Blackheart laughed, a cruel, unforgiving sound. Vashiro’s words from so long ago blazed across Arrun’s memory.
There is no sound as eloquent as the vashka snake’s tail when it sounds before a strike.
Finally, at the last, Daerys Arrun understood.
The Tyrant’s axe fell for a fourth time, crushing the fused ribcage, cleaving right through Arrun’s torso and burying itself in the armoured backplate. The Silver Skull’s body thrashed once or twice in reflexive spasm and then was eternally stilled.
Blackheart twisted the axe viciously, tearing the flesh of his victim still further. He yanked the weapon back out of the corpse and it was only with supreme control that he didn’t fall to repeatedly smashing into Arrun’s body until nothing remained but pulp. The smell of blood as it oozed slowly from the Silver Skull’s body was maddening. The vitae coated his axe blade, dripping from its end.
Dropping to a crouch, Blackheart thrust his hand into the gaping wound his axe had made. Once, many years ago, the task of recovering the progenoids of dead battle-brothers had fallen to him when there had been no Apothecary to carry out the task.
The fates, it seemed, had chosen to favour Daerys Arrun more in death than they had done in life. Blackheart’s blow had rent the captain’s body apart, but the implant remained carefully cocooned behind a remaining chunk of bone. Without a reductor or further smashing of Arrun’s chest, the prize would remain elusive; or his attempts to claim it would result in its ruination.
Hurling curses, Blackheart got back to his feet. He had no more time to spend concerning himself with the conceit; the Space Marines who had witnessed the death of their captain had regained control of their senses and were headed towards him. With a twisted smile, Blackheart reached up with his hand and turned his flamer in their direction.
‘We must leave. We need to withdraw our forces from this planet now, my lord.’
The Corpsemaster’s whisper came into the Tyrant’s ear, even as he coolly watched the two Assault Marines burn. He made no response, concentrating as he was on the matter at hand.
‘Lord Huron!’ Again, the Corpsemaster’s voice, only this time with much more urgent insistence. Blackheart’s incinerating flame died out and the Tyrant hissed his response into the vox.
‘Why “must” we, Garreon?’
‘We are beaten here, Lord Huron. Even as I waste time supplying you with specific details, the Silver Skulls will no doubt begin deploying reinforcements. Without more of our warriors present in this place, we cannot hope to hold against their full force.’ It was spoken very plainly and matter-of-factly, but it did not stop the inevitable reaction. Spittle flying from the corners of his mouth, Blackheart screamed his fury at the news. The two Assault Marines, both of whom had long since stopped thrashing in agony and succumbed to unconsciousness, would never realise how close they came to decapitation as the Tyrant swung his axe in a rage.
This was the life of a Red Corsair. Beaten into near annihilation by the hammer and forge of the Imperium, the Chapter’s livelihood depended on hit and run tactics. They struck at their targets with deadly accuracy, took what they needed and retreated. No more for Huron Blackheart the satisfaction of making an entire world his own. Old hatred welled up in his gut. But he knew the Corpsemaster’s words, however infuriating, were right. They may experience success and even domination within the heart of the Maelstrom. But true victory, true glory would elude him for eternity.
‘I will speak with you back on board the Spectre of Ruin,’ Blackheart finally said when the tantrum had subsided. ‘There is a matter we must discuss.’ He cast a glance over at Arrun’s corpse. ‘A... prophecy.’
‘As my lord commands.’
‘Take what you can from this pathetic rock. We will not leave this place empty handed. Leave the slaves if you have to.’ For a warrior whose numbers ebbed and flowed constantly, losing cultists was never a hardship. Wherever mankind roamed amongst the stars, Chaos spread its taint easily enough. Cultists were interchangeable as far as the Red Corsairs were concerned. Fodder. A means to an end.
One of the gunships dropped to the lip of the crater and with comparative ease, Blackheart made his way back up to the top. He hauled himself on board and the ship powered its thrusters and banked steeply before ascending to the skies in a rush. Time was vital now.
