The Chapters Due

by Graham McNeill

  Uriel’s visor streamed status updates from his squads, confirming what his instincts had already told him. He shook his sword clear of blood as the Swords of Calth set about executing any surviving enemy warriors with quick, efficient slashes of their blades. Despite this portion of the battle having been won, furious exchanges of gunfire and blades still echoed from the fighting further north.

  The Battle for Four Valleys Gorge was far from over.

  Pasanius approached Uriel and removed his helmet. Uriel saw he was beaming with undisguised pleasure at the devastation they’d wrought. His armour was scored and slowly coagulating blood flowed from a deep cut on his thigh.

  “A hard fight, my friend,” said Uriel.

  Pasanius chuckled. “I’ve known tougher,” he said. “Remember the fight to get into Honsou’s fortress?”

  “I would rather not.”

  “Ah, but it’s been too long since I swung a blade,” said Pasanius. “I know it’s my own fault, but that felt good. Every day I spent in penance, knowing I was missing the fighting on Pavonis, was torture.”

  “I am sure it was. And what better way to end that penance by killing traitors.”

  “Ach, these lads? They aren’t first generation,” said Pasanius kicking a dismembered corpse at Uriel’s feet, a warrior he didn’t remember killing. “They’re a founding from way down the line. Copies of copies of copies. You don’t dilute Astartes blood for thousands of years without seeing it become thin and weak.”

  Uriel wanted to say that Pasanius was wrong, that the dead didn’t care whether they were killed by inferior copies of the first Astartes or the genuine article. He looked away, watching as the structure of the nearest tunneller finally gave out under the punishing barrages of artillery. Sparks and blazing wreckage lit the walls of the cavern with a brilliant orange glow, and Uriel saw smoke rising from each one of the wrecks.

  He took a deep breath, knowing how close they had come to losing this fight, when a sudden thought caused his skin to grow clammy and sticky. He scanned the scarred battle lines where the tunnelling war machines had emerged and pressed his hand to his ear.

  “Magos Locard, confirm how many incoming tracks you were reading,” he demanded.

  The vox-bead in his ear hissed until Magos Locard answered.

  “The seismic augurs detected five tracks, Captain Ventris,” said Locard.

  Uriel shut off the vox-link and said, “Pasanius, come on!”

  He set off at a run towards Castra Meridem where the massive form of Lex Tredecim was concealed in a patch of dead ground.

  “Where are we going?” shouted Pasanius.

  “Five tracks!” cried Uriel. “Locard detected five incoming tunnellers!”

  “And?”

  “I only count four wrecks here,” said Uriel. “So where in Guilliman’s name is the fifth?”

  AETHON SHAAN LEPT for the far wall of the Black Basilica, dispensing a magnetic charge from the dispenser on the upper surfaces of his gauntlet.

  He kicked off the wall, somersaulting over the heads of three of the whip-armed templars as the crackling barbs lashed out at him. Shaan landed behind them, punching his claws through the back of the first and breaking the spine of another with a thunderous kick.

  A tulwar arced towards his head as the templar creatures swarmed him. He swayed aside and deflected the return stroke with a graceful backhanded blow that shattered the blade and sent fragments into the augmitter face of the warrior. Its permanent scream was instantly cut off as Shaan dropped below their slashing blades and jabbed out at groin height with his tearing claws.

  Enemy warriors fell and he launched more magnetised grenades from his gauntlet.

  A whip cracked and Shaan’s right arm was jerked back, pulling him off balance. One of the black-armoured templars darted in to stab him, but Shaan lowered his shoulder and the blade shattered on his pauldron. Another whip snagged his left arm, pulling his limbs wide, but Shaan flicked his wrists and sliced through the energy whips.

  Shocking, electric feedback surged along Shaan’s arms and he gritted his teeth against the pain as his nervous system overloaded. He dropped to one knee as two of the templars rushed in, their vox-augmitter faces blaring unintelligible hatred. Powerful arms encircled him, the grossly swollen musculature of a lifter servitor, but before they could close, he vaulted upwards, pushing up with all his strength and cracking the top of his helmet into its jaw. The cybernetic slave’s head snapped back with a horrid crack and it toppled back with its neck broken by the force of the blow.

