by Various
From the wreckage of the Xanthus came the boom of a colossal carriage locking mechanism. Murnau knew that sound. His helmet vox-channel became a cacophony of warnings.
‘Incoming!’ he heard Sergeant Gorphon bellow to his men.
The Chaplain cast his optics across the smashed flank of the frigate. The magna-bore barrel of a single cannon had been rolled out from the darkness of a mangled gunport. Somehow Captain Latham had got one of the remaining cannons operational and his survivors had manhandled it into position on its warped carriage.
There was no cover that could save Murnau from the plasma blast – the open ground and smouldering ferrouswood stumps testified to that. The cannon was devastating in its capabilities but clumsy without a calibrated way to aim the weapon. From the angle of the gargantuan barrel, Murnau estimated only a grazing vector at best. The improvised crew behind the beast would not want to waste the shot and the Chaplain assumed the loyalists would rather aim high than blast uselessly into the mire.
‘Do your worst,’ Murnau hissed through his teeth. Calmly, he knelt down in the shallows and bowed his skull-helm. ‘For death is nothing to fear–’
Everything went white.
The roar of ship-to-ship weaponry shook him to his bones. His battleplate’s auto-senses momentarily clipped out, and the sap about him boiled to a bank of filthy steam.
Before his optics had even been restored, Murnau leapt back to his feet, a gaunt grin of self-satisfaction on his face. As he predicted, the plasma beam had passed above their position and blasted its way through the petrified ferrouswoods beyond. The barrel of the great weapon had gone, shunted back on its colossal carriage, but through the open gunport Murnau sensed he was being regarded with disappointed eyes.
Moving on through the syrupy murk, Murnau found an approving Sergeant Gorphon waiting for him. Two horribly scarred members of the Graven, Brother-Destroyers Khurgul and Gholic, were yelling ripe abuse at the sinking derelict from the necrotic trunks, goading the Imperial Fists within. They hammered the open and more vulnerable areas of the wreck with their monstrous pistols and tossed clutches of grenades at the structure, the detonations of which bathed the swamp in a radioactive haze that killed the flies and made the shattered hull of the Xanthus shimmer. For a few minutes now, Murnau had suffered the background crackle of radioactivity, filtered through his battle plate. His suit told him what he already knew – that death, in one of its myriad forms, hung heavily over the whole area.
‘Inspiring, Chaplain,’ the Destroyer sergeant said as Murnau took his final trudging steps through the las-bolt molested waters. Like the legionary Destroyers, Grull Gorphon was a wretched mess of radiation scarring and weeping rawness. His bare head was like a scab that had cracked, and sores bled rancid fluid down his gaunt cheeks. The bulbous power fist crackling at his side further emphasised the sergeant’s macabre appearance, making him appear lopsided, almost hunchbacked.
‘Status report, sergeant.’ The Chaplain spoke with a focusing harshness, but if his tone bothered Gorphon, the Destroyer certainly didn’t let it show.
‘The Fists have the derelict section locked down tighter than Dorn’s arse cheeks,’ the sergeant related coarsely. ‘Barricades and bulkheads have been torched shut. A lot of bonded crew members – I’d say about forty – hold fire arcs on the approaches and they have a starboard cannon powered and operational. All that before the real problem of Oriel Latham and four of his veterans holed up in there.’
‘Our losses?’ Murnau asked.
‘Three,’ Gorphon told him with casual resignation. ‘That damned gun claimed Rork on its first shot. Latham and his bastard brothers took Urzl-kal and Ortag as they reconnoitred for unsecured entry points. The good news is that Latham is running out of time. The section is sinking and the more swamp water it takes on, the faster it’s going under. Between that and the radioactive hellhole my Destroyers have created between decks, I expect Latham the hero will be giving up his ground soon.’
Murnau gave Gorphon the searing optics of his skull-helm.
‘I’m afraid that’s not good enough, sergeant,’ the Chaplain hissed, some of his former manic morbidity creeping back into his voice. ‘Phorgal has stepped up our schedule. The Moritat has sent Dorn’s loyal dogs a long way down the crow road, but it is down to us to see them to the end of their journey. We don’t have long before extraction. Do you hear me, Gorphon?’
