Ultramarines

by Graham McNeill

  I began to realise the truth and it stirred an even greater concern within me.

  ‘You are here to summon me before Lord Calgar, are you not?’

  Nonplussed, Agemman let go of my shoulder. ‘I am, yes. How did you know?’

  I didn’t answer and turned to Venatio instead.

  ‘Apothecary, tell me – did we bring anything back from Damnos, anything from the necron?’

  Venatio nodded slowly. ‘Yes, but–’

  ‘And is it under Techmarine Vantor’s custody in the east wing armourium?’

  Agemman answered. ‘It is. What is this about, Sicarius?’

  I met his questioning gaze with one of certainty and urgency. ‘Do you have a sidearm you can lend me?’

  Agemman nodded, not understanding but beginning to trust my instincts. He unholstered his bolt pistol and handed it over.

  Appreciating the grip of the weapon, I regarded them both.

  ‘We have to get there at once – the Fortress of Hera has been breached.’

  Daceus had been on his way to the apothecarion when we met in the corridor.

  I quickly explained the situation and together the four of us made all haste to the armourium in the east wing of the fortress-monastery.

  Both Agemman and Daceus had their bolters, whilst Venatio and I held pistols. I hoped it would be enough for whatever awaited us in Vantor’s workshop.

  ‘Should we invoke a fortress-wide alarm?’ asked Daceus on the way.

  Agemman shook his head. ‘Let’s see what’s in there first.’ He had donned his battle-helm again, so I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he doubted my assertion that the fortress was in danger and I suspect he didn’t want to create needless panic.

  I saw him exchange a glance with Venatio. The Apothecary hid his concern poorly, but I took no heed. We had arrived at the armourium.

  We had not voxed ahead. I was insistent on this. Whatever awareness the dormant necrons in the workshop possessed, I didn’t want to risk my warning activating them prematurely.

  I hammered the icon for the door release and stepped first into the armourium.

  It was much as I remembered: a hive of industry and labour, serfs and engineers hurrying back and forth, servitors engaged in their menial tasks, arms and armour in various conditions of repair and restoration. And there, at the back of the expansive workshop, tended by a small army of menials, was the salvage from Damnos.

  Vantor turned as I entered. He was just finishing working up my armour-plate. I saw the Tempest Blade and my plasma pistol on a separate rack nearby.

  ‘Brother-captain, your timing is impeccable.’

  ‘I do hope so.’

  The Techmarine’s expression changed from warm greeting to slight confusion as Agemman, Daceus and Venatio filed in after me.

  ‘Is there a problem I am unaware of, brothers?’

  My gaze was fixed on the back of the workshop.

  ‘Evacuate your labourers.’

  Vantor looked to Agemman for confirmation.

  ‘Do as he asks, brother.’

  Like ants returning to the nest, the horde of serfs, enginseers and servitors removed themselves from the armourium. None questioned their orders, but some looked worryingly askance at the Ultramarines in their midst as they departed.

  ‘With me.’ I advanced into the workshop, indicating a perimeter around the necron salvage where I then came to a halt.

  Vantor joined the others as they fell in beside me.

  ‘This is illogical, Captain Sicarius. What are you trying to–’

  Dozens of viridian eyes flaring into life in the gloomy armourium arrested the Techmarine’s question and had him instinctively reaching for his plasma carbine instead.

  ‘They are self-repairing…’

  I raised Agemman’s bolt pistol. My battle-brothers readied their weapons in unison with me.

  I scowled as the necron host began to reassemble itself.

  ‘Not for long.’

  Roaring muzzle flare and a hail of fire broke the tension as the five of us unleashed our weapons, engulfing the back of the workshop in explosive annihilation and destroying everything in it.

  Only when we had emptied our clips did we stop firing. Even Vantor exhausted the power cell in his plasma carbine.

  When it was over, the back of the workshop was a scorched, half-destroyed ruin. It was as if a battle had just ended. In truth it had. We had won.

  Agemman slammed a fresh clip into his bolter, ever the prepared soldier.