  Shaan squirmed free of its grip and dived to the side as yet more templars and lifter servitors closed in. He launched a flurry of grenades deep into the depths of the ammunition racks, and leapt from crate to crate as he made his way towards the end of the chamber and the bloated, screaming face meshed with the iron wall.

  It screamed in debased binary, but whether it was a warning or scream of fear was impossible to tell. A whip slashed his side and he bit back a scream as it hissed through his armour and bit deep into his pale flesh.

  Shaan landed lightly and rolled to his feet on the iron plinth before the oversized face in the wall. The gorgon overseers had rallied around it, their arms transformed into blades. They stabbed at him with blinding speed. They were fast, but Shaan was faster, and he met their every thrust and lunge with powerful ripostes. One by one, he cut them down, fighting his way through them with a skill known only to those trained on the Ravenspire.

  The last of the gorgon priests died with a squeal of scrapcode. Shaan leapt over its corpse towards the face. He punched his clawed gauntlet through the bridge of the nose and tore upwards. The entire structure of the armoury shook and bilious white fluid erupted from the ruined face. The templars shrieked in harmony with the death of the face and two dropped dead on the spot. The lifter servitors halted in their tracks.

  He’d killed the master of the armoury, but he’d boxed himself in. A cardinal sin, he knew, but he had gambled in the timing of his attack and that calculated risk was about to pay off.

  As the remaining templars closed in, precision bolter fire cut them down from behind. Each shot was taken with great skill, for a single rogue shell would be the death of them all. The walls still shook with the agonised death throes of the face, and Shaan retracted the claws on his gauntlets.

  Revys Kyre and the rest of his Raven Guard spread throughout the armoury, needing no direction in how best to plant their own charges.

  “You took your time,” said Shaan. “Another few seconds and I might actually have been in danger.”

  “The blast shutter was tough to cut through,” said Kyre.

  Shaan turned towards the racks of shells, power packs and canisters of fyceline and promethium.

  “Right, let’s get the charges set,” said Shaan. “The old fashioned way, eh?”

  “The old fashioned way is messy,” said Kyre, seeing the gash in Shaan’s side. “I prefer clean and quick. In and out before the enemy even knows we’re here.”

  “That wasn’t going to happen this time.”

  “I suppose not,” agreed Kyre. “But we should get done here before it gets messier.”

  Shaan grinned. “Oh, it’s going to get a whole lot messier before we’re done.”

  LOCARD WATCHED THE lines of battle ebb and flow across the holo-sphere, staring into the confused morass of icons as though willing the blue and white icons to push the hateful red of the enemy back. The gold of Trejo’s skitarii were so hopelessly embroiled with the daemon engines and Bloodborn that it was next to impossible to tell what was happening. Even real-time pict-imagery was useless. Locard was no warrior, and could not tell which force had the upper hand in the seething brawl of machines.

  “Add encrypted Mechanicus layer,” he commanded, and one of the data servitors on Lex Tredecim’s command bridge chimed as it confirmed his order.

  A soft static burr overlaid the battle imagery on the outside of the holo-sphere, noospheric data streams passi
ng back and forth at incredible speeds between the skitarii, Praetorians and Lex Tredecim’s battle cogitators. Passing information in this manner allowed a level of coordination unimaginable to any other armed force in the Imperium. Locard processed the information in his hindbrain implants, but kept himself aloof from the myriad communications passing between the Praetorians and skitarii. Lingua-technis battle-cant was a robust, belligerent machine language and was painful to those unused to such primal binaric arrangements.

  Beyond the layer of Mechanicus control, more easily accessible information was displayed on a lower layer of the sphere, and Locard focussed his attention on this. Ultramarines forces made surges into the mass of enemy forces, but were more often than not forced to pull back for fear of being encircled and cut off. The one beacon of light in the midst of the daemon engines was the pulsing silver icon of Inquisitor Suzaku. She and her acolytes were emptying machines of their daemonic hosts with powerful psychic mastery, and Locard swung his imagers to watch her.