The sergeant nodded slowly, but couldn’t prevent a grin of lunacy spreading across his scabby lips.
‘We can take the Xanthus,’ he said, ‘but it will be bloody. Our losses will be high.’
The Chaplain nodded. ‘Do you think the Death Lord intended you to accompany him into the forever?’
An involuntary snort became a dark chuckle shared between the two warriors. ‘Do you think he intended it for any of us?’ Murnau added, as much to himself as Gorphon and his Destroyers. ‘Assemble your squad for a direct assault on the enemy vessel, sergeant. We shall create our own entry point and take Latham and his Fists by force.’
‘Yes, Brother-Chaplain,’ Gorphon replied with dead-eyed assurance before returning to his suit vox. ‘Graven,’ the Destroyer sergeant announced across the channel. ‘Fall back to my position immediately. The word is given – boarding action. Zorrak and Hadar-Gul, provide cover for the approach. Barrage. Full spread.’
Murnau drew his pistol and waited amongst the ferrouswoods as the remainder of the Graven worked their way through the las-bolts and shallows to their sergeant’s position. As ordered, Zorrak and Hadar-Gul lit up the Xanthus with a blinding and incessant barrage of rad-missiles, the Destroyers sidling through the filth like crabs. Murnau fancied the derelict rocked under the combined barrage of detonations – under such a devastating distraction the Fists and their sniping bondsmen and crew could create little in the way of murderous opportunity.
Sliding their pistols to automatic, Khurgul and Gholic came out of their cover to provide a curtain of bolt-fire for Gorphon. The Destroyer sergeant’s power fist spat and sizzled with dark energy as he closed his great, metal digits and smashed at the ferrouswood trunk with his seething knuckles. He struck again and again, shredding through blackened pulp and grain and breaking through the base of the forest-moon giant. The ancient and colossal tree gave out with a shrieking crack. The Death Guard watched it topple and followed its petrified canopy with their eyes as it landed on the derelict. The top of the heavy metallic trunk tore along the mangled section of hull-shielding, before coming to rest in a new, gaping breach.
‘To me, Graven!’ Gorphon roared. Murnau held his crozius arcanum above the sergeant, which the Destroyer took as his blessing on their endeavour. Bowing before it, he climbed up through the splintered trunk and took a heavy run at the incline created by the felled ferrouswood.
The Graven followed one after another. Each of the Death Guard slapped one of their brute pistols back into their holsters and drew their blades. The Graven’s chainblades were short, broad and falchion-shaped: the weapon of choice for hacking apart enemy defenders, hiding in the confined spaces and shadows of a crashed vessel.
As Murnau’s ceramite boots chewed up the necrotic bark of the fallen tree, the Chaplain could feel the hammering of the Fists’ bolt-rounds into the underside of the trunk.
By the time the Chaplain reached the hull of the Xanthus, Gorphon and his Destroyers were already inside. Leading with his pistol, and using the head of the crozius to move aside curtains of wiring and bleeding hydraulic lines, Murnau followed the swift progress of the Legion Destroyer squad.
Murnau was delighted to find that everything had already died in their meandering path. The shattered section was a torturous labyrinth of inclined passages, smashed chambers and crash-warped superstructure. There were bodies everywhere – the rag-doll remains of the bonded crew, unfortunates who had not survived the brutal descent and forest-scarring impact. Lamps flickered feebl
y with dying power and the gloom was thick with radioactive haze; inside the derelict vessel, every surface was covered with powdered fallout from the terrible rad-barrage. As the Chaplain moved through the twisted darkness, it dusted his midnight plate.
Murnau stepped through a messy hole in a bulkhead wall. Metal dribbled down the opening – here the Destroyers had used their melta bombs to blast through to a sealed-off section of the ship. Pushing through the trickles of hardening metal, Murnau found himself among carnage.
Here were fresh bodies, most missing limbs. They were riddled with ragged holes, blasted aside in the savage rush of the boarding action. The frigate’s crew and the Imperial Fists bondsmen were all dead or dying. Many clutched lascarbines and pistols. The Chaplain could imagine the staccato light show of beams and las-bolts that had met the Destroyers and lit up the darkness between the decks.
