Cassiel made a growling noise in the back of his throat and advanced towards the centre of the park. ‘We’ll see the enemy soon enough.’ He shot a look at Kaide. ‘Any comms?’
The Techmarine’s head remained bent, and the wind-rush noise of static from the multiple data channels he was sifting was faintly audible.
Cassiel called his name with all the irritation of one who did not like to repeat himself. ‘Brother Kaide! Your attention!’
Kano saw the Techmarine’s head snap up with a startled jerk, as if he had been awakened from a deep dream. He heard the same rush-sound in his ears, faraway and close all at once. He couldn’t be certain what vox-channel it was emanating from.
‘Sergeant?’ Kaide asked, sounding dazed. He looked at the others. ‘Did you hear that? On the vox, the voice?’
‘What voice?’ said Sarga. ‘I heard nothing.’
Kaide glanced towards Captain Harox, as if he might know the answer.
Five krak grenades detonated simultaneously at different points of the compass as all of the tripwires were sprung at once. The Blood Angels reflexively dropped into firing stances, weapons high, aiming in every direction.
Kano felt a peculiar ripple pass through the ground beneath his feet, and the pounding in his ears became a headache. Through the atmosphere feed in the teeth of his breather mask came the distinct tang of ozone.
He saw Meros and Sarga looking back and forth, trying to see what to shoot at. Kano cycled the vision modes of his helmet optics, but found nothing. That didn’t make sense; even a foe beneath a camo cloak or phase-shunt would leave some kind of visual trace against the background environment.
There’s nothing out there.
The whole park shuddered and tilted downwards, earth groaning as it pitched like the deck of a watercraft in a high swell. The legionaries broke formation and went for safer ground, but there was none.
It wasn’t an earthquake; Holst was almost tectonically inert. Still, hab-block buildings quivered and broken glass pealed as it fell all around them. The black voids behind the shattered windows were sightless eyes.
Across the atrium, a long slab of elevated highway broke in the middle and folded together, scattering vehicles as it swung towards the vertical. Kano’s mouth dropped open: instead of crumbling, the broken lines of road slapped together with a concussive crash. It reminded him of great crocodilian jaws snapping shut. Then the broken highway shifted. It was falling towards them, as if it had been directed so.
‘Scatter!’ Cassiel screamed the command into the vox and the warriors broke apart as the shadow fell over them.
The road slabs boomed as they hit the parkland, and Kano saw a Blood Angel vanish beneath, hammered flat in an instant. A torrent of stone dust and displaced ice wheezed up all around them in a vast blanket, reducing visibility to less than a few metres. Kano stumbled forwards, meeting Sarga. The legionary’s crimson armour was dirty with a layer of grey powder.
Together they forged ahead as the dust settled, moving towards other shadows that turned out to be the remainder of the squad.
‘Contact right,’ called a voice, and Kano heard a raucous, clattering sound. It was as if the contents of a scrap yard were being dragged up the side of a granite tor, daggers of steel crunching loudly against stone.
Then the attack began in earnest.
The first thing that tried to kill Kano had a lumen-post for a spine, and a torso and limbs fashioned out of broken highway signs, beheaded traffic signals and other less identifiable pieces of metal debris. It was not a battle robot, for Kano had fought with automata in the training cages and during the year-long Rust Moon War; this thing was animated by some impossible force outside his reckoning. His instinct told him it was powered by anger, and that seemed enough understanding for the moment.
The scrap-thing assailed with fingers made from the spokes of a wheel, fat yellow sparks jetting up from the ground where they dragged and slashed. From gaping trash-bin mouths it spat broken screw-bolts and scattershot fragments of wreckage, all of it heated to orange-white.
Kano defaulted to impulse and aimed for the centre of the mass, blasting it back into its parts with a powerful three-round burst. Pieces of it clattered down around him, but they did not lie still. Twisted lengths of metal snaked towards one another, tips finding other tips, bending and braiding, making anew. He spun away. From the corner of his eye, the Blood Angel saw something tumbling out of the sky, trailing smoke – Kaide’s drone had been shot down, killing their best tactical advantage.