  ‘Whatever is left, incinerate it.’

  Daceus and I were sifting through the wreckage, making sure we had cleansed the room thoroughly.

  I lowered my borrowed bolt pistol, and signalled to my sergeant to stand down.

  ‘There’s nothing left. The threat has been neutralised.’

  Across the workshop, Venatio caught my eye. He gestured to the carnage around us.

  ‘How did you know?’

  I had no good answer for him, so I told the Apothecary the only thing that made any sense.

  ‘I saw a darkness in my dreams and vowed I would not see it come to pass.’

  Agemman was more pragmatic. ‘Whatever the cause of your prescience, I for one am glad of it.’ He bowed his head. ‘Gratitude, Sicarius. But Lord Calgar yet awaits.’

  Agemman insisted I be cleaned and wearing my armour before my audience with the Lord Calgar. As I had seen in my half-remembered dream, I walked the processional of the Hall of Ultramar with the statues of heroes measuring my every step.

  And as before, I knew I would not be found wanting under their gaze.

  Lord Calgar waited for me, seated upon a throne, his banners describing a legacy of war and glory behind him. Agemman was by his side.

  I stopped at a respectful distance and saluted.

  With a huge, power-gloved hand, Calgar beckoned me to approach. ‘Come forth, Cato.’

  I obeyed, masking any surprise at such informality, and took a knee before the Lord of Ultramar.

  I bowed my head solemnly. ‘I stand in judgement.’

  ‘Rise. You are not being judged this day, though I had reviewed the engagement on Damnos.’

  My eyes narrowed in confusion as I came to my feet.

  ‘My lord?’

  Agemman maintained his studied silence as Calgar explained.

  ‘Damnos wounded us all, but you and the Second suffered more grievously than most.’

  ‘It is a stain on my honour.’

  ‘One I would see removed, Cato. I will not have this go unchallenged.’

  I frowned again, not quite grasping Calgar’s meaning.

  ‘Permission to speak freely, my lord.’

  ‘Granted.’

  ‘What exactly are you saying?’

  Calgar’s eyes were like chips of steel. ‘In your unconscious visions, you saw the ice? You heard the beating of its heart?’

  My voice almost caught in my throat at this revelation.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is the necron, mocking us. I feel it in my bones, Cato. Whether it be one year or fifty, we are not done with Damnos, and it is not done with us.’

  A nerve tremor in my cheek didn’t quite manifest into a smile. And it would not until the stain against my honour was removed and Damnos reconquered.

  ‘I shall count the days until our return, my lord. This isn’t over.’

  There was life in this place once.

  Once.

  Before the skies grew dark, before the warp fell silent, before the Great Devourer began its feast of worlds.

  Now there was barren rock, a desert where there used to be a forest, a husk where once stood a city. Here, the alien tyranid had left its mark and no survivors.

  Save one.

  Cato Sicari
us walked alone in a wasteland. Injured, he dragged his left leg where a spur of metal had pierced it during the crash. His battle-helm had split in half and been discarded. Bareheaded, there was no way to mask the smell, the reek of dust and emptiness.

  The broken drop pod was far behind him, as were the corpses of the Vanguard veterans he had been accompanying. Agemman would have something to say about that. He would bring up the ice world again.

  Even Daceus had advised Sicarius not to go, especially without his Lions, but the sergeant went unheeded. Damnos had made Sicarius reckless, more so than before. When he had looked into his sergeant’s eyes, Sicarius suspected Daceus thought the same. It had not changed his mind. Sicarius had to know if he still had his edge. The Lions would stay with the main army and maintain a command presence, whilst he would infiltrate with a small squad. Their mission: assassinate the node creature that maintained the link to the hive. That plan had gone awry when a spore mine had exploded in their airspace during insertion, even if the means to enact that plan had not.

  The device was still hooked to his weapons belt, a dull orb about the size of his fist. Praise the Throne that was still intact.

  The rest was all fire, smoke and blood.

