Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  He smashed his pistol into the Iron Warrior’s face. The weapon shattered but the faceplate buckled, one eye lens popping out.

  ‘There are ten thousand of us,’ growled the Iron Warrior as he tried to fend off Chrysius. ‘The future is ours. Every–’

  Chrysius didn’t let the Iron Warrior finish. He drove his fist into his face, feeling nothing but hatred. It was as if there was nothing in the galaxy but Chrysius’s fist and the Iron Warrior’s steel face which every blow crumpled and split.

  Chrysius’s fist pistoned over and over again until the faceplate came apart and he was able to rip the helmet away. He looked into the Iron Warrior’s face.

  Brother Hestion reached the walkway overlooking the fuel tank. By the time he had vaulted down and reached Chrysius, the Iron Warrior’s face had been reduced to a crimson pulp. Chrysius let the body fall, and it clattered limply to his feet.

  Hestion handed Chrysius the chainsword he had left on the walkway. ‘Good kill, sergeant,’ he said.

  The edge of night passed across the surface of Euklid IV. The gas giant’s upper atmosphere was, in daytime, a mass of firestorms. As night passed the flames became dark, replaced with a grey-black caul of ash speckled with islands of glowing embers.

  People had lived here once – humans, citizens of the Imperium, living on the dozens of space stations orbiting the planet. Now whoever lived here could not be described as people at all.

  Against the scale of Euklid IV, those orbital stations seemed so tiny and delicate they could barely be thought of as existing at all. And compared to the void that lay beyond it, the planet was an insignificant, infinitesimally tiny fragment of nothing. Even Euklid, the system’s star, meant nothing compared to the galaxy. And the galaxy meant nothing compared to the universe.

  It was good, thought Chrysius, that a Space Marine rarely had the luxury of time to think about such things.

  ‘Chrysius!’ came a familiar voice behind him. Chrysius turned to see another Space Marine entering the observation deck. This one wore the White Scars’ livery on one shoulder pad but the rest of his armour was black with silver lettering inscribed. His face was familiar too, half the scalp a metallic shell, one eye a bionic, contrasting with a mouth that smiled easily. His skin, battered and tan like beaten bronze, was typical of the horse nomads from which his Chapter drew their recruits.

  ‘Kholedei!’ said Chrysius. ‘My brother. It has been too long!’

  The two clasped hands. ‘It has,’ said Kholedei. ‘For all the honour of the Deathwatch, it is good to fight alongside old friends again.’

  The last time Chrysius had seen Kholedei, it had been as a joint White Scars and Imperial Fists strike force lifted off from the shattered remains of Hive Mandibus. The city had fallen to a xenos plague which turned the inhabitants into walking incubators from wormlike aliens. The mission had been nothing short of a cull, exterminating every living thing they found. It was a foul, grim business, a merciless grind, when even a Space Marine had been in need of friends. The two had fought alongside each other, their squads merged into one and taking strength from their new comrades.

  ‘I had heard the Deathwatch had sent a kill-team to Euklid IV,’ said Chrysius. ‘I did not know you would be among them.’

  ‘When I knew we would be in support of the Imperial Fists, I ensured that I would be in the kill-team,’ said Kholedei. ‘I would not miss the chance to fight alongside the Sons of Dorn again. What news of your squad?’

  ‘Venelus fell at Thorgin,’ said Chrysius. ‘A shot from an eldar sniper. And Koron at the Fallmarch Expanse, when the Eternal Sacrifice was lost.’

  ‘They were fine brothers, Chrysius. We are all diminished by their loss.’

  ‘It is the way of war to take our best,’ said Chrysius. ‘Vryskus has yet to atone for his defeat at the tournament, though to every-one else but him he has redeemed himself a dozen times over. Myrdos is on his way to taking his own squad. Helian’s just the same, of course.’

  ‘Good to know. I hear that you killed an Iron Warrior yourself.’

  ‘That is so,’ said Chrysius. ‘I was fortunate.’

  ‘A kill that I have not equalled, sergeant,’ said Kholedei. ‘Aliens aplenty have fallen to me and my team, but an Iron Warrior is something else. I would dearly love to shed the blood of such a traitor. I know of the dishonours they have done to the Imperial Fists.’