More of the constructs lurched unsteadily out of the settling haze, drawing fire from all of the warriors. Most were as tall as Dreadnoughts but lacking the density of the venerable war machines. They were thin and spindly, but no single one matched the design of another. The scrap-things were patchwork creations that aped the forms of simians or arachnids or equines, mad sculptures created out of street furniture and wreckage.
There were dozens of them ahead, and more than that behind. Kano blinked, watching one of them come together in the manner of a vid-stream of a demolition played in reverse. He could see no welds or joins holding the pieces in place, detect no electromagnetic fields. Each one of the things had a length of twisting, sinuous cable trailing away behind it, like a leash.
Bolter salvoes thundered around him and he lent his weapon to the chorus, dismantling the constructs over and over. They came on, rebuilding as they went. Adamantium claws scraped over the street and the tiled plaza, ploughing through drifts of snow and stamping frozen corpses into a messy red paste.
‘This is what killed Xagan?’ Leyteo shouted, incredulous. ‘What in the Throne’s name are we shooting at?’
For a long second, Kano felt the urge to know that answer himself. He could reach out, if he was quick. Just the lightest brush of his corralled psychic powers, to seek a mind or an intent behind these things…
He saw his battle-brothers and the Word Bearers all around him. They would see, Kano told himself. They would know. It is forbidden.
‘Keep firing,’ Cassiel commanded. ‘Destroy them!’
At once, the front rank of the junkyard abominations reeled back, resembling archers at the draw. They snapped forwards as one and sent javelins of broken steel hurtling into the lines of the legionaries, the rods of metal ejected from their spindly torsos. One warrior went down, a rusted spear eight metres in length going through his gut to burst out through the coolant pods of his backpack. Kano saw Kaide take a glancing blow that knocked the Techmarine off his feet.
‘Fall back–’ The rest of the sergeant’s words were lost in a moaning rumble from beneath their boots. Pits broke open in the rockcrete all around them, jagged with fangs of split brick. To Kano’s horror, they worked like lamprey mouths, grinding and biting at nothing, trying to savage anything that came close.
The ground contorted and rolled underfoot, the wave of motion rippling back over the entire width of the upper city atrium. In a flash of insight, Kano imagined the surface of the park as if it were a blanket cast over a great sleeping beast, just now awakening to find insects crawling upon its back.
Meros fired into one of the open pits and it actually screamed, the maw sealing up immediately, shedding thin and malodorous oil.
The legionaries were being pushed towards the broken edge of the great dome, the scrap-monsters coming in from all three facing sides. Kano ejected his bolter’s spent magazine and slammed another sickle-shaped clip into the slot, sighting down the gun. As he fired again, he saw the buildings either side of the atrium rock back and forth, shedding more glass and debris.
And then they began to twist. Against possibility, the plasteel frames of the hab towers coiled as the bones of a serpent would bend. The shattered fascias of the buildings glittered in the icy light, the broken balconies and blinded windows taking on the appearance of shouting, angry faces.
Thick cables exploded out from beneath the roadway, whipping at the icy air, fronds of plastek and copper lashing a
t the stonework. They moved with animal character, snaking forth in the hunt for prey. Support pillars buried in the rock ejected themselves into the air, and upper levels of the atrium complex collapsed one atop another. The mass of the buildings compacted together, breaking and reforming into a new, vast shape. Down in the heart of Holst-Prime’s underlevels, the lower tiers were being remade into a structure that resembled spider legs and grasping tentacles. The entire metropolis was in the process of tearing itself free of the bedrock it had been built into.
‘Throne and blood…’ breathed Kano, his words carried across the vox to all his comrades. ‘It’s the city. The city wants to kill us.’
The mad dream of it would not end. For a brief moment, Meros wondered if he had been knocked insensate during the Stormbird crash, and even now lay in a healing coma, his mind dredging up this lunacy from his subconscious.
No. Meros had been in that state not long ago, existing in a realm where thought was as real as flesh, and it had almost killed him. He knew this was not illusion; that would have been too simple an explanation. It seemed as if the insane reality of the nightmare landscape he experienced then had now followed him into this one.
