Brothers of the Snake

by Dan Abnett

  'He's at your feet, brother!'

  Natus stooped down, dropping his empty weapon and groping blindly with his one good hand, finding the young Ithakan's collapsed form.

  'Does he live?'

  'I can't see his life sign!' Natus wailed. He yelled Dyognes's name out in despair, over and over.

  Priad wanted to turn to help him, but there was no break in the onslaught. As fast as Priad shot or smashed a greenskin warrior down, two more filled its place. Priad reeled from the concussive force of a cleaver that shattered against the left side of his helm, leaving a bare-metal gash niched in the metal from ear to snout.

  A massive ork was upon him, a chieftain by his bulk and tusks. His massive arms and torso were painted black and gold, and wrapped in an armour of oily chains. He wielded a twin-headed war-axe, whirling it like a quarter staff. Priad ducked under one lethal swing, then dodged the return, blasting down a smaller greenskin chancer that tried to dart in and stab at him while he was occupied. Holding the thick haft of the double-headed weapon across his massive chest, the chieftain surged at Priad, aiming to run him down. Priad threw out his lightning claw and viced its grip around the centre of the cross-wise haft, splintering it. The chieftain staggered back, salvaging the broken halves of the war-axe so that he now spun a battle-cleaver in each paw. He raised them both overhead to split Priad like firewood. Priad jabbed the muzzle of his bolter up under the chieftain's sagging dewlap and blew out the back of his skull.

  As the huge ork fell, blood splashing out as he hit the ground, bolt rounds slugged into the greenskins at his heels. Dozens went down, maimed or slain by the crossing firepower.

  Khiron appeared, shooting his way into the heart of the melee to reach Priad, white flash-flames sizzling from the barrel of his weapon.

  Roaring his approval, Priad emptied his own clip into the enemy waves in support of his Apothecary's daring run.

  Khiron reached them, laying down further fire while Priad rearmed his weapon. His munition supply was perilously low.

  'Keep them off!' Khiron ordered without ceremony. As Priad renewed his blasting, ripping defence, Khiron clamped his bolter to his chest and looked to the two wounded men.

  Khiron tore open his narthecium, and brought out instruments of brass and toothed steel. He had feared he would need his reduc-tor to unceremoniously recover Dyognes's precious progenoid glands, but the boy was miraculously alive. The pike had ruptured Dyognes's secondary heart and both his natural lungs, as well as cracking his ribcage front and back. But the worst problem was blood loss.

  With the injuring weapon still in place, Dyognes's struggling metabolism was failing to seal the wounds. Khiron drew his short sword, braced the pike, and lopped the head of it off with one sure stroke. Dyognes groaned aloud. Without hesitation, Khiron yanked the headless shaft of the pike out through Dyognes's back. Blood gushed free in a ghastly downpour, and the boy rolled limp. Khiron levered open Dyognes's chest plate, used sterile clay from his narthecium to pack both entry and exit wounds, and then sprayed both with skin wrap to expedite sealing. He took out an inoculator and fired potent doses into the young Ithakan's bloodstream to stimulate coagulation and spike Dyognes back to consciousness.

  Dyognes began to tremble and jerk.

  'Quickly!' Priad yelled, keeping the enemy at bay as best he could. Khiron unlocked Dyognes's helmet and pulled it off. Dyognes sat up, coughing out a matted flow of dark red blood and bile. His face was sallow and pale. He blinked as he woke up to the maelstrom of noise and violence around him. Khiron helped him to his feet. Dyognes seized his fallen bolter, reloaded it, and began to stutter shots out in support of Priad.

  'Keep strong!' Priad told him. He could see how weak and unsteady Dyognes was. Khiron turned his attention to the miserably maimed Natus. He strapped bandage tape around Natus's broken skull, and glued it tight with skin wrap, then he locked Dyognes's helmet over Natus's head. For the most part this was an effort to brace Natus's skull and keep it held in one piece, but Khiron adjusted the headgear settings as he reconnected the suit systems.

  Natus raised his gloved hand to the side of his head.

