Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters

by Edited by Christian Dunn

  The kill-team moved forwards. Teiras knew they hadn’t been properly tried yet. The opposition was still organising. Even so, the assault had been a model of its kind. Every member of the team had fought as if amongst his Chapter brethren. There had been no need for verbal communication, barely even a gesture passing between the Space Marines. A good omen, he thought.

  The platform ended at the rail line. The trains of the Vorago Fastness were not designed with passengers in mind. With very few exceptions, anyone travelling through the Fastness did so on foot. The trains were for the far more valuable cargo of benthamite. They were crude maglev affairs, long links of shallow freight wagons with the most basic locomotive imaginable. It was a car just large enough to hold a control unit as simple as the cable-lift’s. The lever pulled down would set the train in motion. It would travel to the next stop on the line, where sensors would trip the lever back up, releasing the train from the magnetic field and bringing it to a stop.

  The kill-team jumped onto the forward freight wagon. Kyral stood on the locomotive car and held the lever down. The wagons were empty, and the train accelerated rapidly.

  ‘We’re under way,’ Teiras voxed Dagover back on the Merciless.

  Maglev or not, the train rattled and shook as they plunged through the monstrous landscape of the Vorago Fastness. Over the centuries, a metropolis of improvised structures had risen. It made Teiras think of a collapsed hive. Shacks of sheet metal and primitive hab-blocks constructed from roughly chiselled slabs of stone tumbled over each other. There was no order, no thought to the assemblages, just a desperate grab for whatever space and materials could be had. Many structures had fallen, returning to the rubble from which they had sprung, crushing the souls that had sought refuge inside them.

  Between the ruins and tottering agglomerations that would soon be ruins, the ground was hard-packed dirt and stone. The paths were a twisting labyrinth of switchbacks, random forks and dead ends. Some passed through perpetual night as buildings leaned together to form crumbling roofs over the passageways. The ground rose and fell. Some of the higher elevations ran past sunken windows, evidence that the denizens of the Fastness built over whatever fell. Beneath the surface, geological strata held the record of imprisonment and death. Above the paths, running at the level of the upper floors of the taller buildings, were the maglev tracks. They were a metal web stitching the space of the Fastness together, the trains transporting the native wealth of the earth over the imported squalor of man.

  Down those paths, through the windows and doors of the misery expressed in stone, and in the squares of subsiding wreckage, the human population of the Vorago Fastness swarmed and eddied like a blanket of maggots. The movement was desperate. It was a perpetual clawing for survival. Rotting food, weapons of stone and pipe, shelter or the means to build it, blood clans and shifting alliances – these were the currency that paid for another hour of life, another hour of fighting for the means to fight for another hour.

  As the mining train raced through the vistas of the prison, Teiras saw moments of collective effort alternate with blood-soaked riots. The resilience of dignity adjoined the plunge into the bestial. He knew that there were good men and women in the cauldron. From Dagover’s description, he understood that the political wealth of the prison meant that far more of the inmates were innocent of anything that he would recognise as a crime than were guilty. But wolves and lambs were both represented in the bubbles of hope and vortices of violence. The nature of such a place permitted no alternative.

  The train entered the mining zones of the Fastness, where quarries broke up the chaotic squalor of the habitation sectors. Centuries upon centuries of benthamite extraction had created abysses from which rock was hauled by endless cable. Into them, men descended to an existence of slavery in depths so profound that the sky was lost. As the line ran deeper into regions rich in benthamite, the quarries became more numerous, canyons of darkness yawning beneath the train, while overcrowded towers of stone teetered on narrow plateaus between.

  The attack came as the train was going to pass under another track. Teiras saw them lined up on the upper rail, waiting, motionless as armed statues. A dozen warriors, three larger and bulkier than the others. They opened up with a constant barrage of gauss energy before the Space Marines were even in range. The beams sliced the maglev track apart.

  Teiras glanced down. They were passing over a quarry. The blackness looked eager to receive them. Ahead, on the other side of the gap in the line, was one of the narrow plateaus. ‘Too late to stop,’ Kyral warned. Teiras leaned over the rear of their cart, bone-blade out. He hacked at the link between carts. Iron parted before adamantium. He cut the rest of the train away just as they hit the gap.

