Let The Galaxy Burn

by Marc

  South of them, the sky was pale and blue; north, black and oily like pitch, a swirling, expanding bolus of dark cloud that blotted out the light.

  Femlyn was rechecking his autogun’s drum magazine. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Grauss pulled out his laspistol and tossed it to Femlyn.

  ‘Check it,’ he ordered. ‘My rifle too.’

  The wipers were thumping hard. Wind blew spume up over the road from the waterbeds like ocean spray. Grauss tried not to notice the wriggling black spores that were hitting the windshield and conglomerating like pus in his wipers.

  Through the driving rain, he saw the braking lights of the truck in front come on suddenly, and slammed on his own brakes. Rig 177 slid violently from side to side on the wet road. Femlyn cried out and Grauss hauled on the wheel. They stopped hard, clipping the rear bars of the truck ahead.

  The inter-cab vox was crackling with shouts. Grauss opened his door, about to get out, peering ahead to identify the obstruction.

  Something came off the back of the truck ahead of them and landed on the bonnet of 177, denting the metal. It crouched there, for what was probably only a second but felt like an eternity, the rain dribbling down over its bared, smiling teeth.

  Femlyn threw Grauss his laspistol, and Grauss fired it wildly. His salvo burst the termagant’s neck open in a fountain of noxious fluid and it crumpled off the bonnet.

  Settlers were streaming back down the road past them in blind panic.

  The track ahead started again, wheels spinning, drove ten metres and then plunged sideways off the road, rolling down the levee into the water-bed. Grauss saw four termagants scampering towards him. He stood on the throttle. Two of them were crashed under the heavy truck, another slammed away through the air after contact with the wheel arch.

  Femlyn was firing out of the cab window. Shell cases tumbled down into the footwell.

  The convoy ahead was now moving, though several tracks had slewed off the road and one was burning. Grauss had to drop speed to inch past them. Something grotesque and grinning appeared at the cab window beside Grauss and he dropped forward, allowing Femlyn to blast it through the glass.

  A smaller vehicle drew level with them, matching their speed. It was one of the open, short wheel-base escorts mounting a Hydra battery. Grauss waved the driver past and then fell in behind. A moment later, the Hydra battery was pounding, firing directly ahead of the speeding machine. Grauss saw something big and iridescent explode under the anti-aircraft fire and collapse off the road. 177’s wheels span in the ichor slick as they sped past.

  Behind them, on the highway, the racing convoy was assailed by things that poured up out of the fields and irrigation channels to the north and into their hindquarters. The escort vehicles, mounting Hydras and heavy stub-guns, ran alongside the transports, raking the fields. Mantis killers reared and clacked their talons, disintegrating in drizzles of mucus and chitin as the guns found them. Swarming termagants were smashed under speeding wheels. Hit by multiple fleshborers, a Hydra track span out of control and flew off the road, exploding in a drain canal. Biovore spore mines cramped down, blowing two of the fast-moving transports into fragments.

  There were bat-shapes in the air above.

  The convoy’s heavier armour – four Chimeras and a half dozen standard-pattern Leman Russ tanks in Mordian camo, were lagging badly, and found themselves cut off from the fleeing convoy elements.

  Hormagaunts overran two of the Chimeras, covering their hulls with squirming shapes as they opened them like seed cases. Two of the tanks stopped dead, traversed their turrets and began pounding at the wave of obscenities that rippled after the convoy. The crews knew they were as good as dead. Mordian discipline made them sell their lives as dearly as they could. Spitting bio-plasma destroyed one tank. The other was struck by some energised flash that looked like green lightning, and blew apart as its munitions ignited.

  Caught by a trio of lictors, another Chimera tried to turn and was thrown end over end, torn track sections flying. Corrosive spores reduced another of the Leman Russes to tar and semi-solid lumps.

  Standing in the back of a speeding escort truck, Colonel Tiegl manned the gun mount himself. Searing, frenzied, red tendrils had just turned his main gunner inside out. He swung the stub-gun on its pintle, squeezing the firing grip, spraying the road behind him with twin, dipping, dragging streams of heavy fire. He was drenched with rain.

  There was something in his mouth, something crawling on his skin. Mycetic spores plastered him, eating him away.

