Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  The last great capital ship the aliens could muster lay ahead of the Pugio and the other boarding craft. It was vaguely ovoid in shape, a gargantuan fist of brown rock that had been sheathed in patchwork plates of metal, its flanks festering with craters that sported gun turrets and the maws of missile tubes. A collage of engines was bolted crudely to one broad surface of the cannibalised asteroid, blaring out columns of thrust in a vain attempt to power the great hulk up and out of the plane of the ecliptic. As they approached, Kano picked out the tell-tale vanes of Geller field generators ringing the craft, like the spiked collar of a guardian dog. Weak violet light gathered around their tips, a sure sign that the crew of the craft were preparing to erect the protective energy membrane. Once that was done, the next stage would be to commit to translation into the warp.

  Whatever shadow tactic the Alpha Legion employed had worked, and now the Blood Angels were going to strike the final blow, stopping this command ship dead before it could slip from real space and flee into the immaterium.

  ‘Gather and prepare,’ said a voice, and Kano turned to see that Captain Raldoron had entered the compartment from the upper flight deck. ‘We will make our breach in a few minutes.’

  The Pugio’s troop bay was full, a handful of Tactical and Devastator squads lined up at the shock-frames mounted on the deck, ready to lock themselves in before the adamantine prow of the craft bit into the hull of the alien ship. All the men fell silent in respect for the captain. Kano had known Raldoron for decades and he seemed to have changed little in that time, the passage of the Great Crusade granting him only a few more scars, a shade more silver in his hair. He was still the strong, hard-faced veteran Kano had ever known; anything else that had altered about him was concealed like the flesh beneath his power armour.

  He made a beckoning gesture to one of the other legionaries, who opened a metal box mag-locked to the deck plates. Inside was an old, familiar sight. They called it a chalice, but that was a misnomer, as it more closely resembled a tall, narrow tumbler. It was forged out of black, anodised metal and the outer surface of the cup was a forest of tiny, shallow spikes, each with a hollow tip.

  Every warrior in the compartment was in the process of removing his right gauntlet, and Kano did the same without thinking about it. Raldoron had already done so, and he took the chalice with his bare hand and clasped it firmly, allowing the razor-sharp spikes to penetrate the dense flesh of his palm and draw blood. Then the captain handed the cup to the closest battle-brother to him – a veteran sergeant named Orexis – who in turn did the same. Orexis passed the chalice to the next warrior, and he to the next, so on and so on down the line of the Blood Angels. In a few moments the cup had circled the compartment and returned to Kano. He followed suit, noting that the spikes were now wet with the blood of a dozen battle-brothers, and the cup heavier with the fluid it had taken.

  Finally, Raldoron took back the chalice and replaced his gauntlet. The others did the same, the ceramite locking in a chorus of tight snapping sounds. As his troops took their places in their support racks, the First Captain walked down the line of them, dipping his index finger into the mingled blood swirling in the cup. He gave each warrior a mark, a line of red across the right pinion of the alatus cadere, the Blood Angels Legion symbol of a winged droplet of ruby vitae.

  Kano hesitated to call it a ‘ritual’; that smacked of a religious act, and in the secular harmony of the Emperor’s Imperium such things were not permitted. No, it was more truthful to call it a tradition, a pre-battle convention that had been a part of the culture of the planet Baal since before the War of the Burning. Even Terran-born legionaries like Orexis, joined with their Baalite brothers after the reuniting, had embraced the custom without issue. They understood the full the meaning of it.

  By sharing their blood before the fight began, by every battle-brother taking a measure of the mingled vitae upon his armour, the pact between them was remade. Symbolically, the warriors affirmed their unity and the core truth that they were, now and for eternity, of the same blood. Other Legions shared an oath of moment before they committed to an engagement, swearing a vow upon a weapon; for the Blood Angels, this served the same purpose.

  When it was done, they spoke the words together. ‘For Sanguinius and the Emperor.’

  The moment past, Kano gathered up his combat helmet and threw one last glance at the viewport. A wall of dun-coloured stone now filled the window, and he caught a brief glimpse of his own reflection in the armourglass. A serious face the colour of dark teak looked back at him, gaunt but not sallow.