  ‘Gruz was wounded,’ said Chrysius. ‘I am proud to have taken the kill, but not that my battle-brother suffered for it.’

  ‘Then you will avenge him. Just as we avenge our fallen every time we fight. And the next fight will be soon. I have spoken with Captain Haestorr. Given the intelligence the Inquisition gathered on this mission, the enemy will be concentrated in the science facility. We strike there, and strike hard, and the Iron Warriors will be thrown off Euklid IV before they have the chance to mount a defence.’

  ‘What interest does the Ordo Xenos have in Euklid IV?’ asked Chrysius.

  Kholedei smiled. ‘Believe me, the ordo wants the Iron Warriors extinct just as much as we do. They might specialise in hunting the alien, but an enemy is an enemy.’

  ‘Well, that’s why we are here. Why are the Iron Warriors here?’

  Kholedei looked out through the viewing port. Once this station had been a beautiful place, where the citizens could gather and reflect on the majesty of Euklid IV. Now the place was decaying, the walls spotted with rust and damp, the port smeared with condensation. ‘This was an intellectual colony,’ said Kholedei. ‘Artists, philosophers. Perhaps their meditations uncovered or woke something. A moral threat. Perhaps the Iron Warriors want it. Perhaps they built a science station of enough sophistication to make it valuable to the enemy. It matters little as long as it gives us a time and a place to kill them.’

  ‘I am glad the Inquisition and the Chapter made common cause here,’ said Chrysius. ‘It is good to have you back, brother.’

  ‘It is good to be back,’ said Kholedei. Chrysius recognised that smile, which his old friend only broke out when the chance for competition showed itself. ‘I get another chance to show you how a Space Marine really fights.’

  Captain Haestorr ascribed to the tactical philosophy that a Space Marine was not a soldier. A soldier could lose his nerve. A soldier would not just walk into the fury of the enemy – he had to be corralled like an animal or cajoled like a child.

  A Space Marine was more like a bullet fired from a gun. He went wherever he was pointed, and needed no convincing to inflict fatal damage on anything he hit.

  The Imperial Fists’ boarding torpedoes slammed into the side of the station. By the lettering stencilled on its side, this station was called the Enlightenment. The hull plates came apart under the reinforced prows of the Caestus-pattern boarding rams, as the assault vehicles drove through the multiple levels of protective plating.

  Space Marine power armour was proof against the vacuum that ripped everything out of the station’s outer hull spaces. After a few seconds to let the gases vent, the prows of the boarding rams opened up and the Imperial Fists emerged, the assault squad first into the breach. They forged into the tangled labyrinth of ventilation ducts and fuel coolant pipes that encased the station’s interior.

  The enemy knew they were there. Even without any sensors left on the station, the impacts of the rams would have rung throughout the Enlightenment. Every Imperial Fist, and the Deathwatch kill-team members who accompanied them, knew this would be a contested boarding. That meant a close quarters fight, a butcher’s battle.

  It would be against the most hated enemy the Imperial Fists had ever made. They couldn’t wait.

  The first sight Chrysius had of the enemy was a blurred, half-glimpsed shape leaping between the laboratory benches. The lab floor was choked with machinery, wires and ducts hanging from the ceiling. An enormous cylindrical structure, an electron microscope, loom
ed like a monumental sculpture. The enemy had lots of places to hide and the one Chrysius saw, jumping from one piece of cover to the next, was humanoid in a way that was fundamentally wrong. It trailed fronds of skin and its limbs were too long, jointed in the wrong places.

  Mutants.

  Chrysius’s immediate objective was to close with the enemy. It was the first principle of The Doctrines of Assault, sleep-taught to Chrysius during his training. He crashed through the lab equipment, kicking through the bench in front of him, scattering chemical beakers and glassware everywhere. Gunfire was already starting – the staccato thunder of the Imperial Fists’ boltguns, and the red flashes of laser fire in return. Chrysius could see more of them now behind barricades of overturned benches and toppled lab gear, dressed in ragtag uniforms of black and yellow, and sporting different mutations. He saw in that glimpse vividly coloured and patterned skin, claws and stinger tails, tattered wings, scorched and blistered skin.

