Damocles

by Various

  ‘Three minutes out!’ called Brother Silen, reading the transit system’s schematics from his auspex scanner. ‘Unorthodox, captain! I wonder if Guilliman envisioned this when he wrote?’

  ‘He imagined victory,’ said Devynius over the thundering of the passing structures and the howl of the lev-train’s overcharged coils. ‘And this is how we will win it!’

  The squad was in the rearmost carriage of four, the front housing the powerful generator which was being drained dry to force the train well past its maximum speed. According to the schematics, the train could not stay on its tracks if it maintained this speed when it hit the next major junction.

  ‘Then again,’ reflected Devynius, ‘this was Thaxos’s idea.’

  ‘Would that he were here to see it,’ said Brother Merovos, whose plasma gun was slung so he could hold on to the railing beside him with both hands. ‘He would have something clever to say about our chances.’

  ‘We fight this like any other battle and our chances will be nil,’ shouted Devynius in reply. ‘The Emperor demands victory. The Codex commands it. We will deliver.’

  The train shrieked through a passenger station. The controls had been doctored and bypassed by Oderac who, while not a Techmarine, had a more than good enough head for technology. The citizens waiting on the platforms had expected the train to stop to pick them up – instead it shot past at tremendous speed and they screamed as several were thrown off their feet by the gale that passed in the train’s wake.

  Perhaps word would get out about the Ultramarines in the rearmost carriage. It didn’t matter. They had less than thirty seconds before they reached their target, and any warning would arrive far too late.

  Ahead the junction approached, lit by warning lights flashing red. A terrible metallic scream filled the air as the train tried to take the next bend too quickly and the magnetic clamps were torn off the rail, the train slewing onto one side as it arrowed onwards.

  Devynius kept his footing. A couple of the Ultramarines lost their balance, grabbing onto a handhold before they were tumbled through one of the windows that shattered under the strain.

  The front carriage slammed into the wall of the tunnel. The wall collapsed and the carriage was propelled into the rooms beyond it, masonry falling in the dark hail. With an awful sound of tearing metal the front carriage was forced to a halt, embedded deep in the foundations of the building ahead. The second carriage buckled and crumpled to half its length, and the third fared little better. The fourth carriage was warped and twisted but not enough to imperil the Ultramarines still clinging on.

  No normal soldier would have countenanced it as a method of insertion. That was why the Ultramarines had used it to score tactical surprise against the enemy inside.

  Thus was the spirit of the Codex adhered to, if not its letter, as Captain Devynius led his squad through the wreckage and the rubble into the lower floors of the generatorium.

  Sergeant Seanoa’s totem was the flight, the swirling pack of predators that moved as one with the same purpose. That was how his squad moved, following him less by orders and more by instinct. Seanoa was a natural leader in the purest sense, born to be at the head of the flight, born to be the first teeth into the prey.

  They broke into the open among the shanties at the foot of the generatorium’s great cooling towers, cloaked in the pollutant mists and the darkness where the complex’s floodlights could not reach. The people who lived there shut themselves in, bolted their windows and doors, and hoped to survive until the sun came up. The Jade Dragons were angry ghosts breaching the surface of the night, and the ancient fears of Briseis’s tribes spoke of such monsters rising from the slate wastes to mutilate and destroy. They were not far wrong.

  Seanoa led the squad up the lower levels of gantries, up towards the command catwalks allowing maintenance access to the cooling towers. The walkways connected to the main building housing the turbine hall and command rooms. The workers who saw them fled, and not a shot had to be fired before the Jade Dragons reached the turbine hall itself.

  The generatorium was at full capacity. The turbines roared, shuddering the web of catwalks high above the main hall. The first kill was one of the sentries who watched over the hall for xenophile saboteurs, sniped through the upper back with a Stalker shell. His body fell several storeys to the floor of the turbine hall and vanished between the huge cylindrical housings of the turbines.

