by Nick Kyme
Scipio put such maudlin thoughts from his mind as he greeted his fellow Space Marines. Despite everything, it was good to be back amongst his brothers again.
Tigurius was not done addressing the battle force. ‘Fortunate then, that we bring good news.’ He gestured to Scipio, inviting him to elaborate. ‘Brother-sergeant?’
Several of the battle-brothers, including their sergeants, had been eyeing the humans that had joined them in the camp. For their part, the guerrillas looked wary and afraid. Only Jynn seemed unperturbed by the cobalt giants in their midst. She came forwards.
‘I am Captain Evvers, and these are my men… What’s left of them, anyway,’ she added ruefully. ‘We are your salvation.’
Sergeant Vandar was looking down on the woman when he raised his gaze to lock eyes with Scipio. ‘Why does this human speak for you, Brother Vorolanus?’
‘She is bold,’ added Octavian. It was hard to tell through his battle-helm but he sounded mildly amused at the woman’s outburst. ‘And what is this “salvation” she boasts of? Are we in need of rescue?’
Scipio shot Jynn a reproachful look, before bringing his attention back to Vandar. ‘She does not speak for me,’ he said, before addressing Octavian, ‘but she does possess some useful information, a route into the mountains behind the necron’s defences.’
‘Through the defensive circle?’ asked Vandar, suddenly interested in the human now. Vandar was known for his tactical brilliance, yet even he could not devise a strategy that would allow the battle force to bypass the necron defences around the artillery. He wanted to know more.
‘We have a way to breach the impenetrable mountain ridge, yes,’ said Tigurius, ‘but a plan is needed if we’re to make the most of this opportunity.’ His gaze fell on the three sergeants as he was walking away.
‘My lord?’ asked Scipio.
Tigurius didn’t look back. He was heading towards an isolated promontory of rock. Much like the Librarian’s thoughts, it was swathed in snow and ice. ‘I must consult the Sea of Souls,’ he muttered, his mind already drifting elsewhere. ‘The future is uncertain.’
‘Brother-Librarian,’ Scipio called, risking censure for using such familiar language.
Tigurius turned. His eyes were ablaze with actinic fire.
‘Are you sure that is wise, given your last attempts?’
‘Experience matters not, Sergeant Vorolanus,’ he replied solemnly. ‘Need drives us. I must know.’ A swell of snow spiralled up from the ground and the Librarian disappeared into it.
Scipio regarded his fellow sergeants. ‘Vandar, make the most of our reduced forces.’
Vandar nodded. ‘I shall bring victory to our cause, brother.’
The three departed to marshal their squads and prepare for imminent departure to the Thanatos Hills. Scipio left Brakkius to organise the Thunderbolts, while he spoke to the humans.
Jynn returned a steely expression as he regarded her.
‘Accompanying Space Marines into battle is no small thing,’ Scipio told her. ‘It is dangerous beyond imagining. For one, you are not equipped as we–’
‘Look at us,’ said Jynn, interrupting.
Scipio stayed his anger as he waited for what she was about to say. He took in the guerrillas. They were a sorry, but war-hardened sight.
‘What do you see?’ she asked, turning to her troops. When she looked back, there was a proud glint in her eye. ‘I see survivors. I see men and women who have lost their homes, their families, everything they have ever known or will know, and have only vengeance to drive them. We are aware of the dangers and we are not Space Marines, it is true, but do not say that we’re not equipped for this fight; months scrapping for our survival against these bloody things in the ice wastes says otherwise. We will fight, and we will die, but don’t expect us to slow you down – we won’t. We know these hills, this land. Dead or alive, I’ll get you through that cordon. Promise me one thing: make those soulless bastards pay for what they’ve done.’
Scipio met her fearless eyes and his anger ebbed in the face of Jynn’s glorious pride. ‘By Guilliman’s blood, I swear it,’ he said. He held out his massive gauntleted hand, and uttered in a quieter voice. ‘For I desire revenge too.’
She nodded. Her tiny hand was engulfed by his but the gesture was all-important. A compact had been struck, a swearing of an oath that only death could break. In that moment, Scipio saw the grief in her eyes at her loss, and recognised it instantly.
