Her extended mind drew back to the immediate needs of her physical host as a hail of bolter shells hammered down from an overlooking gantry.
The high-explosive shells ripped through her scantily armoured thralls. Soldiers and crew serfs yelled as they hit the deck - oaths to the primarch and the Emperor that made sense to them if no one else - and crawled into cover. Those who had weapons used them, squeezing off shots that sparked from the underfloor and high rails of the gantry, or else ricocheted harmlessly from hulking legionary armour.
Savine had led her thralls into an enginarium storage bay on her way to the launch bay. It was, she had been aware, the perfect site for an ambush, and she had psychically probed the route accordingly before satisfying herself that it was empty of foes. The failure of her sayings was more a cause for curiosity than annoyance.
The legionary did not deign to take cover from her thralls' fire. He stood square on, taking hits, not even angling his body or dropping to one knee to minimise his profile, and mowed the storage bay with bolter fire.
Bolt-rounds ripped human bodies to pieces, perforating the storage containers they sheltered behind and blowing them to smithereens, bloody clouds mingling with aerosolised chemicals and explosions of grain. Every thrall that perished was a tiny scream driven into the ether, a shiver of psychic energy that nourished and strengthened her.
Leaving her thralls to drown the solitary Dark Angel with targets, she strode on, shells bending around the bubble-like barrier of psychic energy that encompassed her.
Confronted by a shielded adversary, the warrior's instinct was to break it. Turning from the inconsequential horde of thralls, the legionary poured the full weight of his tire into her. She grinned as bolt shells whipped around her, accelerated to hyper-relativistic speeds before firing off in random directions, blasting through doorways, bulkheads, exterior plating and several thousand kilometres of realspace before the shells' internal mass-reaction fired. One shot in twenty struck her shield at the precise angle to penetrate, impacting with such force that they were crushed out of their third dimension, transmuted into flat discs that came apart like antimatter fireworks under the weight of their own paradox.
With a voice-augmented growl, the legionary drew his bolter in to his chest plastron and withdrew, backing into one of the myriad passageways that fed the gantry.
Savine frowned after him, but before she could consider what the warrior's retreat might portend, a second hail of bolter fire tore into her thralls from behind.
She turned to look as an identically armoured and robed figure strode from the shadowed bulk of the storage containers, but for his position on the hangar floor it could have been the same knight. Even his thoughts were indistinguishable. The minds of humans flickered like candles, shaped and coloured by their inability to hold fast to a single thought for long. Those of the Dark Angels were hard and self-contained, gemstones forged under ferocious pressures whose only thoughts were of self-sacrifice and duty.
They offered little purchase, and promised meagre sustenance.
A third legionary, identical again to the other two, appeared from a door hatch. Savine ignored him. She had thralls enough to absorb his fire and more importantly his time while she destroyed the warrior in her path. She could always subvert more once she approached the launch bay.
The legionary behind her raised a pistol-sized weapon in a two-handed grip. Despite its small physical size, its light blazed in the empyreal realm like the pilot light of a heavy flamer, for the first time since the host-mind had manifested its will into this body, she hesitated.
The knight opened fire.
IV
'Khrave xenoform engaged.'
‘Mind-slave or root-host?'
'It is the principal mind. Standard-issue ammunition is ineffective. Brothers Beraint and Cerond and Brother-Sergeant Kaliel have been slain.'
‘She is heading for the launch bay.’
'Moving to intercept.'
‘Has there been any word from the preceptor or the Lion?’
'No, brother. Standing orders apply.'
The vox-chatter filled Aravain's helmet, positional markers blinking in the augmented display. Tristerix, this is Cruciatum. I am closing on your position from starboard.'
However it was that the khrave root-host had managed to infiltrate the Dark Angels flagship, it was well and truly unveiled to his senses now. Aravain had never stood before the glory of the Emperor, but those heroes who had done so all spoke haltingly of the experience, as though the impression left by Him on the psyche was too deep to be revisited and experienced again with clarity.
His sensation of the root khrave, though malignant of source, felt similar.
