Now that the beast was dead, Kergis could see it was different from its fellows. Gazing at the dozen or so creatures lying dead around the chamber, he observed that each individual bore only the vaguest signs of kinship to the others. He saw fur and armoured scales, retractable claws and envenomed fangs, poison-weeping musk glands and iridescent insect eyes; sometimes all combined in the body of a single creature. For all that, however, there was a resemblance between each and every one of them, no matter how slight. It was as though each of the monsters had been badly drawn from memory to the same basic design. “Ugly beasts, aren’t they?”
It was Arik. Looking up, Kergis saw the rest of the squad had gathered around him. He was relieved to see there were no casualties among them. Despite the deadly nature of their opponents, his men had passed through the fight unscathed.
“What were they?” Osol asked. He was the youngest man in the squad, with barely half a decade as a battle-brother behind him.
“A hunting pack,” Kergis replied. “A Chaos warband may raid on dozens, even hundreds of worlds. Sometimes, they capture particularly fearsome examples of the local animals, predators especially. Some they use for sport, but others they breed together, creating hybrid monstrosities that they train as hunting packs. Making use of the powers of Chaos, they can combine even completely different animals, creating chimera creatures like these. We have fought them before, maybe a dozen times. Each time the creatures look different. But the smell is always the same.”
“They must have left them down here because they knew the tunnels would be a target for infiltrators,” Arik said. “You realise the noise of the fight may have warned the enemy of our presence?”
“No,” Kergis shook his head. “It doesn’t necessarily follow. We are deep underground, and none of us fired our bolt pistols. The enemy may not have heard the battle at all. Or, if they did, they may rely on the hunting pack to have killed us. What concerns me more right now is the howling.”
The sound had continued, growing louder as the creature making it moved closer to their position. In his long service as an Astartes, Kergis had never heard anything to match it. It was a keening sound, long and ululating, rising and falling in pitch in a harsh, continuous wail. The noise of it was grating, even disturbing.
Kergis would have preferred to believe no human voice was capable of making such a sound, but the howling seemed to speak wordlessly of all too human emotions. Kergis recognised a sound born of rage and insanity. There was a squall of white noise underlying it, which seemed to indicate the howl was issuing from a vox unit, but there was no mistaking the raw seething emotion behind it. Kergis heard tones of outrage, grief and betrayal. Above all else, he heard the sound of madness.
“It started in the middle of the fight,” Arik said. “When the hunting pack heard it, they fled.”
“Spread out,” Kergis ordered his men. “It’s getting closer. Given that sound, we can assume it’s hostile. And if it scared the hunting pack away, it must be dangerous.”
The howling grew louder. Although the sound echoed around the chamber, it was clear which tunnel it was coming from. Taking a step forward, Gurban raised his auspex and tried to gain a reading.
“It’s big,” he said. “From the size of the contact, it must be barely able to fit in the tunnel.”
“All of you, check your bolt pistols and melta charges,” Kergis said as Gurban stepped back to join the line of White Scars standing in the centre of the chamber. “But only use them if you hear my order. If possible, we will try to use our blades.”
Privately, he doubted the White Scars’ swords were up to the task of killing the thing lumbering its way towards them, but he was willing to try so long as there was any chance of maintaining the element of surprise in their mission.
The volume of the howling had risen to an ear-splitting roar. Kergis pressed the activation rune on his power sword as a dark shape emerged from the mouth of the tunnel.
As the creature stepped forward, Kergis saw it clearly for the first time. He realised he and his men were in deep trouble.
His name was long forgotten. If his current captors referred to him by any name at all they called him Shulok-ahk-alim-neg, a phrase meaning “he howls without end” in the corrupt argot favoured by the warband’s leaders. Or else, they simply called him Shulok.
He did not care. His true name had been lost on the day his brothers betrayed him.
Once, he had been handsome and well featured. He was strong of limb and purpose. He was Astartes. When his brothers rebelled against the Emperor, he had followed their example. Ultimately, they had been defeated in their struggle, but they consoled themselves with the thought they had helped deliver a deathblow to the Emperor and all His works.