  By the time his driver fell to a barb-round and spun the vehicle into a transport’s back wheels with splintering force, there was nothing left of Tiegl but some articulated limb bones dragging from the gun-grip.

  TEN KILOMETRES ON, out of the irrigated arable spread and into the lowlands beyond, evac 132/5 found there was no going forward. The convoy was a ragged mess. The black, weeping sky had utterly overtaken what remained of the column and the tide of horror was upon them.

  Femlyn was blasting from the cab window with his autogun, and Grauss was firing his lasrifle out the other side. There was no shifting truck 177 now. Vines, thorn-creepers and other fast-growing things had meshed the axles and ruptured the tyres.

  ‘Look! Look!’ cried Femlyn.

  There were dots in the sky, burning dots that fast resolved themselves into drop-pods flaring in atmospheric entry. A dozen, two dozen, three.

  ‘Oh, praise the Emperor!’ Grauss breathed.

  The first pods hit the ground, bouncing and tearing through the cushion of foliage.

  Grauss saw the men clamber out. Adeptus Astartes. Space Marines, the Lamenters. They had come, as promised, yellow armour gleaming in the dying light. They had come despite the odds.

  The giant armoured warriors, humanity’s finest, deployed from their pods, blasting with boltguns, flamers and meltas. Termagants and hormagaunts exploded beneath the withering firepower. Flamers burned the stinking plant growth away. Gargoyles were blown, ruptured, out of the sky. Grauss saw a ravener convulse and die under a melta’s kiss. He saw plasma-fire destroy a mantis killer.

  There, a Marine with a power claw ripped a tyranid warrior in two, the corpse exploding with bile and psychic energy. Here, a Marine with a rocket launcher sent up a jinking missile that blew a zoanthrope into flaring specks of matter.

  Grauss leapt from the track’s cab and ran into the fray, his lasgun blasting. Mordian troopers were with him now, enervated by the Lamenters’ swinging assault. Grauss cut down a leaping termagaunt in mid-air, blowing it apart. He saw four Marines cripple and kill a lictor nearby.

  We could live, we could live yet, he thought triumphantly!

  He heard a keening behind him, and turned to face the horror of a carnifex charging, blades clicking, saliva flying from the cutting limbs. Femlyn tried to turn his autogun but became nothing more than a shower of meat.

  A lamenter, two of them, hit the screamer-killer from the left side with bolt rounds, and as it turned, destroying its head with melta-fire. Its scything blades, still whickering lethally as it toppled, decapitated them both.

  Grauss fell to his knees. He honestly didn’t think it possible that Space Marines could die. They seemed to him invulnerable, god-like, the walking manifestations of the God-Emperor of Terra himself. But it was true. He looked down at the fallen, splintered helm of one Marine, the glassy, dull, dead face peering out of it.

  He looked away, but saw another Lamenter ripped in two by a mantis killer fifty meters away. A ravener fell, twisting and flicking, onto three more and ground them into the soil, ripping open their armour with its chitinous mouth-parts.

  Then Grauss saw the worst sight of all, the worst, most unmanning thing his eyes had ever witnessed. Four Lamenter Space Marines: falling back, overwhelmed.

  They scrambled through the treacherous, matted ground-growth, trying to find cover from the zoanthrope that shimmered after them, spitting bolts of energised death. They turned, fired, ran on, to no
avail. The hovering thing exploded one of them and then closed on the other three. One headed left and ran onto the keening bone-swords of a tyranid warrior. Another was felled by a glancing blast from the zoanthrope and was swiftly torn apart by a pack of termagants.

  The last made it another twenty metres before the relentless zoanthrope hit him and exploded his armoured form with a vicious stab of energy.

  Grauss couldn’t believe was he was seeing.

  In the first twenty minutes from drop, the Lamenters had cut a hole in the alien assault that had punished them cruelly. Now, in just five more minutes, they were being annihilated.

  A spore mine from a biovore blew two more apart and sent a wash of mud and sap high into the air.

  Two Lamenters faced down another carnifex and blew it apart with sustained bolt fire. A second later, they were both dismembered by hormagaunts before they could reload.