Once blade to blade, the mortal crew had provided no resistance at all. They had been too sick, too weak. They had done as instructed by their masters and held the Warmaster’s forces at bay, but they had done so on their knees, begging for death. The misery and suffering that had been experienced aboard the Xanthus was almost palpable. Murnau found himself smiling behind his faceplate.
The deck was slick with vomit and other bodily fluids, including spreading pools of freshly spilled blood, and many bodies lay with broken limbs already trussed and bandages wrapped around balding heads. The terrible evidence of the Destroyers’ arsenal was everywhere – radiation poisoning, ulceration, blistering, red-raw skin beneath robes that had been long-abandoned under raging fever. Even if the Graven hadn’t butchered and blasted their way through the section by hand, the frigate’s bondsmen would have died anyway. Gorphon had been right: the survivors were running out of time. The sons of Mortarion had simply provided a blessed release and alleviated their suffering with their screeching blades and bolt-rounds.
While his optics feasted upon these past atrocities, Murnau’s vox-feed kept him appraised of new ones unfolding on the decks below. There were screams of anger, futility and death frequently drowned out by grenades, the gunning of blades and the thunder of pistol fire. Gone were the Destroyers’ coarse insults, insanity and hilarity. The Death Guard were implacable, unstoppable. Gorphon’s macabre killers were silent and driven, eating up the carnage and the sweet ambience of endings.
The loyalists’, and indeed their own.
The Chaplain found his first Space Marine casualty of the engagement on an inverted stairwell – Khurgul’s impassive advance had taken him into the path of a stray krak grenade. His Mark III plate had been torn by the blast like a hastily opened rations can. His helm was shattered, and only half the Destroyer’s head remained within it. Lying on his side, his lifeblood cascading down through a grille landing, Khurgul blinked incomprehension at Murnau. He endlessly repeated his attempt to attach a fresh drum-magazine to his empty pistol, failing again and again.
‘Peace, brother,’ the Chaplain told the Destroyer. Swinging his staff of office, Murnau brought the head of the crozius down on what remained of the Space Marine’s own.
Pulling the stylised and serrated wings of the weapon from the Destroyer’s smashed skull, Murnau followed the Graven’s path of destruction down through the charnel-house decks and into the sinking bowels of the frigate. Over the vox-link he heard a new sound: the deep, throaty bark of bolter fire. The Graven had located their quarry – Dorn’s dogs, the Xanthus’ complement of Imperial Fists legionaries, holding out as only the VII Legion could in the dark depths of the shattered section.
Dropping down through another melta-blasted hole in the deck and passing through a buckled bulkhead, Murnau found himself in a maze of twisted metal: sealed-off sections, presumably breached and flooded; barricaded passageways and entire decks collapsed in upon one another. Murnau’s suit lamps lent a ghostly illumination to the devastation. No light penetrated this deep into the ship, leading the Chaplain to believe that they were below the surface level of the swamp.
As he descended, Murnau found two more fallen Destroyers and the barb-mauled body of the Imperial Fist that had taken their lives. The bolt-chatter was closer now, although the frenetic exchange of gunfire was bounced around the torturous architecture of the crashed vessel. Gorphon and his Destroyers must have forced the loyalists out from their fortified hold-point, blasting their way down into the belly of the frigate. The Imperial Fists had run out of vessel to retreat into. They had gone as far as they were going to go.
The Chaplain found the Graven gathered on the steep incline of a maintenance corridor. The deck below was alight with angry fires that drove back the darkness with a white-blue brilliance. The Death Guard were involved in a furious firefight with a handful of the enemy, punctuated by the detonations of rad-grenades. The returned fire from below was wild but insistent. Still, it surprised Murnau to find the Destroyers there, their storming advance having ground to a halt.
Sergeant Gorphon was braced across a hatchway leading to a tool store. He was holding his great power fist up to shield his ghoulish face as bolt-fire tore at the surrounding architecture.
‘Status report, sergeant,’ the Chaplain demanded. ‘Why have you not advanced?’