The years would prove them wrong. The Emperor’s followers refused to accept His demise. They placed Him on a golden throne, a corpse-god effigy to rule over a conquered galaxy. Incredibly, the Imperium He had founded prospered and grew stronger.
Angered by this inexplicable development, Shulok and his brothers had begun to raid the Imperium’s territory. Bitter and vengeful after their defeat, they sought to destroy the Emperor’s dominions in piecemeal fashion.
In truth, there was no longer any grand strategy or noble aim. Once, they had made war in the name of ideas. But defeat had changed everything. Now, they simply killed for its own sake. They fought to bring destruction to their enemies, with no thought of high ideals or consequence.
To the mind of the creature who would one day become Shulok, they had been wonderful times. His memories had been blurred and darkened by the years, but he remembered the heady sense of freedom, of licence. He had fought across the stars with his brothers beside him. He had known glory and victory.
Then, one day he died.
He remembered it vividly. They had fought beneath a giant red sun. A warrior with a crimson fist had raised a bolt pistol as the two of them struggled in hand-to-hand combat. Point blank, the barrel opening of the bolt weapon seemed huge, a yawning chasm. He had tried to grab the pistol, to deflect the shot, but it was too late. There was a bright flash from the muzzle and his world passed to darkness.
After that, there came the betrayal. He awoke to find his body felt strangely numb. Puzzled by unfamiliar sensations, he tried to lift his arms to inspect them. What he saw once he did so made him cry out in anguish.
He had been encased in a metal shell. His body, too badly injured to be healed, had been entombed inside a cold sarcophagus, henceforth to serve as the central cortex piloting a hulking war machine.
Raging at his imprisonment, he had screamed for release. Alternating between fury and bouts of pleading, he had called for someone, anyone, to have mercy. Even death would be better than an eternity trapped inside a machine. He had begged to be killed.
His only answer had come with cruel laughter. Focusing on the sound, he had realised several of his brothers stood nearby. Standing at their head was their leader, the warsmith. He smiled, his expression insufferably smug and mocking.
“Kill you? I think not. You are a resource to us now, a valuable one. And, really, you can’t complain. We simply took you at your promise all those times you uttered our battle cry. ‘Iron within, iron without.’ Now, my friend, you truly are an iron warrior.”
It was then that the creature who would one day be known as Shulok began to earn his name. He started to howl, giving vent to pain and frustration as he strained against the chains his brothers had used to bind him.
From that day on, the howling had never ended. The men who betrayed him were dead and gone, killed in a long ago battle he could barely remember. But even with their deaths his captivity and his torment had not ended. Over the course of thousands of years he had been passed from warband to warband, traded as a chattel or captured as part of the spoils of war.
Through it all, the howling continued.
It had become a reflex. A man of flesh and blood cannot scream forever; he needs rest and sleep.
But a machine knows no such limitations. After thousands of years, the vox unit in his war machine body still gave voice to the same keening, strident shriek.
His reason had long since left him, his wits broken in the centuries since his betrayal. If there was one saving grace left to him, it was that he could still take pleasure in killing his enemies.
In particular, he cherished the killing of Astartes, especially the heirs of the loyalist Legions who had taken the Emperor’s side in the rebellion. He hated them most of all. They reminded him of all he had lost. Killing them gave him respite, creating a brief moment of joy that drowned out his pain and anguish, even if only for a second.
In recent days he had been accorded little opportunity for killing of any kind. Weary of his howling, his current captors had imprisoned him in the disused tunnels beneath the Ignis Mons. Left to wander alone, he had soon discovered the only creatures other than himself in the tunnels were the warband’s hunting animals. He had tried to stalk them, to sate his need for killing, but they proved to be difficult quarry, too quick and wily to be easily caught.
The lack of killing had made his existence even harder to endure. Until, one day, the sounds echoing through his underground domain had brought news of the presence of fresh prey in the tunnels.
