Abruptly, he felt a tremor run through the floor beneath his feet, bringing him back to the present. It was followed by another tremor, and another, each one more insistent than the last.
Kergis knew at once what it meant. Gurban and the others had succeeded in their mission of sabotage. They had destroyed the control systems responsible for holding the eruptions of the Ignis Mons in check. Once the damage had been done it was only a matter of time before the magma pressure built up to a critical level, resulting in an eruption that would engulf the power complex in a rising wave of red-hot lava. After being kept under artificial control for so long, it was likely the eruption would progress quickly. At most, Kergis supposed he might have ten minutes to escape the complex before it was destroyed.
Ten minutes. It was barely enough time for him to find his way out from the complex, never mind the fact it was teeming with enemy troops, none of whom would take it well that he had just killed their leader.
In all likelihood, Kergis expected to die on the Ignis Mons. He had suspected as much from the very beginning. He had known it was the most probable outcome once he had volunteered for his part of the mission. Jurga Khan and Balat had both said as much to him, at different times and in their own individual ways.
Yet, Kergis had accepted the potential sacrifice ahead of him gladly. The fact that the daemon-possessed Borchu was the leader of the garrison guarding the Mons had left the White Scars facing a conflict between duty and honour.
On one hand, the honour of the Chapter dictated the creature had to be destroyed. On the other, they were already committed to destroying the power plant—a mission vital to the success of the coming invasion. Unable to see any other way to achieve this dual purpose, and unwilling to let more of his brothers be put at risk, Kergis had accepted the mission knowing it would probably be his last. It was a suicide run from the very beginning.
Still, if he was to die on this strange world far from home, he would die fighting. Retrieving his bolt pistol and igniting the blade of his power sword once more, Kergis took a last glance at Borchu’s body and turned for the door leading from the chamber.
Expecting to find dozens of enemy warriors waiting for him on the other side, he prepared for the onslaught, opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.
Unexpectedly, it was quiet.
It was empty except for the bodies of the two sentries he had killed earlier. Surprised at his good fortune, Kergis hurried on down the corridor. No matter how far he went there was no sign of the massed ranks of enemy fighters he had expected. The upper levels of the complex seemed almost eerily deserted.
Then, Kergis turned a corner and saw dozens of bodies lying strewn across a broad, open hallway. They were cultists, like the ones he had met earlier, and they had died with great violence. From the amount of autogun casings littering the floor it was clear they had fought savagely, but their killer had cut through them like a scythe through wheat.
“Hello, sergeant.” A smiling figure stood waiting for him in the centre of the hallway. “I had hoped to catch up with you earlier. But it took longer to kill this scum than I expected.”
It was Arik. Staring at him in disbelief, Kergis realised he was the reason there had been no enemies waiting when he left the daemon’s quarters.
“I discussed the matter with Gurban after we planted the charges in the control room,” Arik said.
“We decided it really didn’t need all five of us to fight our way out of the complex once the job was done. And Gurban thought you might need a pathfinder. I realise, strictly speaking, we violated your orders. But I hoped you might forgive us if I helped you escape before the volcano erupts.”
“Perhaps I will forgive you,” Kergis smiled back. “Always assuming you actually have a plan to escape and you aren’t just hoping for a miracle.”
“A miracle couldn’t hurt,” Arik shrugged. “But I notice on the blueprints there’s a landing pad at the top of complex. If we can reach it before the whole place is destroyed, we might be able to seize a shuttle.”
As though underlining his words, another tremor shook through the walls around them.
“All right,” Kergis said. “You’re the pathfinder. Find us a path out of this hellhole.”
Together, they ran down the hallway.
The sun was rising by the time they reached the landing pad, the first glimmerings of dawn painting the sky a vibrant red.
Having taken advantage of the confusion caused by the worsening tremors rumbling through the complex, Kergis and Arik fought their way to an ancient shuttle sitting on the landing pad. It was a light cargo lifter of the kind designed to ferry supplies and the occasional passenger to distant outposts.
Boarding the shuttle before the crew could lift off, the two White Scars killed them without breaking stride. Kergis took the controls, while Arik searched through the channels on the shuttle’s vox for the telltale comms-chatter that would indicate the invasion of Tephra VII was underway.
Kergis had seen a fuel tanker parked beside the shuttle when they came on board. As he triggered the engines, he found himself hoping the tanker had finished its work rather than not yet started it.
In the event, the engines purred into life smoothly. Except for a few desultory bursts of autogun fire plinking against their hull, they took off without incident. Hurtling through the vast smoke cloud now billowing from the summit of the Mons, Kergis sped westward as the tremors shaking through the complex reached a final crescendo.
Sparing a glance behind him, he saw the eruption of the Ignis Mons. Lava issued from the summit and poured down the slopes, an inexorable and slow moving blanket of death.
