Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  ‘We kill them.’

  ‘Yes. That would do it.’

  At Cassiel’s direction, the storm troopers divided into two groups, each carrying a case of demolition charges, and they peeled off to each flank.

  Cassiel glanced over at his White Scar brother, the last of his kill-team.

  ‘Ready?’ he said.

  In answer, the White Scar planted his feet wide and brought his heavy bolter around to bear, the built-in suspensors steadying his aim. Squeezing and holding the trigger, he unleashed a blazing torrent of fire. It was virtually a solid stream of large-calibre bolts he sent roaring across the ice cavern, and the sound was deafening.

  Tanaka’s onslaught tore across the enemy, but their advance did not slow. The shield bearers at their fore tightened their formation, shields interlocking as the heavy bolter fire hammered into them. The shimmering barrier flashed brightly as each heavy bolter round struck, absorbing their energy, creating a flickering strobe as shot after shot rained upon them. Each shot rebounded off this seemingly impenetrable wall, hurled away with the same velocity as it was delivered. Heavy bolter rounds ricocheted across the ice cavern, filling the air.

  One round skimmed just over the rim of one of the shields and took one of the foes in the head. The resultant detonation demolished its skull, and it fell heavily. Its brethren gave it no mind, simply stepping over the body to continue their relentless march. A moment later, it rose again.

  The necrons altered the angle of their shields, and the warriors of the Ordo Xenos suddenly found Tanaka’s stream of bolter fire being redirected back at them.

  Cassiel was struck in the shoulder, half spinning him, and other rounds screamed by him, missing by scant centimetres.

  He turned his head instinctively, registering an incoming bolt a fraction of a second before it took him between the eyes. It still struck a glancing blow, and the resulting detonation ruined his vision in a haze of grainy static, and kicked his neck to one side.

  He tore his helmet off. The whole left hemisphere was a mess of torn metal and fractured ceramite, and his left eye lens was shattered. He could feel blood trickling down his temple. He cast the ruined helm aside.

  The head of one of the storm troopers disappeared in a red mist, and another was torn bodily in two as a stream of fire cut through his midsection.

  Tanaka cut off his volley with an anguished cry, aghast at the carnage he had wrought. No storm trooper had been left standing. Their blood was sprayed across the ice.

  One of the flesh-wearers took its opportunity, leaping upon the White Scar as he stared in horror at the dead. He tried to raise his weapon, but he was too slow and the creature too close. It thrust its talons into his faceplate. Two of the blades smashed straight through his visor lenses, driving deep into his brain. He died instantly, slumping to the ground.

  Cassiel roared, his fury surging to the surface, and this time he made no attempt to quash it. He hurled his bolt pistol aside and hacked into Tanaka’s killer with his blade. His lips drew back in a snarl, exposing his dagger-like canines and he tasted blood on his lips. His blade rose and fell, hacking and slicing. Only when the creature was rendered into a dozen separate sections did he stop. Even then, those parts quivered on the ice, pulling themselves back together, but Cassiel gave it no more thought. He lifted his reddened gaze, breathing heavily, and focused on the xenos lord and his phalanx of guardians.

  He closed the distance quickly, his fury lending him speed. Twenty metres. Fifteen. Ten. He gripped his long blade in a double-handed grip, drawing it back for a powerful strike.

  He sprang lightly off one foot, angling his leap to take him slightly to the side and past the closest guardian’s shield. He turned in the air as he leapt, and rather than bringing his blade around in arc, he drove it down in a powerful two-handed thrust. It sank deep, driven down behind his enemy’s armoured ribcage. Cassiel swiftly withdrew the blade, pulling it free even before his feet had touched the ground.

  He instantly threw himself into a roll as a glowing-bladed halberd swung out, humming through the air. It passed harmlessly above him, and he rammed Aruthel up into his would-be killer as he rose. The blade punched up under the ribcage, thrusting up through its body. The tip burst from the top of its metal cranium, green sparks dancing wildly along its length. He yanked the blade free and the creature collapsed.

