Predator, Prey

by Rob Sanders

  ‘We suffered a breach, captain,’ the oratorium replied. ‘Fortress-Monastery North. Captain Hieronimax is down. The First Captain went to repel the breach force with the Chapter Master’s honour guard and support the Ninth.’

  ‘Sounds like Garthas,’ Reoch added across a private channel, with simultaneous hints of derision and respect.

  ‘To whom do I speak?’ Thane said.

  Another greenskin died. Then another. And another.

  ‘Brother Zerberyn, captain.’

  Thane recognised the name. A member of Alameda’s honour guard. The warriors fighting at the First Captain’s side, Fortress Monastery North.

  ‘Are you injured, honoured brother?’

  ‘At Fortunata, captain,’ Zerberyn replied.

  ‘Brother,’ Thane said, ‘we are hard pressed to gain any ground here. The void ramparts are swarming with greenskins. Can Captain Tyrian spare brothers for a front-line repulsion? We have to push these savages back into range of our weapons. Then we might be able to hold them there.’

  ‘Negative, captain,’ Zerberyn said. ‘The First Captain’s orders were very specific. All companies to hold their own fronts. He did not want resulting strategic weaknesses to lead to breach actions.’

  ‘We already have breach actions,’ Thane snapped back. As the captain spoke, the killing continued.

  ‘And we cannot afford another,’ Zerberyn said. ‘I’m sorry, sir. These are the First Captain’s orders. I would no more countermand them than your own.’

  ‘What about the guns?’ Apothecary Reoch barked, slashing back the beasts with one hand, while plugging charging green swine in the face with the bolt pistol clutched furiously in his other.

  ‘The rampart guns are silent,’ Thane relayed. Indeed, the mega-bolters and gatling-blaster emplacements had smoked to a stop some time before. Their absence had been keenly felt by the Fists Exemplar on the West Transept.

  ‘Master Aloysian ordered the weapons to cease firing, sir,’ Zerberyn reported. ‘The Master of the Forge observed protocols recognising that fighting on the ramparts had become a close-quarters engagement. The guns were silenced in order that no battle-brothers be harmed by the star fort’s weaponry.’

  ‘We’ll risk it,’ Reoch growled.

  ‘Return the guns to operation,’ Thane commanded.

  ‘The Master’s orders, sir,’ Zerberyn replied. ‘His protocols won’t allow it.’

  ‘Are we to die out here by regulation and protocol?’ Thane called back. ‘Patch me through to Master Aloysian.’

  ‘As you wish, captain.’

  ‘I fear he enjoyed that,’ Reoch said of the officious Zerberyn.

  Thane had other problems. His boltgun was empty. Like many of his brother Fists, he would need resupplying, and soon. There was no time for such expediency, however. Swamped by greenskins clambering over the corpses of their barbarian kin, Thane had used the final few rounds of the sickle magazine to take the momentum out of a rabid charge mounted by a suicidal throng of alien monstrosities. He didn’t even have the precious moments it would take to recover his final clip, mag-locked to the rear of his belt. The mob of orks surrounding the captain were met with thrashing elbows and the stamp of armoured boots. Ducking instruments of bludgeoning improvisation and allowing the broad blades of crude machetes to glance off his pauldrons, Thane tried to give back as much savagery and violence as was being collectively bestowed on him.

  ‘Master Aloysian?’

  ‘Yes, second captain,’ the Master of the Forge returned. Thane tried to imagine the Techmarine in the generatorium, at the head of an army of drone-brained servitors, a perpetual scowl buried in the white of his beard.

  ‘Master, I need the rampart guns to visit Dorn’s ire on the enemy once more,’ Thane put to him. The captain brought down a beast with a power-armoured sweep of one leg before stamping down on the throat of the prone creature with the sole of his boot. It took several determined stomps to crush down through the gristle and iron-hard muscle of the greenskin’s neck.

  ‘Impossible, captain,’ Aloysian told him.

  ‘That’s not acceptable, Master Aloysian. I don’t care for the letter of your protocols: we need those guns.’

  ‘Their protocols are runic,’ Aloysian called back. ‘They will not compromise their own observances. And those observances exist to preserve life.’