There was no question their primary mission had been successful. The power complex, along with the body of Borchu, would be engulfed and destroyed. The void shields protecting Chaldis would come down.
After much adjustment of the unfamiliar controls of the shuttle’s vox, Arik found a great welter of encrypted chatter across a dozen channels on Imperial wavelengths. Hearing it, they smiled in satisfaction.
The invasion had begun.
Somewhere, out in the desolate Cradle, Gurban and the other men from the squad would be on their way to rendezvous with Balat and his Scouts, before heading for a pre-arranged extraction point where a Thunderhawk would be waiting to take them back to the Warrior of the Plains. With any luck, Kergis and Arik would be there before them.
Kergis’ smile grew broader when he thought of the surprised looks his comrades would be sure to wear when they arrived and saw him and Arik already waiting for them.
Today, at this time and place, it was a good day to be alive. The mission had achieved its aims. Hopefully, soon, Tephra VII would be free. A daemon had been slain. An old comrade laid to rest.
Kergis did not fool himself his current mood of contentment would last for long. Experience told him to enjoy it while he could, for he knew such times were fleeting. Soon, there would be new conflicts, new dangers, new battles. The galaxy was not made for times of peace.
In the grim darkness of the forty-first millennium there was only war.
THE RELIC
Jonathan Green
The horde spread across the unsullied blue-white wilderness of the ice fields like an oily black stain. Filthy clouds of greasy smoke rose from the exhausts of fossil fuel-guzzling machines, sending sooty trails into the frozen air to mark their passing. Every war-bike and cobbled-together trukk left a petrochemical smear across both land and sky behind it, marking the horde’s progress across the polar wilderness as another region of the planet fell to the furious predations of the alien invaders.
An unstoppable tide of savage, growling machinery poured out across the riven glacier. Before it, still a league or more away, the stalwart line of armour that the Emperor’s chosen had decreed would not be breached approached. Today—at this time and in this place, amidst the desolate ice fields of the Dead Lands of Armageddon—the Astartes would make their stand against the green ti
de.
Warbike outriders gunned their throttles excitedly, while those boyz clinging to the sides of guntrakks, wartrakks and battlewagons cannibalised from captured vehicles of Imperial design fired off round after round from their heavy calibre shootas in their overeagerness to engage with the enemy.
The drop-pod fell from heaven like the wrath of the Emperor Himself. The force of its landing sent shuddering tremors through the iron-hard ice sheet, a network of treacherous crevasses fracturing outwards from the point of impact.
The echoing gunshot retort of the pod’s landing still rumbling across the fractured face of the glacier, the armoured landing craft opened and from it emerged the instrument of the Emperor’s holy vengeance.
Autoloaders clattered into operation as the barrels of an assault cannon noisily cycled up to speed. The four blunt digits of a huge robotic fist, easily large enough to crush an ork’s skull, flexed and whirred, servo-motors in each finger giving it a crushing force equal to that exerted by a crawling glacier.
With heavy, pistoning steps, the revered Dreadnought emerged from the cocoon of its drop-pod, some monstrous metal beetle birthing from its adamantium shell, roused and ready for war.
Bio-linked sensors scanned the rapidly-advancing line of greenskin vehicles, the Dreadnought’s machine-spirit-merged sentience processing the constant stream of information—everything from average velocities to weapon capabilities to wind shear—and waited. Experience won on a thousand battlefields across a hundred worlds—including this Emperor-forsaken rock in particular—came into play, recalled from the depths of mind-linked implants. The orks weren’t going anywhere. He could afford to be patient. Revenge was a dish served best cold, after all.
Heavy munitions fire chewed the frozen ground in front of him. The foul xenos had seen him fall from the heavens on wings of fire like some avenging angel and now that he was in their sights they were directing everything in their crude arsenal directly at him.
Shells threw chips of ice the size of Predator shells from the bullet-pitted surface of the glacier, many raining back down to strike against the Dreadnought’s ancient adamantium armour. It had stood up to much worse over the centuries. The ice shards shattered harmlessly against its hull, some exploding into powder.
As the orks drew closer still and their haphazard targeting devices found their range at last, the greenskins let fly with rockets, high calibre shells and even smoky flamethrowers in their eagerness to engage with the ancient.
The Dreadnought disappeared amidst clouds of sooty smoke and roiling flames, the glacier reverberating now to the explosions and impacts of the orks’ weapons which were, in general, noisy and heavy on the pyrotechnics, but not all that accurate or effective.
And all the time the ork line surged forwards, steadily closing on the Dreadnought’s position.
