by Nick Kyme
‘Just getting warmed up,’ said Daceus, spitting out a red gobbet and wiping away the residue on the back of his craggy hand.
‘I think you might have left more blood on the floor of this arena than you have left in your body, old man.’
‘Is that right…?’ said Daceus, moving into an en garde position.
‘Take him!’ said one of the onlookers loudly, eager for some retribution.
‘In good time, Gaius,’ Daceus replied, though his eyes never left his opponent. ‘I’m going to wear him down.’
‘Of course you are,’ muttered Pillium, unconvinced.
Daceus flicked the tip of his gladius in a gesture for them to commence.
Both sides began to chant, anticipating the fight. An as yet unproven point was about to be declared and settled one way or the other.
Pillium smiled. ‘Willing to oblige, sergeant…’
He didn’t hesitate. A quick thrust drew a parry from Daceus’ buckler, and the older warrior followed up with a savage riposte from the blunted gladius that sent fiery needles down Pillium’s arm as it grazed his bicep.
A braggadocio cheer erupted from Daceus’ supporters.
‘Yes, brother!’ bellowed Gaius, who slammed his combat shield against the bars three times to signal his appreciation. ‘We roar!’
Had Pillium not reacted as fast as he did, blood would already be flowing.
He grimaced but swept low with his spear, forcing Daceus to leap back or be tripped. A second swing kept Daceus on the defensive, the blow pranging loudly against the combined defence of blade and buckler.
‘Do not get complacent.’ This from Secutius, on Pillium’s side of the cage.
More cheering broke out, this time from both sides.
Pillium leaned in until his weapons locked with his opponent’s, both hands on the haft of the spear, and braced. He pushed, feeling Daceus yield to his superior strength. Daceus was a fighter, one of the veterans who called themselves ‘Lions’ and believed strength and determination could carry any fight if meted out in the proper quantity. But he was wily, too. He dropped his left shoulder, intending to use Pillium’s own momentum against him and overbalance him. Pillium read the move and instead lunged with one knee, bringing the spear from horizontal to vertical, sweeping the ferrule up to connect hard with Daceus’ chin.
Stunned silence fell.
Momentarily dazed, Daceus staggered, blood gushing from a bit lip. He swept his gladius diagonally, left to right, a warding cut to buy time, but Pillium saw that too. He stepped around Daceus and struck so swiftly that the sergeant barely registered he had been disarmed and that the ringing in his ears was the chime of his gladius hitting the arena floor.
A rapid blow to the solar plexus finished it, driving the air from Daceus’ lungs and putting him on his back.
Gaius swore loudly, prompting a bellow of vicarious triumph from the other side of the cage.
Pillium revelled in this petty glory, despite what his better self told him about not wanting a spectacle, and made sure he met the other warrior’s gaze. There was anger there in Gaius’ eyes, hidden behind fraternal discipline but as hot as any forge. He raged – they all did, those of the old kind, when faced with the new. Pillium knew what he represented. It was extinction.
He caught Secutius’ gaze, who slowly nodded before turning his back on it all.
Pillium ignored him and remained in stance for a few seconds, looking down on his opponent with the neutral satisfaction of a predicted victory.
Staying down, Daceus explored the crack in his breastplate with his fingers.
‘That might leave a scar,’ he murmured.
‘Another for the tapestry,’ Pillium replied.
‘They taught you poetry as well, did they?’
‘And weapon mastery, hand-to-hand tactics, unarmed combat. We are experts at war.’
‘But not humility,’ said Daceus, groaning a little as he began to rise.
Pillium frowned, letting the spear drop into a one-handed grip and reaching down to help Daceus with the other. ‘I’m not sure I understand, sergeant.’
Daceus had regained his feet and was about to reply when a high-pitched whine shredded across the ship’s vox.
WE ARE MACRAGGE
The alarms were sounding again. From prow to stern, deck to deck, men and women scrambled into sudden and urgent activity, driven by duty and an all-too-human instinct to survive.
To live. To go on. That was it. All they had left. Previously held illusions of glory or honour or even retribution had long since given way to the overwhelming likelihood of extinction.
