Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  His accompanying skitarii unleashed a hail of plasma, graviton guns and micro-conversion beamers. Though the crystal creatures were manifestly inhuman they still obeyed the laws of physics and came apart like any other substance. Their advance was made over crunching debris of flickering crystal and cut-glass carcasses.

  Dahan allowed himself a moment of recklessness and surged ahead of his squad, vaulting into a group of the icy-looking crystal-forms with a burst of hostile binary. He swung his Cebrenian halberd, slamming its entropic capacitor into the chest of a slowly turning construct. A blast of hostile code stabbed into its heart and the green light was instantly extinguished. The impact of the halberd shattered the thing, and Dahan was already moving by the time its glassy remains fell to the ground. Just as they were poor shots, the crystal-forms were no more adept in the arts of close combat. Dahan slashed and stabbed with his halberd, reaping a grim tally of glassy enemies, and cutting shard-limbs from their bodies with his energy-wreathed scarifiers.

  Most battlefields were filled with the screams of frenzied warriors, the howls of the dying and the clash of blades, but in this arena the only sounds were booming gunfire and the brittle shattering of crystal-form bodies.

  The twin horns of the skitarii assault now pressed in on the crystal-form creatures, scything their numbers and pressing in towards the Space Marines atop the Barisan. Dahan’s calculations indicated that this engagement would be decisively ended in four minutes and thirty-five seconds.

  Dahan’s squad finally caught up with him, fighting with implanted weaponry to blast and cut a path through the heart of the enemy towards the Space Marines. Dahan instantly read the identity biometrics of each of the Black Templars, intrigued to note that not one of them displayed any elevated readings to indicate that they were engaged in a desperate firefight.

  He opened a vox-link, cycling through all known Space Marine frequencies until he heard a clipped, verbally-efficient battle-cant based on the northern Inwit tribal argot.

  ‘Sergeant Tanna, this is Magos Dahan,’ he said. ‘Now would seem a prudent time to withdraw.’

  Tanna’s voice sounded shocked to hear a non-Templar voice in his helmet. ‘This is a Templar vox-net,’ he said. ‘You do not speak upon it.’

  ‘Feel free to censure me when we are back on the Tabularium,’ Dahan said, ‘but I suggest you come with us before more of these crystal-forms appear.’

  Tanna did not respond and Dahan realised the sergeant had shut him off.

  ‘Foolish,’ said Dahan, amazed at the self-harm beings not defined by logic would wreak upon themselves for the sake of mortal pride and propriety. Dahan paused in his advance as he registered the destruction of two of his Rhinos. Nowhere in his wide net of sensory inputs had he registered a threat capable of destroying a vehicle. He pulled his awareness outwards as a rippling spiderweb of surging energy patterns converged on the battlefield, like a reversed pict-capture of a shattering pane of glass, the splintering traceries of cracks radiating back towards the point of impact.

  Moments later, the threat levels ramped up as fresh energy forms rapidly appeared without warning. All across the theatre of battle, the ground erupted with thousands of geysering blasts of prismatic shards as an entire army of the crystal-forms ripped up into the fight. The cycling counter of his battle-end calculation went into reverse before winking out and being replaced with a representation of how long his own forces could expect to remain viable.

  Inevitable victory had suddenly become certain annihilation.

  A trio of figures tore themselves from the ground before Dahan, two resembling crude anatomical representations of skitarii, while the third was a glassine mockery of his own form, complete with a tripod arrangement of legs and quad-armatures.

  A blast of fire stuck him on the shoulder, and his combat algorithms leapt in complexity by an order of magnitude. Dahan gasped at the hexamathic density of the required calculations and his shoulders erupted with thermal bloom as his cranial implants desperately vented excess heat. He staggered as his mind and body fought to maintain equilibrium between strategic overview and tactical necessity.

  Something had to give, and right now Dahan’s most pressing concern was the creature right in front of him threatening his life.

  He shut off his high-speed cognitive functions and veils of battlefield awareness fell away like wind-blown smoke. His doppelgänger came at him with its copied halberd slashing for his head. Dahan was still adjusting to his restricted world view and the blow took him full in the chest, hurling him back with a crack of splitting metal. Bolts of las-fire blasted chunks of its substance away, but its imitation body was clearly of greater density than its brethren.