He still had one final card to play. Daerys Arrun had been constantly one step ahead of him throughout this entire engagement. With the Silver Skulls captain now very assuredly deceased there would be no way that he could counter the detonation of the bombs that had been planted around the promethium refinery. The last victory in this battle would be his. He would find out too late that fate was no friend to him this day.
‘Charges are deactivated, Captain Arrun. All explosives neutralised.’
There was no small air of smug satisfaction in Correlan’s voice as he switched his vox back on. The response he received was not what he had been expecting at all.
One point two minutes ago, Captain Daerys Arrun’s biometric read was fatally interrupted, Techmarine Correlan. There was a heartbeat’s silence. Had you not deactivated your communications, you would be aware of this fact. There was more than a hint of reproach.
‘Volker?’ The realisation that the heart of the strike cruiser was actively speaking to him on the vox-net was both disorienting and curiously impressive. The boy had worked out how to manipulate the external communications array far quicker than he had estimated. Pride seeped in to join Correlan’s present state of smugness.
It took a good second before his cognitive functions absorbed what he had just been told. Shock widened his eyes, the inappropriate emotions flushed away by the impact of what he had just heard.
‘Captain Daviks, this is Correlan... I... the bombs...’ In one single sentence, Volker Straub had reduced the Techmarine to a state of inarticulate horror; something that would have astounded Daerys Arrun, had he still lived.
‘Good work on the explosives, Correlan.’ Daviks’s voice was terse; a blend of pent-up rage and grief that Correlan suspected every member of the two companies present on the planet was currently experiencing. He poked uncertainly at the wound, desperate to find some measure of a lie in Volker’s words but knowing that he would not.
‘Captain Daviks, did you receive the transmission from Volker just then?’
The briefest of brief pauses and Correlan knew the answer would be in the affirmative before Daviks spoke.
‘I heard. As such, I am assuming command of this offensive. Entire company deployment under way. Full armoured support.’
‘Prognosticator Inteus...’
‘Prognosticator Inteus concurs with Captain Daviks’s plan.’ The psyker’s voice was smooth and cold as ice. ‘Do what you must, brother.’
‘All Silver Skulls, this is Captain Daviks. We are throwing everything we’ve got at these renegade bastards. Do your duty. Fight with honour and should you die, do so in glory. For Varsavia! For the Emperor!’
The echoing cries in response to Daviks’s words resounded for long minutes. Correlan retracted his mechadendrites. He moved towards the corner of the room where he had flung his helm and picked it up. His clear gaze took in the two battle-brothers still holding position in the doorway. They looked back at him and he realised that they were actually looking to him for orders.
He jammed the helm back on and let its systems come to life. The servo arm attached behind him seemed to react instinctively to his mood of quietly controlled anger. With a hiss, it turned and twisted, clamping itself around the thunder hammer that was mag-locked to his backpack.
Correlan could not remember the last time he had really stopped to consider that despite his genius and his work, he was an instrument of the Emperor. He was an instrument of war. The haft of the weapon felt good in his grip and he let his hands curl around it, an easy familiarity falling into his stride.
A glance through the mangled doorway and a quick estimation showed that the ma
jority of the cultists were dead; a veritable ocean of bodies cluttering the plaza beyond the generarium. Those who had still retained enough sense to hold back had found whatever cover they could and were returning fire.
‘Enough is enough, I believe, my brothers,’ said the Techmarine gravely, confidently hefting the weight of the weapon. ‘I grow weary of this planet and its lack of colour.’
With a nod of agreement from the others at these words, Correlan strode purposefully from the refinery’s core. Gunfire immediately crackled around him and solid rounds sparked from his armour and backpack noisily. His two companions followed close behind him, laying down a carpet of supporting fire as he made his way towards the enemy. His hammer swung, easily felling the first of the cultists in a single blow. The hammer crushed the woman’s entire body in an explosive blast of red mist that sprayed across her fellows. As one of them tried to scramble clear, the servo arm swooped down in a movement that seemed far too balletic for something so bulky and gripped tightly. The body snapped in half and tumbled to the ground in two gore-sodden and misshapen lumps.