  Hestion was ahead of Chrysius, dropping a shoulder and crashing through a bank of cogitator screens. He slammed into the mutant sheltering behind it and yanked the thing off its feet as the mutant tried to wrench the Imperial Fist’s head off with its tentacles. Hestion dashed the mutant against the ground, splitting its head open against the white-tiled floor, and impaled a second mutant through the chest with his chainsword. The whirr of the teeth screeched even above the dying scream and the gunfire, and it was the sound of imminent victory.

  Chrysius jumped a barricade of furniture, shooting one of the mutants behind it through the chest before he even landed. It had huge compound eyes and mouthparts like an insect. He swept his chainblade and cut another in two at the waist, his backswing ruining the leg of a third. He barely had time to register what manner of uncleanness had been marked on their flesh before they died, fresh blood spraying across the golden yellow of his armour, the vibrations of cracking bone running up through his feet as he stamped down on them.

  The mutants were running into the fray, brought by the screams of their brothers. They were armed with las-weapons and autoguns. Bullets and las-blasts pinged off Hestion’s armour as he stood proud, battering down a mutant who charged at him with gun blazing. Hestion was wounded often, and Chrysius had often lectured him on a Space Marine’s duty to preserve himself and his wargear as well as destroy the enemy, but Hestion did not have a self-preserving cell in his huge body.

  There were hundreds of mutants pouring onto the laboratory deck. Radios were blasting orders and exaltations to kill. Chrysius’s squad paused for a moment, the first line of the enemy dead and the next line rushing towards them.

  ‘Hestion! Hold the line and charge on my mark,’ ordered Chrysius. ‘And get down!’

  ‘Behold the enslavers!’ came a braying voice over a vox-caster with speakers mounted on the lab ceiling. ‘The heralds of order! The enslavers of your kind! Watch them fall, and revel in their death-cries!’

  Chrysius glanced over the cover. The mutants were close. He could see their faces, and the ones with expressions he could read were glassy-eyed, as if they had been hypnotised or mind-wiped.

  Dogs, thought Chrysius. Animals, conditioned to attack. The Imperium’s malcontents lied to and indoctrinated, and loosed like a pack of dogs.

  ‘Now!’ yelled Chrysius, and leapt into the front rank of mutants, into the storm of claws and blades.

  Even against this fanatical horde there was glory to be won. The brutal rhythm of violence came easily to Assault-Sergeant Chrysius. They thrust, he parried, reversed and cut, blasted another few bolt shells into them and let them close again near enough for the pattern to repeat. He saw Brother Myrdos clamber onto the cylinder of the microscope and hack down those who tried to reach him, as if he was a flag planted at the summit of a mountain and the mutants were competing to see who could pull it down first. Somewhere in the thick of it was Hestion, hurling the enemy in every direction, some even clattering against the coolant ducts running across the ceiling.

  The enemy relented. They had to – there were only so many of them. As they broke off in twos and threes they were shot down by the bolters of the Imperial Fists behind, directed by Captain Haestorr. The kill-team were there too, firing with lethal precision, each bolter shell shredding a mutant’s central mass in a spray of gore.

  ‘Squads, respond!’ came the vox on Haestorr’s command channel. ‘Report all sightings of the Iron Warriors!’

  ‘None here,’ replied Chrysius. ‘They sent in the fodder. They thought we’d be softened up before we reached them.’

  ‘None yet,’ came a voice Chrysius recognised as Kholedei’s. ‘Squad, free target at will, don’t waste your kraken shells. Watch for the Weaponsmith.’

  Chrysius dropped to one knee behind a bullet-riddled lab bench. ‘Kholedei? Brother Kholedei, can you repeat that?’

  There was no answer. The second part of the vox had sounded like it was directed to the rest of the Deathwatch kill-team and not the rest of the force. Perhaps it had been a mistake, Kholedei momentarily forgetting to switch channels.

  But Chrysius was quite sure of what he had heard. And so had the rest of his squad.

  ‘Sergeant,’ said Brother Hestion, who emerged from a bank of machines to join Chrysius. Hestion was covered from head to toe in blood. His bolt pistol was still in its holster, and he had probably killed as many with his bare left hand as with his chainsword. ‘Did he say that? About the Weaponsmith?’

  ‘Focus on the enemy, Brother Hestion,’ said Chrysius.