  Guarded by her augmetic storm-troopers, Suzaku directed the energies of two bound battle-psykers with shimmering bursts of pyrotechnics that even his multi-spectral picters couldn’t interpret without hazing the sphere with static. Gunfire and chattering machines with slashing blade limbs came for her, but those soldiers nearest her had quickly recognised the value of her presence. Ad hoc squads of Defence Auxilia had formed on her flanks to protect her.

  “Keep her safe,” whispered Locard, though there was no need to keep his voice low. The ordos and the Adeptus Mechanicus had a relationship that could best be described as prickly, but Locard would have gladly seen an entire cohort of inquisitors coming over the hill right now.

  The Raven Guard had finally appeared on the holo-sphere, on the Black Basilica of all places, but where else should he have thought to look save where he had least expected to see them?

  “I should be quite interested in how you avoided detection,” he said, knowing the Raven Guard would never divulge such secrets.

  Yet the more he watched, the more it seemed like as though the tide of battle was, ever so slowly, turning in favour of the Imperial forces. Trejo’s stabbing wedge of skitarii and Praetorians were pushing deeper into the mass of Bloodborn, while platoons of Defence Auxilia began forcing the enemy back over the original front line. Each foray of the Ultramarines cut deeper into the daemon host and within moments it seemed a statistical probability that they would link with the Mechanicus forces.

  Every arm of this Imperial defence was working together, and a probability curve of victory appeared on the holo-sphere as the variables in its calculation became more manageable.

  When the counterattack came, it was so sudden that Locard almost missed the first signs.

  The constant stream of noospheric data streams suddenly doubled in its intensity as a stabbing lance of scrapcode flooded the weave of the network. Bleeding red streams of corrupt data packets exploded in the noosphere, non-Euclidian geometries and unnatural integers fouling the speedy transfer of information and sending infected data shrapnel deep into the network.

  The attack surged with bludgeoning force, invading the network in a blitzkrieg fashion, seeking to overwhelm the Mechanicus network with its sheer bulk and strength. Several servitors began convulsing, as though in the grip of mechileptic fits, tearing themselves free of the network in their struggles. Emerald light erupted from a number of work stations, and warning streams of binary streamed across the holo-sphere.

  Locard shifted his internal consciousness to the blaring cants of the Praetorians. One by one they halted in their tracks, guns falling silent and crushing weapons locking in place as they attempted to process the conflicting instructions flooding their cyborganic brains.

  “Cleverly done, my friend,” said Locard, shutting down the active receptor feeds to the Praetorians and activating his specially designed data purgatives. “But unsubtle.”

  Locard’s hands danced across the surface of the holo-sphere, calling up his researches into the corrupt scrapcode from the data prisons in which he had contained some of the original infection.

  “Your structure is chaotic and primal, but the code isn’t entirely random. Nothing ever is. There is an order to the universe that not even the Primordial Annihilator can undo,” said Locard. He unlocked the info-emetics he had crafted from the original scrapcode attacks on the defence platforms and starships in orbit, allowing it free rein in the noosphere.

  Immediately it fell upon the attacking waves of scrapcode, golden lines of pure data slicing through the fog of infected binary and collapsing entire swathes of corrupt data. Locard let out a relieved breath, though he had no real need to intake oxygen through such a primitive method. His blood filtration systems and augmetic lungs could supply him easily enough.

  “Strange how easily we revert to our primal biologies,” he said with a nervous bray of artificial laughter. “Addendum for further study.”

  Then the scrapcode fought back.

  Like a brawny axeman fighting a duellist, the scrapcode retaliated with a brutal flex of muscular code. Though Locard’s info-emetics were landing graceful blows, the scrapcode’s strength was greater. The leading edges of its corruption flared and died in the face of Locard’s designs, but there was simply too much force and will behind it.

  Locard glanced nervously at the holo-sphere, diving down through the layers to the crudity of the pict feed. The Praetorians were shutting down in the face of the cyber-attack, their aegis shields protecting them from the infection, but forcing them to inaction.