Enough, Correlan had said. And he meant it. He hacked his way without remorse or compassion through the onslaught of cultists, exacting vengeance for the captain who had taken his ideas and given him the free rein to develop something extraordinary. The catharsis of the slaughter dulled the ache of loss.
By the time he reached the rest of his battle-brothers, a line of dead and dying marked his passage. Daviks nodded gravely.
‘Well met, my brother.’
‘Captain.’ Correlan shouldered his thunder hammer and inclined his head respectfully. ‘I am sorry I am late.’
Daviks looked beyond Correlan’s shoulder at the mass of corpses. ‘It is no matter, brother. I see you met with some resistance along the way.’
‘Nothing I couldn’t handle.’
A deep, humourless chuckle sounded from Daviks’s helm. He put a hand on Correlan’s shoulder. ‘Arrun would have been proud of you.’
‘Aye,’ replied Correlan, feeling the sting of his captain’s death once again. ‘Aye, I know.’
EIGHTEEN
BAPTISM BY FIRE
Brand’s eyes snapped wide open, the faintest flare of psychic energy sparking from them. Since the relay of the news surrounding Arrun’s unfortunate and untimely demise, the Prognosticator had been meditating quietly in his cell. It was the best way he knew to keep the temper contained. Now, though, he came to full alertness as an aetheric realisation came to him; a snatch of lucidity through the miasma of psychic noise. He drew in a shuddering breath as though he were breathing the thin, cold air of his home world.
‘They have not left,’ he said to the empty room and, reaching for his staff, used it to help him walk from his cell to the bridge. His pace was urgent. By the time he was even half way towards his destination, what the Prognosticator had sensed had become common knowledge to everyone on board the entire ship. Everything that unfolded from that point happened with such alarming pace that even his psyker’s abilities couldn’t hope to keep the Silver Skulls strike cruiser one step ahead of the game.
As happenstance would have it, there was something faster even than that on their side.
The new servitor slaved to the cogitators on the bridge of the Dread Argent had been female in a former existence. It was a strange thing to hear words he was used to hearing being spoken with a very slight but still discernible feminine cadence. It was a tiny thing in the great scale of all that had taken place, but served as a very strong reminder of the losses of the battle.
‘Augur returns are negative. Residual life signs and energy signatures of the recently perished negligible.’
It was said with such calm indifference that it stung to be reminded. It was not the servitor’s fault; she, as it had once been, had been programmed to feel nothing of the pain that the rest of the ship’s crew knew. He had never once thought he would envy the lobotomised state of a terminal servitor, but for a fleeting moment, he did.
Yanus scratched irritably at his scalp. Captain Daviks had seemed quite sure that there had to be something out there, somewhere in the Rift. But despite their best efforts to find it, several sensor sweeps had revealed nothing at all. Much as Yanus was loathe to acknowledge the creeping thought, there was a possibility that Daviks had overreacted. He would never have dared to suggest such a thing to the Siege Captain and the rebellious thought was quashed before it truly had time to develop. So instead, he did the only thing he knew to do. He obeyed.
‘Run another series of scans again anyway,’ he said, doubt in his voice. ‘Captain Daviks won’t accept anything less and neither will I.’ He had to physically check himself to speak the other captain’s name out loud. News of Arrun’s death had already travelled around the ship with alarming haste and those on board who had been in any way close to the Master of the Fleet were feeling his loss keenly.
‘Compliance.’ The female servitor returned its attentions once again to the banks of cogitators before it. Yanus leaned back in the command throne and stared out through the fore viewport of the vessel. His mind was as cluttered with thoughts as the scene which lay before him.