  Two more died, one to Seanoa’s own lightning claw. He didn’t even activate the weapon’s power field as he punched the weapon’s curved blades through the sentry’s back. The sentry wore the dark red uniform of men under the orders of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and carried a lasgun he never had time to unsling. Seanoa kicked the body over the railing.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing towards one of the control rooms overlooking the turbine hall, a short sprint across the walkways. ‘Expect resistance. Be swift, and do not wait to see a weapon. Move, my brothers.’

  The ten-strong squad were hindered more by the size of their armoured bodies in the narrow doorway than by the generatorium workers manning the late shift in the control room. The shock on their faces was illuminated by the lights on the readouts and control panels lining the walls. Seanoa shot one with his bolt pistol, the customised weapon blowing a torso wide open with a fragmenting metal storm shell. It was overkill, but that was better than underkill.

  The Jade Dragons making their way into the room added their own fire, single bolter shots taking down the half-dozen workers in a few seconds. A vox-link handset on the wall was untouched – none of the workers had time to grab it and raise the alarm. That was a minute or two more of time the Jade Dragons had bought with their speed and lack of mercy. That was how true predators won the day.

  Tagamala affixed a charge to the command room’s back wall, magnetic clamps holding it to the control panel. The Jade Dragons backed up against the wall. Seanoa didn’t have to say anything. His squadmates knew the plan well enough and filled their part in it like true flightmates.

  The charge went off and the wall was blown inwards. Seanoa was through the breach before the debris hit the floor. Beyond the architecture changed. The practical industrial face of the turbine hall was replaced with the religious overtones of the Priesthood of Mars: columns topped with half-skulls and cogs, shrines built into the walls with offerings of raw metal blocks and clockwork trinkets, machine-code prayers pinned to the walls. The air was thick with incense burning in the braziers that provided a guttering light.

  Seanoa didn’t wait for his squad. They would be behind him. They always were. He forged through the Mechanicus chambers, passing by equipment rooms and laboratories where ornate crucibles burned exotic elements and generator towers spat arcs of electricity.

  The alarm had been raised. A klaxon blared somewhere. The Adeptus Mechanicus had brought in more men and armed them to defend this place, in response to the xenophile presence in the city. Seanoa had seen the troop manifests, and he knew they would not be enough.

  Three troopers burst into the laboratory as Seanoa led the squad through it. Las-fire met him and he dropped down behind one of the lab benches, the slab of solid bronze absorbing the fire. Bolter fire streaked back across the room and as the troops took cover, Seanoa vaulted the bench and fell among them. He shot one through the stomach and lashed through the other with his lightning claw – the power field activated this time and burst in a shower of light as it discharged through the second trooper, shredding his upper body and leaving nothing left above the mid-chest.

  The third trooper was shot down by a bolter round from the other Jade Dragons moving through the room. The firefight had lasted about five seconds.

  Ahead was the chapel, overlooked by a great altarpiece of the half-skull, a fat industrial diamond set into its eye and the cog half plated in brass. Columns of polished steel rose towards a vaulted ceiling covered in machine-code script, zero
es and ones mingling with equations picked out in electrum.

  There, Magos Skepteris was performing her prayers to the machine-spirit of the generatorium and the defence laser complex she watched over, and to the Omnissiah of whose intellect they were all a part. She knelt before the altar and turned at the sound of the Jade Dragons’ footsteps booming on the steel grille of the chapel floor. She still wore the hide of the Black Leviathan over her shoulders.

  The magos stood as Seanoa crossed the chapel floor. The rest of the squad stood back – their guns were ready in case they were needed, but for now this was their sergeant’s fight.

  ‘Why are you here?’ demanded Skepteris. ‘This is a place of worship.’

  ‘I know what you worship,’ said Seanoa coldly, ‘and it is not the Omnissiah. You may have fooled the Ultramarines but we are not so stupid. The mark of the Black Leviathan is on you, heretic. As we hunt, so we are hunted, but sometimes fate brings those that hunt us into our gunsights. And so you will die.’

  ‘I am loyal,’ said Skepteris. ‘I am dedicated to destroying the xenophiles and doing the Emperor’s work.’

