by George Mann
The monster was flanked on either side by two Plague Marines, each of them clutching bolters trained on Daed and his brothers.
Daed wasted no time. With a bellowing roar he lowered his head and shoulders, raised his power axe and charged.
The creature’s storm bolter barked, spewing shells, but Daed charged on, strafing left and right and swinging his axe in a wide arc over his head. It connected with the monster’s chest, shattering ancient ceramite and ribs indiscriminately, burying itself deep inside the rotten husk of the former Space Marine. The creature staggered back under the force of the blow, wrenching the shaft of the axe out of Daed’s gauntlets in the process, so that half of the weapon’s double-bladed head still protruded from its chest.
Then, almost as if the weapon had barely caused a scratch, it came on again, lashing out with its multiple tentacles, whipping Daed’s legs from underneath him so that he fell, hard, to the floor.
Daed scrabbled for purchase, attempting to lever himself up before the massive bulk of the thing fell upon him. He could hear the chatter of bolter fire from behind him, and realised that his brothers had engaged the two Plague Marines, keeping them busy while he tackled the beast.
The creature raised its left leg as if to crush him beneath it, but Daed rolled, springing up onto his feet just as the thing was struck by a blast from Targus’s heavy bolter, punching a massive hole in its left side and spilling its rotten innards across the floor. Daed raised his bolt pistol and pressed forward, shooting openly into the creature’s face so that it howled in pain and stumbled back against one of the pillars.
Hands shot out from the strange, fleshy membrane that covered the pillar, and Daed realised with disgust that there were humans in it, half-subsumed by the gelatinous goo so that they had become one with the walls, their bodies melding into the organic morass. They clutched the former Space Marine to them in their fleshy embrace, and it battered them off, lumbering forward, its storm bolter raised.
It snapped out a reply to Targus’s heavy bolter and Daed saw his brother reel, shredded by the explosive rounds as they chewed pockmarks in his chest and face. He fell without issuing a sound, his weapon clattering noisily to the ground.
‘Targus!’ Roaring in rage and defiance, Daed rushed forward, his bolt pistol flaring. The creature swung around, its trigger still depressed, and Daed felt a sharp pain in his left shoulder as a stray shot burst through his armour, blowing out the top of his arm and rendering the limb useless. Warning sigils flared in his helm display but he charged on regardless, crying out for vengeance, ignoring the pain.
Daed slammed against the rotten bulk of the creature, striking it hard in the face with his good fist. He felt its tentacles lash out in response, curling around his waist and squeezing him with crushing force. He could smell the thing now, even through his respirator, and its stench was repugnant: the very scent of death itself.
Choking as the creature tried to squeeze the life out of him, Daed grabbed for the shaft of his axe, hauling on it with all of his might in an effort to wrench it free. He felt it give as the creature shifted, and he pressed on with renewed vigour, working the blade back and forth until it finally slid free in a spray of sickly ichor.
Daed was feeling dizzy now from the sheer force being exerted upon his body. His armour was beginning to crack under the pressure and he could feel where the creature’s acidic spittle was searing his flesh, burning through the ceramite on his chest-plate. He had only moments to act.
With a huge effort, Daed raised the axe as high above his head as his good arm would allow him, and then brought it down in a sharp chopping motion, throwing all of his strength behind it. His aim was true, and the blade struck the creature hard in the side of the throat where acidic discharge had rotted away its armour.
The creature lurched backwards, loosening its grip and allowing Daed to drop to the floor. It staggered back, its storm bolter swinging aimlessly, and then, to Daed’s relief, its head slid from its shoulders, the last vestiges of its decaying flesh failing to hold it in place any longer. The head struck the stone floor only seconds before the lurching, spasming body.
Daed clambered up onto his feet, twisting around to see how his brothers were fairing. Throle was on the ground, his leg shattered at the knee, but with the corpse of a fallen Plague Marine beyond him. Bast was standing over the toppled remains of the other, still spraying its now obliterated face with bolter fire.
Daed staggered over to them.
