KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE
Page 1
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Book 2: PLAGUE WAR
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CONTENTS
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Blood Of Iax’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.
Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
‘We stand at the edge. Ahead of us lies the darkness of the void and the great undertaking we have sworn oaths to accomplish. Make no mistake. Mankind faces extinction. We have existed on the brink for ten thousand years, but know that if we do not succeed, if the Indomitus Crusade fails, then all is lost. We live in exceptional times. Though we long thought him gone, poised on the threshold between life and death, and beyond our reach, our father has returned to us. Guilliman has risen. The primarch is reborn. And he is not alone.
‘Primaris Space Marines stand shoulder to shoulder with us, the first defenders of mankind. Have no concern about these warriors, for they are your brothers just as I, Cato Sicarius, am your brother. We must learn to alloy our strengths quickly, for the galaxy is benighted and only we, the Ultramarines, can lift this shadow. Have heart, cleave to your oaths. Fleet Avenger stands ready for us and the brave souls of the Imperial Navy will see us to our battlefields. Never has there been a darker moment in all of Imperial history. We are the driven spear. We are the redoubtable shield wall. Courage and honour, brothers. We are Macragge!’
– Captain Cato Sicarius, Second Company Ultramarines,
on the eve of deployment, Indomitus Crusade
‘They have breached the hull, they are here.’
– Final transmission of the strike cruiser Emperor’s Will
Praxor Manorian had been amongst the first to die. When the attack came, it had come fast. Far faster than anyone on board the Emperor’s Will had been prepared for. The strike cruiser was assailed the moment His light had died. The Geller field flickered. A momentary, infinitesimal lapse. In the wake of the half-second of its failure, neverborn creatures infiltrated the ship.
They were not alone.
Renegade warbands, prisoners of the warp, fell upon the stricken ship like carrion crows. Their vessels were not large, nor were they powerful, but they were numerous. A foetid swarm of every foul creed, spawned by Chaos.
Sicarius had rallied the defence at once. Strongpoints were established, outer decks sealed off and their silent borders reinforced. Overwatch zones threaded the ship, poised to unleash devastating enfilades the moment the enemy dared to breach their cordon.
And they dared.
First came the horned, red-skinned foot-soldiers. They ran on bent-back legs, hoof beats rattling the deck plates, their long swords trailing sparks and hellfire. A defence line met them, Praxor Manorian at their head.
He had two squads of Ultramarines, his own and that of Sergeant Tirian. A brutal
fusillade started up the moment the neverborn horde was sighted. They materialised, rather than making a breach, emerging from smoke and shadow, presaged by the tang of hot metal on the tongue and the coppery scent of blood.
Manorian uttered no order. He didn’t need to. His men knew what was at stake. Instead, he levelled his sword and gave an incoherent shout of defiance. This was the old enemy, the one that few had fought but that deep down all knew existed.
Daemon.
Muzzle flare lit up the dingy corridor, a light so bright it blazed like a white sun. The red-skinned daemons drove into it. They wove through the bullet storm, deflecting missiles with the flats of their blades and scurrying up the walls and across the ceiling with perverse, arachnoid grace. It confounded the shooters for a few seconds, and this was enough to gain the barricade that had been erected to impede them.
The first daemon over the auto-barrier leapt for Manorian. The sergeant was ready. He had been fashioned to be ready, a perfect exemplar of genetic science, every cell of his body manipulated to make him a better warrior. Yet, in spite of that, the thing he fought was not of reality; it came from the realm of the supernatural. And it fought with supernatural speed and prowess.
Manorian countered its first blow, acutely aware of the others barrelling over the wall, his battle-brothers engaging them. The second blow scored his shoulder guard, a deep cut that left a greasy pall behind it that stank of offal and decay. A thrust of Manorian’s sword found its mark in the creature’s midriff but, far from debilitate, the wound only seemed to embolden it. It laughed, or at least gave an approximation of doing so, a long forked tongue unfurling from its mouth and shivering with every mirthful paroxysm.
