Hammer and Bolter 9

by Christian Dunn

  ‘They’re retreating,’ said Salk as he paused to swap magazines.

  ‘We haven’t hit them that hard,’ said Graevus. ‘I thought they would be on us.’

  ‘Then something else has happened,’ said Salk.

  ‘Don’t be too thankful. They could be mustering for another push.’

  ‘No,’ replied Salk. ‘Not when they had us pinned in place. Not the Howling Griffons, not here. They would have pushed on until either they or we were all dead. This… this is no plan of theirs.’

  ‘Maybe logic prevailed,’ said Graevus.

  With the gunfire reduced to sporadic shots, the roar of the flames and the clattering of armour became like another form of silence, as if the library were in the eye of a storm that had just passed over and now everything was still. Behind the barricade lay two fallen Soul Drinkers, brought down by bolter fire and shrapnel – one was dead, both Graevus and Salk could see that, his torso split open and blood already congealing in a crystalline mass around the enormous spine-deep wound. The other was still but the wound to his leg, severe though it was, should not kill him.

  ‘We need Pallas,’ said Graevus.

  ‘We do not have him,’ replied Salk. ‘Soul Drinkers! Bring the fallen and retreat to Sarpedon’s position! Brother Markis, Thessalon! Cover us!’

  Other Soul Drinkers, the survivors of a dozen Howling Griffons assaults, were moving through the smoke. They looked like the ghosts of some long-distant battle hovering just on this side of reality, clinging on as they enacted the same bloodshed night after night. Most had survived with bearable wounds, but there had been no doubt that the numbers and fury of the Howling Griffons would have soon prevailed. But now the Griffons had fallen back, and in their place was surely an unknown enemy no more inclined to give the Soul Drinkers any respite.

  ‘No,’ said Graevus. ‘On second thoughts, there is no reason here.’

  ‘Bring me everything you know,’ said Chapter Master Vladimir.

  ‘Of course,’ replied Castellan Leucrontas. ‘We know little, but I can confirm that the starboard dorsal cargo section has been lost.’

  Leucrontas had been summoned to the Forge of Ages, which had become Vladimir’s command post. Pict-feeds from the battle site showed little more than screens full of smoke and the vox-channel was full of barked orders and the confusion that the sudden order to retreat had brought about. In spite of that, the Howling Griffons were falling back in good order and even now mustering around the crew mess. That was not the issue.

  ‘Lost?’ said Vladimir. He leaned forward on the steel throne from which the Imperial Fists techmarines usually oversaw the work of the forge-crews.

  ‘It is gone. Full breach and depressurisation. Any crew in the area are dead, no doubt.’

  ‘Any Adeptus Astartes casualties?’

  ‘I do not believe so.’

  ‘What caused it?’

  ‘The psychic wards built around the librarium contemplative chambers reacted,’ replied Leucrontas. ‘And the readings so far obtained are esoteric.’

  ‘A psychic attack?’ said Vladimir.

  ‘If so, my lord, it is a vast and destructive one, well beyond the capacity of an Adeptus Astartes psyker.’

  ‘Then,’ said Vladimir, his chin on his fist, ‘a moral threat? An assault from the warp?’

  ‘Librarian Varnica’s testimony did suggest the Soul Drinkers had daemonic allies,’ said Leucrontas. ‘And there is… something… happening to Kravamesh.’

  ‘Kravamesh? The star? What has the star around which we orbit to do with the Soul Drinkers?’ Vladimir held up his hand before Leucrontas replied. ‘No, Castellan, I ask not for an answer. I merely muse upon it. We must see to the security of the Phalanx before we seek the origin of this new threat. Once the assault on the archives has been withdrawn, we must redeploy our strength around the dorsal cargo bays to keep them contained. A smaller force can maintain the cordon around the archives. Draw up the battle stations and see that Lysander has access to them. Nothing must get in or out of either area without running a gauntlet of bolter fire.’

  ‘Yes, my lord. And the crew?’

  ‘Order them to arms. Protect the critical areas of the ship. I had hoped that even after the escape this would be limited to Space Marine versus Space Marine. It seems events have compelled us to think beyond that.’

  ‘It will be done.’

  ‘Keep me apprised of everything, and…’

  Vladimir’s voice was interrupted by the bleating of an alarm. From the armrest of the throne slid a pict-screen that shuddered in to life.

  ‘The tech-adepts must have got dorsal security back online,’ said Leucrontas.

