Iron Warrior

by Graham McNeill

  It toppled slowly to the ground, as though confused as to why its strength was fading. Its fellows seemed to find its death greatly amusing, and guffawed and bellowed as they ripped what ammunition that hadn’t been set off in the blast from its body.

  More grenades followed the melta charge, and while the rubble made for excellent shrapnel, it also provided a great deal of protection and few were felled by these desperate measures. Honsou and his warrior squads dodged from cover to cover, always moving up and pausing for snap-fire opportunities whenever a target presented itself. He saw flashes of blue armour, but never clear enough for a shot. More underground blasts sent whole swathes of the rubble slope crashing downwards.

  Thirty metres to his right, he saw Grendel, the warrior’s armour unmistakable amongst the other Iron Warriors. A vivid red plume flew from his horned helmet, making him look more like a berserker than an Iron Warrior. Honsou was reminded of Kroeger, the last Iron Warrior to tread the path of the Blood God, and where it had led. Grendel fired his melta gun at the ramparts, vaporising sections of stonework and men where they stood. The warrior’s enthusiasm for the slaughter was infections and Honsou found himself laughing as he broke from cover.

  The crest of the breach was just above him, and he roared to see a line of warriors in the blue and gold of the Ultramarines march to claim it. Fourteen of them. Warriors in gleaming blue battle plate edged in midnight black trims. A medley of Imperial iconography, eagles, skulls and silver halos adorned their pauldrons, and their winged, crested helmets were absurd with needless decoration.

  A trio of tracked units, each with a heavy gun equipped with four barrels, sat alongside the Ultramarines, their barrels red and smoking from such rapid firing. A multitude of warriors in hostile environment suits and blue surcoats fanned out behind them, a solid wall of men that stood between him and his prize.

  ‘It’ll take more than you to stop me,’ hissed Honsou, swinging his axe from its sheath at his back.

  Cadaras Grendel fired his melta gun until it bled empty and hurled the weapon away. Unlike many warriors, he had no sentimental attachment to the gun. If they won, he might go back and get it. If they didn’t then it wouldn’t matter anyway. He drew his pistol and combat knife, a long shank of steel with a monomolecular blade. Grendel was a warrior who liked his killing up close and personal.

  He saw Honsou scrambling to meet the Ultramarines and picked up his pace, vaulting a fallen column and joining a pack of blood-maddened abhumans resembling hugely inflated sacks of meat draped in all-enclosing armour and carrying crackling chain grapples. Straggling bands of Iron Warriors followed him, grim warriors in skull-masked visors and dull, metal plates of armour. The industrial yellow and black seemed so bare to him now, save where the surfaces were coated in blood.

  Honsou’s warriors were almost at the crest of the breach, and as much as he wanted to be there too, he knew it was best to let the master of this army have his moment of glory.

  And… if he happened to get killed achieving it, then so much the better.

  Olantor marched in perfect lockstep with his brothers to the edge of the breach. To see so grievous a wound in the majestic structure horrified him. It seemed impossible that so mighty a defensive bulwark could fall, but if any foe could tear it asunder, it was the Iron Warriors. Tales of these brutally efficient siegemasters were legion, yet Olantor had never expected to face such a foe in a place like this.

  His bolter bucked in his grip as he fired into the charging mass of warriors. He shot from the hip, for it was impossible to miss. A pair of warriors were punched from their feet, but a host of others rushed to take their place. It violated his very soul to see such an abominable horde, a horrifying mix of traitors from an age long thought consigned to legend, and the very worst dregs of the galaxy. Renegades, xenos, pirates and mercenaries all gathered under one banner of damnation.

  A vile-skinned kroot sprang from the rocks towards him and he put a bolt through its skull. Coloured spines and brain blew out the back of its head and a gust of spraying air erupted from where the sealant gel enveloping its skin was breached.

  ‘Fire discipline!’ shouted Decimus. ‘Target the heavily armoured enemy first!’

  Volley after volley of bolter fire boomed in perfect unison and more blood and vented oxygen sprayed from ruptured armour. On this battlefield, even the smallest wound could be fatal. Grenades sailed over his head, demolition charges, and even heavy boulders were pushed from the ramparts.