‘Targus is lost,’ said Throle, matter-of-factly.
‘We shall mourn him later,’ replied Daed, putting a hand on Bast’s pauldron to stay his brother’s hand. Bast released the trigger of his bolter, and the last echoes of the battle died a few moments later.
On the dais, the cultists were working furiously to release the chains that bound Theseon to the marble slab, evidently planning to flee.
‘Hand me your bolter, brother,’ said Daed, passing his axe to Bast and taking his brother’s weapon in return. He raised it, took aim, and felled the screaming cultists one by one as they finally acknowledged his presence and bolted for cover, abandoning the Librarian where he lay. None of them made it as far as the door.
‘Bast – see to Throle. I’ll see to Theseon.’ Daed crossed the cavern, taking the steps two at a time as he leapt up onto the dais. There, on the marble slab, Theseon lay unmoving, still wearing his bright blue power armour, covered now in blasphemous scrawl. He was still alive – that much was clear to Daed almost immediately – but he had retreated into a sus-anic coma, disappearing into his own mind in an effort to protect himself and the secrets of his chapter from the foul ministrations of the Death Guard’s psykers. Whether he might ever be roused from it, Daed did not know. He hoped it would be so – Theseon’s mind was a powerful weapon, and he was needed if the war against the Chaos forces was to be won.
But now was not the time for such thoughts. Daed would have to carry the Librarian to the surface. He only hoped their mysterious benefactors had thought to consider their escape, too.
It was the work of only moments to wrench Theseon free of the chains that bound him. Daed turned to see Throle, upright, resting on Bast, his shattered leg hanging useless and limp. With a groan of agony at the sharp pain in his left shoulder, Daed hefted the bulk of the supine Librarian over his shoulder, and staggered towards the door.
Their passage to the surface proved relatively uneventful, if painfully slow. There was evidence everywhere of the passing of another party; corpses strewn at every junction, tunnels spattered with the blood of both human cultists and traitorous Death Guard. Once again, it was clear to Daed that someone had seen fit to carve them a path to the surface. With the burden of the injured Throle and the unconscious Theseon, it was a much-needed reprieve.
Above, on the planet’s surface, the green mist now swirled thicker than ever, cloying and sickly even through Daed’s helm. Trusting his instincts, he staggered into the haze towards the Thunderhawk resting amongst the broken spires of the vast temple complex.
Soon enough, the shadow of the vessel hulked out of the fog to greet them. Daed staggered over to the ship, reaching for the control panel that would release the boarding hatch. But his fingers encountered something unexpected there. He glanced down to see something dangling on the end of a chain that had been draped over the release mechanism. It was a tiny, fragile bird’s skull, bleached white and stained with spatters of dark blood.
The skull of a raven. He had seen their like before, hanging from the belts of fellow Space Marines, ebon-armoured warriors of the Raven Guard, whom he had fought beside on Empalion II. He cupped the totem in his fist and then thumbed the release control, causing the hatchway to hiss open like a gull’s wing.
‘What is it, Captain?’ asked Bast, standing behind him as he held the raven’s skull up to the light. It twisted as it dangled on the fine chain.
‘Hope,’
said Daed, cryptically. ‘Hope that we may yet win this war, and a debt repaid.’
Daed slipped the totem into a pouch at his belt, and then strode purposefully up the ramp towards the waiting vessel. The Brazen Minotaurs would triumph yet in this conflict. They had Brother Theseon, and they had help from the most unexpected of quarters.
Daed grinned as he dropped Theseon onto a bench and secured him into place with the webbing. He wondered if, even now, the sons of Corax were watching from the shadows. The thought filled him with an unexpected mix of confidence and dread.
Seconds later the hatchway hissed shut once again, and Bast gunned the Thunderhawk’s engines.
Now, Daed knew, the real battle would begin.
Daed
Light and darkness. Darkness and light.
Around him, the world was described only in the stuttering flashes of muzzle flares; the brief, blooming light of detonating incendiary shells; the flickering headlamps of Land Raiders as they roared over the churned earth, now sticky and sodden with spilt blood.