  Grauss saw the hive tyrant advancing through the flaming greenery, slaughtering Space Marines with its massive blade. He saw the vast, obscene shapes of the bio-titans lurching forward in the distant smog.

  The last Lamenter died thirty-nine minutes after the first had clambered from his drop-pod.

  The convoy was ablaze, what parts of it weren’t shredded or swarmed over.

  Grauss dropped into a foxhole, feeling the undergrowth flourish and twist around him. His body was crawling with parasitic infection. He heard chattering.

  On the horizon line, most nightmarish of all, the vile ripper swarms were moving in, consuming everything in their path, eating up the world.

  Karl Grauss made his peace with the God-Emperor, with his long dead parents, with his long-lost homeworld, beloved, distant Mordia, praying it would never suffer this blasphemous fate.

  He put the snout of his lasgun in his open mouth.

  CHILDREN OF THE EMPEROR

  Barrington J Bayley

  HOARSE SCREAMS AND the screech of tortured hot metal filled the air. Massive laser blasts were punching into the spaceship. They superheated the air that men breathed, set fire to everything that could burn and sent fireballs exploding through the crowded passageways.

  Imperial Guardsman Floscan Hartoum found himself in a crowd of jostling, panicking men. Minutes before, the men of the Aurelian IXth regiment had been ordered to the armoury to collect their lasguns and short-swords in case the enemy should manage to teleport aboard. They would never reach the armoury now. The crippled troopship Emperor’s Vengeance was in a state of absolute chaos. Suddenly a great howl of collective terror rose up. Down the corridor a glowing, writhing red mass had appeared, rolling down the passageway towards them.

  Like the others, Floscan turned and ran. He had been at the back of the crowd; now he was at the front. Pushed from behind, he fell, then managed to get his legs under him and leaped. Behind him he heard an automatic emergency bulkhead descend with a thump.

  Staggering to his feet, he found that he was alone in an empty section of corridor. He had been the only one to slither under the bulkhead as it came down. Everyone else was trapped on the other side. Floscan stood, shaking, hearing the fireball slam against the steel partition, accompanied by the agonised shrieks of his comrades who were being incinerated. He pressed his hands to his ears to shut out the cries.

  The Emperor’s Vengeance was old, centuries old. Guardsman Hartoum firmly believed that only the holy rituals carried out daily by the ship’s priests kept it in one piece. But it was meticulously tended. The burnished metal ribs of the arch-roofed passageway gleamed. Effigies and efficacious runes, etched at various times by mechanics and priests, adorned the walls. But right now Floscan was blind to all this. The dying screams of his comrades fading behind him, he stumbled to an oval porthole set in a brass surround, and stared blindly out.

  He was looking into the star-strewn blackness of space. Unknown miles away, the sharp outlines of the attacking ships were visible. Even at this distance they were an extraordinary sight, a motley collection had set, of mongrelised and ramshackle craft, looking for all the galaxy as though they had each been constructed from two or three spacecraft crudely welded together. They had set upon the flotilla of troop transports, clumsy barges only lightly armed, as it emerged from the warp to take its bearings. The result was utter carnage. The makeshift character of the ships identified their crews as orks, who did not build spacecraft themselves but used whatever they could capture or scavenge from other races. How they must have roared with savage delight to see units of the Imperial Navy materialise unsuspectingly before them!

  Now the flotilla’s escorting battlecruiser Glorious Redeemer hove into view, a massive structure with baroque, gargoyle-encrusted spires and weapons turrets which were gouting plasma as it attempted to defend the troopships. But it was heavily out-gunned and had been taken by surprise. Half a dozen ork ships had surrounded it and their armament was tearing it to pieces, great crenellated chunks spinning off into space.

  From another of the ork craft something came flimmering. It was followed by a juddering shock that went right through the vitals of the Emperor’s Vengeance with a roaring noise. The passageway buckled. From all around came the cacophony of a ship breaking up. They had been hit by a plasma torpedo!

  ‘ABANDON SHIP! ABANDON SHIP!’

  The order crackled through the antique ceiling speakers. Guardsman Hartoum however, needed no prompting. He was already dashing for the nearest escape pods, scrambling over the newly-made folds and rents in the floor.