Karthax, forty-five years after
the Black Reach Campaign
The last remnants of the cultist army were being driven back from their walls by the guns of Helios’s Terminators. Enfilading storm bolter fire cut the wretches to fleshy ribbons, whilst bursts of heavy flamer cleansed any lingering heretics from the roadside bunkers.
The Fortress of Ardant had once been a bastion to the Imperial faith; now it was an abomination. Filth caked its walls, hell ruled its halls. Blood and flesh, not mortar, held its bricks together. The emblems of the aquila, soaring proudly from its minarets and looking on imperiously from its crenellations were defaced. It was rotten with cracked timbers and pitted stone, rusted metal and moth-eaten banners – yet it stood. Somehow this festering palace was more resilient than a bunker, in spite of its obvious decay.
With a thundercrack, the incendiary charges placed by Tenth ignited and the gates to the Chaos bastion were blasted open. Severed from the fortress itself they quickly crumbled to dust. From within the gaping maw behind the gates, a swarm of mutated cultists emerged in a frothing frenzy. Other beings came with them, once flesh but now something else, something terrible. They stretched the skin of their hosts, manifesting in the corporeal world as disgusting horrors dredged from man’s worst imaginings.
‘Warp creatures!’ bellowed Helios, a statement of damnation as much as a warning. The First unleashed their weapons. The horde withered as assault cannons and cyclone missile launchers cycled up and let rip. Explosive payloads ruptured the throng, painting bloody welts across the smoke-blackened roadway. Half-putrefied cultists, little more than the walking dead, were blasted explosively apart.
Guard units from the Mordian VI, the Stygian Hounds, were ordered into the breach. Armoured formations began the slow grind towards the bastion; Leman Russ to pound, Hellhounds to burn and purify. In a single day, the Ultramarines had cracked open the enemy resistance, a feat the Imperial Guard couldn’t manage after over three months of continuous siege. But it wasn’t over yet. The broken gate led into a deeper heart of evil. It had to be excised.
Helios waved on the Ultramarines waiting by the Rhino transports on his right.
‘Advance, brothers. In the name of Agemman and the Chapter Master!’
Orad gave the signal to embark. The black-clad Chaplain was last aboard the transport, the access hatch still closing as he stepped inside and the tank drove off at speed.
Nine Ultramarines met him inside, down on one knee with their heads bowed as he entered the troop hold.
Scipio Vorolanus was amongst them.
Outside the patter of small-arms resonated through the hull. The Chaplain hardly noticed it.
‘Reject the taint in all its perfidy,’ Orad began, spitting vitriol against the inner surface of his skull-mask. ‘Resist and crush those who worship Chaos. Know in your hearts you are pure of purpose and that the Emperor walks with you. His light will vanquish the traitor and the daemon.’ As the engines thrashed, the sound reverberated and intensified around the hold. Orad fought it, his oratory rising from a shout to a scream. An explosion nearby rocked the Rhino on its tracks, but he kept his feet. ‘The Ultramarines fight with clenched fist around bolter and blade. We are the inheritors of Guilliman, the heirs of Ultramar. They know our names and they quail as we recite them with bolters as our voice.’
The engine slowed as the Rhino struck the enemy. A lethal rank of spikes gave the hard nose of th
e tank a killing edge. Crunching bone, the spatter of blood and the screams of the dead came dully through the hull. A body rolled under the tracks – something big – and the Rhino lurched up and over it before landing square.
‘For the glory of Ultramar, we shall know no fear!’
Screeching to a halt, the tank’s hatch slammed open and the Ultramarines charged out with Orad at their head.
Blood and death greeted their arrival. Cultists clad in rags, wrapped in pus-soaked bandages pressed in, a horde of the unwashed. The Chaplain cut through them, his crozius blooded, leaving a string of enemy corpses in his wake.
Scipio was behind him, he had a perfect view of Orad’s back. His shoulder plates compensated for the movement allowing his arm to rise and fall like a piston as he bludgeoned. Rancid flesh gummed the brunt of his crozius. He flicked it off with a desultory gesture as a sporadic muzzle flare lit the end of his bolt pistol. Punished heretics exploded as the mass-reactive shells did their holy work. He’d engraved every one with a litany of hate and purging. Orad knew their order in the weapon’s chamber and spoke each and every one as it killed a traitor. Nothing stayed his wrath.