  The necrons’ flayer beams had not warped the line. They had simply removed any trace of what had been there, reducing ten metres of track to floating atoms. The train rode air and dropped. The front cart, lighter now than the rest of the train, flew a little bit further as it fell. It missed the canyon by metres, slamming into the plateau on a hard diagonal. The kill-team was catapulted from the cart. Teiras curled into a ball and hit the ground like a meteor. He came to a stop when he smashed into the wall of a shack. The unmortared stone collapsed around him. He rose, shrugging off the debris and blinking away the amber warning runes before his eyes. His armour was damaged, but still functional.

  The kill-team gathered in the street beside the cart. The landing had killed a dozen prisoners. Their deaths were unavoidable; there was no space in this anthill of humanity for anything to come down without harm. Teiras did not look back at the demolished hab behind him. He turned his attention instead to the street. It was barely four metres across, and moved uphill in a relatively straight line for several hundred metres before taking a sharp bend to the right. Vorago’s haphazard architecture leaned over it. The roofs of some of the buildings almost touched each other, sealing the street in permanent night.

  ‘They’ll be coming soon,’ said Kyral.

  ‘Good,’ Utor snarled.

  Jern said, ‘These structures are a gift.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Ambush paradise, Teiras thought.

  Gherak pointed to a pair of buildings on opposite sides of the street near the top of the hill. ‘There,’ he said. They looked as stable as anything here was, and they had windows facing each other and looking back down the street.

  The Deathwatch charged uphill. Desperate humanity parted before the Space Marines, looking at them with neither hope nor fear, only the feral calculation of survival. Teiras and Jern took the building on the right. There were no stairs between floors. Instead, there were holes cut on alternating sides of each ceiling with a large block of stone placed underneath. An ordinary human could climb to the next floor without too much struggle. The Space Marines leaped. They zigzagged from floor to floor until they reached the top. There were perhaps twenty Fastness denizens here. As Teiras and Jern ran to the windows, a woman approached them. She had short grey hair that looked as if it had been shorn with a knife. Her age was difficult to guess – all the faces here had the worn look of lifetimes of hard experience – but she carried herself with a commanding bearing born of sheer determination.

  ‘My lords, are you here to kill us or save us?’ she asked. Her tone was respectful, but unafraid.

  ‘Neither,’ said Teiras. ‘I’m sorry.’ He was.

  ‘And those creatures?’

  ‘They have not come here to kill you specifically, but they will, all the same.’

  She nodded. ‘Then, my lords, I pray you: do not leave this place unchanged.’ Then she stepped back. Other prisoners clustered around her, as if for protection.

  What must not go unchanged? Teiras thought. Us, or the prison?

  With Jern in position, Teiras climbed out the window and up onto the top of the building. He checked the lower end of the street. Nothing yet. There was time to refine the ambush. He lope
d from rooftop to rooftop, until he was about halfway down the slope. Opposite him, Gherak kept pace. They dropped at the same moment, lying flat on the roofs. The necrons had arrived.

  The xenos ghouls had descended from their perch on the maglev line and were now moving up the street in a wedge formation. The spaces between them were so regular, their steps so precisely synchronised, that they could have been a single machine. But the aura of death that radiated from them had nothing to do with the unfeeling and the inorganic. It was as livid as the green of the gauss rifles. As mechanical and emotionless as the actions of the necrons appeared to be, they were motivated by an ineradicable hatred, older than human civilisation.

  The necrons sought out the Space Marines through a process of brutal elimination. They simply killed everything in sight. Their gauss beams played over the prisoners, flaying them to the bone in agonising instants. The street erupted with a cascade of fragmented screams and violently shed flesh. The necrons swept the beams back and forth, slicing away the supports of the surrounding structures. The patchwork city collapsed in their wake, stone and blood spilling with a roar to close the street behind the marching abominations.

