The Ultramarines Omnibus

by Graham McNeill

  Archon Kesharq strode up to de Valtos. ‘Why do we wait, human? The prize is within, is it not?’ snarled Kesharq. The alien’s voice bubbled, his stilted High Gothic rendered almost unintelligible by the damage caused by Uriel’s bolt round.

  ‘Indeed it is, Archon Kesharq.’

  ‘Then why do we wait?’

  ‘Don’t you feel it?’ said de Valtos. ‘The sense that we stand on the brink of greatness? The sense that once we enter this place nothing will ever be the same again?’

  ‘All I know is that we are wasting time. The Astartes have the one called Barzano back and we should not spend any more time here than we have to. If the prize is inside we should take it and leave.’

  ‘You have no soul, Kesharq,’ whispered de Valtos.

  He brushed past the alien and entered the resting place of a creature older than time.

  THE FIRST ROCKET streaked towards the Ultramarines and exploded amongst the warriors of Squad Nivaneus, scything white-hot fragments in all directions. Two warriors fell, but picked themselves up seconds later.

  As the echo of the explosion faded, a rippling roar of gunfire sprayed from the mining compound. Uriel sprinted into the cover of one of the wide exhaust vents and tried to estimate the numbers opposing them. Judging by the number of muzzle flashes he could see, he guessed there were around two hundred guns firing on them.

  They were well positioned, covering every approach to the mine complex. Uriel smiled grimly, vindicated in his decision to attack the mine.

  But now he and his men were faced with the prospect of attacking a well dug in enemy of superior numbers, uphill and over relatively open terrain. It was the stuff of Chapter legends, wonderful to hear, but a different matter entirely when you had to face such odds yourself.

  His men were now in cover and returning fire. The Codex Astartes laid out precise tactics for dealing with such situations, but he had neither the numbers, equipment or time to follow such strict doctrine.

  A geyser of fumes belched through the grille of the exhaust vent beside Uriel, enveloping him with acrid fumes and hot ash. He coughed and spat a mouthful of the mine’s foul excreta, the neuroglottis situated at the back of his throat assessing its chemical content even as he wiped his face clear.

  A burning mix of various sulphurous gasses, fatal to a normal human, but simply irritating to a Space Marine. He slid across the face of the grilled vent and gripped the hot, ash-encrusted metal. Parts gave way beneath his grip and he wrenched it clear, tossing it aside and staring inside.

  A hot, mustardy stench wafted out. Uriel’s enhanced vision could only pierce a hundred metres of the steaming darkness within, but he could see the passage sloped downwards at a shallow angle. He opened a vox-channel to Sergeant Dardino as a plan began to form in his mind.

  ‘DAMN!’ SWORE MAJOR Helios Bextor of the 33rd Tarmegan PDF regiment as he watched the blue armoured warriors of the Ultramarines go to ground in the rocks below his position.

  He’d given the order to open fire too soon, and cursed his impatience. But who could blame him? The thought of facing the might of the Space Marines was enough to scare even the most courageous of men, and Major Bextor was not fool enough to think that he was such a man.

  Though he knew he was not a man of great bravery, he was a reasonably competent military thinker and he felt the defences were as secure as he’d been able to make them. Two full companies defended the mine head alongside a mortar platoon equipped with incendiary rounds. Briefly he wondered what was so important about this place that it required defending, there had not been any open trade wars for centuries, but quickly discarded such thoughts. Guilder de Valtos had entrusted him with the safety of this place and that was enough for him.

  He watched the rocks for a few minutes more, but there was no further movement from the slopes.

  Major Bextor keyed in the vox frequency of his mortar platoons and said, ‘Overwatch teams, commence volley fire. Targets at two hundred metres plus. ‘Fire for effect!’

  SECONDS LATER, URIEL heard the thump of mortar fire and saw the darts of shells as they rose on a ballistic trajectory. In the time it took them to reach the apex of their climb, he saw they would land short.

  ‘Incoming!’ he yelled.

  The mountain itself seemed to shake with the concussive detonations. A second salvo launched before the echoes of the first had died. Whickering fragments and tendrils of phosphorescent light burst from each shell as they landed with bone-jarring force, sending storms of rock splinters flying through the air alongside the shrapnel.