With a grunt of effort, Manorian pushed the creature back. He rammed it into another of its kind, impaling them both as the potent disruptor field in his blade went to work burning their unnatural flesh. The first creature bared its fangs, still defiant. Manorian filled its mouth with the barrel of his ivory-chased bolt pistol and blew off its head. The detonation tore a chunk from the shoulder of the second creature, which was still squirming, pressed against the corridor wall, and both abominations dissipated in a slurry of viscous, foul-smelling material.
Manorian staggered, a wound he hadn’t realised he’d suffered oozing down his thigh. He clutched at it with the hand holding his sidearm and took a backward step. The corridor was thronged with the enemy. Seconds had lapsed, but the onslaught was total. A hatch had blown off, ringed with the telltale glow of melta-burn, and renegade soldiers were pouring in. A heap of bodies lay around the breach, a slowly accumulating barricade of wasted human flesh. They wore Militarum uniforms, but ragged, patchwork and besmirched with the sigils of traitors and defectors. How many worlds had turned during this long fight? he wondered. How many more would fall with the advent of the Great Rift?
His light had failed, that’s what they were saying. The Astronomican had ceased to exist and it had cast the galaxy into abject darkness. The Emperor was dead, that’s what the warriors chanted, rejoicing as they were slain.
A salvo from Tirian’s squad boomed loudly behind Manorian. The explosion tore the heart from the advancing renegades, the frag missile unerring and catastrophic in the densely packed corridor. Heavy bolters ratcheted up, the slow churn of thrice-blessed loading mechanisms rising to a tinnitus whine as the belt feeds reached optimum speed. Bodies evaporated beyond the barricade, ripped apart in a cascade of violent detonations. Manorian saw limbs ripped from torsos, and torsos blown to pieces. Nothing survived. Not even the daemons, whose vanguard had been largely obliterated or simply faded as the exertions of reality proved too much for their otherworldly bodies. It didn’t really matter; they had accomplished what they’d set out to. The barricade was in tatters, its defenders reduced to two-thirds of their original strength. Whatever bulwark remained, it would not last long, for through the cloak of smoky weapons discharge and blood mist came a third wave.
‘Heretic Astartes!’ roared Manorian, a renewed call to arms as much as it was a warning.
Dregs of the human cult soldiery had survived, and carried on fighting with the reckless abandon of zealots. The warriors in baroque powered plate who succeeded them simply mowed through the chaff. Their heads were enclosed in red-lensed battle helms and they clutched bolt weapons of archaic provenance. They advanced down the corridor in metronomic fashion, weapons lit. No thought was given to who or what was in their path, only that it stood in their way.
Manorian fired back, a slow awareness creeping over him that the defensive salvo had lessened dramatically in its intensity.
A throat shot killed Sergeant Tirian. He had been issuing orders to what remained of his Devastator cadre, stooping to retrieve the fallen heavy bolter of Brother Arcadius. His voice across the tactical feed, which had become a tangled profusion of alerts and desperate imperatives, silenced with a wet gurgle and the snap of bone. He fell back and was lost to Manorian’s sight.
‘Hold the line!’ Manorian bellowed. ‘We are the shield bearers! We are the vanguard! We are–’
He felt the bolt shell breach his abdomen, tearing wider the wound he had taken from the red-skinned daemon. It entered him and detonated. The impact threw him off his feet, turning him sharply through ninety degrees. A sense of dislocation and outer-body paralysis stole upon him, and he was momentarily confused as he saw his own brethren and not the enemy in front of him. His world sank then, and pain crashed over him like a tide of hot knives. It threatened to drown him as he struck the deck, confounded by the fact he was now looking at his dismembered left leg. Critical damage alerts scrolled rapidly across the vision of his retinal lens, too fast to see, their finality obvious in the sudden cold sweeping through him.
He tried to reach for his sword. The bloody hilt was just too far for his spasming fingers to grasp. He’d lost his bolt pistol too.