The traitors had shut off the immense, arcing lumen strips in the rocky canopy above and as a consequence the entire bastion – all several hundred kilometres of it – was shrouded in a dense, artificial night. Even with his ocular implants he was struggling to define anything in the intense gloom, and Daed suspected there were sinister powers at work, somehow altering the very quality of the light, or else his perception of it. He shuddered at the thought of such diabolical things influencing his mind. Daed was forced to rely on his other senses, and on the scant few glimpses of the battle he could garner by the muted light of scattershot explosions and weapons fire.
Around him, the bark of bolters and the echoing boom of exploding mortar shells indicated, along with the screams of the dying, where the battle was at its most fierce.
From his elevated position behind the hastily erected barricade, Daed could survey the entire battlefield, and from what little he could tell – given the gloom and the swirling, miasmic mist that seemed to permeate everything – things were not going well for the Brazen Minotaurs. Two entire companies of his brother Space Marines were engaged in the siege, and had been for weeks. They had suffered heavy losses to both troops and equipment, and he mourned each of them with a heavy heart. It would take decades for the Chapter to recover from such grave losses, and the battle was far from over. They had yet to even breach the bastion walls. Only the Emperor Himself knew what horrors they might face on the other side.
The traitors, by contrast, were legion, and cared little for their dead. They spilled over the bastion walls in their thousands, former Imperial Guardsmen now corrupted by the taint of the Sickening, the rot of Chaos. An inexorable tide of stinking, pestilent flesh, washing over his brothers as they slowly inched their way towards the towering plascrete skirts of the former Imperial stronghold.
Daed had slain hundreds of them in the preceding days, but he had done so without even a mote of satisfaction. That a stronghold so important to the Imperium could fall so easily to the sly imprecations of Chaos left him feeling ill at ease, as if a chill fist had wrapped itself around his primary heart and refused to let go.
Worst of all, amongst the enemy marched ranks of daemons: foul, one-eyed beasts with pustulant, bloated bellies and sharp, bony protrusions erupting from weeping foreheads. These creatures bore broken, rusted blades that dripped with deadly toxins, and they shambled unerringly across the battlefield, coteries of buzzing insects trailing in their wake. Obscene, fist-sized creatures festered in their rancid guts, scampering about amongst their putrid organs, breeding disease.
Daed had seen his brothers cut down by these grotesque plague-
bearers, felled by a single stroke of their poisoned blades. It was not the wounds themselves that brought death, but the vile poisons imparted by their blades. In this war, even the most innocuous graze could prove deadly, if the enemy spores were allowed to fester.
The creatures were difficult to kill, too, and even harder to spot amongst the green mist and frenetic urgency of the battlefield. They leered out of the eternal night, chanting softly beneath their foetid breath, and despite his zeal and determination to face these abominations in the name of the Emperor, to crush them with all the might of the Brazen Minotaurs, Daed feared them.
He did not fear death, nor did he fear facing the daemons in open combat; it was purely what they represented that struck him with a cold sense of dread. He feared the stain such monsters left upon the universe, the corruption and dissention they bred amongst men, and perhaps most of all, he feared failure. He feared the consequences if he and his brothers did not prevail. Such fear as this, he knew, made him stronger, more resolute. This was fear that he could embrace and channel into rage. He would turn it upon his enemies and he would smite them.
Daed longed to bring the battle to a swift end. The war in the Sargassion Reach had become protracted, the enemy entrenched. He was resolved that he would do his duty – that he would lead the Brazen Minotaurs to victory, or would die trying. He would do so in the name of the Emperor, and he would do so with righteousness on his side. Nevertheless, he craved resolution. A war of attrition did not suit the ways of the Brazen Minotaurs.
Nevertheless, they would do as they must.