  'I can't give you eyes, old friend.’ Khiron yelled above the din of fighting, 'but I can boost your hearing.' He'd notched the helmet's auditory systems up to maximum gain. Though it now plucked at his pain threshold, Natus could hear every excruciating detail of the war around him. Sounds assailed him. He could distinguish between the grating hum of Astartes power armour and the jangling ring of greenskin mail. He could hear and feel howls and thundering footfalls as they washed in. Khiron pushed a reloaded bolter into Natus's hand. Immediately, Natus shot two charging orks apart.

  Priad took Dyognes's left hand and planted it on Natus's right shoulder. 'Lead him!' he yelled. In a tight, blasting group, the quartet formed close and began to drive back into the press to fill the broken line. Ahead they could see the blue light of Andromak's plasma weapon, and hear the screams of its victims.

  They closed the rank. To their right, Andromak stood his ground, bellowing obscenities at the heathen masses, his armour covered in gouges and his standard tattered and frayed. To their left, Scyllon fought with bolter and sword, his shield long gone, just a useless, broken boss swinging around his left vambrace like an oversized bangle. He had taken a wound to his right hip, and his thigh was glistening with streaks of crimson blood.

  'Damocles! Damocles of Ithaka!' Scyllon shouted as he saw them.

  'Parthus.’ Natus gasped hoarsely.

  What?' Priad asked.

  'I hear... Parthus.’ Natus answered. The order to break. It had been broadcasting for several minutes, but none of them had been able to make it out over the cacophony. Only Natus, with his hearing alert to every shred of noise.

  'Break! Damocles! Break!' Priad ordered.

  Iron Snakes do not run, but this was not flight. This was part of the battle scheme as Petrok had planned it. Once word had come from Phobor at the head of the twenty-five squads, Petrok's relief company was supposed to pull back up the slopes, to hold the head of the valley. The legions of the enemy swarmed after them as they worked their way backwards, channelling into the narrowing defiles of the canyon mouth like water rushing into a drain.

  The way was treacherous. Petrok's Snakes were forced to move backwards, literally. They could not risk turning from the fight for even a moment. The terrain was steep and littered with rocks, and long-range fire from ork heavy weapons, mounted on vehicles back amid the ork horde, raked across them, pulverising boulders and heaving geysers of loose earth up into the air. A wind picked up, driving banks of smoke sideways across the valley, building great, choking rafts of cloud in the upper flues of the valley heights.

  The squads covered one another as they retreated. Laomon, under Brother-Sergeant Lektas, reached the designated plateau first, and knelt down, offering sustained cover fire to the others from the higher vantage. Lektas had lost two of his brave inductees that hellish morning. Pelleas, with Brother-Sergeant Goront at their head, came up next. Goront had lost his helmet to a warboss's chainsword, and part of his scalp hung away in a grotesque bloody flap. He whipped his seven remaining men up onto the plateau, and in those final moments of retreat, that seven became six as Brother Meglos was blown limb from limb by a screaming rocket. Laetes, the Apothecary, leapt down the smouldering slope to the devastated body, his reductor in his fist and tears in his eyes.

  Nophon squad, the right wing of the fan, backed up the slope, their munitions all but gone. Brother Baccys fired single-handed, his other arm wrapped around the waist of Brother-Sergeant Ryys, holding his beloved commander upright. Ryys had lost his right arm and terrible wounds disfigured his chest and back. Still he was yelling encouragement to his men, blood leaking from his helmet's filters.

  The swinekin gathered in vast numbers around the throat of the valley. Horns sounded, trumpeting a premature victory, the orks believing they had put their attackers to flight. War machines churned forward, crushing over the
piled corpses of fallen orks, trundling onto the slope foot amongst the front runners of the greenskin horde. Rockets dazzled in the air, leaving streamers of smoke. Heavy shells pounded into the valley walls. An echo like the wrack of doom rolled up and down the precious canyon.

  Priad brought Damocles onto the slope, firing as they came. Andromak at last had to dump his beloved plasma weapon, for it had become so overheated it was in danger of critical misfire. He blessed it as he set it down, smoking, on the steep incline, then drew his bolt pistol. Twenty metres back, he put a bolt-round into the abandoned power cell and blew the ancient weapon up in the faces of the advancing greenskins. A ball of blue light engulfed them, hurling painted bodies into the sky, some of them fused or scorched or denuded of flesh by the extreme heat.

