'Stand your ground!' Trigaine bellowed. 'We bleed this beast in the Lion's name!'
Shots continued to chip at the behemoth s armour, but it had adapted itself to physicality and most of the Vaniskray's fire struck off ephemeral shields. With a grimace. Aravain slammed another burning clip into his pistol.
'Fall back,' Muriel voxed.
'What?' said Trigaine.
‘You believe that killing this thing will do damage to the khrave?'
'The Lion says it and thus it is so.'
'Then fall back to my position. I am castellan of the Vaniskray and I will see that it is done.'
VII
Hook-limbed warrior khrave converged on the Lion like bats on wounded prey as he bared his teeth and launched his sword through an electric arc.
The Lion Sword cleaved through a psychic illusion. Mockery fluttered through the khrave-host, a sound like the dry rustling of papyrus wings, and a psychic sledgehammer threw him clear across the nexus chamber. The floor was ribbed, foully reminiscent of the digestive tract of an ophidian nightmare, and his armour hanged and scuffed across its surface as he rolled. From supine, he came smoothly up onto one knee, sword angled to catch the incoming blow.
A witchblade materialised in the khrave’s hand even as it executed the downstroke. The psychic weapon flashed against the solid artifice of the Emperor's forge-lords. Particles and anti-particles destroyed one another as rapidly as they could be conjured into being as the Lion turned the blow across his shoulder. The khrave went with it. the Lion reversing its captured momentum to rise, turn, spin, and hack open a second warrior khrave with a rising slash.
A third creature lunged at him. The Lion twisted sideways, blade reversing to flick the blow aside and scrape up the creature's forearm The wounded xenos reeled, stumbling into a stream of bolter fire that chewed it to pieces. War cries and battle oaths rang out, rejoined by the hard bangs of mass reactives as the Deathwing rose to the Lion's need.
The Lion Sword whirled and darted like an independent creature, a Calibanite lion guided by his movements and intentions but with a will and an instinct for the kill all its own
A straight vertical chop from on high cracked open the shoulder of a warrior khrave, cutting through to its midriff. A burnt-wasp odour sizzled from the jagged wound. While lacking any of the physical orifices or fleshy organs required to emit sound, the wounded xenos nevertheless delivered a shriek of such psychic potency that it buffeted the forbidding walls of the Lion's mind, force and counter-force rippled through the skin of his face, stunning him long enough for a psychically swollen elder khrave to pin his sword arm in its claws. Another with rondel horns of black crystal studding the upper lip of its pectoral thorax made a simultaneous grab for the opposite arm. The Lion struggled to shake off their grip, the contest fought as much mentally as with physical strength, but the combined might of the two khrave was loo great to be dislodged.
The autochthonar approached with jittering movements, as if through a string of micro-teleportation events rather than inconveniencing its mummified limbs. As it drew nearer, the subordinate khrave faded into darkness, individual shadows banished from sight, if not from true existence, by a total eclipse of the sun.
All except the two that held the Lion.
+I will void your mind. I will force down every morsel of knowledge and personality you possess. And when your empire falls, as every empire has fallen before it, then I will be there to feast on its corpse.+ The xenos ancient reached out. With the sense organs of thought, it lasted the primarch's mind. +Lion El'Jonson+
Before the Lion could respond, the khrave holding on to his right arm exploded into shards of chitin and ichorous spray. Death was so immediate, so unexpected and total, that the khrave did not even have time for a mortis shriek. It simply ended.
With his sword arm free, the Lion turned and plunged the humming artificer blade into the thorax of the rondel-spined khrave to his left. He looked over his shoulder as the warrior khrave spasmed against the lion Sword's energised embrace.