  The Thunderfire cannons boomed once again, throwing up geysers of rock dust as they pummelled the slope of debris with powerful shockwaves. The horde was close enough that the air between both forces was thick with gunfire. Astartes armour was amongst the most powerful in existence, but it could only take so much.

  Brother Tanicus went down, his leg hanging from his pelvis by stringy ropes of ruptured flesh. He shuddered as his armour fought to close the wound and the last of the leg was severed by the integrity seals. Tanicus fought from the ground, still firing his bolter at the oncoming enemy.

  ‘Tanicus!’ shouted Brother Braxus, moving to help the fallen warrior.

  ‘Hold your position, brother!’ shouted Olantor.

  Streaming gouts of fire licked down the breach and Olantor looked up to see Interrogator Sibiya atop the overhanging stub of rampart. Her Saurians raked their melta-lances over the enemy ranks. Flames leapt briefly over the enemy warriors before the lack of oxygen killed them, but the instantaneous superheating melted through armour plates and flesh with a flash of molten metal. The preacher was still with her, still reciting his unheard mantra, but all Olantor could think of as he looked at Sibiya was the cold, dormant thing lying like a living bomb in her ship’s hold.

  He shook off the distaste he felt for such things and emptied the last of his magazine into the oncoming enemy warriors. In an instant he saw that the enemy were close enough that bolters would be no use.

  ‘Switch weapons!’ shouted Olantor. ‘Swords and pistols!’

  Each of his warriors smoothly slung their bolters and charged to their close combat loadout in an instant. Normal codex equipment for men such as these did not include such a fit of weapons, but Marneus Calgar had granted Brother Altarion special dispensation to equip the defenders as he saw necessary. As strange as it was, Olantor was grateful for that unheard of leeway in the codex.

  ‘For Macragge!’ cried Sergeant Decimus, and the cry was echoed by a thousand throats.

  The instant before the two forces clashed, a booming, stentorian voice cut through the chatter on the vox-net.

 

  Instantly, the Ultramarines parted as the towering and mighty, powerful and unstoppable form of Brother Altarion took position in the centre of their ranks. His monstrous hammer was raised and sheathed in flickering arcs of blue lightning, his assault cannon spinning at an incredible rate as he took aim down the breach.

 

  Honsou saw the towering form of the Dreadnought as the Ultramarines parted before it. This close to such an armoured behemoth was not a healthy place to be and he dived to one side as its enormous cannon opened fire. A blazing plume of white light roared from the barrel and a rain of copper-jacketed shell casings sprayed from its ammo hopper.

  Three Iron Warriors behind him vanished in a sparking explosion of metal, flesh and bone. Blitzing shells sawed through the ranks of warriors packed tightly below the lip of the breach and ripped into the hull of one of Votheer Tark’s battle-engines. The machine shrieked a squall of binary as it died, collapsing into a pile of twisted metal and flames.

  Weapons fire spattered from the Dreadnought’s hide, bolter shells and lasrifles useless against its armoured plates. Heavier shells rocked it back on its thick legs, but like a statue of some ancient god, it refused to be moved.

  Once more its heavy cannon roared and yet more of Honsou’s warriors were cut down. Two of the hulking ogre creatures were hit, losing limbs,
but carrying on without them. One even managed to snag the Dreadnought’s granite glacis with its chain grapple, but a tongue of superheated melta fire from above finally brought it down. The links melted, leaving the grapple hook embedded in the Dreadnought and the chain swinging at its side.

  The tracked gun units fired again, and the slope heaved and groaned. Rock and rubble streamed downwards from the underground blasts, but few men were killed. Honsou shook his head. A host of enemy warriors before you and you waste your guns firing into the ground. It made no sense until you factored in the Ultramarines slavish devotion to a book ten thousand years out of date.

  Grendel and Etassay dropped into cover beside him as the Dreadnought’s cannon shot up a pack of kroot warriors seeking to outflank the defenders. Grendel was tensed and ready to fight, his muscles coiled and needing to kill something with his bare hands. Etassay leaned against a fallen carving of a great eagle, its wings shorn and its head pocked with bullet impacts. Though his golden helm obscured his features, Honsou could tell Etassay was enjoying this assault immensely.