  The screen showed a view of a corridor, bulkhead doors standing open along its length. Mist clung to the floor and rolled through the doorways.

  Shapes were coalescing. Tentacles, eyes, mouths, malformed limbs, writhing masses of entrails that moved with an impossible impression of intelligence and malice. Teeth, blades of bone, tides of filth, all wrapped into dimensions that refused to fit into reality. Like a stain the madness was spreading out, a tide of filth and insanity that warped the fabric of the Phalanx as it advanced.

  ‘Daemons,’ snarled Vladimir. He looked up at Leucrontas. ‘Bring me the Fangs of Dorn.’

  In the smouldering ruins of the archive, Sarpedon and his officers convened. The smoke that still clung to everything made it look as if they were wanderers in dense mist who had come across one another by accident. They gathered around one of the few intact reading tables, where the ground was knee-deep in charred pages and gutted spines.

  Graevus and Salk joined Luko, Tyrendian and Sarpedon where they waited. ‘The dead have been counted,’ said Graevus.

  ‘What is the tally?’ said Sarpedon.

  Salk stepped forwards. ‘Fifteen,’ he said. ‘Those who remain number forty-seven.’

  ‘Was it ever true that there were once a thousand of us?’ said Sarpedon.

  ‘No,’ replied Tyrendian. ‘The old Chapter boasted a thousand warriors. We are not that Chapter.’

  ‘Then they died,’ said Sarpedon, ‘as we surely shall. Now is not the time to bar that truth from our souls. Many times a Space Marine facing death refuses to allow it into his mind, for by defying the inevitable we can sometimes rob it of victory. But not here. I think I accepted our deaths here when the Imperial Fists first faced us on Selaaca, but if any of you still rage against our fate then I ask you to abandon it. Take the certainty of death into yourselves, welcome it, and make peace with it. It is not an easy task, but now, it is the right path to take.’

  ‘If we fight not to survive,’ said Luko, ‘then why? Why not simply present ourselves to the Howling Griffons so they might put a bullet in the back of our heads and be done with it?’

  ‘Because there are matters unfinished amongst us that our enemy’s retreat has permitted to us to address,’ replied Sarpedon.

  ‘You mean Daenyathos,’ said Salk, ‘and Iktinos.’

  ‘We still have no understanding of what they intend here,’ said Tyrendian. Somehow he, as always seemed the case, had come through the battle in the archive with barely any scar or blemish on him. Perhaps his psychic talent was not limited to throwing lightning bolts in battle, but also gave him some kind of inviolability, some ward against the ugliness of war. ‘Presuming it was Iktinos, under Daenyathos’s direction, who brought us to this juncture, there is no indication of what he actually wants to achieve here.’

  ‘Then we shall find out,’ said Sarpedon. ‘The Howling Griffons will attack again soon, or a cordon will be set up to contain us. Either way, if any of us are to begin the hunt for Iktinos and Daenyathos then we must do so soon. I do not believe our whole force can move through the Phalanx quickly enough. The whole of the Imperial Fists and Howling Griffons will mobilise to stand in our way. But if a smaller force does so while the main force must also be dealt with, we will have a greater chance of breaking through any opposition and finding Daenyatho
s.’

  ‘Then who will go?’ said Tyrendian.

  ‘Sergeant Salk,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I ask that you select a squad and accompany me. I cannot do this alone. Captain Luko, you shall take command of the rest of the Chapter.’

  ‘You are our chapter master,’ replied Luko. ‘It is to your leadership that our battle-brothers look. Would you deny them that in their final battle? Let one of us go.’

  ‘No, captain,’ retorted Sarpedon. ‘I am faster than any Space Marine. Foul as they are, my mutations serve me well in that regard. Not to mention, I would send no man to face Iktinos or Daenyathos save myself. And I may be their leader by right, but ask any Soul Drinker what man he would prefer to fight alongside and those who are honest will name Captain Luko.’

  Luko did not reply for a long moment. ‘If I was asked that question,’ said Luko levelly, ‘then I would say Chapter Master Sarpedon. Is it my fate that I will be denied that in these, our last moments?’

  ‘It is,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I promised you peace, captain. It will come soon. I did not promise I would be there when it arrived. Forgive me, but these are my orders.’

  Luko said nothing, but saluted by way of reply.

  ‘Our objectives?’ asked Tyrendian.