  Shells landed in a string of roaring booms, marching in disciplined volleys towards the Ultramarines. Uriel kept his head down as the ground convulsed with each burst of strikes.

  They had no choice but to wait for Dardino’s signal and take the punishment the enemy commander was dishing out. To advance forward through concentrated mortar fire into the teeth of enemy guns was tantamount to suicide and Uriel had no desire to see his command end in such a way.

  Sheets of flame rose from each impact, craters blasted into the soil of the mountain spewing thick smoke from the flames. Uriel caught the stink of promethium on the air and frowned in puzzlement. Incendiaries? Was the enemy commander mad? Against lightly armoured troops, incendiaries would sow havoc and panic, but against warriors clad in power armour they were almost useless. Then he realised that the enemy commander was PDF and almost certainly had no prior experience fighting Space Marines.

  Huge banks of black smoke rose from burning streams of fuel, drifting and spreading slowly in the mountain breeze and obscuring the combatants from one another. The Ultramarines had just been given the cover they sorely desired.

  SERGEANT DARDINO PUNCHED his fist through the steel of the vent tube and peeled it back with powerful sweeps of his arms. Daylight flooded the rifled metal vent and he leaned out, training his bolt pistol upwards lest anyone was keeping a watchful eye on this portion of the mineshaft.

  Before him, he saw a mass of cables descending into darkness and deep adamantium girders spanning the huge width of the mine, supporting lifting gear and dozens of thick-girthed vent tubes like the one he now pushed himself clear of.

  He dropped onto the huge adamantium beam the vent pipe was bolted to and motioned for the rest of his squad to join him. One by one, the warriors of his assault squad clambered out onto the beam. Their armour was scorched and blackened from the mine’s exhaust fumes. The status runes on Dardino’s visor told him that his rebreather units were badly clogged.

  They were deep within the cylindrical shaft of the mine, the sky a bright disc some five hundred metres above them. Too far for jump packs.

  He edged out along the beam, trying not to look down into the impenetrable darkness of the mine, knowing that it dropped over nine kilometres. He bolstered his pistol and turned to the nine men of his squad.

  ‘There’s only one way up. Follow me!’ he ordered and leapt into the centre of the mine, grabbing onto the cables hanging from the lip of the crater nearly half a kilometre above them.

  Hand over hand, Sergeant Dardino and his men began climbing back to the surface.

  URIEL ROSE FROM cover and shouted, ‘Men of the Emperor, forwards!’

  He sprinted uphill, the augmented muscles of his power armour carrying him forwards at a terrifying rate. With a roar of defiance, the Ultramarines followed their captain into the smoke from the incendiary shells, leaping over burning pools of superheated fuel.

  Mortar rounds continued to drop, most falling behind them, the artillerymen unable to correctly shift their fire.

  Uriel could hear the snap of lasgun fire and crack of heavier weapons, but it was uncoordinated and sporadic. A shot grazed the top of his shoulder guard, but most of the fire was too high, further proof that they were up against poor opposition. Firing downhill, most soldiers tended to shoot high.

  Uriel burst from the clouds of smoke, blinking in the sudden brightness. Gunfire leapt out to meet them, plucking at thei
r armour and a handful of warriors fell, but all picked themselves up and charged onwards.

  A missile lanced out and struck Sergeant Nivaneus, a veteran of the Thracian campaign, disintegrating his upper body in a burst of crimson. Autocannon fire sprayed a group of Space Marines from Sergeant Elerna’s squad. Four went down: only two got back up.

  One of the survivors had lost his right arm, but continued upwards, picking up his pistol with his remaining hand and firing as he ran.

  ‘Spread out, don’t bunch up!’ yelled Uriel as the autocannon fired again.

  MAJOR BEXTOR PUNCHED the air as the autocannon cut a swathe through the Ultramarines’ ranks. He fired over the parapet into the charging warriors.

  This was his first battle and he’d begun to enjoy himself immensely. They were holding off the Space Marines, though the analytical part of his brain told him that there were less coming at his position than had begun the assault.