  ‘Life is not being preserved out here, Master Aloysian, I can assure you of that.’

  ‘Captain,’ the Techmarine returned, ‘I can’t do anything for you. Each holy weapon would need catechising by hand. Besides, I’ve sent the gun crews to Fortress Monastery North to establish barricades and corridor emplacements.’

  ‘What can the generatorium do for us?’ Thane asked bitterly. ‘The enemy is upon us as a relentless force. Our weapons run dry and battle-brothers are dying in their droves.’

  ‘Little, captain,’ Aloysian said with regret. ‘Once the Alcazar Astra was an instrument of preservation. A great weapon among the stars. Now, the fort is an instrument to be preserved. An objective to be garrisoned and guarded. As a fortress-home, it serves with honour. But great weapon of the void it is no more.’

  Thane dwelled on the forge master’s words. He thought on the Alcazar Astra restored to her former glory, her great engines turning her graceful bulk to present her batteries of void cannon to the armada junkships of the alien invader. He momentarily lived the pure obliteration the star fort could visit on hulks and landers packed to their rattletrap airlocks with hulking greenskins. Invaders it would take hours to meat-grind through in the ramparts could be void-scorched in moments in orbit.

  Thane’s fantasy had cost him. A towering brute of a greenskin – repugnant, even by the standards of its breed – battered two ork bully-boys aside to get to the captain. It swung a length of sharpened girder in its hulking claws like a broadsword. The irresistible path of the heavy blade swooped underneath Thane’s elbow and smashed the captain to one side, cleaving the ceramite of his torso into crumpled plating. Auto-senses within his helm went wild. The girder-blade came down at Thane from above. It didn’t have the same orbital force as the first blow but all the captain had to offer in defence was his forearm plate, his empty boltgun still held tightly in his gauntlets. Slicing into the plate of the defending arm, the monstrous ork cut down at the captain as he knelt on one armoured knee.

  The Apothecary’s gleaming chainblade was suddenly between them. The glint of its monomolecular teeth seemed to grab the beast’s attention. It swung the girder-blade at Reoch, the Apothecary defending as elegantly as a battle-brother might against such force and ferocity. Slicing and lopping at each other – the savage not seeming to notice the bite of the chainsword’s tip – the pair clashed blades. Holding the chainsword out in front of him, Reoch gunned it to a screeching blur.

  Sparks showered the pair. The girder must have been made of some reinforced alloy, something scavenged by the creature from a crashed vessel. The chainblade was struggling against the material, and the ork used the difficulty to put its full weight behind the crude edge. The brute pushed with all its savage might, sending Reoch tumbling back into a knot of smaller creatures.

  By the time it returned its barbaric attentions to Thane, the captain was back on his feet. The girder-blade came up. The tusked maw snarled. A battle-brother was suddenly there to defend his captain, his boltgun blazing, but the monster absently cleaved the Space Marine in two.

  ‘Captain!’ a second Fist Exemplar called. His weapon was spent also, and he cut deep into the creature’s green flesh with a gladius blade. The colossal ork’s arm shot out and grabbed the Space Marine by the helmet. His entire head was lost in the thing’s claw. The battle-brother dropped both empty boltgun and sword. His limbs thrashed furiously as the monstrous ork crushed his helm and tossed his armoured body out into the killing fields of its kin.

  The be
ast was back on Thane in an instant. Its mongrel weapon rose. Thane brought up his boltgun. The length of the weapon was all he had to put between him and the sword’s mangling impact, but the captain suddenly jabbed the boltgun forwards, smashing into the greenskin’s tusk-crowded jaws with the empty sickle-clip. Thumbing the ejection stud, Thane retracted the boltgun, leaving the magazine embedded in the beast’s fractured face.

  The broadsword came down. Thane stepped aside, and drew back his right gauntlet. Leaning into the servo-supported punch, Maximus Thane slammed his fist into the clip, hammering it into the monster’s skull. The girder-blade rang to the deck first, followed swiftly by the small green mountain of the ork’s corpse.