  Raldoron secured himself in the shock-frame next to his adjutant and lay back, closing his eyes for a moment. Strangely, the captain seemed almost peaceful, as if he were about to drop into a slumber.

  Kano donned his helmet and his world changed, the emerald lenses of his helm activating with soft trills. Icons and display cues were transmitted directly into his cortex by neural interface, symbols blinking into being as the other warriors in the command squad sealed their armour and signalled readiness.

  A countdown feed relayed from the Pugio’s pilot rolled steadily towards a zero point as the boarding craft closed on the ork ship. Kano felt the deck shift beneath him as the vessel banked sharply, probably to avoid a flash of laser fire from the alien point-defence batteries.

  Raldoron took control of the vox-network as the clock began to blink red. ‘Brothers. We will breach the target at the foot of what appears to be a command tower. Our primary objective is to push through to the bridge of the vessel and render its control systems inactive. Once we stop them from running, we can purge the xenos…’ Kano heard the cold smile in his voice. ‘And then perhaps at last we will be done with this makeweight endeavour.’

  A rumble of gruff agreement passed among the squads, and Kano could not help but join in.

  Icons changed colour as the other warriors showed their ready status. ‘Prepare to deploy,’ said the captain.

  Then the armoured bow of the Pugio struck the enemy ship and Kano’s head slammed forwards and back.

  He heard the sound of metal tearing.

  The boarding action destroyed the ship that had carried them. The canny orks, aware that the humans might try to bring the fight to them, had reinforced the hull plates of their command ship, and this had made the penetration a far more costly experience. The armoured troop compartment was proof against much, and it survived with its warriors intact; but the rest of the Pugio’s fuselage was torn apart by the conflicting forces of the impact. Systems all through the craft’s power train malfunctioned and fused. The pilot was already dead, his gravity web having strangled him in the collision, and the cogitators that acted as failsafes were ruptured beyond operable function.

  If the boarding craft had been filled with common men, they all would have died; not in the impact, as the shock-frames did their jobs, but in the aftermath as the ship shut down and vented air to space. The legionaries, sealed in their armour and immune to such minor concerns, broke free. Under Raldoron’s guidance, they forced open the petal-shaped sections of the forward hatch.

  A torrent of sensations assailed them at once. Air escaping through the gaps around the makeshift seal made by the vanes of the boarding pod, shrill like the cry of a widow; the brisk and throaty bray of ork guns in the distance; the heavy midden-stench of alien foetor; the sudden shift in gravity.

  Raldoron was first onto the stony deck of the ship, raising his weapon to his shoulder and gesturing for the rest of them to follow. Kano was behind him, pausing barely a moment to ensure his bolter was cocked and ready to deal death.

  The sturdy Umbra Ferrox-pattern gun was decorated with honour marks and an adequate kill tally. In his earlier years of service, Kano had used a very different weapon in defence of the Legion. In a way, it still felt like a novelty for him to be relying on something as basic as a ballistic firearm, the core design of which had not greatly altered since before the age of Old Night.

  Mirroring the cap
tain’s stance, Kano took his place among the second tier of the command squad and moved out into the long, low corridor where the Pugio had breached. The mag-locks in their boots thudded as the discharge of atmosphere tried to pull them off-balance. Further down the open space, other boarding craft knifed through the hull and settled in showers of twisted debris and fat yellow sparks. Ramps dropped and more warriors in crimson armour spilled out, engaging the first of the ork guards as they scrambled around a corner, heavy belt-fed cannons in their clawed hands.

  Raldoron ignored the engagement and pointed forwards. ‘Keep moving! We can’t afford to slow down and engage. We have to press on.’

  Kano nodded, still advancing. They had no way of knowing how long it would take the orks on the bridge to complete their pre-jump preparations. Based on observed behaviours gleaned from Imperial records, that interval could be anything from a few minutes to several hours. Ork technology was largely a random and inelegantly constructed thing, and no two greenskin ships were alike. It was all the more reason to move with alacrity. Kano didn’t relish the idea of being trapped on board the alien vessel if it made the translation into warp-space. There would be no way of knowing when or where they would emerge… or even if they would survive the journey. Other Blood Angels units were hitting the ork ship in other places – he knew there were squads attacking the engine core and navigational blisters – but they could not rely on only one force achieving their mission objective.

