by Nick Kyme
An expressionless silver rictus, stained with blood, reared towards the sergeant. A bolt pistol burst took off the necron’s left claw-hand before it could slash him. Scipio then butted it, snapping the creature’s neck so its head lolled at an unnatural angle. He thumped his chainsword’s activation stud again, muttering a quick litany to the machine-spirit within, and it churned to life. Dropping his pistol, Scipio drove the blade two-handed clean through the flayed one’s body and out the other side. As he stepped back, ready to strike again, the two mechanical halves slid diagonally and fell in opposite directions.
Scipio had barely recovered when a second necron was advancing upon him. Without his bolt pistol, he adopted a rapid defensive stance.
The flayed one exploded before it could engage, sparks and machine-parts flying like frag.
A pair of hard eyes, glowing with power and set in an ice-carved face, regarded him.
Take up your arms+
Scipio gave a curt nod of thanks to Tigurius, his soul ever so slightly chilled by the Librarian’s gaze, and retrieved his bolt pistol.
There was little time. The flayed ones were vanquished, Brakkius and Cator were finishing the wounded at close range, but the line of gauss-flayers remained.
Scipio waved his squad forwards after Tigurius. Catching the Librarian’s battle-signal on his retinal display, he opened up the comm-feed again.
‘Squad Strabo. Bring fire from heaven.’
Hidden behind the wreckage of a refinery tower, ten bulky figures arrowed into the air on plumes of fire. The roar of their ascent jets made the necrons look skywards. Half of the creatures switched their aim, but the gauss-stream was too late and not nearly enough.
Hit from the front by Tigurius and Squad Vorolanus, and from above by Assault Squad Strabo, the necron firing line disintegrated leaving the Ultramarines the victors.
In the aftermath, Tigurius eyed the distant Thanatos foothills. The forbidding arc of necron pylons and the long noses of gauss siege cannon blighted the horizon line. Sustained particle whips and focussed energy beams bombarded the city of Kellenport relentlessly.
‘They will be well guarded,’ counselled the Librarian, without acknowledging Scipio’s presence but answering his question before he’d even asked it.
‘We’ll need a way to breach their defences,’ Scipio replied. Behind him, his squad and that of Sergeant Strabo secured the battle-site.
‘A dagger rather than a hammer,’ said Tigurius. ‘But not one wielded by the hand of a Space Marine,’ he added cryptically, turning his attention onto the sergeant. ‘Does something trouble you, Brother Vorolanus?’
Scipio shifted uncomfortably in his armour, wishing he hadn’t removed his battle helm.
‘No, my lord,’ he answered, truthfully. Nothing, except your psyker’s interrogation.
Tigurius smiled and it was, at once, a deeply incongruous and unsettling gesture.
‘Perhaps it should be,’ he said, and left Scipio to plan the next stage of the assault.
Brother Orin was at the sergeant’s shoulder before he could reply.
‘We’ve secured the battle-site, my lord.’
Scipio re-donned his helmet. ‘Retrieve Naceon’s body and replenish ammo. We advance,’ he replied, left to wonder at Tigurius’s meaning.
They saw it as a star-fall from the heavens. All who manned the Kellenport walls, their tired bodies and weary souls crying out for succour, knew it for what it was. No mere meteor shower, although celestially that was how it first appeared.
No, it was salvation. Or so they all hoped.
Adanar Sonne surveyed the dispositions of his troops on the city battlements. They’d lost much of the outer ground beyond the core. Several of the defensive walls had fallen, those ringing the heart of the city. Ferrocrete, armaplas and adamantite had been made a mockery of by the necron flayer technology. The horrors it could inflict upon flesh and blood were even worse to behold.
The necrons had some kind of device, a phasic-generator the tech-priests had postulated. It had allowed the bulk of their awakened troops to teleport directly behind the Ark Guard’s defensive positions. Fortified walls, bunkers, fields of razor-wire – they were no impediment to the mechanised advance of the necrontyr. Isolated pockets of resistance in these outer zones, ‘the wasteland’ as it had come to be known, fought still. Their lasgun reports diminished to the same ratio that the emerald flash of gauss-flayers increased. Soon they’d be silent and the metal host would come for the survivors cowering within the city’s core.