The warband Empyrion’s Blight, led by traitorous Space Marines of the former Death Guard Legion, had plunged the Sargassion Reach into conflict, devastating entire worlds and leaving behind nothing but seething pestilence and death. These former Space Marines were now given over wholly to the foul taint of Nurgle, and the very thought of their depravity made Daed’s blood boil. Their motives were obscure and arcane. Their corruption appeared to extend not only to the physical – the oozing boils, necrotic flesh and parasitic worms that they encouraged to writhe and fester inside their once glorious bodies – but to their logical minds, also. Their tactics could not be anticipated. Their goals could not be fathomed. They appeared to delight only in destruction and death for their own sake. The spreading of the Sickening had become their sole purpose.
Planet after planet had fallen to the contagion, from the mortuary world of Kasharat to the forge world of Plutonis. And now it had come to Fortane’s World. The last outpost on the rim of the Sargassion Reach, a bizarre planet with an eccentric orbit that brought it close to the neighbouring Kandoor system, a sector of Imperial space teeming with heavily-populated colony worlds. Fortane’s World, if not regained, would form the perfect beachhead for an invasion of Kandoor. Billions of human souls would fall to the Sickening if the Chaos forces were allowed to progress. The Brazen Minotaurs were all that stood between Empyrion’s Blight and death on an unimaginable scale.
On top of that, Daed knew, came the risk of corruption. Those who did not die in such a mass invasion might instead succumb to the lure of the impure, the deadly breath of Chaos. That would mean a fate much worse than death and, more harmfully for the Imperium, a swelling of the enemy ranks. It had to be prevented. Failure was not an option.
Fortane’s World itself was not an inhabited planet. There were no useful minerals buried deep beneath its crust, and the gravitational stresses imposed by its eccentric orbit rendered it unsuitable for the erection of vast hive cities. Nevertheless, the worldlet was one of the most valuable planetary bodies in the system. Its position at the tail end of the Sargassion Reach was paramount – a prime defensive position against the terrors of the warp and the ever-encroaching xenos threat emanating from the galactic rim.
The planet’s unique composition aided significantly in this role: half of the world was encapsulated by a vast, rocky carapace, a tectonic umbrella that from space resembled an enormous, half-closed lid, shrouding the planet against the vagaries of the immaterium, and any weapons that might be trained upon its surface from orbit. Beneath this immense, natural shield, the Imperium had constructed a city-sized bastion, and from here innumerable foes had been rebutted in the intervenin
g millennia, from xenos incursions to all manner of warp-spawned horrors.
The bastion was built to be impregnable. No invasion force had ever succeeded in breaching its walls by direct assault or devastating bombardment. As Daed well knew, however, there were other, more subtle, forms of invasion.
The taint of Chaos had come to Fortane’s World, worming its insidious way into the weak minds of the men who were stationed there, insinuating itself amongst the ranks of the Imperial Guard. Unbeknownst to the Administratum or the Ecclesiarchy, sinister death cults had begun to spring up amongst the men, in turn blossoming into full-blown dissent and daemon worship. By the time the problem had been identified it was already too late, and the garrison on Fortane’s World was in full revolt. Those few who had remained true to the Emperor were sacrificed according to bizarre rites, their bodies given over to become breeding grounds for plague maggots and the poisonous warp spawn that now stalked across the battlefield, spreading their foul contagion.
So it was that when the vanguard had arrived – the festering hulks of Empyrion’s Blight – the traitorous bastards of Fortane’s World had thrown open the doors and welcomed the Chaos forces inside.
Now, with only two companies at his disposal, Captain Daed of the Brazen Minotaurs needed to find a means to achieve the impossible: he had to breach the walls of the bastion and root out an entrenched enemy that knew the bastion far better than he did, and who outnumbered the Imperial forces by a factor of ten to one.
Not only that, but he was working to a deadline. Within another ten days Fortane’s World would reach the zenith of its orbit, bringing it temporarily within the boundaries of the Kandoor system. Once that happened, it would be too late. The infection would spread.
Daed sighed. He lived for battle. He did not know patience. He longed to find himself on the other side of those plascrete walls so that he might take his axe to the traitorous scum who hid behind them.