  ‘Draw in our enemies, keep them busy. The fiercer the fight here, the shorter odds you buy for Salk and myself.’

  ‘I shall round up a squad,’ said Salk. ‘I know who to choose. It will not take long.’

  ‘Then we must part,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Remember, regardless of whose blood flows in us, we are still sons of Dorn. If there was ever a man who did not know when to give up, it was Rogal Dorn. We are blessed with a battle in which we cannot fail. Think on Dorn, and forget how to lose.’

  The assembled Soul Drinkers saluted their commander. Then, to a man, they bowed their heads to pray.

  Like a poisoned barb in flesh, like an infection, the warp portal had caused to grow around it a corrupted cyst that ran with blood and pain. From the steel of the Phalanx it had chewed out a great cathedral of gore, its arching ceiling ribbed with clotted veins of filth and its walls of vivid, oozing torn flesh. Blood washed in tides born of Kravamesh’s gravity, like wine swirled in a bowl, and through it slithered all the foul things of the warp.

  Every power of the warp wanted its hand played on the Phalanx. So many of their servants had been banished or destroyed by the Imperial Fists and the other Chapters represented there that even their aeons-old hatreds could not stop them from sending their minions to join Abraxes’s own. Brass-skinned soldiers of the Blood God marched from the blood onto the shore of torn metal, their black iron swords at attention and their muscular bodies moving in time as if they were on a parade ground. Flitting snakelike things with long lashing tongues darted here and there, quick as hovering insects, snapping at the morsels of flesh that scudded on the surface of the blood. And a horde of decaying forms hauled on rusted chains as they dragged an enormous thing of rotting flesh out of the mire, a contented smile on its bloated face as it plucked a tiny squealing daemon from the rents in its skin and swallowed it down. It seemed that every shape of the warp’s hatred was emerging from the blood-gate, beyond which vast intelligences gathered to watch this invasion of the Imperial Fists sanctum.

  On an island of corroded metal, all that remained of the docking bay deck, stood Daenyathos. He seemed the only solid thing in an arena of flesh that mutated at the whim of the Dark Gods, as if the dreadnought’s chassis anchored the whole scene in realspace and without him it would all collapse into the warp under the weight of its own madness.

  ‘I brought you here,’ he yelled, voice amplified to maximum. ‘It is at my sufferance that you walk again in the realms of the real. Abraxes the Fair, Abraxes the Magnificent, I call upon you to hear me.’

  Abraxes rose from his throne of bodies, twisted and fused together from crewmen whose minds had shattered under the psychic assault of the gate’s opening. The daemon prince’s beauty was not marred by the blood that soaked his garments and ran down his perfect alabaster skin. ‘Abraxes is not summoned,’ he said in a voice like song. ‘He arrives not at the whim of another.’

  ‘And yet,’ replied Daenyathos, ‘you are here. For who else would I bring forth to have his revenge on Sarpedon of the Soul Drinkers?’

  Abraxes leaned forward. ‘Sarpedon? And yet here I thought that Imperial Fists, as delicious as they would be, were the sole morsels I might find here to soothe my hunger. Yet Sarpedon is here… where is he? The gate is opened fully and the daemon army is ready to march. I would march upon him first, and destroy what remains in celebration of my revenge!’

  ‘I imagine,’ said Daenyathos, ‘that he will come to you. But mere slaughter is too small an objective for one such as Abraxes, is it not? To butcher a starship full of Space Marines is a worthy endeavour for any petty prince or aspiring daemon, but for Abraxes? Surely your dreams are grander than that?’

  ‘Explain yourself!’ demanded Abraxes. ‘I grow impatient. See! The horrors of Tzeentch march to my tune. A thousand of them emerge from the warp at my whim! I shall lead them forth without delay unless your words are profound indeed.’

  ‘This is a spaceship,’ said Daenyathos. ‘A spaceship as huge and deadly as any the Imperium has ever fielded. And now it is a spaceship with a warp portal. I have stolen the Predator’s Eye from the star Kravamesh and embedded it in the Phalanx. What could the great Abraxes desire more than a doorway into the warp from which spills all the legions under his command, and that he can take between the stars as he wishes?’

  Abraxes clenched a fist, and his thoughts could almost be read on his face. They were not human thoughts – they would not fit in a human mind. ‘I shall extinguish stars,’ he said. ‘I shall weave a pattern across the galaxy, even unto Terra!’