  A crystal-clawed foot stamped down on a scarifier arm and sheared it from his body. Pain signals flared in Dahan’s brain. Nothing organic was left in that limb, but the hurt was no less real. Dahan’s recalibrating combat subroutines snapped back into focus and he parried a follow-up blow, rolling aside as the halberd slammed down where his head had been.

  ‘My turn,’ he snarled, driving his scarifier up into the thing’s body.

  Snapping electrical discharge blew out a vast chunk of crystalline material, and he kicked out with his third leg, snapping one of his attacker’s. The creature staggered, but didn’t fall until he pushed himself upright and brought his Cebrenian halberd down on its skull. The blow sheared the creature in two, its severed body collapsing like two halves of a cloven sculpture. More of the risen crystal-form creatures were surrounding him; the sheer quantity of enemy firepower had a quality all of its own.

  Four more came at him and he swayed back on his rear leg to avoid a thrusting spear-limb. A halberd strike destroyed the limb, and he sprang forwards to deliver a hammering electrical strike from his remaining scarifier. The creature exploded and he spun low on his reverse-jointed main limbs, scything his retracted rear leg around. Two crystal-forms went down. Dahan skewered one with his halberd, spinning the weapon around to deliver a thunderous strike with the entropic generator on the other. A crackling energy fist came at him and he lowered his head to take the blow on his armoured cowl. Crystal shattered against the adamantium hood; Dahan didn’t give the creature another chance.

  He surged upright, vaulting over the thing’s head and bringing his halberd around in three ultra-rapid slices before he landed. The crystal form slid apart into pieces, green light spewing from its ruptured chest cavity. On another day, Dahan would have dearly loved to study that energy source, but now was not the time.

  With a fractional space cleared around him, the skitarii rallied to his side.

  Dahan allowed himself a brief increase in cognition speed to access his strategic awareness protocols, skimming the blurts of real-time data-feeds from the warriors under his command.

  The information was not heartening.

  Dahan’s skitarii were dying, and instead of rescuing the Black Templars, he and his command squad were now as isolated as Tanna and his warriors.

  Tanna had long since expended his supply of bolter ammunition and the powercell of his chainsword was dangerously close to running empty. His armour was scorched from dozens of impacts and he was among the least wounded of his warriors. Auiden had already brought Bracha back into the fight, sealing a neatly cauterised blast through his thigh.

  Now Bracha knelt propped up by the Barisan’s tailfin, picking shots with his implanted plasma gun and fending off close range attackers with his combat blade. Issur met the foe blade to blade, hacking the crystalline mockeries of Space Marines apart with graceful blows of his shrieking power sword. Only his nerve-damage induced muscle spasms allowed the creatures anywhere near him. Shards of his armour hung from him where their energised claws had torn it from him.

  Issur fought back to back with Varda, who alone of them all appeared untouchable. The Black Sword cut through the translucent glass bodies of their attackers with ease, and his gold-chased pistol had a seemingly unending supply of killing bolts.


  Yael fought from behind a turret that Tanna dearly wished was firing, snapping off carefully aimed shots with his bolter and driving the enemy back with his sword when that wasn’t enough. Auiden fought at Tanna’s side, a warrior first, Apothecary second. His pistol was empty, but his sword and narthecium blades were just as efficient at killing.

  ‘Not how I imagined this would end,’ said Auiden.

  ‘Nor I,’ replied Tanna, sweeping his sword through the faceplate of a crystal-form imitation of a Space Marine. He kicked its broken remains from the gunship, all too aware that the encroaching ice of the plateau was at least a metre higher than when they had first crashed. At this rate, its structure would be completely absorbed by the plateau within the next ten minutes.

  Not that Tanna expected to live that long.