  At least without his trappings, he was light. He wore stripped down power armour, not his Mantle of the Suzerain. Such finery did not befit this kind of work, and Sicarius was glad of it. Even his Tempest Blade was absent, a sheathed gladius strapped to his hip instead. He kept his plasma pistol, which sat snug in its holster and was, as of yet, unused. But as Sicarius approached the ghostly ruin of a settlement, that fact was about to change.

  Shadows lurked here. They also chittered, perhaps in some crude approximation of speech. To the Master of the Watch, it sounded like laughter.

  They had been drawn to him, these hunter-slayers, drawn to his living biology. A need drove them that went beyond hunger. Consumption was to the tyranid as war was to a Space Marine. The two could not be separated.

  By Sicarius’s reckoning, the farthest Ultramarine outpost was still several kilometres away. He would have to fight through the husk of the dead city, and its new xenos tenants, if he were to reach his brothers.

  He made for the ruins, mindful as the shadows drew closer with his every step and began to grow claws.

  Sicarius had barely crossed the threshold of some former municipal district, its lonely barricades and toothless defences still standing but empty, when the first of the hunter-slayers emerged from darkness.

  Slipping the plasma pistol from his holster, he aimed and fired. The tyranid was vaporised by the superheated bolt, but Sicarius’s triumph only lasted until the moment his sidearm red-lined and refused to function.

  ‘Guilliman’s blood…’ he said beneath his breath, cursing the crash that had obviously damaged the pistol.

  Now there were more hunter-slayers, drawn by the demise of their brood-mate, and cautiously scenting easy prey.

  Sicarius spat, ‘Ugly little bastards,’ as the ochre-skinned, canine-like aliens began to scurry towards him. He had made it far enough that he could peel off the main concourse and head down one of the lifeless streets. Limping badly, Sicarius grimaced and cursed with every step, but was determined not to submit. He needed a better vantage, somewhere the diminutive aliens’ numerical superiority would count for less.

  He found a lexographer’s office. Kicking in the door, ignoring the pain from his leg, he found a small chamber with a narrow corridor leading off into an even smaller domicile at the back.

  Sicarius was heading for the corridor when the hunter-slayers burst through the doorway. Savage teeth sank into his back, armour screeching as razor-sharp incisors bit hard. With a roar, he shrugged the creature off and heard it strike the wall. A second clamped to his wounded leg. Now he screamed. Agony gave way to wrath, as Sicarius wrenched out his gladius and pierced the tyranid through its skull. It squealed once and fell limp.

  Three more barrelled into him, their combined weight nearby taking over him. The close confines of the clerk’s office made for a tight battlefield. Using his forearm, Sicarius crushed one alien against the wall, the second he stomped using the foot of his good leg, the third he decapitated.

  Gore washed over his face and torso. It burned a little, and he smelled his own seared skin.

  More were coming. He could hear them further down the street, chattering like jackals. The spilled blood of their kin had drawn them.

  His own blood leaking from a dozen minor wounds, Sicarius headed down the corridor as he had originally intended, but instead of looking for a place to make a stand he sought an exit as a fresh strategy superseded his previous plan – escape and get to higher ground. With a decent vantage point, he could chart a route through this ghost city and possibly signal his company.

  Damnos returned again, taunting him with its bitter memory. Failure was no easy pill for Sicarius to swallow. Even here, wounded and outnumbered, Sicarius refused to yield.

  ‘I still have the edge,’ he snarled through clenched teeth as he found what he was looking for.

  A ladder in the rear domicile led to the roof. He took it, the metal groaning against his power armoured weight. Punching through the hatch, he emerged into dismal half-light and onto the roof.

  It was a good vantage point. Higher up, he looked out across the city…

  …and beheld a horde.

  Emerging from drains and sewer pipes, from every crack and alcove, were hundreds of tyranids. The hunter-slayers were in the numerical ascendency but there were larger forms too that scuttled, stomped and champed.

  It was impossible, even for one such as he.