  ‘I can lead you there,’ continued Daenyathos. ‘For a lifetime I studied the path that will take you beyond the reach of the Imperium’s cumbersome armies and into the orbits of its most populous worlds. It is a path that leads to Terra, I assure you. But it leads also through the very soul of humanity! Imagine world after world falling, drowned in madness, their last sane vision that of the Phalanx appearing like a dread star above them! A thousand times a thousand worlds shall share this fate, so that by the time you reach Terra it shall be to deal the death blow to a species cringing on its knees before you!’

  ‘And for what reason would a Space Marine lead me on such a dance?’ said Abraxes. ‘You who were born of the Emperor’s will. You who have sworn so many oaths to destroy all such as me. Why do you wish your species to undergo such a tortuous death?’

  ‘I need no reason,’ said Daenyathos. ‘Hatred is its own justification.’

  ‘Ah, hatred!’ said Abraxes, jumping to his cloven feet. The blood washed around his ankles, mindless predators slithering from the foam. ‘The human gift to the universe. The greatest work of man. Even your Emperor himself was in thrall to it. There has been no creation to rival it. It builds worlds and brings them down. Aloud it is war, and in silence it is peace. The human race is nothing but a trillion manifestations of hatred! When humanity is gone, I think I shall preserve alone its hatred. From it I shall mould whatever I see fit to succeed them. Hatred alone shall rule among the stars.’

  ‘And so it shall be,’ said Daenyathos. ‘But first, the Phalanx must become your own.’

  ‘That,’ replied Abraxes with scorn, ‘is a task worthy of my notice only because Sarpedon’s death shall be a part of it. Sarpedon is the last of the universe I once knew, one in which Abraxes could fail. When he is gone, only victory shall be left. I can see the fates twining out towards destruction. There is no thread that humanity can follow to safety. Sarpedon dies. They all die. Then your universe shall follow!’

  With the atonal braying of a hundred pipes, Abraxes’s army gathered on the blood shore. Greater daemons, hateful lumps of the warp’s own will given form, were the generals of a thousands-strong army. Bloodletters of Khorne chanted in th
eir own dark tongue, bodies smouldering as their lust for slaughter grew. Abraxes’s own horrors were a shuddering tide of formless flesh, shifting in and out of solid forms at the speed of thought. Plaguebearers, emissaries of the plague god Nurgle who had once been Abraxes’s sworn enemy, fawned around the enormous drooling avatar of rot that was their leader.

  Abraxes strode to the head of his army. In response, the walls of the cyst opened into vast orifices, leading towards the interior of the Phalanx. Lesser daemons scrambled forwards, shrieking and gibbering with the joy of approaching battle. The lords of the daemonic host howled a terrible cacophony of bellowed orders and the army advanced, horrors of Tzeentch following Abraxes like the wake of a battleship.

  Daenyathos could see in the army’s advance another thread of fate winding its way towards a conclusion. Even Chaos had to observe the inevitability of fate. Abraxes, a being that had perfected its use of unwitting pawns such as the Soul Drinkers, had been drawn by that same fate to serve Daenyathos’s design. Through Abraxes, Daenyathos’s own will would be done.

  It had taken so long and so much to reach this point, but that was merely a prelude. The bloodshed on the Phalanx was the true beginning of Daenyathos’s remaking of the galaxy.

  Sarpedon had nothing but raw instinct to go on. He knew a little of Daenyathos and rather more of Iktinos’s ways, but even so it was barely more than guesswork that took him through the cordon of Imperial Fists and into the vast training section of the Phalanx, where sparring circles and shooting galleries were equipped with hundreds of target-servitors and racks of exotic weapons from cultures across the galaxy.

  The industrialised sections of the Phalanx, the cargo bays and engineering sections towards the rear of the ship, were the best place for a single Space Marine to hide. Even a dreadnought would find places to hole up there. That was where Sarpedon resolved to look, but first he would have to cross the training sections.

  ‘We should take the mock battlefield,’ said Sergeant Salk. His squad, picked from the survivors of the battle in the archive, was advancing in a wide formation to give them the widest angles of vision. Ahead, a jumble of deck sections formed a series of slopes, hills and valleys, each section on hydraulics which could move them into a new topography to create a constantly changing battlefield. It was here that Imperial Fists recruits were put through days-long battle simulations, waves of target-servitors and the shifting landscape combining to create a test as much mental as it was physical.