They escaped from the great dome even as the broken edges of the crystalflex hemisphere became lips of a fanged mouth and snapped shut after them. Out in the snows of the open highway, dead vehicles under thick cowls of snow suddenly burst into motion, lurching forwards on skidding, frozen wheels as they tried to bull the legionaries into the walls of the median strip.
It was a hard drop from the elevated road to the surface of Holst’s ice plains, but they made it, even with their wounded comrades. Cassiel’s orders bid them to put as much distance as possible between them and any element of the city’s infrastructure. If their enemy could call on inert objects to assault them, nowhere was safe.
Meros dared to cast a look over his shoulder and saw the highway bending into ribbons, as whatever monstrous malaise had infected the city spread out across the broad bridges.
That was how it seemed to him, like a great disease. An alien cancer had infected Holst-Prime Hive and meta-stasised, corrupting it from within. Adamantium and plasteel, crystalflex and stone, all had become contaminated by some science he could not understand.
That was the only explanation. Reason gave him nothing else to cling to, no other rationale that could possibly fit. But for now the question of how this could happen was a distant second to the uncertainty of how they would survive.
The city was malforming before his eyes, taking on rudiments of sessile life and ophidians, mimicking legs and grasping limbs as it assembled them from pieces of commerce malls, hab towers and transit complexes. Meros faltered a step as he watched Holst-Prime Hive dragging itself out of the great crater that had been the base of its construction. If this leviathan had a directing intelligence, then it wanted to be free – but more than that, it wanted death to all invaders.
A tentacle-like protuberance made of monorail trains and power cables trailed a slow, giddy, arc through the frosted air and beat at the ground, narrowly missing the line of armoured figures. Ice fractured all around and the heavy kinetic shock pitched them off their feet.
Meros collided with one of the other warriors and they fell together, sliding towards a newly-opened fissure. The Apothecary used the cutting gear on his medicae gauntlet to dig into the ice, anchoring them both. For a moment, his battle-brother swung over the lip of the deadfall, and then clawed his way back, scrambling to his feet once again. There was no time to share words of gratitude; the other Blood Angel helped him up and then they were moving again, making for open ground.
The howling wind over the ice fields warred with the stone-breaking cacophony of the mutant city’s birth pangs. Rimes of fresh frost were already collecting in the crevices of Meros’s battle plate, and his armour’s skin-sensors registered the sharp drop in temperature. Signus Alpha had fallen beneath Holst’s horizon and what little warmth the other suns provided was negligible.
Perhaps they might be able to outrun this monstrosity, perhaps it might lose interest in them; and then they would only have to face a punishing cold that would push the capacity of their life-support systems to the red-line. Meros looked to where Cassiel was helping the warrior who had taken the spear-hit. The compromised integrity of his armour would mean certain death.
Then Sarga shouted a warning and thoughts of dying on the ice were forgotten.
‘Incoming!’
From beneath the elevated highway at their backs, a gargantuan maggot of warped rockcrete reared up from under the frozen ground, knocking aside road supports in a rain of falling cars and broken structural antennae. It lolled and rolled, coming at them over the ice like a side-winding snake. It had once been a service conduit for the hive, running vox-cables and geothermal taps out to the neighbouring settlements. Now it was a serpentine thing, an extension of the titanic city-beast.
A volley of concentrated bolter shells exploded across the splintered stone hide of the kilometre-long feeler, followed by the secondary detonations of krak grenades. The crumbling head of the thing broke off and smashed, but the main mass of it still came on, rising up, leaving the ground. Processor fluids drooled from the maw as it wavered before diving to make a strike.
‘Damn these xenos!’ shouted Leyteo. ‘There’s nowhere we can go to escape this thing!’
Meros had no answer for him, until two spears of orange fire shrieked past above them and pierced the stone serpent along its length. Spheres of force bifurcated the construct and ripped it into fragments, the thrashing tail losing all coherence and falling to the ice. For a moment, Meros thought he heard a distant bellow of agony, deep and booming like winds forced through cavernous halls of stone and metal.