  'Where's Petrok?' Priad barked. There was no sign of their master on the slopes, nor any sign at all of the fifth squad, Ridates. Priad searched the clamouring mass below for some clue.

  'There!' cried Xander.

  Petrok had been delayed in his retreat by a massive warboss, with whom the Librarian had squared in mortal combat. Petrok had driven Bellus deep into the warboss's sternum, but not before he had received two savage wounds to the chest and stomach. Ridates, inductees all, and fired with the will to prove their valour on this, their first ever undertaking, had closed in a circle around the stricken Librarian instead of falling back as per the design.

  'We can't leave them!' Khiron bellowed.

  'We can't leave Petrok!' Priad agreed. 'Xander, get Damocles to the summit! No arguments! I want two men!'

  Fate, and the simple disposition of the men, decided that the two would be Andromak and Aekon. They were the two closest to Priad, though every brother, even Natus and Dyognes, would have volunteered.

  'Come on!' Priad urged them. Khiron made to follow. 'Do as I ordered!' Priad yelled at him. 'Help Xander form the others tight!'

  'Priad-'

  'Do it! Help Xander!'

  Khiron knew what this meant. It wasn't simply an order for now, it was an order forever. If Priad didn't return, Xander would be in command, and he would dearly need the Apothecary. Khiron began to scramble back up the slope.

  Priad, Andromak and Aekon slaughtered their way back down the rocky rise, driving a path into the brute squadrons of the Painted Ones. They were no longer figures of grey, plastered as they were from head to foot with blood and gore. They were giants washed wet with the blood of their foe amongst the whirling phalanxes of black and red and sugar pink.

  Priad's trio broke in behind the circle of Ridates, forging an exit by force of arms. Priad and Aekon fired their boltguns, Andromak supporting with shots from his heavy pistol and blows from his notched sword.

  'Come on! This way!' Priad shouted.

  Seuthis saw him, and snapped his squad around, pulling them back under the boom and whistle of the falling shells. Three of his inductees were gravely wounded, one badly. Seuthis ran to his stricken brother and began to guide him clear, hacking with his short sword at the closing press of greenskins.

  Petrok stood his ground, defiant to the last, whirling Bellus two handed and squirting out forks of jagged light from his brow. Priad reached his side, firing the last of his shots. He clamped the empty bolter to his chest and drew his combat sword, striking out with it and his lightning claw together.

  'Quite an hour, this.’ Petrok muttered to him as they fought side by side, holding the tide back long enough for Ridates to filter away onto the clearer stretches of the slope.

  'This must be what Fate had in mind for us, master,' Priad answered.

  Petrok snorted, felling an oak of a greenskin with a single, bone-breaking blow. 'So, at last my friend Priad takes Fate seriously?' he retorted.

  'I know this much,' said Priad, slogging and slicing, his limbs so fatigued they felt as if they were on fire. 'If this is Fate's purpose, Fate doesn't like us very much.'

  XVI

  Petrok, who seemed to find amusement in all things including doom, was still laughing aloud as they reached the plateau. Seuthis had brought Ridates squad onto the summit half a minute before them. Now the remnants of the five companies employed the gained advantage of height and cover, and teamed that to the narrowing of the valley, which forced the swinekin below them into a compressed formation as they poured up the slope.

  Such a narrow, defined profile made the orks an easier target to contain, as long as munitions held out. The Painted Ones thundered up through the canyon mouth, and each rising wave was cut down as it came into range. A wide embankment of ork bodies began to form as the phratry guns found them. The embankment became a wall, a bulwark, as orks clambered over it only to be cut down to add to it. 'Swineguard!' Seuthis yelled in warning.

  Below, the greenskin mass was edging back and parting to allow the enemy elite a chance to try for the plateau. The swineguard were true monsters, each one of them a giant the size of a mature warboss. They wore polished mail linked with black gold and human bones, some of them carrying murder trees of black iron spikes on their shoulder harnesses. Clusters of human skulls, glowing white in the smoke-stained sunlight, rattled and clattered, pinned on the iron barbs of the murder trees as career trophies. The swineguard warriors were daubed in white body paint, banded with streaks of pink and red. Their throats were deeper, their roars more gut-shaking and bellicose than anything the phratry had yet heard. They eclipsed the war horns with their howling. Natus shuddered and stepped back, fumbling to remove his helmet, one handed.

