Overfiend

by David Annandale

  Chapter Seven

  The eldar strike force had been hammered badly. It was down to half its strength. Its extermination was inevitable. Its mission was the most important fact of its members’ existence. So the Fire Dragons struck with the furious desperation of a terminally wounded animal. Weapons fuel was no longer a concern. There was only the imperative to stop the Salamanders here, in this nightmare space, before they disappeared into the warren of corridors. Beyond that, there was nothing for which to hope.

  Later, Ha’garen would have the spare seconds needed to look back at this moment and understand the frantic need of eldar. But now, all he knew was heat and a terrible alchemy that turned metal to liquid and gas, and battle-brother to twisted hulk or nothing, nothing at all. The Fire Dragons kept up a constant stream of fire from their fusion guns as they advanced. A swath of orks vanished, and after them more Salamanders, reduced to vibrating molecules.

  (Remember their names, add them to the roster of the lost and faithful: Verus and Hateris, Tychaeus, Sy’pax and Ob’iang. The cordon between the Fire Dragons and Elisath. The Space Marines who sacrificed themselves for an eldar. Warriors of purest faith and unshakeable duty.)

  There was no formation defence against weapons designed to melt tanks and bunkers. For several seconds, the Salamanders were under simultaneous attack by enemies of such radically opposite methods of warmaking that to counter one was to be vulnerable to the other. Then the eldar strike culled the orks engaged with the Space Marines, and there were possible actions.

  The Salamanders spread out, reducing the effectiveness of the fusion guns. There were no more melta bombs coming. Ha’garen deduced that there would be no further such weapons on this field. If the eldar still had some, they would have used them and finished the squads completely. They had not. Instead, they closed rapidly, still firing, their leader scouring the terrain before him and all who stood on it with his powerful xenos flamer.

  Ha’garen grabbed Elisath with two servo-arms and hurled him out of the range of the Aspect Warrior rushing to greet him. His flesh-arms swung the chainaxe. The eldar jerked left, trying to dance around him and reach the seer. Ha’garen’s ruined servo-arm, now nothing but an articulated club, swept in, knocking the Fire Dragon off balance. Ha’garen brought the chainaxe back. His blow exploded the eldar’s helmet and face.

  As he finished the swing, a blur passed within his reach and lunged upwards at his neck with a sword. Ha’garen took a stumbled step back, and the Witchblade sliced within centimetres of the seam between his gorget and helmet. Ha’garen grounded himself on his heel and countered with his axe, reversing his swing and bringing the weapon up. Its teeth snarled, ripping the air as they sought to tear flesh.

  Kaderial sidestepped. The eldar’s timing was beyond exquisite: it was impossible. As Ha’garen’s chainaxe went high, catching nothing, he realised that the warlock had dodged the instant before Ha’garen had begun his counter. And now the Witchblade plunged at his chest. He pivoted to deflect. He was as slow as Kaderial had been fast. He turned away the full force of the blow, but the blade sliced through his armour and he felt something cold and merciless, an omen of mortality, slide between his ribs. He brought his flamer to bear, and Kaderial was already behind him. He spun again, swinging the chainaxe before him, trying to use his greater reach to push the warlock back and regain the initiative.

  Kaderial was ahead of him again. The eldar crouched low, beneath the arc of the axe blade. The sword rose in a gutting strike. Ha’garen’s armour took the hit, but the sorcerous blade carved a deep gouge up his placket. He jumped back, using the damaged servo-arm to block a second strike. The sword sliced the arm off below the first joint, leaving Ha’garen a flapping stump on the servo-harness. The limb had already been ruined, and it was not part of his body, but his nervous system felt the loss as keenly as any flesh amputation.