  ‘Wondrous, Honsou, simply wondrous!’ cried Etassay. ‘The horror! The violence and blood! I’ve never known the like. It almost makes the tedium of waiting for a breach worthwhile!’

  ‘We have to go forward!’ shouted Grendel, ignoring Etassay’s rapturous delirium.

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ replied Honsou, jerking his axe blade in the direction of the Dreadnought. ‘We can’t until that thing’s taken out.’

  ‘So get it taken out!’ snarled Grendel, scraping his blade over his breastplate.

  Honsou recognised the criticality of this moment. If the enemy could hold them here long enough, the fire and momentum of the charge would be lost and they would be slaughtered only metres from their goal. But to go forward prematurely would see them cut to pieces.

  ‘Tark!’ shouted Honsou. ‘Get your machines into that breach! Take out that bastard Dreadnought!’

  A frothing mix of scrapcode burbled in his helmet, followed by a swirl of static and corrupt binaric hash.

  ‘You understand that?’ barked Grendel.

  ‘Not even a little bit,’ said Honsou.

  The substance of Votheer Tark’s answer was made plain moments later, as a trio of the champion’s battle-engines dragged their bulk upwards. Two were heavily-armoured vehicles with multiple guns on a rear-set turret, and spiked tracks that clawed the rubble as they slowly made their way uphill. The third was a monstrous mechanical hybrid of a scorpion and centaur. Its multiple legs rapidly hauled its heavy, segmented bulk uphill in sinuous sweeps, a brass, skull-rimmed cannon in its chest spitting gobbets of electrical fire.

  Honsou ducked as the mecha-organic beast stomped past him, the impacts of its heavy treads sending yet more rubble skittering downhill. A bolt of blue lightning arced from its chest gun to the summit of the breach, and a dozen mortal soldiers were burned to cinders where they stood, their suits erupting in oxygen-rich flames before swiftly snuffing out. One of the Ultramarines dropped to his knees, his armour burned and hissing oxygen where the seals had burst.

  The Dreadnought rocked back, liquid lightning dancing across its granite sarcophagus and crackling hammer arm. Its cannon streamed a thundering blizzard of shells that tore across the battle-engine’s flanks, blasting off armour plates and chewing up the mechanised flesh beneath. Pale liquid, like the blood of some giant insect, sprayed and the monster howled in agony, but it kept going.

  Tark’s vehicles didn’t fire, the angle too steep for their main guns to be brought to bear. Unstoppable and indestructible, the heavy tanks crunched upwards behind the rapidly-climbing scorpion beast. They would roll over any opposition, and Honsou wished he had a hundred more like them.

  Another underground blast rocked the slope of the breach as the scorpion machine clawed its way onto the top of the breach. Its red flesh pulsed in battle fury, the sparking conduits that slithered around its underbelly glowing with wychfires. The battle-engine’s giant pincer arms snapped at the Dreadnought, tearing off an eagle-stamped sheet of adamantium and ceramite. Sparks and flames erupted from the wound, but the Dreadnought simply stepped in closer to its attacker and brought its hammer down with crushing force on the scorpion creature’s head.

  Driven by hate as much as mechanical, fibre-bundle muscles, the energised hammer slammed into the scorpion beast’s body with seismic force, obliterating its mechanised skull and exploding its chest in a welter of artificial blood and machine parts. The battle-engine died with a deafening shriek of scrapcode that sliced through Honsou’s skull like a laser drill.

  He cried out and dropped his weapon, his hands unconsciously flying to the sides of his skull as if to better block the sound. Grendel too, jerked in pain, but Notha Etassay leapt to his feet, jerking like an electrocution victim, and Honsou could hear his moans of ecstatic pleasure over the scorpion beast’s death scream.

  Blinking away the aftermath of the agonising spike of pain, Honsou felt the ground lurch beneath him, as though the slope had suddenly and horribly shifted. With a cold jolt of realisation he suddenly understood why the Imperials were using their mobile artillery pieces in such an unorthodox manner.

  ‘Iron Warriors!’ he shouted, as the rocks beneath him began grinding together and he felt a monstrously powerful vibration work its way up from somewhere far below. ‘Everyone get back! Get down now!’