  He lifted the sword in a horizontal parry, sensing rather than seeing a blow coming at him from behind. His blade crackled and gave off the smell of ozone as it met the downward strike of an energy halberd. The force of the blow drove him to his knees, but he was up in a second, snarling and spitting, stepping in close.

  Still holding his blade two-handed, he slammed its pommel up into his opponent’s skull twice in quick succession, jerking its head back but doing little real damage. It backhanded him across the side of his face, sending him sprawling.

  With an animalistic snarl, Cassiel rose, swinging his blade around in a lethal arc. One of the warriors that he had already dropped was rising once more, its damage self-repairing. He chopped its legs out from under it and rammed Aruthel down into its skull as it toppled to the ground. An energy shield slammed into him, shocking him and sending him stumbling. An overhead blow came crashing down upon him. Cassiel took it upon his blade before ripping around in a screaming arc, neatly cutting the creature in two.

  He stood before the xenos lord now, having fought his way in behind its guardians. It glared at him with its baleful green orbs. A burst of mechanised sound emerged from its throat. It took a moment for Cassiel to realise that it was laughing at him.

  It stepped forward, thrusting its staff at his chest. Cassiel batted the blow aside and lunged, the move perfectly timed. His blade slid between the lord’s slit of a mouth, silencing its ugly laughter. With a roar, he pressed forward, using all his strength and weight to ram Aruthel home until the hilt struck its face, a full metre and a half of blade protruding out from the back of its neck.

  Even as the light died in the xenos being’s eyes, its appearance changed. Its body grew larger in stature, heavy armoured plates appearing on its shoulders and chest, and the shape of its cranium altering. Before Cassiel’s eyes, its metal physiology had morphed into that of one of its bodyguards.

  ‘What–’ he began, startled by this unexpected transformation.

  He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stiffen, and there was a crackling sound behind him.

  A blow struck him squarely in the back, accompanied by a sound akin to a thunderclap.

  He was slammed flat, twitching involuntarily. Green-tinged lightning danced across his armour. He struggled to push himself to his feet, but his muscles were convulsing uncontrollably, and he could not rise.

  The xenos lord stood behind him. It had taken over the body of another of its bodyguards and stood now in its place, looking down upon him, croaking its ugly laughter.

  One of the guardians, newly reformed from the damage Cassiel had wrought upon it, stepped forward with its blade ready. The xenos lord barked something in its indecipherable dead language, and the guardian halted, warily. Hunched and cowled, the lord shuffled in, leaning over Cassiel, regarding him closely.

  It was so close that he could see the intricate circuitry behind its armoured ribcage, and smell its repugnant stink, a strange mix of battery acid, oil and dust. Aruthel lay on the ice, just half a metre away. He could kill this abomination in an instant, he was sure, and he strained to regain control of his body. The convulsions were passing. His fingers twitched, and the veins in his neck bulged.

  With a roar, he shot his hand out and grabbed the blade.

  He was too slow, however. The ancient xenos placed its hand upon his chest, skeletal metal fingers spread wide. A pulse of energy passed into Cassiel’s body. He gasped, his eyes wide – in that instant, Cassiel’s twin hearts ceased to beat, and his breathing halted.

/>   ‘You… are… mine,’ the necron lord said, his hand still upon the fallen Space Marine’s chest.

  One of them was about to die.

  They stood at the epicentre of the battle, beneath a sky that was burning, and it seemed as though time stood still. The black-armoured paragon of humanity brought a golden-winged power sword around in a crackling two-handed killing strike. His pale face was twisted in hatred, and his eyes were tinged red with blood-rage. Despite the thickness of his enemy’s bull-like neck, the blow was perfectly timed, delivered with all his genhanced and armour-augmented strength.

  His opponent was a hulking green skinned monster that stood over two and half metres tall. It lived only for battle and knew – nay, cared for – nothing else. It roared as it swung its chugging chain-glaive around in a brutal arc, a blow that could carve the Space Marine clean in two.

  Either blow would be mortal if it landed. Both would land within a single heartbeat.

  But that heartbeat would never come.