  The corridor branched and widened, changing from a tube of jury-rigged metal plate and rusted mesh to a huge flue that reached up several hundred metres. The aliens had turned the massive tube into an accessway by building a corkscrew ramp into the wall. It rose up in tight curves, turning in on itself, and webs of singing, flexing cable criss-crossed the interior, holding the platforms in some semblance of stability.

  ‘A single rousing shout and that’ll come down on our heads,’ muttered one of Orexis’s men.

  ‘Then keep your voices down,’ retorted Raldoron, without turning. ‘Third and fourth squad, hold this level. Second and first on me, advance by tiers.’ He surged forwards at a jog. ‘Take the pace!’

  Kano broke into a run and went after his battle-brothers, automatically falling into a two-by-two overwatch formation as they sprinted up the incline. The deck beneath them swayed alarmingly as they rose, resonating with each armoured footfall, but it held steady.

  Automated gun turrets were waiting for them on the fourth circuit, little more than boxes welded together out of scrap and oil drums, hoppers full of ammunition feeding clusters of growling guns. Raldoron didn’t break stride, taking out the first with a hurled krak grenade and the second with a pinpoint pistol shot through the aiming slit that fouled the works inside. The others he left to the warriors of the second squad to kill – and they did, reducing the devices to smoking piles of wreckage.

  But the auto-guns had been there more as early-warning devices than a concerted attempt to stop the advance of the legionaries, and the dull chatter of their attack brought orks swarming down the suspension cables from the upper levels of the access shaft.

  Kano saw them coming, momentarily surprised by the agility the greenskins displayed as they swung like great simians, hand over hand across the yawning gap. Others actually abseiled in, hanging upside down with rapid-firing weapons in their hands. All of them were roaring in their own thuggish, mindless language.

  The Blood Angels fired from the hip as they continued their ascent, meeting the orks head on. Aliens wearing curved panels of body armour landed in clumps on the lip of the ramp and made their attack, shooting or slashing with great bayonet-blades attached to the blackened muzzles of their guns.

  One of them slammed down right next to Kano and bellowed at him, its yellow eyes misted with a kind of empty frenzy. In that split second he registered the necklace of bones and teeth about its neck, the rotting odour of its breath, the loutish swagger of its pose.

  His lip curled behind his battle helm, antipathy rising for the brutal monstrosity. The ork was thickset, easily the same mass as Kano, but it wasn’t slow. It had a twin-barrelled long gun that had been mated to a double-bladed axe, and it discharged the weapon and slashed with it all at once.

  Kano’s reactions were not conscious, but instinctive. He turned into the bolter at his hip with a twist of his torso and squeezed the trigger, allowing the weapon’s powerful recoil to pull the muzzle up in a three-round semi-automatic burst. The first round clipped the ork’s leg, blasting a fist-sized divot of flesh out of the green meat of its thigh; the second and third shots hit home in its stomach and sternum. The impact blew it back over the lip of the ramp and the creature spiralled away, bouncing off cables until its fall ended messily upon the deck far below.

  His target eliminated, the warrior was already racing ahead, switching his bolter to single-shot mode and raising it to his chest. As he ran, he fired rounds into every ork that still had the temerity to remain standing. The mass-reactive shells became part of the same crashing chorus spilling from the weapons of his brothers. They cut through the alien defenders without pause and continued to rise, deck by deck, towards the top of the shaft.

  ‘Grenades,’ called Raldoron. ‘Impact setting.’

  The forward squad all mimicked the First Captain’s action, drawing a drum-shaped munition from their belts, priming it.

  ‘Ready. Loose!’

  Half a dozen grenades looped through the air and struck the heavy armoured door sealing off the upper level.

  Kano put up the blade of his gauntleted hand to shield his eye-slits from the multiple magnesium-bright flashes of the explosions. A chain of thunder-rumbles sounded and the hatch sagged back on fractured hinges, dropping to the deck with a hollow boom.