  Already those shields were collapsing, eroding with horrifying swiftness in the face of such hideously powerful infection. The let-up in the attack had given the Bloodborn the lull they so desperately needed and they hurled themselves at the Imperial forces like cornered wolves.

  Locard glanced at the graph of victory probability. The projected line was curving towards defeat, its projection becoming ever more unsound with this new variable dragging it down. Without the heavy firepower and monstrous combat prowess of the Praetorians, it was unlikely the Imperial forces would prevail, but should the scrapcode turn them into corrupt warriors of the enemy, the consequences would be disastrous.

  “Come on, come on…” he hissed, watching the dance of numbers as his info-emetics did battle with the scrapcode. His designs were working as he had known they would, but there were simply too many streams of bad data to purge for them to be effective.

  As galling as it was to admit, it seemed his promise to Captain Ventris that he could guarantee the loyalty of the Praetorians would prove to be a costly error in judgement.

  USING THEIR LIGHTNING claws as friction brakes, the Raven Guard slid down the high flanks of the Black Basilica, leaving torn gouges and fans of sparks in their wake. Aethon Shaan dropped lightly to the ground amid a cluster of debased machine priests. He killed the first and second with flicks of his razored gauntlets as the rest of his warriors landed behind him with heavy splashes in the sucking quagmire surrounding the monstrous behemoth.

  Thunder crashed overhead and a streak of vivid lightning cast a flickering glow over the nightmarish landscape around the Black Basilica. At the edge of the wall, scores of heavy-limbed ogre creatures beat the stretched skin of giant steel drums with iron bars. Blasted craters filled with promethium blazed with orange light and sent up tar-black columns of smoke that reeked of burnt fat. Capering monsters in bloody armour danced to music only they could hear, and black-robed priests cursed weapons with dark rituals.

  A trio of machine priests with monstrously oversized shoulders and overgrown augmentations like black angels’ wings swung to face them. Their eyes blazed with jade light, and a horrific scream, deafening beyond all measure erupted from their forms.

  “So much for getting out the way we got in,” said Kyre.

  “I said this would get messy,” said Shaan.

  “I thought you meant for them.”

  “I did,” said Shaan.

  Th
is was a land of the damned and, like airborne troops landing in the middle of an enemy force, the Raven Guard needed to maintain the initiative and prevent their foes from getting off the back foot. They had hit hard, but with the enemy now aware of their presence, they needed to keep hitting hard to get out of here alive.

  “Egress in force,” ordered Shaan. “Do as much damage as you can on the way out. Go!”

  Like a flock of startled crows, the Raven Guard split apart and dispersed into the darkness of the unnatural storm cover. Each warrior would make his own way out, moving from shadow to shadow and always choosing his path with an eye to the damage he could cause. They had come in with the darkness as their ally, but that was now stripped from them as the lightning flashed again and again, as though conspiring to unmask them in retaliation for the havoc they had wreaked here.

  Shaan set off towards the wall, weaving in and out of cover. He lobbed a grenade into an ammo pile and it exploded in a blaze of light, scattering the men reaching for the weapons stacked there. They flew through the air and Shaan fired a burst of shots from his pistol into a pack of pursuing Bloodborn hunters. Two fell and the rest went to ground.

  He broke left, diving behind a bullish earth-moving machine, its flanks oily and streaked with blood where it had rolled over something living. Shots sparked from the track guards and he rolled aside, leaving a grenade planted on the engine block. It detonated with a dull whump as he darted from cover, heading straight for a pack of soldiers with their lasrifles raised. Another grenade zipped from his gauntlet and burst in the air before them, felling those at the front with a scything blast of fragments. He leapt toward the dazed survivors, unsheathing his gauntlet blades and tearing them up with three crosswise strokes.

  Their bodies hadn’t even fallen when a spraying burst of las-fire pummelled his side. Pain flared as one particularly lucky shot struck the gap torn in his armour by the templar’s electro-whip. His skin burned and he felt the organ beneath cauterise. He stumbled, narrowly avoiding a chattering blast of solid rounds that ripped through a timber structure filled with building materials.