Catechism Of Hate

by Gav Thorpe

  'It is an honour for us all to fight in such fine company as we have here,' said the Chaplain, keeping the force-wide channel open so that all could hear his speech. 'We shall be lauded as the warriors that saved Styxia. What we do in the next day will echo down the centuries, marked in the roll of honour for eternity. The people of Styxia will know the names of their saviours and they shall praise them for generations to come.

  'But that is not why we will sally forth against this foe today. It is not for praise or recognition that we plunge into the tyranids as a dagger seeking their heart. It is not for glory or even honour that we attack rather than retreat. It is something far more than strategic necessity that leads us to place our lives in the way of harm rather than seek sanctuary.

  'We will find the hive tyrant and we will slay it. We do this for the Emperor and the Chapter. We do this because we swore oaths to defend the worlds of the Emperor against all threats, xenos and human, from without and within. We will do this because we were created to be bright stars in the firmament of battle.

  'We will not show doubt, we will not hesitate. How do I know this? Because we are Ultramarines! For ten thousand years our ideals have been the bastion upon which the survival of mankind has been founded. We are the exemplars, the bright beacon of war to whom all turn in darkness! It is our privilege to destroy these foes for the Emperor, and in His name we will cleanse the unholy stain from His realm. Our hate for this foe, our righteous loathing that brought us to this place, will be our sword and our shield, cutting down our foes and protecting us from fear.

  'Do I hate this enemy? Yes! A thousand times yes! I hate them with a passion that would scour worlds and extinguish stars. I hate them with a ferocity that breaches walls and topples towers. Yes, I hate the tyranids! I hate them because they slew millions who were under our protection. I hate them because they dared set their clawed alien feet on the sacred soil of Macragge, and defiled our home world with their spores and their beasts. I hate them because they killed my battle-brothers and brought Ultramar to its knees.

  'All of these are reasons enough to hate with a fire that melts adamantium and scorches the heavens. Yet I have one more reason to hate these creatures, one more cause to despise them with every fibre of my soul and every cell of my body. I hate them because they humbled us, the greatest Space Marine Chapter in the Imperium! We came so close to being destroyed; we, the light of the Eastern Fringe, the heroes of Ultramar, the sons of Roboute Guilliman, protectors of the Codex. We are the first amongst a thousand in the minds of a trillion trillion men and women and our light guttered and almost died - on our own world!

  'We endured but there is a wound inside my soul that will not heal, and its pain is more bitter than any scar on my face and any puckered mark upon my body. It is an injury that cuts me to my core, virulent with the putrescence of failure that lights a fever in my heart. I hate the tyranids as water hates fire, and I would be the same and extinguish their presence with mine.

  'To hold on in a glorious last stand is as equally pointless as retreat. A Space Marine owes it to the Emperor and the Imperium to give his life only at great cost to the enemy. To await one's fate, to accept a death without meaning would be cowardice. I know the tyranids well and know how to hurt them; the Ultramarines will attack!

  'The task is daunting, but that is no reason not to attempt it. Remember this simple truth: Hatred finds a way. Where love for our brothers and Emperor might ultimately falter, hatred perseveres for eternity. It is the Emperor's greatest gift to us and we have nurtured it in our hearts these long years of disgrace. Set aside your doubts and know that hatred will see us revenged upon this foe.'

  'Hail the Emperor!' roared Dacia, slamming his fist to his chest in salute. 'Praise the primarch! Honour the Chapter!'

  The cry and salute were echoed by the other Ultramarines. There was a growl to the sergeant's voice as he stepped up close to Cassius. Dacia dropped to one knee. Behind him, the rest of the command followed suit, paying obeisance to their commander.

  'Show us the foe and we will slay them for you, brother. Forgive us the doubts of these past days.'

  'There will be no more doubt,' Cassius said, laying a hand on Dacia's bowed head, 'only death.'