He frowned, armoured by duty as he braced the weight of his gun and targeted the tidal surge of infected crewmen rushing up from the storage bay towards him.
He pulled the trigger.
A spray of explosive psychoactive rounds incinerated the tightly packed mortals, body and soul, each individual screaming into a pyre that burned across two realms. Aravain counted twenty-five men armed with stub pistols and wrenches A second after he had counted them they were gone, every ripple and echo that suggested they had ever existed eradicated, and even Aravain's eidetic recall struggled to conjure any details of their appearance: except that there had been twenty-five, armed with stub pistols and wrenches.
An itch walked up his spine, and in spite of his discipline Aravain struggled to suppress a shudder as he lowered the weapon and continued his advance.
Sparks gouted from torn conduits and vandalised fascia consoles. Ductwork hung from the ceiling. The Invincible Reason was destroying herself from within, like a living organism, her own immune system driven wild by a viral contagion. As structurally sound as she appeared from the outside, the flagship would be out of service for months after this, even if the khrave could be uprooted swiftly.
A shriek that was both human and alien, physical and unreal, echoed through the torn innards of the ship
The khrave of Indra-Sul had been many weeks dead, a subject of the Mechanicum Biologis, by the time Aravain had managed to see it. In spite of its preservative stasis, the xenos parasite had still been an abhorrent deviation of the honiminid form. It had been three metres tall, spread across two tables, its long-limbed body sheathed in a reflective carapace that shared something of the aeldari in its loathsome grace. Its head had been a featureless ovoid, like a black egg, lacking in any kind of orifice for ingestion, respiration or the transmission of sensory information. How it had sustained itself, how it had perceived the universe from within that hermetic shell had been a mystery to the Biologis, but according to the accumulated lore of the Order of Santales the khrave were a race who dwelt, and fed, at least in part in the realm of the psychic.
From what Aravain had been able to glean, the creature that Corax had slain had been an engorged and physically atrophied specimen, already on the wane having exhausted the psychic resources of its world.
What he faced here was different, an alpha xenos mind in the full power of its ascendency.
Aravain reopened the Santales cenobium frequency as something that his brother had said over the vox came back to him.
'Tristerix, this is Cruciatum - did you say 'she'?'
'It is the remembrancer, Cruciatum. Savine Grael.’
He muted the vox-pickup before he could say something he might later regret, recalling as he did the fleeting contact between Savine and the corpse aboard the Obrin. Was that what khrave domination required? Physical proximity, however brief?
Had he set the khrave loose aboard the Lion's ship?
He broke into a run.
V
A Dark Angel sidestepped from behind a modified cargo Atlas, his aura as black as hate, and raised a hideously robust assault cannon. The light streaming from its radiators and vanes was acid on the retinas. The legionary flicked out a switch from the weapon's upper handguard, its charge stacks emitting a rising hum before
discharging a torrent of forced energy pulses into the stampeding thralls. A single, instinctive moment of recoil spared Savine. Dead bodies tumbled around her where live ones had been running, the energy blasts tearing through the web of organo-psychic tendrils that bound them. The pain of it was like nothing she had ever known, and she had outlived the fall of star-empires and the birth pains of gods. It was as though every nerve in her distant, physical body were being attacked with a flaming torch.
With a roar she lashed out, not purely with the mind but, in her distraction, flinging out an arm, a telekinetic battering ram that sent the massive Atlas shrieking sideways on its tracks before crushing the Dark Angel between it and the wall. She clenched a fist, howling in anger and pain, and the entire tank and the legionary behind it crumbled into black sand.
Savine dived for the deck as a whoosh of psychically coloured flame licked towards her. Another legionary stepped out from behind a baffled screen, a silver mistletoe talisman falling from the folds of his hood as he raked his flamer-type weapon back and forth. Thralls screamed and rolled over on the deck, frantically patting at their clothes, and Savine felt every iota of their agonies. Holding onto the psychic feedback until it felt as though her bones would melt, she rounded on the legionary.