An atonal whine went through the Emperor’s Will like a rusty bandsaw. It drew Arna Reda’s face into a sharp grimace that pulled at her scars and set her perfect teeth on edge.
‘Get your gear…’ she growled, her skin alternating from tan to red to tan as the warning lumens flashed across her face. ‘Up, up!’
The ship’s armsmen rose with bone-tired urgency from their bunks. Sleep routine had been scheduled for forty-five minutes. They had taken barely ten. Momentum grew as the inertia of fatigue faded, ready hands grabbing the stocks of autostubbers and lascarbines. The lights were off, barring the red strobes. The ring of booted feet thundered through the corridor adjacent to the barrack room.
‘Armour on, flakweave and carapace. Heavy assault conditions. Move!’ shouted Reda, her own armour strapped and locked. Reports came thick through her personal vox, describing encounters with the enemy across different parts of the ship. Frantically, the Emperor’s Will strove to respond, its defenders coalescing the way white blood cells gather to fight an infection of the body. This ship was their body; lose it to that infection and they were all dead or worse.
Men and women filed out into the corridor clad in begrimed grey fatigues and scarred blue carapace. Reda followed them into the darkness, their numbers adding to the cacophony.
‘Who are we?’ she bellowed, her voice barely audible over the clamour.
But her charges all replied as one.
‘We are Macragge!’
‘Who are we?’ she asked again, ratcheting a grenade into the underslung launcher attached to her shotgun.
‘We are Macragge!’
‘Damn right we are,’ said Reda, ducking under an overhead branch of piping, and clapped the armsman in front of her hard on the shoulders to make him pick up the pace. ‘Now, let’s kick these bastards off our ship.’
She clamped on her helmet, hooking up the chin strap one-handed.
It had happened fast. Nothing, weeks of empty patrols and raw-nerved uneventfulness and then suddenly peril. Ships had materialised. With so few interceptors left and a dearth of still-functional anti-aircraft guns, the enemy boarders had been virtually unimpeded. But even without some of her guns, as weary as she was, the Emperor’s Will still had teeth.
Inside the ship everything was red-flushed darkness as gaudy as a neon abattoir. As the walls of the minor transitway pressed in, the air swilled with the stink of sweat and unwashed bodies. No time to think, no time to fear. Just fight. This was Ultramar. They were born to this, and she would not be found wanting in their eyes.
Through the press and the ruddy gloom, a small fissure of brighter light persisted ahead. The corridor’s edge. From there, the ship opened out into one of its main arterials, a larger hall. An honour hall. Reda carried on into the ruck, closer and closer to the light. Like a dawning sun it began to fill her claustrophobic world, migraine bright and hot as a forge.
The hall was burning.
‘That isn’t the lumens,’ she murmured as the armsmen flooded out in search of cover.
It was fire.
‘Into position!’ Fallad was shouting orders, as cerulean las-fire spat either side of his gesturing form. ‘By squad, by squ–’
He stopped short when his throat was shot out. Blood exploded in slow motion, painting his armour plate and spinning Fallad so he fell face down in front of the advancing troopers.
Others died too. Head shots, through gaps in their armour, some caught in the throat like their sergeant.
‘Down, down!’ shouted Reda, barely able to make out the enemy amidst the cascade of heat and light and smoke. ‘Into cover,’ she roared. ‘Rebreathers on.’
She dragged on her own mask and the sound of her rapid, adrenaline-fuelled breathing resonated loudly in her skull. It failed to block the high-pitched whine of lascarbines and the thud of solid shot. Metal-on-metal ricochets lit the edge of the maintenance alcove in sparks like dying fireflies. Hunkered down, she gave a burst of retaliatory fire and a smoke-hazed silhouette sank from view ahead.
Reda estimated around seventy per cent of her force had survived deployment into the arterial. She had around twelve troopers with her in the alcove, and several groups of a similar size stood farther up the corridor or crouched directly across from her, exchanging blind snap-fire with their foes.