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE ULTRAMARINES MOUNTED up, full squads in the Rhinos, five-man combat squads in the heavily-armed Razorbacks. They headed slightly north of west, away from the Minoran Gradient, directly towards the volcanic uplands where the tyranids had made planetstrike. Behind the Ultramarines, Cordus Via was lit by the flicker of bolt-rounds and the blinding blast of the Titans' weapons as Ultramarines and Legio Fortitudis continued the pretence of defending the settlement, drawing the tyranids away from Cassius's line of advance.

  Smothered by the dark, the engines of their transports growling, the Space Marines were kilometres away when Cassius received a final signal from Princeps Jasyn. The Titan commander's tone was hushed.

  'No more defensive fire registering from Cordus Via, Chaplain. The last of your warriors has fallen. They took a heavy toll of their foes. We will honour their sacrifice.'

  'They will be remembered,' replied the Chaplain. 'Join the defence of Plains Fall, princeps. You have the gratitude of the Ultramarines.'

  'We will incinerate Cordus Via before we depart, to ensure the bodies of your dead are not defiled by these hideous creatures. We will re-arm and return. The Legio Fortitudis will lead the counterattack when Arka commands it and we will be reunited soon enough, Chaplain Cassius. May the spirits of your weapons stay true and may the Omnissiah grant you his divine knowledge to destroy this enemy.'

  'Ave Imperator dominus,' Cassius said before closing the link.

  He moved from the front of the Rhino to the main compartment, where Dacia and his squad were sat on the benches to either side; the seven surviving veterans were acting as honour guard to the Master of Sanctity. Cassius crossed to the rear door controls and lowered the ramp halfway. Above its rim could be seen the glow of Cordus Via burning on the horizon as Dominatus Rex turned its volcano cannons on the waystation. The depot ignited with a huge fireball that raced into the air, illuminating the gigantic war machines standing over the settlement.

  'We will avenge.'

  Cassius turned to find Dacia and his squad had stood up, kept steady by their power armour actuators as the Rhino bumped over the burnt earth. It was the sergeant who had spoken.

  'We will avenge,' said Cassius.

  DAWN SAW THE Ultramarines more than two hundred kilometres from Cordus Via. Standing at one of the fore hatches of the Rhino, its mounted storm bolter tilted to one side, Cassius surveyed the ground ahead. The land rose steadily into a series of steep foothills, before rising higher still as the volcanic peaks thrust up from the fields and orchards. A dark smudge swathed the distance, which Cassius took to be ash from recent eruptions. The highlands constantly spewed new life to the surface, the influx of nutrients more than compensating for thousands of hectares of crops lost to flash fires and lava flows.

  Kilometre after kilometre of cereal fields stretched to either side of the column of vehicles, swaying in the ever-present winds. Not far ahead, less than a kilometre away, the grassy young stems were thrashing more violently. Beyond, in a swathe that was several kilometres wide, there was nothing but dark desolation stretching far into the distance.

  At the front of the convoy, Cassius's Rhino was the first to come level with the tortured crops. From the vantage point of his cupola, by the light of the Rhino's headlamps and the rising sun, the Chaplain could see a carpet of snakelike creatures with bulbous heads and pronounced mandibles chewing their way through the crop. Known colloquially as rippers, they were the primary means for the swarm to take on biomass; other tyranids had vicious jaws and fangs, but did not feed on flesh. Anything slain was left for the rippers to consume and return to the norn queens for reprocessing into new tyranid bio-constructs. The ripper swarm was like a conveyor belt, moving forwards, consuming and breaking down e
verything on the surface, while a steady stream of full rippers slithered back towards the mountains.

  'Our task has been set out for us,' Cassius signalled his warriors. 'We need only to follow the swarm back to its source and we will discover the location of the norn queen.'

  'The death of the norn queen will halt reinforcement, brother, but we promised Arka we would destroy the hive tyrant,' replied Dacia.

  'I am confident, brother-sergeant, that if we threaten the norn queen, the hive tyrant will come to us.'

  'A good plan, Brother-Chaplain,' said Dacia. 'The beast will be lured to its doom.'

  'Squads Menaton, Heletis and Tyrius, use your flamers to set a blaze in the fields. We shall let the flames consume those beasts we cannot spare the time to destroy ourselves.'