Adanar could make out the remains of the lord governor’s Proteus bunker in the snow-choked battlefield. How they had managed to extract him was unknown, but he was rumoured to be alive, albeit comatose and in critical condition. The body of Tarn, the former commander of the Ark Guard, lay amongst the corpse-tide. Their icy graves were barely settled when the necrons had begun marching over them. Tarn had been a brave man, and honourable. His rearguard action had allowed Adanar to lead the bulk of the troops behind the inner walls of Kellenport, all the way back to the western gate and the Courtyard of Thor. It was only delaying the inevitable but it gave them all a few more hours to contemplate their fate.
A sea of metal horrors extended all the way to the horizon line, their bale-fire eyes adding to the chill colonising the hearts of the men. In the distance, arcane pyramids, newly unearthed, hove into position. Every burst of infernal light from their cores seemed to bring fresh monsters into the fray. This legion of death would not be denied, but despite his fatalism Adanar would not yield without making a fight of it.
Behind him, the dense thud of uber-mortars and long-cannons could be heard. Their reports, though loud and earth-shaking, had started to pale in comparison to the necron barrage. Slowly, they were being drowned out.
We are all drowning… in our fear. Death, slow and terrible, has come to my world and there is no escaping it.
Adanar flinched reflexively as another of the artillery stations was sundered. A vast cloud of smoke belched across the Ark Guard platoons waiting in the Courtyard of Thor to fill the inevitable breaches in the wall.
Lasgun fire rained from the battlements, a steady shriek of energy that the necrons waded through as if it were nothing but an insect swarm. Shielded by bunkers, hunched below plascrete bulwarks or hastily erected barricades, the Ark Guard were holding out. For now, at least.
Rotational guns – las and autocannon, heavy stubber and bolter – slaved to a rail network, spat muzzle flashes into an alien darkness. Not only had the necrontyr brought a comms shroud to blanket the regions before them, they had summoned an unnatural shadow too. Running hot on its tracks, Adanar watched a team wheel an autocannon in position only for it to be vaporised by necron heavy fire before it could shoot. Ammo buckets attached to the platform went up in a fiery cascade, shredding the crew and several more Ark Guard nearby. Below, platoon sergeants saw the hole and ordered more men into the gap.
‘Sir.’
Adanar was dimly aware of someone addressing him.
The voice became insistent. ‘Commander Sonne.’
He glared at Besseque, his aide. The man was shorter by a head than Adanar and had his cold-coat buckled all the way to his chin. His goggles were perched on his hooded head and covered in rime-frost. Shivering, Besseque saluted before going on.
‘Acting-Governor Rancourt has just been on the vox. He wants a battalion sent to the capitolis administratum. He says if the area outside the walls can be cleared then an extraction from the Crastia Shipyards will be possible.’
Adanar fought the urge to strike Besseque, but it wasn’t the messenger’s fault. He cursed the day that Rancourt returned from the ice wastes alive.
‘Request denied,’ he answered flatly.
The capitolis administratum was an isolated bastion out in the wasteland. From his vantage point on the wall Adanar could discer
n its troops fighting hard against necron aggressors. Somewhere inside, Zeph Rancourt had secreted himself, deep within the governmental chambers. Perhaps that was where they’d moved Arxis to, as well.
Mercifully, only the lesser necron constructs were harrying the bastion’s high walls. Wave after wave of scarab creatures assailed the Ark Guard platoon and the capitolis storm troopers charged with its defence, but they were holding. The necron war cell diverting its attention in the bastion’s direction suggested that situation was about to change.
‘It’s a suicide mission,’ Adanar muttered, and brought his attention back to the broader killing-fields.
‘What should I tell the acting governor, sir, he won’t–’
‘Tell him to feg off for all I care, Besseque! There are no more men, no spare battalions. It’s ov–’ Adanar caught himself before he went too far. He lowered his voice, just for the aide. ‘It’s over, Corporal Besseque. This world is our tomb.’