Soon, the roar of the hunting animals and the smell of blood had seemed to confirm his hopes, bringing him hurrying to investigate. Stepping forward from the confined space of the tunnels into open territory, he saw nine figures clad in white power armour emblazoned with a lightning insignia.
White Scars.
A thrill of anticipation ran through him.
The pistons of his leg hydraulics hissing like a pit of angry vipers, he strode forward into the chamber and made ready to kill them.
“Dreadnought!”
Forewarned by his auspex a split second before the metal giant emerged from the tunnel, Gurban shouted out a desperate warning.
The war machine was huge. Dust fell where its massive hulking shoulders had scraped against the tunnel walls. Still howling as it moved into the chamber, it advanced with thudding, foreboding footsteps. Its exterior was a dull gunmetal grey in colour, overlaid with riveted Chaos symbols in brass and copper. On one shoulder, Kergis could see an ancient skull insignia indicating the Dreadnought had once belonged to the Iron Warriors. The skull had been crudely scratched out and defaced, but the outline of the insignia was still visible.
Unlike the majority of Astartes Chapters, the White Scars had never made use of Dreadnoughts. To warriors accustomed to the freedom of the plains of their home world Chogoris, the idea of being entombed in a walking sarcophagus seemed like a fate worse than death.
Despite this, as the Chaos Dreadnought advanced on his position Kergis was forced to grant that the machine was impressive. He did not doubt that a group of lesser warriors might have decided to flee rather than face the monster. But he and his men were White Scars. They were made of sterner stuff.
The Dreadnought came closer, eager to begin the fight.
“Switch to bolt pistols!” Kergis called out to his men. “Rapid fire! Aim for the legs!”
Fanning out to create more room between themselves and their opponent, the men of the squad drew their pistols and began firing. Following their sergeant’s order they aimed at the Dreadnought’s legs, hoping to knock out the motive hydraulics enabling its movement.
It was an old lesson of the plains that an immobilised enemy was nearly as good as dead. When facing a more powerful opponent, the White Scars would often attempt to hamstring him in order to take the greatest advantage of their manoeuvrability on their bikes. Kergis realised that the tactic was less likely to be successful in the relatively confined space of the overflow chamber, especially as the White Scars were on foot. The most he could hope for was that if they destroyed the Dreadnought’s movement capability it would allow them to outflank and overwhelm it.
Despite the hail of gunfire, the Dreadnought was unaffected. Almost contemptuous of the White Scars’ efforts, it brandished the plasma cannon fitted to its left arm.
Kergis dived to the ground just in time as a stream of plasma scythed through the air over his head. Going into a roll, he came up and fired his bolt pistol at the war machine again. He aimed for the shadowed recess where its head met his body, hoping to find a weak point in the heavy armour protecting it from the front.
Meanwhile, his men had spread out in a wide circle around their enemy. Adapting their more normal tactics to the situation, they fired on the move, each individual Space Marine alternating between phases of advance, retreat and sideways movement in an attempt to confuse the Dreadnought.
Greeted with multiple, moving targets the Dreadnought seemed briefly stymied. Until, seeking to make use of the opportunity presented by the enemy’s uncertainty, Osol moved behind the machine and made a sudden dash for its back. In his hand, he held the round shape of a melta bomb.
Guessing his intent Kergis almost called out a warning, but kept his silence for fear of alerting the Dreadnought. His worst fears were quickly realised. As Osol came within a few paces, the Dreadnought suddenly turned, its legs remaining motionless as it pivoted its upper body around one hundred and eighty degrees on its central axis. Catching Osol by surprise, it smashed him to the ground with a blow from the power claw on its right arm.
Using the heavy gauntlet as a club, it hammered repeatedly on Osol’s inert form. Attempting to rescue his battle-brother, Doshin swept into the fray firing his bolt pistol. Turning once more on its axis, the Dreadnought moved with surprising swiftness. It raised its plasma cannon to meet Doshin’s attack, leaving the charging White Scar staring down the muzzle of the weapon at nearly point-blank range.