  ‘I care nothing for the xenophiles,’ said Seanoa. ‘Briseis and Agrellan can burn for all we care. Fate put us here to destroy you.’ Seanoa pointed at Skepteris with the blades of his lightning claw and the blue-white light of the power field flickered across the columns and the shadowy vault of the ceiling.

  Skepteris fought back. Her augmentations had enough combat capability to give her a good chance against xenophile assassins. Her mechadendrites whipped around Seanoa, who grabbed them in the crook of one elbow and twisted, throwing Skepteris to the ground like a wrestler. He slashed down at her with his claw but she was faster than she looked and rolled out of the way, the mechadendrites slithering out of Seanoa’s grasp.

  Skepteris’s jaw opened wide, too wide to be natural. Between her metal teeth emerged the barrel of a gun, the slotted heat dissipater of a melta weapon. She fired a bolt of superheated particles that burned a deep furrow through one of Seanoa’s shoulder pads, scorching through the ceramite down to the bone. Seanoa roared and ducked behind a column, molten ceramite running down his side.

  ‘What witchery has taken root on Briseis?’ shouted Seanoa. ‘What dark god sent you here? You will answer the Emperor in hell!’

  Skepteris stood, the gun barrel withdrawing back down her throat. She turned to see the Jade Dragons squad standing across the chapel, cutting off any escape. Every bolter barrel was aimed at her.

  ‘I can kill one of you,’ said Skepteris. ‘But the chances are low. And then I will die. So there is no logic in resisting. Use no more of the Emperor’s bullets on me than you have to.’

  She did not turn as Seanoa walked up behind her, the power field crackling around his claw. He rammed the blades through her midriff, carving upwards through her chest and out through her upper back. Her head flopped forwards on its ruined neck and Seanoa caught her as she fell forwards. He slashed across her waist and cut her in two, shreds of burning robe and hide falling among the showering blood.

  ‘I will waste no bullets on this creature,’ said Seanoa, dropping the upper half of Magos Skepteris to the floor.

  The bodies formed a trail from the turbine hall to the chapel, marking out the progress of the Jade Dragons. Some of the bodies were still alive, by some fluke their vital organs spared the bolter shrapnel, leaving blood loss and shock to finish the job.

  One of them, a Peacemaker soldier, dragged himself on bloody hands into the command room. The place was choked with smoke from the charge that had blown the wall out, and draped with the bodies of the workers who had died there with no idea why. The floor was slick with blood and the trooper’s hand slipped in it as he dragged himself forwards.

  He reached one of the control consoles. Lights still winked on its readouts. He grabbed the ankle of the body lying over the controls and pulled it away, letting it flop to the floor. A handset came away with the body, dangling by a wire, and the trooper held it to his face.

  ‘Whoever hears,’ gasped the trooper. ‘What brothers there are out there. I know one of you must hear me. The generatorium. They are hitting the generatorium. Tell the ambassadors, tell everyone. For the Greater Good.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘The enemy will use every wile of battle against you, every truth you have learned herein, every hard lesson that war has taught you. The general who thinks himself unique in his learning is merely the next head hanging on the wall.’

  – Codex Astartes

  The Ultramarines plan was simple, but that did not mean it was easy. The generatorium and the adjoining defence laser complex were always the primary objective for the Space Marines in Port Memnor, but it was the endgame, the capstone of the campaign to bring the planetoid to heel. Any tactician of the Imperial Guard would identify a cascade of objectives to be toppled one at a time, culminating in the conquest of the defence lasers to make the spaceport safe for Imperial use.

  Space Marines did not think like that. They did what had to be done, fight the battle that had to be fought, and ignore everything else. They would not reduce the xenophile strongholds, fortify the parliament and the places of worship, assist in the evacuation of Imperial personnel or establish garrisons throughout the city. They would go for the throat, for the heart of the victory, trusting in their superiority in battle to make everything else irrelevant.

  So Captain Devynius led his squad into the lowest levels of the generatorium, where the lights were few and the shadows were deep. It was a relic of the first days of Briseis’s Imperial settlement, where the burgeoning city had been fuelled by fat iron boilers surrounded by a tangle of corroded pipework. The structure had been dropped from orbit shortly after the Imperial settlers had first broken ground on Port Memnor, then forgotten and crushed beneath the mass of the generatorium for centuries.