Slowly, Besseque nodded and backed away. The hollow anger in Adanar’s eyes was reflected in the corporal’s fearful pupils.
Adanar didn’t watch him go. He returned to observe the assault. Hard to see, as a sudden snowfall shawled the more distant defensive walls, but a line of shattered tanks punctuated the outer marker of the city where they’d first tried to meet the necrons. The enemy had annihilated the armour columns with perfunctory ease and then used their swarm creatures to gut the machine innards of the Imperial tanks and convert them into more necron warrior constructs. How foolish the humans had been to think anything other than hiding behind the walls of the capital would extend their lives, albeit fractionally.
‘How much of a fool,’ whispered Adanar. He rubbed his figure over a locket-charm chained to his wrist. There were two picts nestled inside, memories of the wife and child now slumbering beneath the Damnos earth like so many others.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ghosting the air with his breath, the din of the battle all around him receding. He felt the scar on his face, the ache in his shoulder and back from when he’d tried to save them. When the hab had collapsed and… and…
Adanar shut his eyes.
Tarn, the poor dead fegger, had been wise to tell him to flee with his family. A pity Adanar had not heeded him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he echoed, talking to the phantoms in his mind. He wiped away a tear, crystallised on his cheek, and the battle rushed back. They were stretched. He needed more men. Once the phasic-generator was in range it wouldn’t matter. Not long now. He’d be with them soon enough.
Some of the Ark Guard in the courtyard were pointing at the sky.
Adanar followed their gestures and saw… comets. Armoured comets, cobalt blue and streaked in flame, emblazoned with an icon he had seen depicted in tapestries and triptychs if never in real life.
Ultramarines.
The Space Marines had come.
When ordered to join the gate-guard, a soldier surrendered all semblance of control and accepted his fate was no longer in his own hands. Even firing a weapon was pointless. Engaging the enemy was impossible. The first moment a gate-guard would know of the enemy was when that enemy was bearing down on him, breaching the very portal he had sworn to protect.
Falka accepted the duty grimly. He never trembled like the other men did when the earth shook and the gate shuddered from artillery impacts. He gripped his lascarbine, felt the reassuring weight of the ice-pick tugging at his belt loop, and waited. He thought of Jynn, lost in the ice storm. It seemed like years, but in reality it was just months. She’d got them out of the mine and died an ignominious death for her bravery. Sometimes, the Emperor’s sense of humour was a cruel one. Falka’s last sight of her had been the ice bank collapsing, Jynn and a dozen or so others falling to the abysmal white of the frost-gale.
Now all he had was the gate. He had lived, she had not. It would count for something, Falka decided. He’d seen, first-hand, what had happened in the outer zones – ‘the wasteland’. Ferrocrete and plasteel were no barriers to these creatures, these necrons. They filled the air with their threats, their promises of annihilation and domination, and there was nothing the Ark Guard could do. This was a menace that could materialise through walls or inside bunkers. There was no place on all of Damnos to hide. So, it was with a certain irony that Falka regarded the western gate.
When the phasic-generator, an arcane device spoken of in fearful whispers by the men, got close enough or attained enough power, they would be tooth to nail with the necrons. Flesh against metal, the humans did not stand a chance.
‘You were the lucky one, Jynn,’ muttered Falka, and the sadness plucked at his stomach, making him feel sick.
‘Trooper Kolpeck.’ It was the gate-sergeant, a hard-edged brute called Muhrne. ‘Save your prayers until they’re at the gate.’
‘With respect, sir,’ Falka replied, ‘it won’t matter a shard. They’ll pass the western gate and be on us without warning.’
Muhrne nodded sagely. ‘So, like I said: save your prayers.’
Falka laughed before his eye-line was drawn to the sky and he saw the stars falling, setting the clouds aflame.
The drop pods hammered into the earth with concussive fury. Adanar watched a wave slam into position around the capitolis administratum, burning scarabs off the walls with the displaced heat of their re-entry. Slab-sides like the edges of an arrowhead crashed open with a hiss of venting pressure and a missile barrage disgorged from within. Tiny explosions, combining to form much larger ones, erupted throughout the necron ranks in close proximity to the bastion. Adanar had expected Space Marines; instead he got a fusillade that was punishing the enemy hard with automated precision. The defenders, pushed close to the brink of defeat, rallied at once. Redoubled las-fire spat from the walls adding to the carnage.