  ‘But he did,’ said Brother Vryskus, who approached wiping the blood from the blade of the duellist’s sabre he used in place of a chainsword. ‘We all heard him. I think, sergeant, we all know now why we are here.’

  According to the collators of the Imperial Fists’ lore – those battle-brothers responsible for recording battle legends and old grudges –Weaponsmith Gurlagorg had been one of the first Iron Warriors ever to break the greatest taboo of the Space Marines. This Iron Warrior, a commander of his Legion, had taken an Imperial Fist prisoner at a long-ago battle, cut open his body and removed the gene-seed organs. The gene-seed, the organ that regulated all the many augmentations of a Space Marine’s body, without which he could simply not exist. The gene-seed, created after the genetic pattern of the Primarch Rogal Dorn himself who had in turn been made in the image of the Emperor. A shred of the divine that every Space Marine carried inside him.

  Gurlagorg had sought a way to create more Iron Warriors, and had struck upon the idea of harvesting the gene-seed from Imperial Space Marines, corrupting and debasing it, and creating new battle-brothers of his own. It was as blasphemous a concept as existed among the Chapter of the Space Marines. Some had even thought that the Traitor Legions, heretics and sworn enemies of mankind though they were, would at least respect the principles of their own creation. But no – Gurlagorg had created a new Iron Warrior from the first gene-seed he took, and set about seeking more to defile with his corrupted sciences.

  It was a dangerous story to tell, and the Chapter Masters condemned its spreading. But it was told, hushed and always changing. Gurlagorg was the worst of the worst, as deadly an enemy as the Imperial Fists had. If ever a roll of the Imperial Fists’ deadliest enemies were drawn up, Weaponsmith Gurlagorg would be near the top. Few and powerful would be names ahead of his.

  And now he was orbiting Euklid IV. The Deathwatch knew, and presumably Captain Haestorr and the Chapter’s leaders did, too. That was why the Inquisition had sent the kill-team to assist the Imperial Fists in wiping out the Iron Warriors there – because the Inquisition knew that Gurlagorg was a hated enemy of mankind, and that his death would make the galaxy that one degree more sacred.

  They had found him. After thousands of years they had found him. And now, after thousands of years, they would kill him.

  The deck beyond the laboratory bled from its walls. Where there had once been panels of steel, there was
now a blackened biomechanical covering of skin, the rotting metal blistered up with pulsing steel veins. Drops of acid pattered from the sagging ceiling and a silver-black ooze bubbled up underfoot. Every warning rune was lit up on the retinas of the Imperial Fists as they warily moved into the science station’s core, the filters of their armoured faceplates capturing the worst of the pollutants that turned the air thick and hazy.

  Even Assault-Sergeant Chrysius wore his helmet here. The Imperial Fists force spread out through the deck, which stretched most of the rest of the way to the station’s centre. The deck was badly warped, forming slopes and hills as it rose and fell, and in places it shuddered underfoot as if ready to give way into the fuel cells and thruster arrays on the station’s underside.

  ‘It’s a miracle the gravity still works,’ voxed Brother Vryskus.

  ‘Speak not too soon, brother,’ replied Myrdos. ‘Think to the Battle of the Dark Ascension. The Night Lords there deactivated their flagship’s gravity just as battle was joined, hoping to spread confusion through the Imperial Fists’ ranks.’

  ‘Did it work?’ asked Vryskus.

  ‘If you were minded to read anything our forefathers wrote, Vryskus, you would know the Imperial Fists were stern and resolute, and were victorious,’ said Myrdos testily. ‘Our brethren there were ready. So must we be.’

  Before Chrysius was a blistered section of the deck where the biomechanical substance was stretched thin. Beneath the surface, suspended in greyish translucent fluid, was an object that looked like a boltgun of an ancient mark. Its lines were undeveloped and its details indistinct, as if it had been moulded from clay. ‘They’re growing their wargear here,’ he said.

  ‘Truly,’ said Vryskus, ‘no tech-heresy is beyond the Iron Warriors.’

  Other blisters held segments of power armour and more weapons, all in various stages of growth. ‘We can destroy this on the way out,’ voxed Captain Haestorr. ‘The Iron Warriors are the objective here.’