The air ignited, becoming a roiling fireball that ripped through the storage bay as it swelled. It crumpled the bulkheads, melted stanchions, brought gantries and derricks crashing in. The legionary attempted to throw himself clear, but was incinerated.
Savine howled in frustration.
All of the Dark Angels her mind had touched aboard this ship were hard-edged and cold to her sight. But those wielding the warp weapons were almost invisible. They cloaked themselves somehow, an anti-psychic field generated by the sigils on their war-plate, or a protean veil woven into the fabric of their hoods or the padding of their helmets. If she lost sight of them, even for a moment, then they were gone, and the knights were doing all in their power to remain hidden.
Staccato barks of explosive fire, conventional bolter rounds, fell amongst what was left of her thralls, whole shells and blast debris bending and rippling across her psy-shields.
She had been herded by fire, driven into a subsector of the enginarium seldom visited by mortals and which, even after Savine's six months aboard ship and the khrave’s access to the memories of a thousand minds, was a black space.
She was alone, and she was lost.
Her scream rose into the suprasonic, warping metal and armaplas until bolters refused to fire and audial dampeners exploded into sparks from the sides of legionary helmets. Dark Angels fell from positions of hiding with screams of pain. Savine stalked towards a warrior who lay half paralysed on the deck, soaked in the promethium jelly and accelerant that was leaking from the ruptured canister on his back.
Savine's lips drew back into a snarl, psychic corposant licking the splayed fingers of her hand as she prepared to burn the warrior alive.
VI
Aravain had been in the corridor, coming at the storage bay on an oblique, when the khrave's witch-scream had burned out his vox-link to the cenobium. He stumbled into the bay, liven with the muffling effect of walls and a few hundred metres of distance, the aftershocks were still ringing in his ears. The former remembrancer was the last thing standing, stalking towards the downed knight. Aravain levelled his cannon at the woman and opened fire.
The psychically charged shells punched through the host's barriers, detonating under the mangled wreckage of the enginarium bay as she sought cover. With his own precognitive gifts, he tracked the blurred streak as the khrave-host sped towards the nearest exit corridor. He raked the path ahead of her. but whatever powers he possessed the khrave's were of an order greater, and the last shells in the cannon s hopper banged off the heavy steel frame of the door as Savine vanished through it.
'Cruciatum.' breathed the warrior that the khrave-host had been set to finish. Aravain knew him only by his order identity, Viscium. His weapon's casing had split, and even had it been operable both of its fuel canisters had been ruptured in battle with the khrave-host. 'Did you kill her. brother?’
Aravain shook his head.
The other knight struggled to rise, failed. 'By the dark woods of fair Caliban, we wounded her, brother.’ He groped blindly for Aravain's hand. Lowering the emptied cannon to the deck, Aravain guided the other's hand to his forearm and clasped it in a firm, warrior's grip. 'Kill her, brother, for the Lion.'
Aravain released the knight's grip. Viscium's arm dropped to the deck. The knight was dead.
VII
The Vaniskray's summit was a fortress in miniature, an urban tangle of turrets. Hydra autocannon batteries and battlemented walkways. Castellated rotunda housed laser destroyer arrays and the hab-sized scaffold of charge cells and capacitors required to fire a weapon capable of knocking a capital ship from orbit. The shells of void generators rose like iron molluscs against the keep's angular skyline. Ropes of armoured and insulated cabling fed their enormous demands for energy, liven with the shields down - for embattled though they were, no force yet challenged them from orbit - the thick, muggy scent of water vapour and ozone filled the battlements and static lingered on every metallic surface. While most of the rooftop was given over to armoured conduits for the rapid deployment of infantry and, more usefully, support staff for the heavier defensive systems, the aegis of anti-air and anti-orbital firepower also served to protect landing facilities for a mid-size Imperial transport, equivalent to a Thunderhawk gunship. An 'X' of roads crossed the landing pad, each branch terminating in the super-heavy vehicle elevators enclosed within the corner towers. They were wide enough to allow a Hydra flak tank to pass in each direction without colliding Access from the north-easterly wing was blocked by a steel portcullis. It acquiesced to the Lion's presence with a hiss and rose into the wall as he passed.