  Raldoron did not need to order them forwards. The Blood Angels shifted into a double wedge formation, the first entering the wide antechamber beyond the door and taking up overwatch positions, the second moving forwards to find the next place to hold. Each holding station for the other, the two squads moved down the tunnel, swapping between leading and trailing positions.

  Ahead the passage widened, large enough that it could have accommodated a pair of Rhino troop transports moving side-by-side. What might have been storage compartments and equipment bays branched off at irregular intervals, while beneath their feet and over their heads, metal gantries concealed lines of piping and cables that puffed blue sparks. The fungal, earthy stench of the xenos was thicker in here, reaching through the filters of their breather grilles.

  Kano saw Orexis pause at a mass of rags in an alcove; no, not rags. It was the remains of an ork gunner. ‘There was a firefight,’ he reported. ‘Very recent.’

  The legionary glanced around, and made out more heaps of dead aliens, clearly delineated into two groups on either side of the corridor. ‘They killed each other…?’ Kano wondered aloud. The differing bands of orks didn’t seem to look any different to one another at first sight, all of them bearing the same tribal glyphs crudely rendered on their armour, the same tattoos and ritual scars. He shared a look with the sergeant and wondered if the veteran was thinking the same thing as himself: was this more evidence of the Alpha Legion’s hand at work?

  But then something different crowded unbidden into Kano’s mind, and he tensed automatically, resisting it by reflex even as he felt his gorge rise. ‘Orexis–!’

  The sergeant’s name slipped from his mouth in a shout, just as the body of the dead ork moved, revealing another lying beneath it. A saw-toothed blade flashed as the hidden alien stabbed upwards, aiming for the flexible joint between the veteran’s thigh-plates. The knife scraped across red ceramite, but the action was lost in the din of a renewed attack.

  ‘Ambush!’ shouted the captain, as other orks similarly concealed beneath the bodies of their dead exploded into life. There were more in the gantries overhead, their thermal signatures lost in the heat bloom from the poorly shielded power cables; they kicked out the mesh beneath them and
dropped en masse into the middle of the Blood Angels formation, firing in all directions.

  Kano was closest to Orexis and he stormed towards him, battering an ork gunner that tried to block him with the butt of his boltgun. The blow was of such force that it smashed the bones of the greenskin’s skull into its brain cavity, killing it instantly.

  Fire blossomed at his back and Kano half-turned to see an ork with a massive shoulder-mounted flamer weapon ropes of burning, pressurised fuel about the chamber in what seemed like random motions. He fell into a forward roll and came up firing. Other shots joined his and abruptly the ork with the flamer detonated like a bomb – doubtless from some random bolt-round finding the weak spot in the fuel tank.

  Orexis was busy killing the alien that had attempted to stab him, the warriors with him engaging the emerging orks; but the aftermath of the exploded flamer did not end with the orange fire billowing down the corridor, over their helmets.

  Suddenly, rounds were cooking off as the flames failed to die out, instead taking hold across the fallen corpses of the dead aliens. Too late, Kano saw the spreading inferno envelop the body of an ork that had died carrying a quiver full of heavy, armour-piercing rifle grenades on its back.

  A second, more powerful detonation, confined in the stone flue of the carved asteroidal rock, sounded with such power that it blasted all the combatants off their feet. The noise of it was loud enough to top out Kano’s autosenses in the split-second before the protective blocks cut in to protect the neural interface. Stone ground on stone, and great chunks of rock and metal sheared off in planes, choking the corridor. The unlucky, Space Marine and ork alike, were buried. Suddenly, Raldoron’s assault force was cut in two, the majority of the legionaries on the wrong side of the debris with the ambushers.

  Sergeant Orexis finished off the last of the aliens on their side of the rubble and took a shaky step forwards, reaching up to tap his helmet. It was only then that Kano saw that the veteran had not survived the engagement without a wound. Dark arterial blood shimmered, a river of it flowing down his thigh and pooling on the deck. The fact that the vitae wasn’t clotting immediately meant that the cut had not only been deep, but also envenomed.