It was… inspiring.
Chainsword chugging on the flesh of a dying cultist, Scipio forged himself a little space and briefly examined the battlefield.
Across the roadway, on the opposite side of the gate, a second squad of Ultramarines had deployed. Like Scipio’s Thunderbolts, they were swarmed by enemies. He recognised Sergeant Solinus immediately and felt an urge to breach the gatehouse before him. Given Orad’s fervour, the Chaplain wanted that honour too.
‘Repel them!’ he roared. ‘Smite them! Become the Angels of Death!’
He was locked in battle with a ferocious warp-thing, a possessed flesh puppet of some daemon from the abyss. Tentacled appendages spewed from the creature’s distended maw. Several fizzed and burned against the Chaplain’s rosarius field impelled from the icon chained around his gorget, but at least one got through and bit into his power armour.
Pressed by his own opponents, Scipio thought he heard Orad grunt and saw the protective energy field flicker for but a moment when the Chaplain dispatched the bloated hell-beast with a hate-filled curse.
Sensing a shift in momentum, Scipio ordered his warriors with even more aggressive tactics. Bolters were slung in favour of gladius and pistol as the Thunderbolts closed hand-to-hand. Brakkius snapped a cultist in two across his armoured knee, whilst Ortus stabbed another in the throat and crushed the skull of a second in his gauntlet.
Cator unleashed a ragged line of fiery promethium into the decaying ranks from his flamer and they burned. Combined with the furious blade assault it tore enough of a gap for the Thunderbolts to advance, gaining precious ground into the gatehouse and the inner citadel beyond.
The horde of traitors that had sallied forth was slowly being cut down. Helios kept up a furious but disciplined barrage from the edge of the Ultramarines battle line, withering the enemy troops that had sought to flee the fighting.
Nothing must survive. Those were Calgar’s orders.
Ground under the tracks of tanks, eviscerated by blades or crushed underfoot, it didn’t matter – the only sure way to cleanse the fortress was to systematically eradicate everything inside.
Once the tactical squads were in, the Terminators would begin their implacable march to the gates. The Mordians would follow, bringing tanks and more flamers for the purge.
Elsewhere on the battlefield the Tenth were taking down gun towers, cutting off supply points and collapsing defences under Master Telion’s expert direction. Several weapon emplacements had already been sabotaged, leaving behind twisted metal and blast-scarred sandbags.
A plasma cannon turret, protected inside a mobile bunker, slowly turned to draw a bead on the Thunderbolts. Its rotational axle was slicked with pus instead of oil, and the bulbous maw of the weapon that extruded from the firing slit was malformed with corrosion. The weapon had almost built to expulsion when an explosive typhoon engulfed it – more of the Scouts’ unseen work. Shrapnel and flesh-parts pattered against Scipio’s armour as the Ultramarines fought through the last of the cultists and entered the courtyard behind them.
‘Glory to the Thunderbolts,’ said Scipio quickly but good-naturedly to Solinus.
‘It is for the Chapter, Brother-Sergeant Vorolanus,’ Orad said before Solinus could reply.
Both sergeants bowed to the Chaplain’s wisdom before moving into a slow run towards the inner citadel, a craggy, gore-stained structure that poked out of the centre of the bastion like a diseased talon.
It was the briefest of respites as they crossed the courtyard, which was littered with the dead but otherwise empty of threat, and reached the portal to the inner citadel. The door was like an open wound, festering with decay. Veins pulsed in the marblesque rock, like arteries swollen with plague. But it was unbarred.
Orad held the others back with his outstretched arm as he stood at the threshold of the inner citadel, staring. ‘It is dark as sin, but the way is open to us,’ he said. As he led them onwards down a shallow set of steps, Scipio thought he heard Orad’s sharp intake of breath. It sounded like pain.
‘Brother-Chaplain?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Orad, though the timbre of his voice suggested he was injured. It had a faint gurgling quality, like there was blood or mucus in his throat.
One of the warp-thing’s barbs had got past his rosarius field and penetrated his power armour too. Scipio noticed crusting around the wound and some of the ceramite had even started to corrode.