  He attributed this to his initial awe at the size and apparent power of the Space Marines, but now he had their measure and they did not seem nearly so fearsome. He would be a hero! The man who had beaten the Ultramarines. The men would tell tales of this battle in the regimental mess hall for decades to come.

  Bextor reached for another energy cell, smiling at the trooper next to him.

  ‘Soon see these buggers off, eh, son?’ he joked.

  The boy’s head exploded, showering Bextor with blood and brains and he fell back, repulsed beyond words at the horrid death of the trooper. He lost his balance and fell from the firing step, thudding painfully into the hard-packed ground. He turned in the direction the shot had come from in time to see hulking figures clamber over the lip of the mine shaft and begin the systematic butchery of his soldiers.

  Blackened giants with hideously grinning masks of fury, they struck his line like a thunderbolt, hacking men in two with great sweeps of shrieking swords or pumping explosive rounds into their bodies from roaring pistols.

  He rolled onto his side, feeling blood run from a gash in his forehead, weeping in terror at these dark nightmares

  that had emerged from the bowels of the planet. Chattering gunfire ripped his men to pieces and swords surely forged in the heart of Chaos chopped and chopped, severing limbs and ending lives.

  All around him, his men were screaming and dying. Weakly he pushed himself to his feet and picked up his fallen lasgun. Death surrounded him, but he vowed he would take one of these devils screaming into hell with him.

  He heard a crashing impact behind him and spun. A black shape emerged from the smoke with a grinning skull mask, raising a golden weapon high. Bextor felt his knees sag in terror and his gaze fixed upon the winged eagle atop the golden staff the black armoured figure held.

  Its red eyes seemed to shine the colour of blood as its energy-wreathed edge clove him in two.

  VIRGIL ORTEGA FOUGHT through the pain of his shattered ribs as he fired around the door at the PDF troopers. The corridor outside the armoury was thick with dead bodies and smoke, both sides firing blindly into the stinking blue cordite fog in the hope of hitting something.

  The twin linked autocannons had not proved as useful as they had hoped, the furious recoil tearing the guns loose from their mount and demolishing most of the barricade in a hail of explosive rounds. It had brought a brief respite in the fighting, however, as the PDF proved reluctant to advance into the jaws of such a weapon. It had taken them several minutes to realise that it was no longer a threat.

  In the intervening time, Collix and Ortega pulled the last two surviving judges back into the armoury itself. With the barricade mostly gone there was no realistic way to hold the corridor.

  Ortega hurled a pair of grenades around the door, ducking back as the explosion filled the passageway outside with shrapnel and screams.

  Collix skidded next to him, handing him a canvas satchel filled with shotgun shells and clips of bolter ammunition for his pistol.

  ‘At least there’s no shortage of ammo,’ grunted Ortega.

  Collix nodded, ‘Or traitorous curs to fire it at.’

  Ortega grinned and pushed himself to his feet as he heard muffled shouts from beyond the armoury doors.

  ‘There is no escaping the Emperor’s justice, even in death!’ he shouted to their attackers, wincing as his cracked ribs flared painfully.

  They jogged back to a hastily constructed barricade of emptied ammo crates and tipped-over racking, taking up position as they waited for the inevitable next attack. A wealth of weaponry lay clustered behind the barricade along with a box of each weapon’s ammunition. Lasguns, bolters, autoguns, two missile launchers, a grenade launcher, a lascannon and six heavy bolters.

  It was an impressive array of guns, but with only four of them left alive, most of the weapons would remain unfired. Thirty metres behind them, their surviving compatriots worked furiously to rig the armoury for destruction. Without detonators much of the explosive stored here was useless, but the time that had been bought with Arbites’ lives had not been wasted.

  At key points throughout the cavern, they’d stacked opened crates of ammo and ordnance in large piles, placing a cluster of grenades in the centre of each stockpile, the pins pulled and arming mechanisms wired to the vox-caster’s battery unit.

  Within minutes, they should have a crude but effective method of setting off a chain reaction that would cook off every shred of ammo in the cavern.