  Trazyn the Infinite stepped between the two frozen combatants, inspecting his latest acquisition. He peered into the Space Marine’s eyes. Life blazed there, along with a frenzied, insane fury. He knew that the enhanced human creature could see him. He knew that its conscious mind still remained, trapped forever within the prison of its own body. If it were not so, then his display would be lacking.

  Satisfied, he shuffled across the battlefield, past hundreds more frozen statues, each carefully positioned as per his grand design. Some were firing weapons or swinging blades. Others were dying, trapped forever in the moment of their deaths. It was glorious.

  The holographic burning sky and the red-sanded earth flickered as he reached the edge of the display. Once again he stood upon the gleaming obsidian deck of his infinite gallery.

  Trazyn strode away, his staff clicking sharply with each step. He walked his halls, past countless other displays with primitive creatures of every description, breed and race; all arrayed and carefully posed; all living, trapped until the end of time. He passed beings that had died out half a million years earlier – some whose loss was mourned by the galaxy at large, and others that had simply disappeared without note.

  There were hundreds of displays on this deck alone, many of them far grander than his latest, humble effort. Thousands more decks lay above and below.

  Trazyn gave them no more thought. His mind was already moving on to his next project.

  He rubbed his metal hands in glee. It would be a masterpiece.

  Headhunted

  Steve Parker

  Something vast, dark and brutish moved across the pinpricked curtain of space, blotting out the diamond lights of the constellations behind it as if swallowing them whole. It was the size of a city block, and its bulbous eyes, like those of a great blind fish, glowed with a green and baleful light.

  It was a terrible thing to behold, this leviathan – a harbinger of doom – and its passage had brought agony and destruction to countless victims in the centuries it had swum among the stars. It travelled, now, through the Charybdis Subsector on trails of angry red plasma, cutting across the inky darkness with a purpose.

  That purpose was close at hand, and a change began to take place on its bestial features. New lights flickered to life on its muzzle, shining far brighter and sharper than its eyes, illuminating myriad shapes, large and small, that danced and spun in high orbit above the glowing orange sphere of Arronax II. With a slow, deliberate motion, the leviathan unhinged its massive lower jaw, and opened its mouth to feed.

  At first, the glimmering pieces of debris it swallowed were mere fragments, nothing much larger than a man. But soon, heavier, bulkier pieces drifted into that gaping maw, passing between its bladelike teeth and down into its black throat.

  For hours, the monster gorged itself on space-borne scrap, devouring everything it could fit into its mouth. The pickings were good. There had been heavy fighting here in ages past. Scoured worlds and lifeless wrecks were all that remained now, locked in a slow elliptical dance around the local star. But the wrecks, at least, had a future. Once salvaged, they would be forged anew, recast in forms that would bring death and suffering down upon countless others. For, of course, this beast, this hungry monster of the void, was no beast at all.

  It was an ork ship. And the massive glyphs daubed sloppily on its hull marked it as a vessel of the Deathskull clan.

  Re-pressurisation began the moment the ship’s vast metal jaws clanged shut. The process took around twenty minutes, pumps flooding the salvage bay with breathable, if foul-smelling, air. The orks crowding the corridor beyond the bay’s airlock doors roared their impatience and hammered their fists against the thick metal bulkheads. They shoved and jostled for position. Then, just when it seemed murderous violence was sure to erupt, sirens sounded and the heavy doors split apart. The orks surged forward, pushing and scrambling, racing towards the mountains of scrap, each utterly focused on claiming the choicest pieces for himself.

  Fights broke out between the biggest and darkest-skinned. They roared and wrestled with each other, and snapped at each other with tusk-filled jaws. They lashed out with the tools and weapons that bristled on their augmented limbs. They might have killed each other but for the massive suits of cybernetic armour they wore. These were no mere greenskin foot soldiers. They were orks of a unique genus, the engineers of their race, each born with an inherent understanding of machines. It was hard-coded into their marrow in the same way as violence and torture.

  As was true of every caste, however, some among them were cleverer than others. While the mightiest bellowed and beat their metal-plated chests, one ork, marginally shorter and leaner than the rest, slid around them and into the shadows, intent on getting first pickings.