  ‘No way through…’ Sicarius almost laughed at the senselessness of it all as he unclipped the fist-sized orb at his belt. Pride had brought him to this place. Not here, in this city, but this moment. It was a little late for a realisation, though. Resolve forced him into a different direction, the recognition and acceptance of a final duty.

  The vortex grenade was intended for the node creature, but Sicarius would have to settle for a host of its minions instead. It wasn’t the end he had imagined for himself. Fate had dealt him a cruel hand with that crash. It was merely chance… or was it?

  Sicarius had the grenade out in front of him. It was ready, primed and only needed to be activated.

  ‘Fortune favours the bold… Perhaps I have become too bold.’

  Ever since Damnos. Ever since he fell. He had been trying to prove something… To his Chapter, to himself.

  Such thoughts were the province of fools. Until now, Sicarius had never considered himself amongst such men.

  Creeping towards him, the sea of tooth, claw and chitin reached the edge of the building.

  One hand on the vortex grenade, the other clamped around his gladius, Sicarius prepared for his duty to finally end. He was about to shout a challenge when something stopped him.

  There, at the edge of the ruins, a pale mist was rolling in. It came on fast, thick, and engulfed the horde in a matter of seconds. As if reacting to a threat, the aliens began to snarl and snap at each other. Soon even that was lost to the mist.

  Sicarius’s grip on his weapons tightened as an unearthly chill went through him like a jolt of electricity.

  To his left a muzzle flash erupted, partially smothered by the mist. Then another, and another until the pale obfuscating cloud was awash with weapons fire. He heard blades, first unsheathed and then cutting. The alien screams came next. He half-glimpsed a figure moving in the white miasma below. It looked familiar, definitely Adeptus Astartes, but belonging to no Chapter Sicarius had ever encountered. At first he thought they might be Deathwatch – an operation on this world would suit their tactical predilections – but the warriors in the mist moved too fast to be Space Marines. No warrior in power armour could move like that.

  Sicarius had no time to wonder further. In a few m
inutes, silence returned, the mist evaporated as swiftly as it had appeared and nothing else remained. Nothing. Not even the dead.

  Reattaching the vortex grenade and sheathing his sword, Sicarius rubbed his eyes. He was wounded. Perhaps the blood loss… no, he dismissed that as he heard a low thrum overhead become a dull roar. It had been there for a while but Sicarius put the throbbing down to his injuries. It was actually a turbo-fan.

  Overhead, the bulky outline of an Ultramarines Stormraven loomed.

  As the gunship drew close, its assault cannons cycling down when no targets presented themselves, it turned. Standing on the rear ramp, Daceus waved his captain aboard.

  ‘When we found the downed drop pod, we thought you might be dead,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘I nearly was,’ said Sicarius.

  ‘This area is crawling with xeno-forms. How did you avoid them?’ Daceus sounded genuinely incredulous.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Daceus cocked his head asking an unspoken question.

  ‘I did have help though,’ Sicarius answered.

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘An unexpected quarter.’ Sicarius said nothing further on the subject.

  Daceus called behind him, ‘Apothecary.’

  ‘No,’ said Sicarius, holding up a hand and prompting the medic to shrink back into the gloom. ‘Bring me my armour. This war is far from over, but I suspect the scales have been tipped in our favour.’

  Daceus didn’t ask, for Sicarius showed no sign of providing an answer.

  In truth, he couldn’t but knew that he was right.

  The ramp closed, the gunship peeled away, headed back to the Ultramarines lines.

  In the darkness of the hold, Sicarius remembered the mist and the warriors within it. He remembered something else too, a detail of their war-plate. Bone, it was bone. They were covered in it.

  A debt was owed, his life preserved for some greater fate, and Sicarius wondered when it would have to be paid.

  It was the smell of Quintarn that hit you first, a gut-punch mix of turned earth, gaseous discharge from the domed agri-cities and the planet-wide reek of synthetic fertiliser. One of the bread basket worlds of Ultramar, its arid surface was hot and dusty, but no amount of desert wind could mask the pungent stench that wormed its way through even the most advanced air scrubber.