  Kaderial jumped forwards, pressing his advantage. Ha’garen changed tactics, defending with offence, trying to crowd the warlock, limit his movements. Their duel was a brutal dance of move and countermove, but one where Ha’garen was perpetually out of step and off the beat. It was like a game of regicide where one player was obliged to reveal all his moves in advance to the other. Every one of Ha’garen’s blocks simply exposed a different flank to Kaderial. Every counter was nothing but an invitation for a specific strike. Ha’garen landed no blows. Kaderial was insubstantial as a shadow, as fluid as quicksilver. He struck the Techmarine at his leisure. There was a condescending artistry to his movements, as if it were somehow beneath him to be saddled with so clumsy and brutish a foe. When he decapitated the orks who tried to rush in and capitalise on the distraction of the duellists, the kills were elegant grace notes in a composition of perfect balance and harmony. Ha’garen’s only victory was in not dying. He suffered a thousand cuts, and he turned them into a bloody accumulation of minor wounds, just managing, with hit after hit, to deflect and absorb and redirect the blade. His transhuman nature kept him alive. His wounds clotted almost as quickly as they were inflicted.

  Giving Kaderial a long fight was no victory. So as he fought and blocked and bled, Ha’garen analysed. The eldar was faster and more agile. His anticipation of Ha’garen’s moves was far beyond skill and the ability to read an opponent. The warlock responded before Ha’garen even knew what he was going to do. Kaderial had some form of precognitive power.

  Query: how do you vanquish a foe who can see the future?

  Answer: put him in circumstances where that makes no difference.

  Ha’garen saw what he had to do. So did Kaderial. The warlock stepped away from Ha’garen and thrust out his left hand, palm out. He hurled something at Ha’garen, something with no form but fierce substance. It hit Ha’garen, an invisible tidal wave. It was a blast of hatred and loathing. It pummelled Ha’garen. It crushed and drowned. It engulfed him with the knowledge that his species was the most obscene aberration the galaxy had ever produced. It implied by assault that extinction was too kind a fate for a species so perverse, so hideous, so vile. So beyond any hope for redemption.

  The weight of the loathing was immense. The power of the attack came in the depersonalisation of the hatred. When it struck, it was no longer the expression of one being. It was the wrathful judgement of the cosmos itself. It sank through the interstices of his soul, a deluge onto sand, seeking the means to pry him apart. Ha’garen did not know fear. Since his induction into the cult of the Omnissiah, he knew very little emotion of any kind. But he still bore traces of the human in his being, and so he did know doubt. Not in the Emperor. Not in the Machine-God. Not in his Chapter.

  What are you?

  In himself.

  The seeds of doubt responded to the scalding hate. They rose to meet it like poisonous desert blooms. Their tendrils tangled in his will, strangled his sense of self. They suffocated him, concealing everything, becoming everything. They had their own will, and that was to bring him to his knees in despair. Their blackness reached beyond the soul as his physiology reacted to the attack. His vision greyed. There was weakness in his limbs. The very air turned to grasping mud that would not let him move. Awareness of the orks charging at his back, of Kaderial raising his blade, of anything other than the dark flowering of doubt shrank to a distant point.

  He fought back. He attacked the doubt with the weapons that remained to him: the certainties of Emperor, Omnissiah and Chapter. Those were the unshakeable bedrock of his being, the core without which he would not exist, and he did exist. And as long as he existed, there was duty. It too, was beyond doubt. Its demands did not care for doubt. Duty was action, and if he did not act, he would fail in his duty.

  And betray Emperor, Omnissiah, Chapter.

  Rage, pure and holy, at the mere concept of betrayal burned through the foliage of doubt. The poison still coursed through his system, but it had been there before Kaderial’s attack. It would still be there after the eldar lay dead at his
feet.

  His vision cleared. The darkness evaporated. Kaderial was still raising his blade. He still had his palm out. Ha’garen’s internal war had lasted less than the blink of an eye. Too long. In his anger, he surged forwards, chainaxe roaring for blood. His three remaining servo-arms lunged at Kaderial to grasp and cut and burn. Ha’garen struck to overwhelm. This was the attack the eldar had tried to prevent. This was the attack against which no degree of foreknowledge could help. This was doom.