  Even as Cassius spoke these words, the Rhino reached the leading edge of the approaching swarm. Rippers hissed up at him from the ground as the transport's tracks crushed carapaces and fleshy bodies beneath plasteel treads. Those vehicles that were equipped with frontal blades lowered them, carving wounds through the near-continuous mass of creatures, until the hulls of the vehicles were encrusted with gore and chitin.

  Behind the Ultramarines, the flames grew, spreading to the north and south as the winds fanned the growing blaze. From track, blade and fire, thousands of rippers were slain, yet Cassius knew it was but a drop in the ocean of alien filth that still stained Styxia.

  IT TOOK TWO and a half hours to pass through the main part of the ripper host. The further the Ultramarines drove, the more desolate became the land they passed. They had not seen crops for a hundred kilometres, and seventy-five kilometres ago the halfeaten remains of grox and unfortunate farmers had disappeared also. Here, two hundred and fifty kilometres behind the leading rippers, the creatures were gnawing their way into the dirt itself, draining it of nutrients, viruses and bacteria, sucking every last vestige of life from the increasingly parched earth.

  It also became clear to Cassius that the darkness that engulfed the highlands was not caused by a cloud of ash. In the far distance, their bases beyond the horizon, large spore chimneys were spewing swathes of gloom into the sky. Dark streamers of spores lay like tattered cloth on the wind, stretching for hundreds of kilometres to the south and east. The microorganisms carried across the continent would work in conjunction with the rippers, breaking down all biomass to make it easier to consume by the approaching swarm.

  'Spore risk,' Cassius warned the column. 'Recheck ventilators and seals.'

  Individual spores presented little danger to a person, especially a Space Marine, but an unarmoured human caught in a cloud would be slowly eaten away, skin first, then fat, then flesh, then bone, turned to a mushy pool of constituent elements. To breathe them in was agonising, even for a Space Marine, and the spores had a nasty trait of settling inside airways to replicate, choking their unfortunate host to death.

  As at Cordus Via, the two Thunderhawks had been rotating combat air patrols around the column, ready to warn of any sizeable enemy force and engage distant targets if needed. On the ground, the spore cloud was still thin, but carried on volcanic updraughts into the upper atmosphere, the cloud was much, much thicker. The Thunderhawk pilots reported the filters on their engine intakes were becoming clogged with the tiny creatures, threatening their ability to fly. Rather than risk losing one of the craft, Cassius had to concede to the concerns of the crews and ordered the Thunderhawks to return to Fidelis to fit new filters and await further command.

  Onwards the Ultramarines pushed, into the heart of the wilderness, into the dead land left in the wake of the Great Devourer. Kilometre after kilometre passed by with monotonous regularity, the only features left being the mound of a hill or the empty buildings of a farmstead. All vegetation had been engulfed, the land stripped to rock.

  Night fell as the column passed one thousand and forty kilometres from Cordus Via. With no desire for comfort, their armour protecting them from bumps and bangs inside their vehicles, the Space Marines were able to advance at speed, their transport slowing only to negotiate some of the larger drainage ditches and irrigation trenches. The drivers turned off their lights, not wishing to attract attention now that they were approaching the heart of the tyranid drop-zone.

  Two hours after sunset, Cassius was studying the scanner reports from Fidelis. The ground ahead was uncertain; the strike cruiser's scans had been affected by the volcanic ash and the growing spore cloud, which acted as a blanketing shield against some of the vessel's sophisticated surveyors. The Ultramarines needed to head further north, where there seemed to be the largest concentration of organic matter. He could be wrong - it might be some forest hidden from the tyranids in an ancient caldera, but Cassius's instinct told him that combined with the heat register that had been detected, he would find the norn queen amongst the spore funnels three hundred kilometres north.

  He was broken from his thoughts by a loud crack and a vibration that ran through the hull of the Rhino. He first looked to the sweeping scanner screen to his right, but all it showed were the haphazard heat registers of rippers returning to the spore funnels to throw themselves into the digestion pools surrounding the norn queen.

  The driver, Brother Exeletus, cursed suddenly and brought the Rhino to a sliding stop as another resounding detonation shuddered the vehicle from front to rear. The vox-net filled with inquiries as the column slewed to a halt behind the Chaplain's vehicle.