Scipio paused, uncertain what to do.
‘It’s nothing,’ Orad said more vehemently and just for the sergeant this time. ‘Our enemy is close. We must destroy it. I will seek out an Apothecary later.’
He turned, signalling an end to it, and beckoned the Ultramarines on, closer to the nest of evil.
There was a stink upon the air, copper-blood and the reek of putrefaction. Corpse-fattened spiders and bloated flies skittered from the light as the Ultramarines switched on their lamp-packs. Grainy lances of magnesium white stabbed into the blackness in all directions. There were alcoves where more corpses lingered, slumped against columns or strewn over debris from the fallen ceiling. The only route further into the citadel was ahead, over a stinking carpet of mould that stuck to the Ultramarines’ boots and led to a temple of horrors.
‘Steel yourselves,’ hissed Orad as they arrived at the entrance, the oleaginous glow of rancid lanterns spilling sticky light ahead of it.
As he touched the rim of the light, Scipio could almost feel it coating his armour in a film of decay. He suppressed the urge to remove his trappings and be free of the taint, wanting nothing more than to experience the cleansing fury of his ritual ablutions.
The foetid temple was no better.
Rusted chains hung lankly from a pitted ceiling, strung with flayed corpses and gossamer-thin webs of flesh-dust. Filth-streaked columns were inscribed with ruinous sigils and contained alcoves bearing cadaverous, half-fleshed skulls. A pit was hewn in the centre of the room, which had once been some kind of great hall but was now divested of its former use and put towards corruption. Something boiled within it, wallowing in a soup of pestilence. Noxious bubbles belched to the surface as the creature moved, disturbing bleached skulls and half-digested viscera.
So it wasn’t only a temple, it was also the abomination’s feasting chamber. It was the very root of evil on Karthax.
Orad had seen enough.
‘Destroy it!’
Squads Scipio and Solinus unleashed their weapons in a terrifying storm at the loathsome spawn in the filth-pool. For a moment, it was utterly obscured from view by the Ultramarines’ blistering salvo.
After a full minute of the hell-storm, the reports of bolters and the hiss of flamers slowly echoed away around the circular room. Smoke an
d fire trailed from the pit afterwards. Most of its disgusting contents had been splattered around the walls or flecked the Ultramarines’ power armour.
As the smoke cleared, Orad ordered Solinus forwards. The sergeant acknowledged, and approached the edge of the pit warily. He used his boot to nudge something within it, leaning back from the sight suddenly repulsed.
‘There is a body,’ Solinus waved the others forwards.
Scipio crouched by the ragged corpse of a man. He was wearing robes and his flesh and bones had been utterly sundered. Bolt impacts marked his body. His exploded limbs and innards, the shattered bones and scorched skin were testament to the effectiveness of the Ultramarines’ weapons.
‘A sanctioned psyker of some sort,’ he decided, noting sigil-marks on the skin the fusillade hadn’t obliterated. ‘Cursed by Nurgle.’
‘So where is it?’ asked Solinus.
Scipio met his gaze, questioning.
‘Where is the beast?’ the other sergeant clarified.
‘That was not the creature I burned,’ offered Cator.
His battle-brothers were right. This thing was a puppet; no more than a vessel for whatever entity had claimed this place and transformed it into its own wretched domain. Where was the plaguebearer that had claimed the soul of this man?
Scipio turned around at the sound of ceramite clattering against stone behind them.
‘Brother-Chaplain, replace your battle-helm. This place is unclean!’
He went to go to Orad but was held back by the Chaplain’s warding hand. The wound in his power armour was seeping gore and pus. It crusted his entire forearm and was spreading.
His words were thick with phlegm. ‘Stay back.’
‘Lords of Ultramar,’ Solinus gasped and reached for his bolt pistol. ‘It has taken him, it has taken our Chaplain.’
Scipio pushed down his aim. ‘Wait!’
Orad went to speak again but bent double and vomited a stream of corruption. Chin drooling with sick, he spat a last gobbet of the stuff from his mouth. His eyes were sunken in his skull, the old wounds on his face throbbing, raw and reopened. He sank down, knee deep in the filth. His crozius fell from his grasp.