  Ha’garen stormed into Kaderial, bringing the eldar within the full, terrible storm of his grasp. He surrounded Kaderial with the war-form of his rage. Plasma beam, promethium and chainaxe descended on the eldar from all sides. There was no escape. Kaderial did not dodge. He did not attempt that futility. Instead, he attempted another: to kill a Space Marine in the full transport of righteous fury. With nowhere to retreat, he met Ha’garen’s charge. The clash was unbalanced, a reed against a stampeding sauroch. But the weed had a thorn, and Kaderial plunged the Witchblade deep into Ha’garen’s torso. The Techmarine did not deflect the blow. The fury of his assault threw Kaderial’s aim off, and the sword did not strike true. It stabbed Ha’garen in the side. The wound was deep, the blood flow copious. He would heal. The blood would clot in a few moments. But now the sword was his. He clamped an arm against his side and trapped the blade in his body. Kaderial tried to tug it out. He didn’t have the strength. Ha’garen closed the burning, searing, crushing trap around the eldar.

  ‘By your ignorance,’ Kaderial began, ‘you will destroy all...’ The words failed him by the end, and Ha’garen barely caught them. Then there was crushing and paralysis, cutting and flame. He reduced the eldar to pulp and charcoal.

  When there was nothing left of Kaderial, Ha’garen looked for Elisath. The seer wasn’t far. He was still within the thinned ranks of the Salamanders. He was crouched behind a large metal box from which sprang a profusion of flexible stalks. Dangling from the stalks were chunks of iron cut into a senseless variety of shapes. Ha’garen had no idea what use the object could possibly have. Then again, he could say the same about Elisath.

  But he knew his duty.

  Ha’garen ran to the seer. Just behind the box, a melta bomb had gouged a crater in the scrap metal, almost down to the bare deck. Its walls were steep, and on the far side rose what looked like a dorsal fin five metres high. The location was almost defensible. Ha’garen tossed the seer into the makeshift trench.

  As his battle-brothers took down the Fire Dragons and converged on his position, Ha’garen turned to face the next threat to the seer. It was the eldar commander. He was advancing behind the wall of flame that his weapon was projecting. His approach, stolid and relentless, was, Ha’garen thought, more Salamander than eldar in style. It was also, for this warrior, suicidal. Down to his last few troops, lightly armoured, outnumbered by a factor of many thousands, the eldar had little chance of surviving beyond the next few seconds. But he might well drive his flame through enough foes to reach and kill his target. There was a commitment there that Ha’garen understood, even as he prepared to thwart it.

  Ha’garen heard thunder. He looked past the eldar leader. The oncoming orks were turned into silhouettes by the glare of the flames. They were big, much bigger than the ones the Salamanders had been fighting. Leading them was a monster. Ha’garen recognised the gigantic shape from the arena. It was larger than any ork he had ever seen. The entire hold seemed to shake with the doom-beat of its footfalls.

  ‘Brothers,’ Ha’garen said. ‘He is here.’

  The Overfiend loomed over the Fire Dragons commander. The eldar must have known what had come for him. The energy of the ork’s presence alone was overwhelming. But the eldar did not look back, did not deviate, marched straight on towards Ha’garen’s position and the seer.

  Such was his duty. Such was his end.

  The Overfiend fell upon the Fire Dragon. He reached a massive, mailed hand down.

  Before the Overfiend could grasp the eldar, something happened. And the flames shone hellish light on a terrible miracle.

  The kill kroozer entered low orbit of Lepidus Prime. Dropping through the ionosphere to a point less than a hundred kilometres in altitude, it skimmed the upper mesosphere like a bird of prey trolling for fish. It was visible from the surface, a bloated, grotesque shadow as it passed before the sun. A new moon had come to the planet, and its rising was a dark omen. It declared the futility of all resistance, and the pointlessness of dreams. It was the end of hope. It was the end.

  The Overfiend had come, and with him the green horde in numbers to drown a world.

  On the surface, the people of the city of Reclamation gazed at the new moon as it passed overhead, and knew a great despair. The Raven Guard looked up, and knew resolve, along with a grim realism.

  A being of absolute aggression was on the planet’s threshold. Beneath the surface, the fragment of a shattered god responded. There were none of the deity’s worshippers at hand to propitiate and redirect the inchoate hunger for war that the shard embodied. But now, near at hand were more of the beings who not only did not resist the shard’s desires, but were eager for its gifts, even if they did not yet know it. They were pure. They were aggression and war and nothing else. They fed the shard with violence, and it repaid them with the capacity for even greater feats of destruction.