  He scrambled to his feet and began skidding and sliding down the slope of the breach. Warriors who had been, moments before, fighting to reach the top of the breach, milled in confusion.

  Etassay’s voice sounded in his ear. ‘Retreat? Are you mad? This is too good to stop now!’

  ‘Move now or you’re going to die!’ snarled Honsou, risking a glance over his shoulder in time to see the blackened and scarred Dreadnought raise its hammer once more and strike a mighty blow against the rubble at the top of the breach.

  It was all the force needed to complete the work begun by the subterranean blasts.

  With a tortured vibration of cracked and broken stone, the entire slope of rubble slid away from the walls, its previously stable condition of tightly packed debris undone by the defenders. Enormous sections of the slope simply collapsed like sinkholes, dragging scores of warriors to their doom, while others were swept away in devastating avalanches of rock. Tark’s battle-engines, so close to the breach, fell into the deep chasm that opened up between the rubble slope and the wall. Thousands of tonnes of rock and steel collapsed in a crashing flow of debris that crushed men and machines, burying them forever beneath a sea of stone.

  Honsou ran for his life, fighting to keep his feet on a juddering carpet of uneven ground. Shattered chunks of the walls bounced past him, crushing anything in their path. A rebar of orange steel slashed downwards to impale the Iron Warrior running alongside him. The spinning head of an Ultramarines statue slid past him, the enigmatic smile on its alabaster face seeming to mock his attempts to stay alive.

  He heard panicked cries echoing in his helmet, but cared nothing for the men dying around him. All that mattered was his own life. The ground heaved, an animal desperate to hurl him from its back, and he felt his balance failing.

  A flying rock struck the side of his helmet with dizzying force and he fell, tumbling end over end down the avalanche, carried as helpless as an insect in a surging river.

  Rocks, steel and bodies pummelled him as he fell, the world spinning around him and disintegrating into an impenetrable mass of light and sound and pain.

  Chapter Five

  High in the shadowed roof beams of a metal fabrik in the eastern reaches of the Via Rex, Ardaric Vaanes leaned against a heavy iron stanchion. His helmet sat before him on the wide girder, and he took a deep breath of air. It tasted of metal shavings and the warm, animal reek of the loxatl, but the chance to remove his helmet was too good to pass up. This deep in the star fort, atmospheric integrity had not been compromised and even the stale taste of recycled air was like a refreshing
mountain breeze in his lungs.

  Far below, huge piles of refined metal covered vast areas of the floor between the dormant forges and idle milling machines. Further along the girder, the Newborn watched the surviving loxatl with rapt attention. The lizard-like beasts clung to the iron girders, as dormant as the machinery below, and their chameleon-like skin rippled through shades of darkness as the light changed.

  While Honsou and his Iron Warriors laid siege to the Gauntlet Bastions, Vaanes, the Newborn and the loxatl had taken the fight to the Imperials in a shadow war behind the front lines. Day and night, they sabotaged communication nodes, blew power relays, generators and void arrays. With looted weapons and explosives they set improvised traps that claimed the lives of hundreds of enemy soldiers.

  Supply trains, repair crews and isolated patrols were ambushed and killed, and now the Imperials never travelled without an escort of heavily armoured vehicles. Hundreds of men had been drawn from the front lines to guard vital locations, and Vaanes could almost taste their fear in the air. Something in the dark was hunting them, and the terror of that unseen foe was scraping at their nerves like a rusty blade.

  Realising the enemy had infiltrated their rear echelons, the Imperials sent scout patrols to seek them out, tough soldiers schooled in working behind the lines. They were good, the best of their regiment no doubt, but their prey was a hunter trained since birth to be like a shadow himself. Ardaric Vaanes had been Raven Guard, a warrior first and foremost, but haunting the shadows, striking from ambush and killing in the darkness, he was in his element, and there were no finer hunters of men than the scions of Corax.

  He glanced at the bare plates of his shoulder guards. Once they had proudly borne the heraldry of the Raven Guard, a winged white hunting bird. A moment of madness had seen that symbol’s meaning and identity stripped from him, and strange circumstance had forced him to adopt a new symbol, that of the renegade; the jagged red cross of the Red Corsairs.