Five knights in the mixed symbols of a dozen squads held position in the cover of some corrugated steel crates that had fallen from the back of an upturned Taurox. Their fire discipline was superb in spite of the anarchy, firing in waves whereby one warrior reloaded while his brothers emptied their magazines. Fifty of their brothers lay in states of dismemberment along the X of the roads, scattered like the petals of a black flower to line the approach of a god. Plates of scorched and mangled ceramite trembled with the metronomic footfalls of their destroyer.
One of the knights sheltering behind the Taurox rose from cover, a missile launch tube on his shoulder, and fired. The krak missile streaked over the debris-strewn road, between the flanking battlements, looping upwards before thumping into the target's void shields. It vanished with implosive brilliance, the field bubble rippling as the kinetic energy was absorbed and devoured.
With a strident blast of its horns, Rubrum Viator, Warhound of the Legio Osedax, strode through the pinprick explosions of bolter fire.
The roadway cracked under its splayed, adamantium tread. Fourteen metres high at its hunched shoulders, limbs backward-jointed, it moved with a predator's gait that devoured the road at a rate at odds with its size. It crushed a parked Troika cargo truck underfoot. Rain speckled its dorsal void coverage, the occasional oil-on-water ripple of multilaser-fire, suggesting that at least one loyal human soldier still manned the turrets of the Vaniskray's roof. With a howl of autoloaders and rotating barrels, Rubrum Viator opened up with its mega-bolter.
A hail of heavy bolter rounds chewed through the Taurox's hull with a sound like a tin can being mutilated with a screwdriver. Two of his knights were killed instantly, mauled beyond even the recognition of their own brothers. A third, the warrior with the missile launcher, had his arm carved from his body. He fell to the ground, the launch tube rolling away from him. In defiance of futility and in disregard of pain, he drew a bolt pistol from its thigh-plate mag-lock and fired up at the advancing Titan. Specks of brilliance popped around its snarling wolf head as mass-reactive shells died against its shields, metres away from its armour.
Anot
her knight ran to gather up the missile launcher, the warrior's discipline an inspiration as his last standing brother provided cover for him with bolter fire. They fell back to the crates.
'For the Lion!'
Herodael stomped onto the road, advancing without consideration for his own safety into the Titan's arc of fire. If there was one thing on the world that could legitimately threaten the life of one of the Emperor's sons then it was the god-engines of the Legio Osedax. And so the Deathwing Oathbearer pushed the inertial stabilisers of his Tartaros-pattern war-plate to their limits to put himself between it and his liege.
His two Companion brothers followed suit, assuming flanking positions, three sets of combi-bolters guided by the hands of Legion veterans stippling the Titan's shield with fire. But for all their firepower, the Terminators were not nearly well-enough equipped to injure a Titan. Even a Scout Titan. Their armour, while impervious to almost anything found in the arsenals of mortal men, would not be proof against anything worse than a grazing hit from a Vulcan mega-bolter.
The only thing that could stand against an Imperial Titan was another Titan.
'I stand amongst the honoured dead,' Herodael intoned, voice deepened and strengthened by his armour's augmitter systems.
'Beyond the reach of uncertainty and doubt,' said the second.
'Beyond the frailties of honour and flesh,’ spoke the third.
'Where only duty remains,' Herodael finished.
Another krak missile exploded against the Warhound’s shields, detonating above the hip joint with force enough penetrating the barrier to draw a whine of compensatory power-draw from the motors. The Titan swayed, forced to adjust its stride, buying the Dark Angels perhaps a second and a half of life.
The knight dropped his spent launcher and picked up a bolter.
'Fall back!' the Lion roared. 'This beast is beyond you.'
Physically incapable of resisting a direct command from the Lion, the two knights rose from cover, firing upwards from the chest as they withdrew to the portcullis. The third knight hastened after them, delaying only to reload his boll pistol one-handed, slamming the clip in against his thigh and limping to link up with his brothers.
Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 10