  The shard’s essence reached out and caressed the kroozer. It was drawn inside, called by the enormous potential of the creature whose will the ship obeyed. The creature was found, and mindless energy underwent a kind of ecstasy. It poured itself into the orks and, most of all, into a monster whose capacity for violence was infinite.

  In the darkness of its temple, the shard vibrated and glowed. It called to the monster. It fed him and promised more. It promised him power on the same scale as his dreams of rage.

  The moon of ill-omen had not just risen over the planet. It had risen over the galaxy.

  Something entered the ship. Ha’garen felt it at an atavistic level. There was an apprehension of the alien and the divine, but no more. The orks had a much stronger reaction. All of them paused where they stood, and roared. The collective shout drowned out the machines. The roar was triumph, glee, ferocity, power. It was the sound of a species on the path to apotheosis. For a moment, the orks seemed to glow. No light shone from them, but they radiated energy in an almost palpable form. And they grew. That, Ha’garen could tell, was no illusion. Armour strained against expanding chests and swelling limbs. The footsoldiers, the greenskins that the Space Marines saw as little more than cannon fodder, suddenly had the mass and ferocity of elite units. The officers were turning into monsters of war. And the Overfiend...

  Ha’garen was reluctant to apply a word to what the Overfiend was becoming. He did not want to use a word like ‘god’.

  The undertow was hard to resist.

  The Overfiend raised his arms as if to smash the universe. His roar obliterated even that of his army. He was already twice the height of a man, and he grew larger yet. His armour sported a termagant skull on each shoulder, and looked like a disassembled Leman Russ tank. Massive steel plates covered his torso and limbs, and his lower face was protected by a jutting metal jaw. Pistons linked the joints and provided powered assist. The resemblance to a tank went beyond appearance. It must have been, Ha’garen could tell, like wearing a tank. And now the Overfiend expanded. For a moment, Ha’garen thought the ork was going to be crushed by his own armour. Instead, the flesh and muscle won out. The pistons were yanked from their sockets. The fastenings of the individual plates were flexible enough to withstand the pressure of the greater beast. Without the support of the pistons, the monster should have collapsed under the weight of his protection. But he stood at ease, half again as tall and wide as he had been, his fanged jaw now the same size as the metal guard. The multi-barrelled gun in his right hand seemed no more than a pistol. His left hand was an organic version of the b
attle claws wielded by his lieutenants.

  The eldar leader had sensed the hand reaching for him, and turned at the last second. What he saw changed his mission priority. He never let up on the flamer. Eldar fire and Salamanders bolter rounds anointed the Overfiend throughout his transformation. The rounds exploded chunks of his armour, but no more. The flames were simply a baptism. Something had chosen the ork, and would not allow the moment to be tarnished.

  The moment, a paltry second of chronological time, an age in the fortunes of war, passed. Their blessing received, the orks charged with unholy energy. The Overfiend moved with a speed that belied the weight of his armour. His hand snapped around the upper body of the Fire Dragon. He lifted the eldar warrior as if hoisting a doll. He squeezed. Runic armour collapsed. The eldar jerked. Bones shattered with audible cracks. The eldar’s helmet shook back and forth as if plugged into an electrical circuit. Then blood cascaded over the pauldron from beneath the helmet. The Overfiend hurled the broken doll to the ground and marched on the Salamanders.

  The Fire Dragons had been exterminated. The Salamanders closed their thinned ranks around the seer.

  In perfectly accented Gothic, and with the voice of despair, Elisath spoke. ‘You must tell your commander to destroy this ship.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘If you know what just happened, tell us,’ Ba’birin told Elisath. ‘Quickly.’

  The Salamanders were only metres from the exit, but taking it was no longer a viable strategy. An unending river of orks flowed in though the gate. There was no way out.

  ‘There is a fragment of Kaela Mensha Khaine, our god of war, on the planet. The orks respond to it, and it to them. If a being as powerful as the ork warlord were to come into direct contact with the shard, he would be invincible.’