  This ork was called Gorgrot in the rough speech of his race, and, despite the sheer density of salvage the ship had swallowed, it didn’t take him long to find something truly valuable. At the very back of the junk-filled bay, closes to the ship’s great metal teeth, he found the ruined, severed prow of a mid-sized human craft. As he studied it, he noticed weapon barrels protruding from the front end. His alien heart quickened. Functional or not, he could do great things with salvaged weapon systems. He would make himself more dangerous, an ork to be reckoned with.

  After a furtive look over his shoulder to make sure none of the bigger orks had noticed him, he moved straight across to the wrecked prow, reached out a gnarled hand and touched the hull. Its armour-plating was in bad shape, pocked and cratered by plasma fire and torpedo impacts. To the rear, the metal was twisted and black where it had sheared away from the rest of the craft. It looked like an explosion had torn the ship apart. To Gorgrot, however, the nature of the ship’s destruction mattered not at all. What mattered was its potential. Already, visions of murderous creativity were flashing through his tiny mind in rapid succession, so many at once, in fact, that he forgot to breathe until his lungs sent him a painful reminder. These visions were a gift from Gork and Mork, the bloodthirsty greenskin gods, and he had received their like many times before. All greenskin engineers received them, and nothing, save the rending of an enemy’s flesh, felt so utterly right.

  Even so, it was something small and insignificant that pulled him out of his rapture.

  A light had begun to flash on the lower left side of the ruined prow, winking at him from beneath a tangle of beams and cables and dented armour plates, igniting his simple-minded curiosity, drawing him towards it. It was small and green, and it looked like it might be a button of some kind. Gorgrot began clearing debris from the area around it. Soon, he was grunting and growling with the effort, sweating despite the assistance of his armour’s strength-boosting hydraulics.

  Within minutes, he had removed all obstructions between himself and the blinking light, and discovered that it was indeed a kind of button.

  Gorgrot was extending his finger out to press it when
something suddenly wrenched him backwards with irresistible force. He was hurled to the ground and landed hard on his back with a snarl. Immediately, he tried to scramble up again, but a huge metal boot stamped down on him, denting his belly-armour and pushing him deep into the carpet of sharp scrap.

  Gorgrot looked up into the blazing red eyes of the biggest, heaviest ork in the salvage bay.

  This was Zazog, personal engineer to the mighty Warboss Balthazog Bludwrekk, and few orks on the ship were foolish enough to challenge any of his salvage claims. It was the reason he always arrived in the salvage bay last of all; his tardiness was the supreme symbol of his dominance among the scavengers.

  Zazog staked his claim now, turning from Gorgrot and stomping over to the wrecked prow. There, he hunkered down to examine the winking button. He knew well enough what it meant. There had to be a working power source onboard, something far more valuable than most scrap. He flicked out a blowtorch attachment from the middle knuckle of his mechanised left claw and burned a rough likeness of his personal glyph into the side of the wrecked prow. Then he rose and bellowed a challenge to those around him.

  Scores of gretchin, the puniest members of the orkoid race, skittered away in panic, disappearing into the protection of the shadows. The other orks stepped back, growling at Zazog, snarling in anger. But none dared challenge him.

  Zazog glared at each in turn, forcing them, one by one, to drop their gazes or die by his hand. Then, satisfied at their deference, he turned and pressed a thick finger to the winking green button.

  For a brief moment, nothing happened. Zazog growled and pressed it again. Still nothing. He was about to begin pounding it with his mighty fist when he heard a noise.

  It was the sound of atmospheric seals unlocking.

  The door shuddered, and began sliding up into the hull.

  Zazog’s craggy, scar-covered face twisted into a hideous grin. Yes, there was a power source on board. The door’s motion proved it. He, like Gorgrot, began to experience flashes of divine inspiration, visions of weaponry so grand and deadly that his limited brain could hardly cope. No matter; the gods would work through him once he got started. His hands would automatically fashion what his brain could barely comprehend. It was always the way.