Outside the ship, the Gildar Rift was just as it had ever been only now amplified; a vast debris field that was now significantly increased in its volume of broken ships and slowly turning corpses thanks to the recent conflict between the Silver Skulls and the Red Corsairs. Void servitors whose primary function was working on the exterior of the vessel swarmed across the surface of the Dread Argent like ants, working on repairing the worst of the damage caused to the strike cruiser during the raid. In addition to this duty, Yanus had charged them with a further task. Whenever the body of a Space Marine or a serf wearing the colours of the Silver Skulls drifted past, they were ordered to recover the dead.
Presently, the number of salvaged corpses in the cargo hold was minimal. Finding them in such difficult conditions was a slim chance, but one of great importance to the Chapter. For that reason alone, Yanus was prepared to try his hardest. They had saved the lives of his crew and his own on many occasions. Showing respect in death was the best he could ever hope to offer in return. The bodies that had been pulled in from the void were rimed with frost and some were so badly burned and scarred that had it not been for the Chapter’s colours and markings, they were all but unrecognisable. Kept respectfully shrouded, they all awaited transport to the same destination.
The Silver Skulls funeral world was one of the three small moons that orbited their home world of Varsavia. In accordance with the Chapter’s deeply rooted superstitions, they believed categorically that the spirits of the dead and the souls of the ancestors looked down on them from the moon, watching over them and guiding them forwards. It was an extraordinary place, with mausoleums and memorials that had been lovingly hand-crafted and engraved by the brothers of the Custodes Cruor meandering across its surface. The entirety of the moon was maintained with pride by a veritable army of Chapter serfs.
So many memorials and monuments were especially unusual particularly given that the Chapter’s choice of burial was cremation. Whenever possible, the ashes of the honoured dead were placed in an urn that was ornately carved and fashioned from the skull of the enemy who had taken their life. If this was not a feasible option, then the Custodes Cruor fashioned a passable substitute from the finest materials. If opinion concerning the contradictory nature of cremating and yet honouring their dead with memorials bothered the Silver Skulls, they never acknowledged it.
It was a place where the last divide between the Adeptus Astartes and the non-ascended loyal and faithful who served alongside them was rubbed away. Here, artificers were buried alongside their masters. All those who swore fealty to the battle-brothers of Varsavia were, in death, ultimately treated as the equals they could never have been in life. It was a devoutly spiritual place, and one which frequently drew young warriors to its calming presence. Every battle-brother of the Chapter sought their own manner of q
uelling the furious Varsavian fires that raged in their bellies at the time of their ascension. This sense of peace could often be found amongst the walkways and corridors of the dead. This, along with the sacred, hallowed monument to the first Argentius had given the moon its name.
Pax Argentius was also where the battle-brothers who trained as Chaplains went to study the texts and tomes of their calling. There, amidst the spirits of the fallen, the belief was that they could truly feel and understand the lessons of the past. Like their more numerous psychic Prognosticators, the Chapter’s Chaplains were deeply superstitious and fanatical in the discharge of their duties.
‘Augur returns are negative. Residual life signs and energy...’ The servitor’s repeated statement broke Yanus’s reverie. Sighing inwardly, he moved to activate the vox on his forearm. Before he could speak, Daviks’s voice crackled over the network. His words were abrupt and to the point, underscored by the visceral background sounds of the battle going on down on the planet’s surface.
‘Dread Argent. Prepare for incoming. Thunderhawk transports are travelling up from the surface. I can give you no clue as to their bearing or heading.’
‘Aye, my lord.’
His back straightening, Yanus began issuing commands. The Dread Argent had remained at high alert throughout the ground deployment so it would not take a great deal to return it to battle readiness. There was one major issue, however, that gave Yanus call for concern and he addressed that one straight away.
‘What is the current status of the shields?’ Of all their key systems, it would be the shields which would take the longest to restore. Rerouting power from other, non-essential areas was never a speedy process and when systems were off-line to start with, even more problems would be encountered.
‘If we fire the shield generators now, we should be able to obtain approximately sixty per cent.’
The Gildar Rift Page 37