Stenius strode into the central nexus. The knight of the Ironwing had been outfitted with a psychically baffled helmet of the Santales order, and was flanked by a pair of towering six-limbed cyber automata. Adamantium-clad behemoths of inhuman aspect and devilish asymmetry, the things advanced ahead of the legionary as though directly from the techno-horrified imaginings of Old Night. No blundering automata were these, no cybermantically preserved cadavers spared the final kiss of death. They were Excindios, the last of the dreaded Silica Animus, the bastard offspring of the Men of Iron. Tortured, neutered, once-limitless intellects, they were now chained to a single armoured core and the service of the Emperor of Mankind. Legends of such terrors lived on in the species memory of Old Night and the wars of Unification. The continued existence of such artificial terrors, even in their current mutilated capacity, was a secret kept even from the primarchs and the adepts of Mars, one known only to the Emperor, the Lion and the most exalted ranks of the First Legion's Ironwing.
The Lion sensed the ripples in the ether as the khrave autochthonar unfurled its mind towards them, only to have its thoughts rebuffed by logic processes of copper, silicon and steel.
'You cannot fight what you cannot see,' said the Lion, launching himself at the wizened xenos as the two Excindio automata deployed their weapons.
With the rage of tyrants brought low, of once-infinite beings who had been gagged and blinded and bound in chains, and who had been let slip for this one moment with the tools of murder in their metal hands, they opened fire. Irad cleansers and subatomic pulses whickered through the stunned khrave. Graviton flux projectors shook the resonant plastek of the nexus to its core structure. And, when the destructive energies of even that proscribed arsenal proved insufficient to the slaking of their haired, the behemoths waded in with adamaniium-toothed Evisceratons and stamping feet. Left to their own devices, the shackled AIs would not have limited themselves to the khrave. It was only Stenius' measured guidance, and the finger he held over their artificia kill switch that kept them from rampaging right through the Deathwing and into the Lion.
+Abominations. +
The thought was not one deliberately sent, but a mind as powerful and permeating as the autochthonar's could not keep its cognition wholly to itself.
A pulse of aggression smashed the Lion into the tangle of ribbed vaults and he rebounded to the floor with a clatter of heavy armour, just as warrior khrave began projecting psy-shields to repel the Excindios' rampage.
But the artificia had already presented enough of a distraction.
'Whatever the foe,' said the Lion, raising his sword. 'Whatever its virtue and its strength. The First Legion alone harbours the means to address and vanquish it. That is our purpose. That is our strength.'
The autochthonar's age-withered form seemed to thicken and expand, the rampant energies of its halo hardening into an energy field that flickered with the shearing sound of phantasmal blades, orbiting at the speed of thought. It extended its sword, two metres long, a two-dimensional anomaly speckled with the light of dead stars.
The blade fizzed as the paradoxical force of its unreality touched the energised field of the Lion Sword.
VIII
Duriel stood between Canis Incaedium and Arsia Praedator. The giant war machines were unpowered and immobile, but their bulk made them effective shields against the torrent of incoming fire from the bridge-fort. Ancient Telamane and his cohort of veterans had finally succumbed to weight of numbers and the gate had been fully breached. Battle tanks forced their way through. Bolt rounds spanked off the glacis plates of Leman Russ as they rolled through in single file, hull-mounted heavy bolters barking at the retreating legionaries in return. Human and skitarii soldiers poured in over the walls. The Dark Angels fell back before them. Hefty warriors in Terminator armour acted as bulwarks, but the tide of misguided humanity dragged them under. Shorn of support by the precision strikes of the khrave and the extermination of thei
r reserves by the khrave-Titan, they could not hold.
Duriel's honour guard and remaining consuls fired back. It was like shooting at the sea.
He cut the vox-link to the Knights of Santales to perform one last check on the arcane instrumentations and crude wiring he had strung between the two god-machines and a cluster of distinctly Dark Age esoterica he had drawn from the Dreadwing arsenal for this purpose. The Warhounds could not fight, but they could still serve. If he listened, tuned out the stuttering bangs and the screams of a bastion put to the sword, and concentrated, he could almost hear the voice of Arsia Praedator in his mind. Its deep silica dreams came to him in a fitful Martian cant, a pronounced Phaetonii accent. The technology to which its weapons and power transfer systems had been so cruelly hardwired, however, was blackest Terran and its murmurings spoke of its distress.