  Snatching his remaining magazine from his belt and slamming it home, Thane blasted several greenskin savages clear of the struggling Apothecary. The remaining beasts fell to a three-hundred-and-sixty degree spin that Reoch accomplished with his chainsword, aided by the slick of gore on the void hull surface.

  ‘Captain?’ the Master of the Forge called. ‘Captain, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, Master Aloysian,’ Thane replied, ‘but not for much longer. We have to force the enemy back to range. The alien are too many and we are too few to take them one at a time. As Apothecary Reoch says, the arithmetic doesn’t add up.’

  ‘What can I do, captain?’

  ‘You can activate the Alcazar Astra’s remaining plasma drive.’

  ‘Captain?’

  ‘Are you hearing me, Aloysian?’ Thane called across the vox-channel. ‘I want you to fire the Transept East engine column.’

  ‘But captain,’ the Master of the Forge protested, ‘the star fort is buried in a crater of its own making. It cannot ascend on one engine alone.’

  ‘Can it be done?’ Thane demanded.

  ‘The fortress-monastery’s superstructure will suffer damage.’

  ‘Would you rather the invader demolish it instead?’

  ‘The fort will incline, not ascend, captain,’ the Techmarine insisted.

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ Maximus Thane said.

  Sliding about in the gore, his chainsword singing its way through tough, alien flesh, Reoch allowed himself a grunt of realisation and agreement.

  ‘I should vox the First Captain,’ Master Aloysian said.

  ‘Captain Garthas is busy,’ Thane told him. ‘I am ranking brother on the ramparts and this strategy concerns their very orientation.’

  ‘Yes, captain.’

  ‘As soon as possible, Master Aloysian,’ Thane added. ‘Brother Fists will pay for any delay.’

  ‘Yes, captain.’

  Crashing bolts through the greenskins throwing themselves at him, Thane smashed and skidded his way back to Apothecary Reoch.

  ‘Brother Zerberyn,’ the second captain voxed to the injured honorarius.

  ‘Captain?’

  ‘I want you to vox all companies and captains with the following order,’ Thane said. Before the battle-brother could protest, Thane added, ‘And if you don’t, Brother Zerberyn, in less than a minute you’ll very much wish you had.’

  ‘What’s the order?’ Zerberyn crackled back after a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘All Fists Exemplar battle-brothers to mag-lock their boots to the void hull.’

  ‘Why?’ the honour guard Space Marine voxed back.

  Once again, the Apothecary and the captain’s packs brushed. Back to back, the Fists Exemplar Space Marines carved and blasted an open space in the green edifice of muscle and savagery surrounding them. An island of life – raw and desperate – in a sea of alien barbarity and death. Four gore-spattering clunks, one after another, echoed about the carnage as Thane and Reoch mag-locked their armoured boots to the blood-slick deck.

  ‘Why?’ Thane voxed back to Zerberyn. ‘Because we are going for a ride.’

  SIXTEEN

  Undine – Desolation Point

  The north-eastern anchorage was treacherous but, as Allegra had indicated, deep enough to admit the submerged draught of the Tiamat. With little else but the conning tower breaking the surface, Captain Lux Allegra accompanied Commander Tyrhone’s Marineer Elites out onto the small observation deck. The Elites carried garrison-duty dirks and stubby lascarbines, slung in waterproof casings.

  The grating was awash with the chemical brume that passed for seawater on Undine. The commander and several other Elites had hauled personal sweeps up onto the deck. The sweeps were one-man watercraft: lightweight planers that consisted of a pontoon chassis, steering bars and a high-power churnfan. Setting off towards the colony outcrop that was Desolation Point on the sweeps, the watercraft’s riders dragged behind them wire ladders to which Allegra and the other Elites clung.

  The sky was streaming with rocks and crash-capsules, falling towards the ocean surface. Fountains of spray erupted from impact sites. The greenskin descent wave had reached Desolation Point before them.

  As Allegra had predicted, the anchorage was largely deserted. Vox-casts would have warned the many denizens of the marauder colony of the horror to come. Those with grapnel-rigs, solarjammers and Q-craft took to the seas, taking as many with them as could afford to leave the island. Even now, vessels were streaming out of port: smoke-belching outriggers, armed freighters and plasteel-clad sloops.