Cultists, she realised. No enviro-suits, no rebreathers, though they did wear masks. Leather, but not animal hide. Reda thought she recognised part of a human ear on one of them, dried out and beaten flat. Cheap armour, scavenged gear. They were inferior in every way to the Ultramarians, but they had a manic fervour, an utter disregard for their lives or the lives of their comrades that went beyond suicidal. Through drifts of smoke, Reda saw a cultist crouched over one of the injured. A crude bone mask hid gender and identity but revealed a balding skull, wretched with rad-scars and tufts of wiry, white hair. Clad in black leather and rough brown hessian, the cultist looked more like a butcher than a soldier and went to work on the injured armsman with a serrated knife about the length of a human forearm. The armsman screamed, already in agony, but now having to deal with the torture of his flesh too.
Reda fired two shots, and the boom of the shotgun’s report barely registered in the madness of it all. The first shot almost cut the cultist in half and blasted it into the darkness to lie with the rest of the dead. The second killed the tortured armsman, and Reda said to herself this was mercy.
A heavy rate of fire was coming from the armsmen now, their better training and equipment tipping the scales. The cultists had thinned, still trading shots, still seizing like hungry arachnids on the wounded.
Reda had seen enough.
‘Push up, push up!’ she roared, letting the vox-emitter strapped to her breastplate carry the order.
The armsmen moved as one, suppressing fire staving off the worst of the cultists’ reply. It was all over in a few more minutes, the last of the cultists slashing its own throat and hollering some dark promise to its gods before it bled out all over the deck.
Recyc-fans had kicked in, draining off the worst of the smoke, and only then did Reda see the enemy’s entry point. A crude breacher shell had cored through the hull, the melta-burns from its cutting array still glowing hot around the savaged metal, such was the rapidity of the engagement. Banners, parchment rolls of honour, had once stood in this hall. They were soot and charred remains now, despite the best efforts of the armsmen to save them. And now they realised where the fires had been started.
Pulling down the rebreather mask, Reda regarded the ragged horde her troops had just annihilated. Cannon fodder. Light enough fires, cause enough disruption and the true target of an attack is much harder to discern.
Reports of further engagements tripped over the vox-feed as if to confirm this fact.
‘Lieutenant…’ A bloodied trooper, Gerrant, approached Reda to ask an unspoken question.
The sounds of battle echoed from deeper in the ship, north of their position. The enemy amassing its disparate forces, trying to attain coherency. The armsmen had to meet them and make sure that did not happen.
‘Anything from Colonel Kraef?’
Gerrant shook his head.
‘Then we move up,’ said Reda, and then louder so that all the survivors could hear. ‘You three,’ she said, her gaze quickly taking in three armsmen, ‘get the wounded to the medicae. The rest,’ she said, indulging in an emphatic reload of the shotgun, ‘forwards on my lead.’
REPEL ALL BOARDERS
Pillium thundered through the ship, his battle-brothers from the arena right behind him. They had stopped only to arm, making swift observances to the machine-spirits of their bolt rifles and strapping on combat blades before hurrying on. They were still unarmoured, the complex rituals required in the donning of Tacticus war-plate an indulgence they could not afford.
‘This is what we were bred for,’ said Secutius as he racked the loading slide of his weapon.
‘You find the cage is not to your liking, brother?’ Pillium asked, to which his fellow Primaris Marine gave a snort of derision.
He heard Daceus, Gaius and the other veterans following in their wake. Pillium had set a ruthless pace and would not let up until they reached the enemy. He had absorbed enough vox chatter in the brief observance before the machine shrine to assert that a sizeable enemy force was moving on the warp engines.
‘Poet…’
Pillium heard Daceus shout out, and turned sharply. The sergeant loitered at a junction point that Pillium had bypassed.
‘This way is faster.’
Pillium frowned, hesitating.
‘The warp engines, yes?’ said Daceus. ‘This way is faster,’ he repeated, and disappeared from sight as he took the branching corridor. ‘I know this ship, Poet…’ His voice echoed loudly, though it was fading by the second, ‘…like my tapestry of scars.’
‘You heard him, brother,’ said Secutius.