Radiological dating placed the technology's origin at between twenty-five and thirty millennia ago, an era when humanity had only begun exploring the arts of species-scale annihilation. Its power had waned over the intervening epoch, but it remained effective, requiring only that which Canis Incaedium and Arsia Praedator slumbering reactors were able to provide.
An acolyte of Mars would have deemed this gambit sacrilegious, and would not have hesitated in laying down his or her life to prevent Duriel from proceeding.
But Duriel was not a Techmarine. He was a forge-wright, and a master of the Ironwing. He was learned where those of his brethren trained on Mats were not. The Theologiteks of Narodnya had guided his learning, encouraging the accumulation of wisdom rather than lore and of reason rather than dogma. He had studied heretechnika that would be burned on sight on Mars, infernal war machines that consumed the flesh of the slain as fuel, and worse, diabolical engines whose Silica Animus harked back to the blood-soaked legends of prehistory, machines capable of offering divine providence and fortune in battle in exchange for the blood of a willing sacrifice.
This was why the forge-wrights of the Ironwing existed. This was why the Dark Angels existed: to wield the sanction that other warriors dared not.
He turned towards the shouts of fleeing knights. The Santales emerged from the chaos of smoke and spray, the khrave-Titan pursuing them like a primordial horror spewed onto the esplanades from the depths of an alien ocean. The warriors snapped off shots as they ran. Their fire aggravated it.
Most importantly, it kept it solid.
'Redloss. this is Duriel.'
'Redloss.'
'Engage, brother.'
He turned to the Vaniskray. watching as the great gates were cast wide. Scores of warriors, their black ceramite and battle standards emblazoned with the skull-in-hourglass emblem of the Dreadwing sallied forth. They assailed the Titan from its flank like fire-breathing ants, hosing the war engine's lower sections with their flamers. Fire, Duriel bad discovered, was inimical to the khrave. Their shields shrivelled before it. Their bodies burned like any other. He did not know why, and did not need to; it was enough for him to know that it worked. The magnetically pressurised jets of plasma ejected by the weapons of the Dreadwing were flames that burned many times more violently than the hottest star. The Titan screeched, tentacle-limbs dripping even as they extended to drag the behemoth forward. But for all their ferocity. the Dark Angels were still ants just the same. Bolts of psychic power scythed through their ranks. Dreadwing interemptors dropping dead without a mark on their armour.
'Fall back with the Order of Santales,' Duriel voxcd.
'Yes, castellan.'
The surviving Dreadwing lowered their plasma burners and ran, not back towards the safety of the Vaniskray, but further up the esplanade, drawing it on. A handful of Santales knights held their ground to cover the retreat. Uncanny effects striped the Titan's exo-shell, weird crystalline structures materialising from hidden sub layers of the warp under the Santales' fire. The Titan turned the warriors to ash with a brute force psychic lash. Burnt tendrils withdrew into the central mass. Undamaged ones remerged.
Warriors streamed past Duriel and his entourage of knights.
'Keep running,' Duriel shouted to them as they approached, waving them on towards his forces still battling around the bridge-fort. They had done their duty in luring the Titan away from the Vaniskray. They could do more to aid their brothers’ retreat than they could to assist Duriel now. 'Go. Go.'
The khrave-Titan loomed over him. Bits of it flickered. Bits of it burned. Debilitating waves of anger and hate throbbed from its structure like heat from a furnace, liable to burn one who approached too close, liable to kill anyone who ignored that warning. Duriel turned to his warriors. They had all sworn themselves to this duty, as he had. He bowed his head to them as the last of the Dreadwing and the Santales ran past their position, and smiled.
'We hold this ground for the Lion,’ he said, and pressed the detonator he held in his hand.
* * *
IX
A mushroom plume rose above the crenellated peaks of the Vaniskray, atomic fire blasting the khrave-Titan from its physical form and burning it all the way to its roots in the dark, infinitely malleable soil of the empyrean.
