling wedge of traitor Astartes.

  “Time to die, rebel dogs!” blared Zethus, the assault cannon unleashing a hurricane of solid shot towards the enemy. Shell casings fell in a glittering rain from the weapon’s ejection port and the arboretum exploded in a blizzard of impacts. Deafening cracks rang from shattered armour plates and stone walls disintegrated under the punishing volume of fire. Zethus strode onwards, raking a solid wall of shells over the enemy position. Smoke and dust billowed from the razed ground as Claws of Lorek scattered before the Dreadnought’s advance.

  Kroot warriors fled, hugging the ground or seeking cover in the trees, their flimsy bodies bursting apart in the storm. The Claws of Lorek weathered the inferno of shells, their armour able to withstand a measure of Zethus’ fire, and Uriel saw a number of the orange- and black-armoured warriors taking aim at the Dreadnought with weapons capable of breaching its armour.

  “Peleus!” shouted Uriel. “Heavy weapons.”

  “I see them,” confirmed his standard bearer, resting his bolter on the edge of the breach torn by the Dreadnought’s advance. Peleus sighted along the top of the weapon and pulled the trigger six times. Five warriors pitched backwards. The sixth ducked back into cover, taking his tankbusting weapon with him. It was an impressive display of skill, but Peleus had been tutored by Torias Telion, and Uriel expected nothing less.

  Then Zethus was amongst the enemy, his power fist slamming left and right and hurling broken bodies through the air. The integral storm bolter filled the space around it with explosive impacts, and its augmitters blared with the Battle Hymn of the Imperium as it fought with merciless precision.

  “That’s it,” said Uriel. “Swords of Calth, with me!”

  Uriel’s command squad rose and charged from the ruins, pushing forward alongside Pasanius’ Firebrands. They moved swiftly, taking shots of opportunity as they arose, picking off lone berserkers drunk on slaughter. Uriel saw the kroot pressing forward, slinking away from the fight with the Dreadnought. His warriors needed no encouragemen
t to rake their taut xenos bodies with gunfire. Only a scant few escaped into the burning woodland.

  Zethus was surrounded by enemy warriors who stabbed and shot him with desperate fury. Most of their weapons were useless, but Uriel saw one of the traitors was armed with an oversized fist that could tear through Zethus’ armour. The warriors fighting to reach the Dreadnought turned at the sound of Uriel’s charge, and the two forces met with bludgeoning force. Uriel’s sword cut a traitor in half as Nero lanced his sabre through another’s throat and expertly tore it up through his skull.

  Pasanius hit the enemy like a blow from a thunder hammer, scattering warriors with the force of his charge. His sword swung out and hacked one of the Claws of Lorek in two. His new arm drove his blade with greater force than even Uriel could muster, and though its edge was nowhere near as lethal as the blade of Idaeus, it tore through armour with equal savagery.

  Uriel shoulder charged his way through the Claws of Lorek. They fought back with strength born of desperation. They knew their surprise assault was in danger of collapsing, and fought to regain the initiative. With Pasanius on one side and Petronius Nero on the other, Uriel cut a path through the enemy towards the melee swirling around Brother Zethus.

  The warrior with the power fist drew back his arm to strike Zethus as Uriel slashed his sword across the small of his back, the blade cutting deep and separating the upper half of the warrior’s body from his lower. Zethus spun to face Uriel; his own fist raised, but dismissed him in an instant as he registered the colour of his armour.

  The battle raged on for several brutal minutes, but with the charge of Uriel and Pasanius, the fate of the Claws of Lorek had been sealed. Relentless volleys of bolter fire from beyond the fight told Uriel that his Tactical squads had contained the threat of the berserkers. Newly realigned artillery batteries dropped shells on the tunnellers. In moments, all four were gutted hulks, blazing from their powerful drive engines to their blackened drilling rigs.