  He ducked as he saw a crystal-form take aim and felt the heat of the shot’s passing. Two more creatures clawed their way up the Barisan’s fuselage. He kicked the first one back down and plunged his blade into the green-lit chest of the second. Three more came up behind them, and sawing blasts of fire tore over his back as he threw himself flat. He rolled and found himself sliding towards the edge of the gunship, where a host of climbing enemy awaited him.

  ‘Tanna!’ shouted Auiden, diving over the topside to grab the edge of his armour.

  The Apothecary’s grip gave Tanna the chance to swing his sword around and hook it behind a protruding intake vent. With Auiden’s help, he finally found purchase and pushed himself away from the drop. He rolled as numerous crystalline claws appeared at the edge.

  ‘My thanks,’ said Tanna, scrambling to his feet and stamping down on the besieging hands.

  As far as he could see, the plateau was squirming with motion as more and more of the crystalline creatures burst from geysers of crystal shards, cracking and splitting the ground with their arrival. Magos Dahan’s assault now looked like a last stand as they too were surrounded by the emergent beasts.

  ‘Galling to be killed while we’re in spitting distance of a god-machine,’ cried Auiden, backhanding his chainsword across the neck of an enemy warrior.

  ‘If they’re so… nggh… close, why aren’t they… hnng… here?’ spat Issur.

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ shouted Bracha. ‘Would you trust a war machine that almost blew your ship out from under you?’

  ‘Kotov would never authorise Lupa Capitalina to fire on the Tomioka,’ said Tanna. ‘He has crossed the galaxy to find this ship and isn’t about to risk it being damaged by Titan fire.’

  ‘Then the next few moments are going to be interesting,’ said Auiden.

  ‘You have a strange idea of interesting, Apothecary,’ said Varda as he put a bolt through an enemy’s chest.

  ‘That’s only because you think purely in terms of killing.’

  ‘What other… gnnah… way is there to think?’ said Issur, cutting the legs out from two enemy warriors with one blow.

  ‘I have to think of killing and keeping all of you alive,’ said the Apothecary, adjusting the settings on his narthecium gauntlet. ‘Now that’s interesting.’

  No sooner were the words out of Auiden’s mouth than a hideously unlucky volley of shots punched through his plastron, gorget and helmet. Blood fountained, and even without Apothecary training, Tanna knew the wounds were mortal. He caught Auiden as he fell, wrenching his helmet off before blood from his arteries filled his helmet and drowned him.

  But the Apothecary’s face was a ruin of scorched meat and boiled blood. His noble features were obliterated and even as Tanna watched, the molten bone structure of his skull sagged inwards to form a sloshing pool of steaming brain matter.

  Tanna’s grief swelled around him, but he quashed it savagely as the Barisan lurched down into the plateau once again. He heard the shouts of his warriors, but ignored them as he saw a way out of their entrapment racing towards them.

  Emil would be calling him a lunatic right about now and Roboute would be hard-pressed to disagree with that assessment. He swung the grav-sled around a knot of embattled skitarii as they fought in a diminishing shield wall against the crystalline monsters that broke free of the glassy plateau like creatures rising from uncounted millennia frozen beneath the planet’s surface.

  Beside him, Adara fired his laspistol with pinpoint accuracy, decapitating a crystal warrior with every shot. Pavelka had no dedicated weaponry, but her mechadendrites were equipped with fusion cutters, ion beamers and las-saws, and they served as fearsome combat attachments. The grav-sled wasn’t armed, but Roboute was using it as a weapon, barrelling through the overwhelming numbers of enemy like an Adeptus Arbites urban pacification vehicle.

  Of course he tried to avoid that, but the closer he got to the Barisan, the harder it became. For the most part, the crystal-forms were directing their lethal attentions on the skitarii and Space Marines, but that was about to change.

  ‘This is insane and illogical,’ said Pavelka, neatly snipping the head from a crystal-form about to deliver the death blow to the exposed cortex of a downed battle robot. ‘I should wrest control of this vehicle from you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ said Roboute.

  ‘I would if I thought you wouldn’t just jump out and keep going,’ she replied.

  Despite the unimaginable danger, Roboute felt nothing but a towering sense of invulnerability as he slewed around the gunship’s partially enveloped engines. He shattered more of the enemy with the sled’s bull-bars, hauling the controls back to bring him down the starboard flank of the gunship where its wing was now completely enveloped by the ground.