Aravain clung to the armoured skirting of a crippled Land Raider, buffeted by nuclear winds as everything from small stones and unexploded munitions to light tanks were thrown towards the sea. His helmplate was awash with radiological warnings. It hurt to look through them, to see the Titan's true form shrivelling like so much paper in the inferno's heat. He did so anyway.
The atomic, on its own, might not have been sufficient to end the god-machine's infernal life. On some level, Duriel must have intuited this, that the workings of such a weapon derive as much from the man as from the machine. And the spirit of self-sacrifice burned as righteously in the Dark Angels as did the flame of Old Earth.
The searing light went through Aravain's eyes and into his mind. Still, he would not look away. One man needed to remember.
The Imperium could forget. Because the Dark Angels never would.
X
The death of the xenos Titan ran through the khrave's collective psyche like a fire along a trail of promethium. As the Lion had known it would.
Destroy the foe by the most expeditious means possible, beset him as swiftly as he was able, and from every avenue of assault: if the Lion could be said to have a single overarching principle of war then it was this.
The warrior khrave who had survived the nexus battle shrieked, segmented limbs flailing even before the phosphex launchers and heavy flamers of Deathwing Terminators and Excindio artiftcia put them to the torch. The knights took the unexpected moment's respite to reform into defensive spirals around their liege, taking the chance to reload and recover their breath. The twisted logic of the Excindio, however, had no understanding of mercy or quarter and would grant none, even in error. Streams of arcane fire and hails of quixotic projectiles mowed the khrave down, every shrieking death further fuel for the bonfire of xenos souls that burned across the shrivelling overmind of the autochthonar.
Spasming energies forked across the khrave lord's brittle exo-shell, multiple-jointed limbs twitching beyond conscious control. The flawless geometries of its war-crown bent under the play of energies as its mind sought to corral and contain the enormous psychic feedback that had overridden its body.
'It is possible that the Imperium of my father will one day falter as you insist it must,' said the Lion. Breathing hard from his exertions, he reversed his sword to wield it point down over the spasming body of the khrave, the quillons raised to his eyes. 'As I still draw breath it shall not, and you shall never know.'
Lion El'Jonson drove his sword through the autochthonar's skull.
'Because you sought to pit your strength against the valour of the Dark Angels.’
ELEVEN
I
Stenius walked
Slanted, metre-thick armourglass viewing panes slid by overhead. The mass of shipping cluttering the Muspellian inner system blocked out the stars of the Northern Fringe
. Sorting through the flotsam of the khrave's leaderless armada had been a full-time task, and one that the war-weary Legion had passed down to the Muspellian militia and those units of the 2003rd auxilia who had been spared the worst of the actions on Muspel.
Even now, weeks after the Vaniskray triumph, units of Carribic Jazzerines, Gramarye Castellans and Serranic Peltasts escorted groups of aexactors, numerators and recordists through the ramshackle armada. Stenius did not know what they were looking for. The Orders Civilis, its membership comprised of the civilian and auxilia elements of the Legion, did their work in parallel to the hekatonystika, and largely in secret, reporting ultimately, even if not always directly, to the Lion alone. Stenius had seen reports of several thousand human soldiers and crew bundled into transports for interrogation by the Firewing. Most could be traced back to Crusade fleets reported lost in the Ghoul Stars. They had surrendered themselves willingly. Many more, however, could have their origins traced to worlds as yet unclaimed or those marked hominum extinctus in the ledgers of the Great Crusade - some of them third, fourth or even sixth generation thralls of the khrave. As far as the Lion was concerned this war had ended with the destruction of the khrave and the demise of their lord, but the fighting aboard some of those ships continued to be heavy.
Stenius stepped off the central aisle and into the well-armoured forward section. Lights blinked from steep banks of consoles and displays, reflections gleaming from the dulled plasteel of the palisades. The handful of technical staff on duty drowned in the space. Departmental and sectoral overseers were still taking headcounts, but most estimates placed losses to khrave subversion from the Invincible Reason's human complement at around a third. It was a figure replicated by similar tallies throughout the fleet. Those that continued to serve would almost certainly never know what had befallen their former crewmates.
Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 16