  The swineguard began to assault the slope. Every one of them carried a chainblade of some description and a heavy bolter. Priad knew just by looking that some of those weapons would have been a true test for even him to lift, but in the ghastly, oversized fists of the swineguard they seemed like toys. The boss leaders, larger even than the elite warriors they commanded, wore barbed helmets, or bronze skull-pots adorned with magnificent antlers four metres in span.

  'I think you were right about Fate.’ Petrok said. He was no longer laughing.

  Behind the swineguard came the formations of war machines, the fortress trucks and battlewagons of the ork host. They chugged and clanged like steam engines, exhaling soot, driving saw-edged dozer blades into the mounds of the dead to plough them aside like snow drifts. Chain cannon on the foremost wagons opened fire, and the Iron Snakes ducked as tracer rounds streamed over the plateau like luminous hail.

  'Time for our last gift to them,' Petrok announced. The five squads had carried as great a quantity of explosives as they could bear with them over the pass the night before: just about every demolition charge they could muster from the landing ships. As they had advanced into the fight, they had seeded the explosives in their wake, inert but primed.

  The charges had been prepared for sowing by Pindor, whose skill with such materials was without peer. The devices were on a lapse trigger that would be keyed by the detonation of marker charges.

  Priad beckoned Pindor to his side. 'Your privilege.'

  'Are you sure?' Pindor asked.

  'Quickly, brother!'

  Pindor raised his boltgun to his chin and took aim. He knew as well as any of them that he was not the best marksman in the phratry. He targeted the lead marker charge.

  Pindor fired. The bolt crumped off the rock a metre wide.

  'For Throne's sake...' Xander growled.

  'Oh, shut up! I'm just getting my eye in.’ Pindor grunted back.

  He aimed again, and fired.

  The marker charge, struck cleanly, ignited. The force of the blast showered stone chips into the air. The gravel went scattering down the depth of the slope into the faces of the advancing swineguard.

  Harmlessly.

  'Bloody hell!' Xander exclaimed. 'We-'

  Pindor turned to face Xander and held up one hand for quiet. 'Two... one...'

  The slope came apart in a shockwave of fire and dirt. The magnitude of the backwash was so fierce that some of the Iron Snakes on the plateau were thrown over. Below them, swineg
uard monsters were torn apart, or hurled into the air, or simply vaporised. A retching column of boiling fire and smoke rose up above the plateau in a mushroom cloud.

  In shuddering series, the lapse triggered charges continued to fire, detonating right back down the slope and out onto the plain where they had been sown. Whole phalanxes of greenskins were obliterated in blooms of flame, and war wagons hurled over, disintegrating in showers of sparks and outflung scraps of metal and armour plating.

  With a noise like the Emperor's own thundering voice, part of the valley face came away in a colossal landslip, and buried thousands of greenskins under a tide of churning rock that obeyed no master except the force of gravity. An inferno retched up the slope, consuming the few, struggling ork survivors in the canyon. Torched ork munitions, some of them the payloads of fighting vehicles, exploded sympathetically, adding to the holocaust.

  As the booming echoed away and the veil of dust and ash began to clear, the five squads saw that an almost endless sea of raging greenskins still occupied the plains below, screaming and howling in outrage. But in the canyon slope and the foreland beyond, only devastation remained, a wild storm of fire and swirling smoke, lifting embers into the air. Vehicles, smashed beyond all recognition, burned and collapsed, their chassis disintegrating. Thousands of scorched corpses littered the incline at the mouth of the valley.

  'Move out.’ Petrok said, 'back up the valley. Now, while they're reeling.'

  Priad looked at him. 'What of the Chapter Master?'

  'Phobor reports that the twenty-five squads have broken clear. They're heading for the landing sites.’ said Petrok.

  'Fate loves us after all, Priad. It's time to join Seydon.'

  XVII

  By the evening of that day, the Iron Snakes had left the surface of Ganahedarak. Despite their losses, the extraction was a notable achievement. Several of the senior officers made it known that the action at Ganahedarak would stand proud amongst the attainments of the phratry.