  ‘Belay that order, Guardsman! Fight to the end against the vile enemies of the Emperor!’

  Floscan pulled up sharp. An intimidating figure in a black, square-shouldered longcoat was standing stiffly at the corridor’s next bend. It was the commissar, Leminkanen. The grim expression beneath his peaked cap was nothing new. He wore it all the time, but especially during the fanatical morale-boosting lectures Floscan had been required to attend.

  The order to abandon ship had come from the captain. Floscan had no idea who ranked higher in this situation, captain or commissar, but he did know that if he obeyed the latter he was unlikely to still be alive one minute from now. Instinctively he moved to the nearby pod.

  ‘You will not ran in the face of the enemy, Guardsman. Where is your lasgun?’

  The last words were drowned out by an enormous squealing of metal being torn apart, followed by the terrifying hiss of air escaping from the ruptured hull. A lasgun suddenly appeared in the Commissar Leminkanen’s hand. Its lethal beam zipped past Hartoum’s ear as he hurled himself into die lifepod, in the same motion striking the rune-encrusted button that closed the hermetic seal. His hand trembling with panic, he pulled the lever to eject.

  Fragments rattled against the pod as it rocketed away from the disintegrating troopship. The fierce acceleration drained the blood from Floscan’s brain and he blacked out.

  WHEN HE CAME TO, the total silence of fhe pod’s close confines, in which there was barely room to move, was frightening. Even the sound of Floscan’s breathing seemed unnaturally loud. He dragged himself to the tiny porthole and peered out.

  If there was anything to be seen at all, it consisted of spread wreckage which occasionally drifted between himself and the stars, making them twinkle. The flotilla was destroyed, and with it the Aurelian IXth Regiment. Of the ork ships there was no sign.

  Guardsman Hartoum fell back on the pod’s couch, unable to bear the devastating sight.

  Aurelia, where Floscan had been raised, was an agricultural world. He had joined the founding Imperial Guard regiment voluntarily, hoping for challenge and adventure. Now that he had found them, he was wishing for his quiet life back on the farm. He firmly believed in the Emperor, of course, but now he was beyond even His help. He was alone, and lost. Rescue was impossible. The navy would not even know where the flotilla had emerged from the warp. The pod would keep him alive for a few days, and then…

  It would have been better to have died alongside his comrades.

  Overcome with despa
ir and even shame at his escape, Floscan buried his face in his hands and sobbed for a while. Then he took a grip on himself. He was an Imperial Guardsmen, he told himself. The Emperor would expect him to keep up his courage, no matter how bad things became. He steeled himself to face death calmly. Eventually, some dread curiosity drew him back to the porthole. He felt compelled to look again into the void which was to be his grave. When he did, he gasped, his jaw hanging.

  There was a planet below him.

  FLOSCAN HARTOUM’S HEART was beating wildly, thoughts racing through his brain. The planet might have a poisonous atmosphere; it might hold deadly horrors – or it might offer a chance of survival, though he would be marooned for life. It was beautiful, too, with dazzling blue oceans and shining white clouds.

  The pod could already be falling towards the planet, or it could be in orbit around it, but most likely it was on a course that would take it out of range and unable to reach the shining world. Hartoum would have to act quickly. He studied the simple controls. Escape pods were manufactured cheaply, in huge numbers, and were best described as crude. Floscan’s training in their use had lasted less than twenty minutes, and he barely knew what to do. Luckily, there was little to understand. There were none of the glowing icons and shining runes that would have embellished more sophisticated equipment. Instead there was, included in the moulding of the control panel, a simple prayer to the Emperor:

  Fotens Terribilitas, adjuva me in extremis!

  Mighty Terribilitas, aid me in my plight!

  Fervently muttering the prayer, he took hold of the control levers. The gyro whined, rotating the pod to point its snub nose at the luminous world. The small rocket engine fired again, drawing on the scant amount of fuel. Floscan was sent hurtling into the planet’s atmosphere.

  DESPITE IT BEING his only way to see outside, Floscan dogged down the porthole’s cover once the buffeting began. He wasn’t sure the glassite would be able to withstand the heat that would be generated by the friction of the atmosphere.