  Teiras looked through his bolter’s range finder. He zeroed in on the skull of the leading necron. It was one of the larger ghouls. Invisible beams bounced between the scope and the target, and the precise distance to the xenos appeared as a readout in the sight. Teiras adjusted his aim and fired. He held the gun steady as he pumped a stream of penetrator rounds into the necron’s skull. It was like sniping with a bolter. The head disintegrated. The necron phased out in mid-step. Gherak took out another in the next rank. The perfection of the wedge was shattered.

  The necrons retaliated. They charged forwards and brought their beams to bear on the rooftops. But Teiras and Gherak had already moved on, leaping to the next building down and firing again. Two more ghouls uttered their electronic scream and vanished. The necrons spread their fire wide and low, and all the lopsided, deathtrap piles of stone for a hundred metres on both sides of the street now fell. Teiras saw the destruction coming to his position, and he jumped, dropping ten metres to the ground. He stuck the landing, and felt the jar of impact shoot up his spine. Gherak was also down and at his side in a moment. They were now behind the necron wedge, and they unloaded their clips into the ghouls at the same time as their brothers in the forward positions began shooting. A haywire grenade joined the enfilading fire, and the necrons were stitched with mass-reactive devastation. More were sent back to the hell from which they had crawled.

  The ghouls staggered forwards, as if against a strong wind, and emerged from the grenade’s disruptor field. Beams raging, they toppled the buildings at the head of the street. Kyral, Jern and Utor jumped from the windows and outran the destruction, closing with the necrons and firing still. Teiras and Gherak advanced, and now they were a pincer snapping shut on the enemy.

  The remaining necrons split into two groups and charged forward and rear, matching the Deathwatch’s aggression, but not the kill-team’s speed. The Space Marines came at the ghouls in sudden doglegs and diagonal sprints, keeping their movements unpredictable.

  The street was a shrunken space, filled with rubble and smashed bodies. The two forces were in close quarters now. They were seconds from clashing together.

  Utor leapt forwards, reckless. A beam sideswiped his midsection. The Flesh Tearer fell forwards, but then rose to a crouched firing position. His anger roared from the barrel of his gun.

  ‘Brother Utor?’ Jern voxed.

  ‘Stupid,’ Utor rasped. His breathing was laboured. ‘Fine. Fine. Come on, then. Fight.’ He spoke with the staccato of strain, but not, Teiras thought, from pain. He was holding back his rage with a slippery grip.

  They had all taken glancing hits, but their armour held. Utor had suffered serious tissue loss in his midriff, but his Larraman cells’ rapid formation of scar tissue was compensating. His breathing was a constant sub-vocalised growl. He fought with increasing savagery. It was as if every violent gesture was a blow against the madness that promised a deeper violence. But despite the toll it must have been taking on him, Utor’s brutal energy was infectious. Teiras felt himself exhilarated by battle. The fury of the Emperor was upon him, and nothing could stem its charge.

  The Space Marines moved as one, the genetic insanity of Utor’s blood transmuted into an infusion of strategic savagery in his brothers.

  Brothers.

  Brothers.

  Teiras felt the spirit of battle granting them the blessing of unity, turning them into the fingers of a single fist.

  They raced over the final metres, taunting fate and lethal weaponry. Crimson runes flashed in Teiras’s retinal lenses as a flaying beam glanced against his arm. But the contact was brief and shaken as he unleashed a torrent of bolter shells into the necron’s face. Then he was moving forwards through the skeleton’s shriek and vanishing flash. In his peripheral vision, his brothers were moving with the same grace of perpetual killing.

  Ahead of him, the last of the larger, more powerful ghouls levelled its gauss blaster at his chest. Teiras threw himself to one side. The air shrieked with destructive energy and slashed at his armour’s flank. The necron adjusted its aim. Teiras tucked himself into a roll underneath the barrel of the gun. Bone-blade unsheathed, Teiras slashed upwards, cutting through the fuel line. The weapon disappeared in a flash of disordered energy, and took the top half of the necron with it.

  Teiras stood up. To his left, Jern knocked the barrel of a ghoul’s blaster aside with his bolter. The necron countered with inhuman speed, reversing the gun and smashing its stock against the side of Jern’s head. The blow would have staggered Teiras, but Jern’s only reaction was to slam his bolter down on the necron’s crown with such force that the machine head seemed to implode. Then it was gone. The last of the other necrons were also nothing more than the crackle of dissipating energy.