  THE CHAMBER OF the god was far smaller than Kasimir de Valtos had imagined, but the sense of power it contained was enormous. Its walls sloped inwards to a golden point above the chamber’s exact centre, where a rectangular oblong of smooth black obsidian rested, magnificent in its solitude. The base of each wall was lined with rectangular alcoves, each containing a skeletal figure, identical to those his workers had pulled from the outer chamber of the tomb complex some months ago.

  Even the eldar and Vendare Taloun looked impressed with the chamber, staring in wonder at this alien structure

  that had been buried beneath the surface of Pavonis for sixty million years.

  ‘It’s magnificent,’ de Valtos breathed, moving to stand before one of the alcoves. The skeletal warrior within was as lifeless as the ones back at his house, its sheen dulled with a verdigris stain. Unlike the ones in his possession, these carried bizarre looking rifles, their barrels coated in dust. It was quite fascinating and he looked forward to learning more of these strange creatures when he was free of the shackles of mortality.

  Enthralled by the rows of warriors as he was, he could not deny the diabolical attraction of the central sarcophagus and marched across the echoing chamber towards it.

  It was enormous, fully five metres on its long edge, and as he drew nearer he saw that its surface was not smooth at all, but inscribed with runic symbols and pitted with precisely shaped indentations. His heart pounded as he recognised them as the same as the ones he had read beneath the ruins of Cthelmax.

  The same runes he had been scouring the sector for since that day.

  Channels cut in the floor radiated from the sarcophagus, each twisting in precise geometric patterns towards the wall alcoves.

  Kesharq stood alongside him and raised the visor of his helmet. Despite the immobile nature of his face and the crudely stitched bullet wound on his cheek, de Valtos could see the hunger in the alien’s eyes.

  ‘You feel it too, don’t you?’ he whispered.

  Kesharq sneered, quickly masking his emotions and shook his head. ‘I merely wish to secure the device and be away.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ giggled de Valtos. ‘I can see it in your eyes. You want this as much as I.’

  ‘Does it matter? Let us be about our business.’

  De Valtos wagged his finger below the eldar warrior’s nose and jerked his head in the direction of the silver case carried by his warriors.

  ‘Very well. Give me the pieces you secured for me and I shall unlock the key to the weapon.’

  Kesharq held de Valtos’s stare b
efore nodding curtly. The alien carried the silver box forward, depositing it before his leader. Kesharq opened the box without taking his eyes from de Valtos and said, ‘How do I know I can trust you?’

  ‘You can trust me as much as I trust you, my dear Kesharq.’

  He could see the alien visibly strain to hold his hand away from his pistol, but knew that it would not dare shoot him until he had summoned the Nightbringer from the shadowy realm it now occupied.

  Anchored to Pavonis by ancient science, it had remained a ghost ship in this sector since the day it had been lost.

  De Valtos knew that today would see it reborn, and the galaxy would mourn its second coming.

  COLLIX WAS DYING. Scything grenade fragments had blown out a chunk of his belly and his guts were leaking from his armour across the floor of the armoury. The sergeant propped himself against the barricade, firing a heavy bolter, though the recoil caused him to grunt in pain with each shot. Ortega’s left arm hung uselessly at his side, a lasbolt having all but severed it at the elbow.

  He fired and racked his shotgun one handed, shouting the Litanies of Justice at the rebel troopers as they broke themselves against their stubborn defence.

  The explosives were rigged and now all that remained was to detonate them. There was no choice any more. Virgil had hoped that they could defend the place long enough for loyalist forces to relieve them, but that didn’t seem likely any more.

  He and Collix were all that was left. The other judges were dead, killed in the last attack, and now it was down to them.

  Ortega had always wondered how death would come, and now that it was here, he found that it was not something to be feared, but to be embraced. It would bring the righteous wrath of the Emperor upon those who thought they could transgress His laws.

  He could hear rebel officers gathering their men for another charge. Collix painfully dragged a fresh belt of bolter ammunition from the ammo crate into the weapon’s smoking breech, his face ashen and twisted in pain. The shells kept slipping in his bloody hands and Ortega reached over to help his sergeant.