  Although they remained low in the water and were not advertising their presence, Allegra and the Elites didn’t need to avoid such pirate vessels on their shoreline approach. Each was being horrifically boarded. As green alien hulks hauled themselves up the vessels they tore pieces off them and swamped the decks with brutality and carnage. The creatures soaked up canister-shot from pintle-mounted deck weapons and made short work of pistol-blazing raiders – who eventually had little choice but to climb for their towers and rigging.

  The colony itself – a fragile accretion of scrap, adapted giga-containers and chain walkways – had been well on its way to becoming a proto-hive. The restrictions of the island bedrock meant that designs became more vertiginous and the rising architecture increasingly perilous. Fires were feeling their way through the pirate haven, with smoke snaking from underbuildings and corrugated citadels. As Commander Tyrhone guided his sweep through the choppy waters of the evacuating anchorage, Allegra held on tight, her eyes kept busy with the demise of Desolation Point.

  The captain had not got off to the best start with the Elites. There had been several reasons for this. Firstly, like Tyrhone, they largely hailed from the Southern hives and so were naturally suspicious of a salt-pale Northerner like Allegra. Her tattoos and piercings marked her out as being a turncoat: a pirate turned privateer. The kind of scum that real Marineers like Tyrhone and his men traditionally hunted. Her Marineer rank, similarly, had little meaning for them either. Her ‘Screeching Eagles’ had been grunt coastals and boardsmen, not the highly-trained tacticals that General Phifer retained for his security detail.

  The final insult was Allegra’s insistence that they eat before they set off on their mission. Tyrhone told her that he didn’t expect the operation to last long enough to warrant rations, while his men gave her jaundiced glares. Besides, if needed, Elites could live off the ocean for as long as the mission dictated. Allegra had been forced to make her insistence an order and gave each Marineer a rations can of toonweed. Several refused to eat the pungent mush, until Tyrhone too made it an order to do so. Toonweed, while cheap and nutritious, was considered a pauper’s dish by the mezzohivers, since it got its name from the crop-forests that grew on the bottom of roving pontoon shanties. Coming largely from sub-spire military families, the Elites regarded the stinking slaw with disgust.

  As the sweeps churned away, dragging the Marineer Elites, Tiamat dropped back below the waves. Commander Tyrhone wasted no time in making a direct approach, but Allegra directed him towards the bare rock of a jagged spit on the anchorage side. As the sweeps drew closer, it became apparent to the Elit
es that the rocky shoreline of the island was awash with greenskin beasts, clawing their way out of the sea and shaking water from their brute weaponry. Pockets of resistence were evident across the haven, with the ocean-world pirates employing the island’s defences against the greenskin invaders, rather than the enemy for which they were intended – planetary defence and security forces like the approaching Marineer Elites. The spit seemed relatively sparse of alien invaders, and it soon became clear to the Elites why.

  The water about the spit seemed agitated, and it had nothing to do with the currents or rock formations about the coastline. Like thick, rubbery propeller screws, a school-pack of helicondra surged for the shale beach. Long, muscular serpentforms, the native creatures cut through the water in a helical, spiral motion. They were prey for many of the ocean world’s marine megafauna, but also predators in their own right. They whirled their way through the shallows until, forming rigid, rubbery shafts, they surged up the shale beach to snatch flippered marine mammals from a dog-colony that existed on the spit. The blubber-dog meat was greasily repugnant and not favoured by the inhabitants of Desolation Point. The helicondra pack, however, would reach up the beach like a single, tentacular beast, slithering around surprised blubber-dogs and their pups before dragging them back to the shallows for unfussy ingestion.

  As Tyrhone cautiously led the sweeps towards the shale, the Elites could see that the water was bobbing with distended serpents, dazed, full and floating after devouring the bounty of greenskins unfortunate enough to choose the spit as their approach to the haven. Other monsters could be seen on the beach, set upon by three or four of the rubbery constrictors, each attempting the swallow the aliens there on the shale. With arms and legs disappearing down the rippling lengths of the serpents and the helicondra crushing bones and ribcages underneath their knots and coils, the orks were thinning out on the spit.