  Utor stood over the spot where his foe had been. The growl in his breathing had ratcheted up. He was shifting his weight back and forth from foot to foot, a hunter looking for a reason to spring. Gherak stood in front of him, close enough to get his attention, far enough not to be an immediate threat. His bolter was mag-locked to his thigh, his arms at his side. ‘Brother Utor,’ Gherak said, ‘are you with us?’ His tone was even, measured, neutral. When Utor didn’t respond, Gherak repeated the question.

  There was a brief pause in the rattling breath.

  ‘We stand with you,’ Gherak said. ‘We stand in the Emperor’s light. Can you feel it? Can you feel His blessing? It is upon our mission, it is upon this action and it is upon you.’ He raised his right arm, hand open, palm up. ‘Draw strength from His light, brother. Draw focus and clarity. He calls you to our mission, and it is far from over. We still have need of your strength, and of the gift that is yours alone.’

  Teiras would have pledged his oath that he heard Utor blink. The Flesh Tearer stopped his rocking. ‘Brother Gherak,’ he said. He clasped forearms with the other Space Marine.

  ‘We are close,’ Kyral said. He was consulting the map on his data-slate. ‘The target is on the other side of this plateau. A few thousand metres.’

  They set off at a quick march. As they passed the wreckage of the building where Jern had been stationed, Teiras saw that the woman who had spoken to them had survived the collapse. She was helping dig for other survivors. She looked up, and Teiras nodded to her. She gazed back, impassive.

  The kill-team moved beyond the destruction. Though the road turned at the top of the hill, it was faster to climb over the low houses and move straight towards their destination.

  Teiras joined Gherak and opened a private vox-channel. ‘You handled Utor well, brother,’ he said.

  Gherak shrugged. ‘The true madness was not upon him.’

  ‘But he was teetering on the edge. You brought him back. I thought your approach demonstrated an unu
sual understanding.’

  ‘You mean I didn’t call for his immediate execution?’

  Interesting, Teiras thought. It was the first flash of emotion he had heard from Gherak. ‘I meant that to view the call in his blood as in any way a gift takes a rare insight.’

  ‘Do you regard your own mutation as a curse?’

  Bless the curse. The refrain of the Black Dragons’ holy communion came back to Teiras. ‘My Chapter’s creed is not that crude,’ he answered; and neither, it seems, is yours, he thought. He waited for Gherak to speak again, but the other had fallen silent.

  The train had taken them north and west from the tower, and by now the kill-team had travelled most of the way to the outer wall. They were, Teiras calculated, approximately level with the Lord Governor’s palace. There were no more houses now as they entered mining territory again. There was a rise in the terrain ahead, and from the other side came a pulsing green glow and the crump of explosions.

  At the crest of the rise, a quarry came into view. This one was not a vertical gulf, more a narrow box canyon. It had been dug into the hill, creating ragged, oppressive cliffs on either side of a steep, uneven slope. From its depths came the unholy flashes and echoing energy crackles of xenos warfare.

  The kill-team descended the slope. The broken surface gave the Space Marines plenty of cover. They moved from boulder to boulder. On the other side of a large tumble of stone, they saw the siege. There were ten necron warriors. Before them was a monstrous face fifty metres high, and they were assaulting it with a relentless, untiring, mechanical rhythm. The face bore the disfigurements of a week of unceasing assault. Its features had blurred and crumbled, and what its true character had been was now impossible to determine. It had never been human, that much was sure. Teiras could see the vague suggestion of scales, and its eye sockets were much too far apart, as if the being represented had possessed 180-degree vision. More disturbing yet was that it did not appear to be carved from the rock. At first, Teiras thought that it looked as if it somehow had been formed by the rock, as natural an extrusion as a crystal. But that too was wrong. He had the process reversed, he realised. The rock had been formed by the face. Strata exposed by the dig showed the record of metamorphism radiating out from it. Benthamite and all its glory were the mere by-product of the face’s creation.