Then it was gone, replaced by the glorious noise of rocket engines. A great crimson hawk flashed past and performed a sharp turn upon the tip of its wing, before settling into a shaky hover on plumes of thruster exhaust. Buffeted by the heavy gale, the Stormbird could not settle to land.
A familiar voice crackled over the general vox. ‘Scout force, this is Captain Amit. What in Terra’s name have you found?’ There was a hesitance in the captain’s voice that Meros had never heard before.
‘I’ll explain later, sir,’ Cassiel responded. ‘We need to get off this rock.’
‘Before it comes back,’ added Sarga.
Lines extended from the underside of the drop-ship and the legionaries took the mag-locks at their ends and connected them to their armour. Meros tried not to think of how much the recovery lines looked like the same snaking cables that had raced after them in the city, and locked on. Then Amit’s Stormbird powered away, reeling them in as it climbed skywards.
Black-armoured hands dragged Meros in through the ventral hatch, and he was dimly aware of Warden Annellus’s skull-helm glaring back at him. He turned away, wiping frost from his eye slits. The Apothecary’s last sight of Holst-Prime Hive was a giant’s hand made of broken buildings atop an arm taller than an Imperator Titan. He watched it snatch at the vessel and miss, falling apart as it collapsed back towards the surface.
Cassiel’s squad and the Word Bearers sat silently on the landing bay’s deck as the beat of air resistance gave way to the smoothness of vacuum. Meros’s helmet came off in his hands and he found himself looking across at Kano. His friend’s eyes were glazed and distant, focused on a point beyond the far bulkhead.
A shadow fell over the Apothecary, but he didn’t look up. The Warden stood over him, surveying the survivors as Captain Amit emerged through the forward hatch.
The sergeant rose and saluted. ‘Sir. Your timing could not have been better.’
Amit dismissed his thanks with a curt nod. ‘I brought ships to assist in the Hermia’s mission. The Victus was in closer orbit, so I offered to take on the search for you myself. I wanted to look upon the enemy.’ He paused. ‘Is that what I saw, brother-sergeant?’
‘I’m a warrior, not a scholar,’ Cassie
l replied. ‘Which, begging the captain’s pardon, means I don’t have the first bloodless inkling of what we were shooting at.’
The steady thrumming of the Stormbird’s engines filled the silence in the landing bay, but not so much that Meros missed the single whispered word that fell from the lips of Warden Annellus.
‘Sorcery.’
A buzzing tone sounded over the Stormbird’s internal vox. ‘Attention, this is the flight deck. Brace for combat manoeuvres!’
Amit tapped the comm-bead in his gorget. ‘Pilot, report! We detected no other ships out here. What is the threat?’
The crew-serf’s voice was tense. ‘It’s not a ship, captain… It’s the planet. It’s shooting at us.’
‘It doesn’t want to let us go,’ said Kano quietly.
Sanguinius came to Holst to see for himself.
The engagement was already well under way as they came into visual range. The Hermia, along with the Victus and her escort cruisers, Sable and Paleknight, were connecting back to the planet’s surface with the glittering, impermanent red threads of mega-lasers, but at first it was not clear what enemy the other ships had come across.
The primarch’s flagship hove closer, the Red Tear flanked by the Ignis and the Covenant of Baal, the vessels temporarily detached from the main body of the fleet out in open space. Scans searching for conventional weapons discharges registered only the barrages coming from the orbiting cruisers; returns from Holst itself showed a chaotic mess of interference patterns.
Then a missile made of dense rock, most likely the head of a great mountain from Holst’s equatorial zone, threw itself out of the hive-world’s gravity well. A singular, incredible release of volcanic power ejected the mass into the orbital path of the Paleknight, at such speed that the cruiser’s fusion thrusters were not sufficient to set it on a different heading.
The collision lit a small, brief sun over Holst’s night side. The starship’s back was instantly broken, and it came apart in clouds of venting atmosphere and plasmatic discharges.
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