Pillium scowled, then nodded to the others. They went after Daceus.
Smoke laced the stale air, a thin veneer of grey muddying Reda’s vision and turning the ship hazy. She knew this vessel. She had served on it for years and seen active duty many times, but as the sounds of fighting and dying reached her through the fog, it felt like a foreign country. As if she had the map but had forgotten how to read it.
The armsmen moved through one of the ship’s cargo holds. All available intelligence, and this was fragmentary and unconfirmed, suggested an attack on the warp engines. Reda did not want to imagine the consequences if that attack proved successful. She kept her ear to the vox and managed to piece together that the defenders stationed in that part of the ship had started to come under heavy assault. Calls for reinforcements issued regularly across the feed. Other voices broke in, too, from time to time, voices Reda knew but had chosen to ignore. The voices of the dead.
And there were shadows, familiar silhouettes in an unfamiliar setting. Reda found these harder to push away, every sudden jerk of her combat shotgun betraying her unease.
‘Lieutenant?’ Gerrant had seen her react and had a wild-eyed look of his own.
Prolonged warp transit took a toll. Young, but getting older by the minute, Gerrant had a dark wash of stubble over the lower half of his face and pressed a standard-issue autocarbine close to his body. A winged skull tattoo was inked beneath his left eye with the name ‘Edon’ underneath. Edon Gerrant had served in the Imperial Guard. Vanko Gerrant had barely known his father, but the need to venerate in such a violent galaxy was strong.
‘It’s nothing, Vanko,’ Reda reassured him. She kept her voice low so as not to break the eerie quietude that had fallen upon the ship, like a mourner at a funeral. ‘Keep moving.’
She wanted to get out of the cargo hold and away from the shadows.
Give me something I can fight and kill.
‘Where are the rest of these bastards?’ asked Helder, keeping close to Reda’s left shoulder. She smelled the man’s fear-sweat through the dark patches in his fatigues. His breath was bad eggs and tooth rot. Nerves played havoc with his halitosis. Thin-faced and narrow-eyed, Helder had never been the picture of health but the last few years had been wearing on him. He looked like a ghoul and carried the aroma of one too.
Reda grimaced. She’d smelled worse, but Helder was breathing hard, and through his mouth.
‘Just keep moving,’ she repeated, gratefully turni
ng away.
He had a point though. Since the skirmish, they had heard the enemy but not yet encountered them. Reda thought the ship must be carrying the sound and amplifying it.
Either that or the warp was playing tricks.
‘Perhaps the ones we engaged earlier had ended up off course, and hit the wrong part of the ship?’ suggested Gerrant, overhearing the conversation. He had moved ahead of Reda and was acting as scout with three others.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Reda assured him. ‘Our only job is to reach the warp engines and get them off this ship.’
‘I can hear them,’ said another of the scouts, Tebb. ‘Seems to be getting louder.’
‘It’s always louder,’ said another, Merln, ‘but still nothing.’
‘Maybe it’s a trap,’ offered Helder, unable to stop his fear from bubbling up to the surface of his thoughts and escaping through his pungent mouth.
A slight hesitation seized the front of the group, and Reda could have struck Helder for his weakness.
‘Then we’ll be ready for it,’ she said. ‘This is our ship. This is where we live, by Hera. It’s our duty to protect it. This is Ultramar. This is your entire damn world. We make for the warp engines and eliminate anything unfriendly we meet on the way.’
A determined silence settled after that, fear subsumed by the desire to inflict violence against the enemy, just as Reda had hoped. The atmosphere grew hotter. Sweat gathered in the nooks of her body, stippling her back and forearms, clothing her neck in a scarf of perspiration. The air felt charged and had an actinic aftertaste. She heard the rising groan of the ship’s enginarium beneath them and smelled the shanty-town aroma of toil, grime and effluvia. The warp engines were close.
Then they caught their second sight of the enemy.
Reda saw the las-sights too late, shouting a warning just as Tebb and Merln spun, their bodies riddled with las-burns. Darkness swept in again a moment later, the red emergency lumens doing little to lift it.