The vox crackled in his ear, the comm-feed resolving into the desperate sounds of another battle. A voice he recognised was repeating his name.
‘Scipio…’ rasped Manorian, gasping between spits of blood.
‘Brother…’ Scipio sounded afraid, but that wasn’t possible. Fear had been bled out of them, another facet of their miraculous genetic rebirth. ‘Brother, we are coming.’
‘They’re everywhere, Scipio…’
‘We are coming, Praxor.’ He sounded urgent now, and Manorian realised that the fear he heard was for him. It was grief, and a note of vengeance waiting in the wings behind it.
‘They’re dead, Scipio,’ was all Manorian could think of to say.
‘Hold on, Praxor. We are almost to you. Sicarius has driven them back. The Master of the Watch has rallied the field.’
‘Tirian is dead,’ he said, continuing as if he hadn’t been interrupted. ‘They were Guilliman’s Hammer. They fought at Arcona City.’
‘Praxor…’
The barricade collapsed and the handful of Ultramarines defending it were taken down with deadly efficiency.
Manorian looked up through a bloodshot eye as heavy boot steps resonated close to where he had fallen. The horned effigy of the Adeptus Astartes’ darker reflection gazed down at him. It didn’t speak, it showed no emotion of any kind. It merely drew its sword, a serrated thing that carried an age-old stamp of manufacture. Manorian didn’t recognise it, but he could guess it was from the old Legions.
‘We are all still fighting the long war…’ he breathed, though he could not say whether he meant those words for Scipio or his enemy as he watched the blade fall.
FIVE YEARS LATER…
PART ONE
LOST IN THE WARP
THE ARENA
Silence had fallen across the arena. A crowd gathered at the edges: two groups, very alike and yet also very different, each keenly eyeing their champion.
Pillium felt their eyes upon him and ignored them. He wasn’t here to entertain. He was here to prove his superiority. He hefted a blunted spear – an uncommon weapon for a Space Marine, but he lik
ed the feel and the balance of it. The charging unit in its flat, circular ferrule had been disengaged to accord with training etiquette where lethality was generally frowned upon. He had shed his power armour too. This was also unconventional, especially given the extended period of high alert conditions currently in force, but it had been quiet for weeks. Maddeningly so. Even the Emperor’s angels needed an outlet. They were made for battle, and to deny them that was to deny a man oxygen or a fish water. Pillium had another reason for his lack of armour. He desired to hone his skill at arms and his martial instincts without a technological crutch. In the training cages, he considered such things an encumbrance. War, of course, was a different matter. Well-refined skill and instinct allied to the finest trappings of the Martian priesthood would render him formidable and the equal of any opponent. Thus was Pillium’s creed. It spoke to decades, even centuries of war-making, but in fact Pillium had only served in a handful of campaigns, and had seen but a few major engagements.
‘Are you sure you want to do this again, Daceus?’ said Pillium, languidly rolling the spear around his shoulders, one hand to the other and then back again to tuck into the crook of his right arm.
He moved barefoot around the ten foot by ten foot cage, the light from the overhead sodium lamps describing the immaculately chiselled cut of his finely muscled body. He had no upper armour, though a light training cuirass had been offered and refused, and he wore a pair of dark blue fatigues.
His opponent, a gruff and squat-looking pugilist with a shaved head and a flattened nose, had taken the chest armour and wore soft boots. He carried a blunted gladius and a small, de-energised buckler. Cuts and bruises to Daceus’ face and exposed flesh told the story of the previous bouts. The patch over his left eye, a simple thing of brown leather, covered a much older injury. The fact he also surrendered almost a foot and a half in height, and a significant amount of breadth across the shoulders and his overall frame, made it clear by any level of observation that the two Ultramarines came from differing provenance.
The two groups of supporters who had gathered to watch the contest were each relative to the size and stature of one of the fighters. Old versus young. Experience against vigour, with obsolescence in the balance.