  'Hatches open, ready weapons for quadrant defence!' Sergeant Dacia's voice cut through the noise, silencing all chatter. 'Locate source of attack.'

  'I saw something, a thermal flicker just before the impact,' said Exeletus.

  'Where?' demanded Cassius. 'What sector?'

  'That is the problem, Brother-Chaplain. It was right next to us. I think we must have…' Exeletus's voice drifted away and he leaned forwards, peering through the driver's vision slit. He glanced at Cassius. 'There is another one. Off to the right, thirty degrees.'

  'I have it,' said Dacia. The veteran squad had opened the double doors of the armoured hatch above the troop compartment and were on firing steps, bolters and other weapons ready to repel any attack on the vehicle. The sergeant dropped down from the open hatchway, causing the Rhino to rock on its suspension for a few moments. He pointed his bolter to the right. 'Spore mines, Brother-Chaplain. Take a look for yourself.'

  Cassius pulled himself up to the opening and looked in the direction Dacia had indicated, switching to thermal vision. Sure enough, several shapes resolved in his view. They appeared as bright red globes, trailing half a dozen tendrils of orange that faded to green. Increasing magnification, the Chaplain did a full sweep, turning around completely. He counted at least twenty spore mines within two hundred metres, and had seen the telltale glimmer of scores more further away. Focusing on one of the organic mines, he watched it drifting on the breeze, buoyed up by gases inside its spherical top. Its tentacles just touched the ground at their claw-like tips, so that it appeared to be walking, changing direction with flicks of its tendrils as its rudimentary sensory organs detected light, heat and sound.

  It had started to head towards the convoy, drawn by the idling engines. Checking again, Cassius saw that several more were heading in the direction of the Ultramarines.

  'Lights on, move forwards,' said the Chaplain. 'Batten hatches, remote weapons only.'

  He let himself drop to the floor of the Rhino, boots clanging on the decking as the veteran squad lowered themselves around him. With a wheeze of hydraulic pistons the overhead hatch doors closed. Cassius moved back to his command seat beside the driver and quickly surveyed the screens laid out before him. He activated the controls for the remote storm bolter situated on the hull above his head and another screen flickered into life, relaying an image from the weapon's motion-pict. With steady movements of his fingers, the Chaplain brought the storm bolter to aim at a spore mine forty metres ahead. He thumbed the trigger button just as the Rhino lurched forwards and started to pick u
p speed. The mine exploded in a shower of hard carapace and acidic mist moments before the Rhino sped through the expanding cloud.

  Elsewhere there were other detonations as the storm bolters of the other Rhinos and the assault cannons and heavy bolters of the Razorbacks shredded more of the drifting organic bombs. Directing the fire of his storm bolter ahead, Cassius ordered the Razorback gunners to cease their firing; it was best to conserve ammunition for more worthwhile targets they would surely encounter once the attack on the norn queen began.

  Pressing on through the night and the spore mines, the column was sometimes slowed to a crawl by the weight of creatures in front, other times able to speed up the increasingly steep slopes. Despite the attention of the Rhino crews, it was impossible to spot every spore mine and destroy it if the column was to advance at any reasonable speed. Every few minutes a distinctive crack would sound as a Rhino or Razorback came too close to a spore mine.

  Hunkered in their vehicles, the Space Marines were safe from harm, though the irregular detonations grated on Cassius's nerves and every time the column was forced to slow it was irritating in the extreme. For all that Cassius knew, the hive tyrant could be half a continent away, though it seemed unlikely. The sooner the attack on the norn queen could commence, the more swiftly the hive tyrant would be brought forth from the horde and destroyed, relieving the pressure on Plains Fall.

  MOST OF THE night had passed when Sergeant Octanus reported that his Razorback had thrown a track and been forced to a halt. The other vehicles quickly drew up in a laager around the stricken transport, weapons directed out towards the moving field of spore mines. Only when the position was secured did Cassius open the rear ramp of his Rhino and meet Octanus beside his vehicle.