“No!”
Activating his power sword, Kergis charged forward to intervene.
It was too late. The plasma weapon fired with a blinding light. Doshin’s head was atomised in an instant, leaving his body still standing, the seared flesh smouldering from the heat of the energy discharge.
Caught in the backwash of the blast as he leapt forward, Kergis’ sword strike was deflected. Instead of biting deep into the Dreadnought’s arm, he caught it a glancing blow on the shoulder. Shuddering as the crackling energy field surrounding the blade sliced off a layer of its metal skin, the Dreadnought bellowed in rage and hit the White Scar sergeant with a heavy, backhanded blow.
The force of it sent Kergis hurtling bodily across the chamber. He landed with a jarring impact, skidding to a halt beside the cadaver of one of the dead hunting animals. Pulling himself up, he saw his men had increased their attacks against the Dreadnought to distract it from going after their sergeant.
Kergis was about to charge back into the battle when he realised he was no longer holding his power sword. Evidently, it had slipped from his grip when the Dreadnought hit him.
Looking about desperately, he saw it lying on the floor of the chamber near the Dreadnought’s feet. Spotting it, he almost cried out in frustration. The sword was the most potent weapon he possessed. In the absence of the heavy weapons his squad had given up to carry explosives, it was the best weapon they had against the Dreadnought. Without it, there was precious little chance that he and his men could even hurt the machine, much less kill it.
For a moment, it appeared to Kergis that he and his men were doomed. He would fight to the last, they all would, but there seemed no prospect of their survival. Worse, their mission would be a failure. At dawn, when their brothers assaulted the city of Chaldis they would find the enemy shields were still in place. The likely result would be a bloodbath. The success of the invasion would be at risk.
Then, abruptly, he spotted something in the chamber floor that changed everything.
There was a spider web of cracks in the surface of the floor around the Dreadnought. With each crunching footstep more cracks appeared, adding to the pattern as the great weight of the war machine pressed down on the stone. More tellingly, Kergis could see tiny wisps of steam
and smoke rising from among some of the cracks, almost lost in the thin clouds of dust that hugged the chamber floor. At the same time, he noticed the ground beneath his feet was hot to the touch. Looking down, he saw the floor was not composed of the same stonework as the walls of the chamber. Instead, it appeared almost identical to the rocks he had seen while travelling through the Cradle.
With a sudden burst of inspiration, Kergis realised the chamber he was standing in was a sphere, not a hemisphere. He and his men had mistaken a bed of dried lava for the chamber floor. It seemed likely there was yet more lava beneath it, red-hot and still liquid.
A dangerous plan forming in his mind, Kergis’ hands scrabbled in the satchel he carried with him. Then, lifting his bolt pistol to fire a rapid series of shots, he charged across the chamber towards the Dreadnought.
“Pull back!” he yelled to his men as he drew closer to the machine. “Keep firing, but pull back, all of you! That is an order! Leave this monster to me.”
With no time to explain his plan, he could only hope the habit of obedience was so deeply engrained that his men would follow his orders without question.
Ahead, it was almost as if the Dreadnought was waiting for him. Instead of firing its weapons, it spread its arms wide in a taunting gesture and encouraged Kergis to continue his charge. Sprinting closer as the bolt pistol in his hand ran out of ammunition and fell silent, Kergis let out an emphatic battle cry.
“For the Khan and the Emperor! For victory!”
The Dreadnought leaned its great bulk forward, ready to meet his charge. But instead of facing the monster head-on, Kergis changed tack. At the very last instant before he moved into range of its grasp he threw himself to the ground, relying on the momentum of the charge to carry him forward as his body skidded across the filmy dusty surface of the lava floor. Catching the Dreadnought by surprise, Kergis slid between its articulated legs and emerged behind the machine. His momentum exhausted, he slowed to a gentle stop a few metres behind the Dreadnought.
Legends of the Space Marines Page 9