  Around thirty of the crystalline Space Marines hauled their way up the listing side of the Barisan, like a horde of plague victims trying to break into a sealed medicae structure.

  ‘Hold on!’ shouted Roboute and gunned the engine.

  The collision was ferocious, a splintering series of shattering impacts as dozens of bodies went under the grav-sled. Its engines screeched and the rear section heeled sideways as the machine-spirit howled in protest at such cavalier treatment. Roboute’s harness split along its centre-line, and only one of Pavelka’s snapping mechadendrites kept him from falling from the sled.

  She pulled him upright and he waved his arms to attract the attention of the Black Templars.

  A Space Marine with an augmetic arm implanted with a seething hot plasma gun dropped onto the cargo bed, followed by a warrior with a crackling energy blade. Between them, they carried the body of a fallen warrior, but Roboute couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Another Templar dropped onto the sled after them, until only Tanna and the warrior with the white-wreathed helm remained. Though it was surely ridiculous, it looked as though the two of them were arguing over who should be the last to abandon their position.

  ‘For the Emperor’s sake, just get on the damn sled!’ shouted Roboute, though there was little chance they would hear him.

  But his words had the desired effect, and the two warriors leapt together, landing on the sled with enough force to drive the back end into the ground. The repulsor engine flared, but miraculously stayed lit.

  ‘They’re aboard!’ shouted Pavelka. ‘Now get us out of here!’

  Roboute nodded and wrenched the controls around with a whispered prayer to the Omnissiah to forgive him for his rough treatment of the grav-sled. The sled’s controls were sluggish, but Roboute had the measure of them now, and compensated for the added weight of the Space Marines as he gunned the engine hard. The sled shot away from the downed gunship, every dial on the panel in front of him tapping into the red.

  The crystal-form creatures weren’t about to be denied their prey and turned their attack from the gunship to the grav-sled. One wrenched Adara’s door off and received an armoured boot in the face. The creature fell away as Roboute wove a path through the battling skitarii. Bolts of emerald light streaked around him. Explosions stitched across the heavy plates of the engine cowling, and the sled lurched as some internal mechanism blew out.
/>   A voice blasted into his helmet. ‘Get us out of here!’

  Roboute flinched. Adeptus Astartes. Tanna.

  ‘I’m trying,’ said Roboute, skidding around a pack of crystal-forms as they tried to box the grav-sled in. ‘These things are everywhere. And we’re not exactly travelling light.’

  ‘We will secure you a path,’ said Tanna.

  Seconds later, blazing trails of bolter fire streaked overhead, ripping through the crystal-forms and clearing a path of broken glass. Adara added his pistol fire to the scouring barrage, and Roboute could just imagine the stories he’d get out of this. Fighting alongside the Black Templars!

  Though he’d caution the youth not to use the word rescue in his tales.

  A flat bang of electrical discharge blew out on the grav-sled, and Roboute’s heart sank as a number of the dials on the control panel dropped rapidly to zero.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit…’ he muttered, banging a palm against the panel: the universal repair panacea.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder, seeing the Black Templars kneeling or standing on the cargo flatbed with their bolters roaring.

  But behind them, the grav-sled’s engine was billowing twin plumes of tarry black oil smoke.

  The atmosphere aboard the Tabularium was one of control. Despite the sudden reversal of fortune suffered by Magos Dahan’s skitarii, there was no panic on the command bridge. Magos Kryptaestrex had assumed command of the Land Leviathan, and though the pioneer units had not yet certified the temporary structures bridging the crevasse, his experienced optics had adjudged them capable of taking its weight.

  Cadian units were already streaming across, but only a reckless vanguard, for the Tabularium now occupied the centre of the newly-built span. Its stomping feet shook the bridge and dislodged debris from the inner faces of the crevasse where the supporting corbels and inset supports were drilled. Portions of the vast machine’s width hung over the edge of the bridge, and Linya tried not to imagine what would happen if Magos Azuramagelli strayed but a little from its centre-line.