Adanar’s vicarious exultation was short-lived as the phasic-generator came into range and so too did the necron warrior cohorts. Several war cells translated through the Kellenport walls and fell upon the vanguard Adanar had positioned in front of the Courtyard of Thor. A strange sensation emanated from the newly-arrived enemy, something brought on by the effects of the generator’s recent activation. The world spun vertiginously and Adanar was forced to cling to the battlement for support. He heard screams, echoing through the fog of sudden dislocation, and assumed several of the Ark Guard stationed on the wall had fallen.
‘Sergeant,’ he began, spitting out the word through gritted teeth.
Sergeant Nabor was on his knees, blubbering like an infant with his hands over his ears.
It had affected the entire garrison.
Adanar tried to move, thinking he was stepping back when in fact he went forwards. He reached for his laspistol, hoping the sudden discharge might return his senses, but grabbed for the empty air on the left side of his belt, instead of the holster on his right.
‘Throne of Earth,’ he garbled, as an errant trickle of blood wept from his nostril and touched his lip. The copper tang was intense, almost acidic.
Below, through his tunnelling, kaleidoscopic vision, the vanguard was being slaughtered.
A voice, inhuman and metallic, resolved on the breeze.
Heed my words for I am the Herald and we are the footsteps of doom. Interlopers, do we name you. Defilers of our sacred earth. We have awoken to your primitive species and will not tolerate your presence. Ours is the way of logic, of cold hard reason; your irrationality, your human disease has no place in the necrontyr. Flesh is weak. Surrender to the machine incarnate. Surrender and die.
Adanar found his laspistol – it was as if it’d been placed in his trembling grasp – and pressed it to his forehead.
‘Surrender to the machine incarnate,’ he echoed macabrely. ‘Surrender and die.’ A thought, so small and insignificant he barely felt it, entered his brain and he paused for a few life-saving seconds. The trigger pull never came.
The c
omets from heaven crashed home, flooding the plaza beyond the walls with cobalt-blue angels, and the terrible sensation abated.
Weeping openly, Adanar put down his gun and praised the Emperor.
‘Thank you, my loves,’ he sobbed, rubbing at the locket-charm. ‘Thank you.’
Mustering his resolve, ignoring the fact Sergeant Nabor had forcibly evacuated much of his brainpan across the battlement, Adanar issued the order to open the western gate and empty the Courtyard of Thor.
The tide had turned.
Chapter Three
Aboard the Valin’s Revenge prior to drop pod assault
Scipio knelt on the assembly deck, blessing his weapons before launch. Less than fifty metres away row upon row of drop pods waited, cinched in their launch tubes.
‘As I anoint this holy bolter with these words of benediction, so too do I commit myself, body and mind, to the service of the Emperor. I swear by Guilliman’s blade and for the glory of Ultramar that Thy will be done.’ Holstering his bolt pistol, Scipio drew his chainsword from a sheath on his armour’s power generator and pressed the still blade to his forehead. ‘Make my hand into a ready sword; let my faith and certainty of purpose be my shield. For I am Adeptus Astartes, Ultramarine, pre-eminent of all Chapters. So swears Lord Guilliman.’
‘So swears Lord Guilliman,’ echoed a deep voice behind him.
Scipio smiled and turned, sheathing his weapon. ‘Didn’t think I’d see you again so soon, brother.’
Iulus Fennion had a face like a slab of carved granite and displayed about the same amount of emotion. He clasped Scipio’s proffered hand and tiny cracks sprang out from the corners of his eyes in what could have been amusement.
‘A dangerous mission into the Thanatos Hills,’ Iulus replied, all business. His square jaw and flat nose shifted like a mountain crag as he spoke, and the stubble on his chin and head reminded Scipio of grit rather than hair.
‘Is that concern I hear, brother?’ Scipio asked, releasing his grip and patting his fellow sergeant on the shoulder.