‘Three,’ the Destroyer stated, ‘perhaps four Fists are holding the gunnery deck below. The retreat point is fortified and seems well-supplied with ammunition from the frigate’s armoury. We, on the other hand, are down to our last clips.’
‘Latham…’ Murnau spat, but the sergeant shook his scalded features. Stepping back he allowed Murnau’s suit lamps to brush the outline of an armoured corpse beyond. The body had been laid carefully in the corner of the storeroom. The figure was helmetless, and plate markings identified the Space Marine as an Imperial Fists captain.
Captain Oriel Latham, wearing the ghastly expression of one unexpectedly confronting a sudden and violent death.
‘You?’ the Chaplain asked.
Gorphon shook his head. ‘Killed in the crash, we think.’
Murnau nodded slowly. Latham, dead… with the resistance being led by… who? Another legionary? A resourceful sergeant or second?
He looked to Gorphon. ‘Other ways in?’
The Death Guard sergeant shook his head.
‘We can’t force our way through?’ Murnau hissed with sudden annoyance. The Chaplain could feel victory almost within his throttling grasp.
‘We don’t have the numbers to weather that kind of punishment,’ Gorphon told him, shrugging one seemingly hunched shoulder. ‘Besides, such losses are unnecessary. The Imperial Fists will probably present themselves to us shortly.’
Murnau didn’t like where the Destroyer sergeant’s smug self-satisfaction was taking them. ‘And why would they do that?’ the Chaplain muttered.
Gorphon unhooked a fat bomb-canister that was hanging from the bottom of his pack.
‘Because they’ll die if they don’t,’ Gorphon announced amongst the incessant chunter of echoing gunfire. He tossed the canister over to the Chaplain. Murnau caught the weapon and turned it over in his gauntlets.
Phosphex.
The Legiones Astartes had many brute weapons at their disposal. Some were favoured for their surgical precision; others for their simple, destructive potential. As living weapons of the burgeoning Imperium, legionaries appreciated the respective merits of the death-dealing tools of their trade. In many monastery bases and Legion battle-barges there were certain weapons that gathered dust, unused by those unwilling to embrace their destructive potential. For many squads and officers, the use of rad-weaponry and chemical devastants was beyond the pale. They were distant echoes of a dark past, and forgotten remnants of the anarchy from which a stable Imperium was ultimately born. For a Legion’s Destroyers they were the weapons of choice – weapons that inflicted horror and sowed fear in enemy ranks.
Following the phosphorescent nightmare of its exothermic detonation, phos
phex would hang like a poison that burned and seeped its way into anything unfortunate enough to come into contact with it. As far as could be determined, it would never decay.
‘You have deployed this weapon?’ Murnau asked.
‘Rolled two canisters down there,’ Gorphon told him with raw-faced pride. ‘You missed the screams, Chaplain.’
‘That’s unfortunate. I wish you hadn’t done that.’
‘Why?’ the sergeant asked absently as he risked a brief glance down the slanting maintenance corridor. The firefight was dying away to nothing, a testament to the toxic inferno that had swept through the lower deck.
‘Because our mission requires us to go down there,’ the Chaplain said with almost reptilian resolve. Gorphon clearly saw the conviction in Murnau’s eyes.
‘You can’t be serious! That would be suicide,’ the Death Guard Destroyer protested.
Murnau leant in close. Each of his words was hushed and deliberate.
‘No… survivors…’
‘But, Brother-Chaplain,’ Gorphon began, ‘the phosphex–’
‘Will test us, yes,’ Murnau admitted. ‘But no more than Lord Mortarion was tested, advancing undaunted, indomitable, into the mountains of Barbarus. Each step was agony for him, every breath torment, but he did it to set us free. And so we are – free to choose, free to follow. Free to determine our own destiny. All he asks in return is obedience. Let us follow in the primarch’s footsteps now, undaunted and indomitable.’
Murnau unclasped his skull-helm and fixed the sergeant with his eyes. A moment of fleeting doubt crossed the sergeant’s wretched face before the pair shared a moment of infectious insanity.
The Chaplain would lead them in the primarch’s footsteps.
The sergeant nodded.