  Devynius emerged into the coolant complex, enormous refrigerated storage tanks reaching seven storeys above the labyrinth of pipework. Freezing mist clung to the lower levels, swirling around the Ultramarines as they burst through from the below.

  ‘The objective is the defence laser command,’ voxed Devynius. ‘Through the coolant towers, into the defence complex. Do not get held up. Once we have the complex, the xenophiles will never get us out.’

  The generatorium workers fled at the first sight of the Ultramarines. They had all heard what had happened at the parliament house. There was no impediment to the squad making their way up to the mid-levels, moving towards the laser complex adjoining the generatorium.

  Soon the towering vault of the laser cathedral loomed ahead. Six enormous laser cannon stood around the huge circular hall, forming a great place of worship dedicated to the Omnissiah. An icon of the Machine Cult stood in the centre of the arena-like central expanse, a hooded titan surrounded by a cog halo and carrying the power axe that symbolised the Priesthood of Mars. The first magi to oversee the defence lasers’ construction had consecrated this place, the rituals repeated by every magos since up to Skepteris.

  ‘Hold this place,’ said Devynius. ‘Oderac! Barricade the entrances, take whoever you need. I need to get onto the vox and bring as many workers in as we can to help. The xenophiles will strike as soon as they realise we have moved, but we will throw them back to their tau masters in pieces!’

  ‘They cannot weed us out of here,’ said Oderac, looking around the cathedral. ‘This monument to Imperial might, this icon of majesty! We can hold this for years, my brothers.’

  ‘I wish the xenophiles had been rooted out first,’ voxed Devynius as the squad spread out to cover all the ways in. ‘And this city could have been taken without bloodshed. But they are dug in deep, my brothers. They will come to us, they will beg to die on our blades. If they will refuse the Emperor’s mercy I fought so hard to show them, they will get the Emperor’s wrath in its place!’

  The laser complex
was highly defensible, built to be garrisoned by Imperial forces. Destroying the xenophiles had been at the forefront of the Space Marines mission objectives, but the ultimate goal had always been holding the defence lasers and hence securing the spaceport for Imperial transports. The xenophiles would die, and many innocent citizens, as they were forced to mobilise against the complex, but the Ultramarines would hold it. Briseis would suffer, as Devynius had sought to prevent, but the Emperor’s will would be done and the forces fighting on Agrellan would be bolstered.

  This battle would be won. Agrellan would be won, and this war after it. It was the Emperor’s will.

  Devynius’s thoughts were broken by the metallic howl from above. A section of the ceiling bowed in and fell, a shower of wreckage and flame pouring through. His squadmates scattered across the cathedral floor.

  Through the flames it descended. The hard lines of its shape were framed in the fire that shimmered against the chrome-bright surrounds of the reactors built into its chest, echoed in the blue-yellow jets of flame from the exhausts on its back. It was huge, not far shy of a an Imperial Knight demi-Titan in scale, one arm holding a massive multi-barrelled pulse weapon and the other the glowing vanes of a shield generator. Twin reactors glowed on either side of its massive torso, its reverse-jointed knees bending to absorb the shock as it hit the cathedral floor. Burning wreckage crashed into the floor around it as the missiles racked around its shoulder angled towards Devynius.

  The design was unmistakeably tau. The lenses in its head dilated as they focused on Devynius. Smaller machines were descending around it, their jets firing to land.

  Devynius had never seen anything like it, save the early battle assessments from the war on Agrellan. A new form of battlesuit, a bipedal machine with the firepower of a super-heavy tank and manoeuvrability equal to anything the tau had fielded before. Until now only a few grainy pict-captures and garbled field reports attested to their existence. The tau treatment of technology was their most blatant heresy – they created, they innovated, constantly forging new machines to fight their expansionist wars. This machine was their latest, a huge and massively armed iteration of the smaller Crisis battlesuits now dropping into the cathedral behind it.