Preceded by a torrent of cannon and bolter fire, the Dreadnought stepped from the smoke of its supposed destruction, swivelling about its waist axis, raking the hurtling ork vehicles with its arm-mounted weapons. The standard that hung from its banner-pole was scorched black and still smouldering at the edges, the halo of iron spikes surmounting its armoured body glowing orange in the oily flames lapping at its pockmarked hull.
Three times the height of a man, larger than many of the ork machines and as heavy as a warbuggy, armoured with adamantium plates and carrying an arsenal that rivalled the firepower of a battlewagon, it would take more than that to halt this juggernaut’s advance.
It took the Dreadnought’s symbiotic machine-spirit mere nanoseconds to divine the ancient’s position relative to the speeding ork vehicles and select a succession of suitable targets. The Dreadnought opened up with its assault cannon and storm bolter again, a hail of hard shells reaping their own whirlwind of death and destruction.
“Death to the invaders!” Brother Jarold of the Black Templars Solemnus Crusade bellowed, his augmented voice booming from vox-casters built into his Dreadnought body-shell. What little of him that was still flesh and blood spasmed in fury, thrashing and sloshing within the amniotic fluids of his sarcophagus-tank. “Cleanse this place of the xenos taint, in the name of the primarch and the Emperor. Death to the defilers of Armageddon!”
The squadron of warbikes leading the Kult of Speed in its attack was the first to taste his wrath. Burning rubber shredded under the attention of the Dreadnought’s assault cannon, sending several bikes and their riders cart-wheeling over the ice, as sheared axles and wheel-less spokes stabbed into the ice, flipping the screaming machines through the air to land in broken piles upon the iron-hard glacier.
Those orks unfortunate enough to land at Jarold’s feet had limbs and skulls crushed beneath his relentless, pounding footfalls.
A burst of storm bolter fire found a promethium barrel lashed to the side of wartrakk. The fuel inside touched off, blowing the vehicle apart, spreading pieces of wartrakk up to twenty-five metres away across the ice field.
With a series of hollow pops, the rocket launchers arrayed across the Dreadnought’s broad shoulders sent a fusillade of mortar shells arcing into the pack of vehicles behind the disintegrating line of war-bikes.
Unable to stop in time, some of the ork bikes skidded past the Dreadnought, and having already missed one target chose instead to rev their engines and plough on towards the advancing line of Astartes armour.
Three bikes crashed and burned as Brother Jarold’s weapons-fire took them down, and just as many again collided with the wrecked vehicles.
Many of the ork drivers were horrified to discover that the Dreadnought still stood after their concerted bombardment of it, and swerved at the last moment to avoid the immovable hulk. But one wasn’t quick enough and cleared the choking exhaust trail of another bike to find itself directly on top of the Dreadnought.
The warbike hit Brother Jarold with the force of an ork rokkit. Even as the bike hit him, Jarold grabbed hold of it with his huge power fist, the vehicle swinging up into the air in his grasp as its momentum spun them both around. The ork rider was still clinging to the wide handlebars when a direct hit from Brother Jarold’s storm bolter ignited the contents of the bike’s fuel tank, as he released the vehicle at the height of its rising arc. The bike spun through the air above him and became a fiery comet, annihilating another ork rider that was rounding on the Dreadnought as the bike crashed back down to earth.
The Dreadnought’s deep strike insertion and deadly combination of cannon and bolter fire had decimated the front line of the ork Speed Freeks. And all the while, unheard over the roar of bike and trukk, assault cannon and bolter, as well as the concussive booms of fuel-tank explosions, Brother Jarold called down the wrath of the Emperor and His primarchs on the heads of the xenos filth.
The promethium roar of crude ork engines was joined by the well-tuned growl of the superior Astartes armour as the bikes of the Black Templars’ rapid deployment force and its supporting land speeder squadron closed on the drop-pod’s homing beacon.
If the orks had been surprised by the fury of the Dreadnought’s initial attack, it proved to be only a foretaste of what was to come as Ansgar’s Avengers—the strike force mustered in memory of the fallen Emperor’s Champion—engaged the enemy.
Clouds of bittersweet incense swirled and ascended into the vault of the battle-chapel filling the cathedral space with a sparkling aromatic mist. Shapes swam in and out of the constantly shifting vapours, giving glimpses of fluted columns a hundred metres tall, skull and cross adorned buttresses and statues commemorating the fallen of the Chapter.
The skull-set glow-globes had been dimmed and the forests of candles were in the process of being snuffed out by a trundling cenobyte servitor while its partner, following on behind, proceeded to trim their wicks and clear away the crusted wax that coated the black iron candelabra, like a series of frozen cataracts.
The sound of the pitted oak doors opening—the doors so old now the wood was black—resounded throughout the battle-chapel like the boom of distant gunfi
re. Chaplain Wolfram opened his eyes, finishing the prayer that was on his lips. He rose to standing from where he had been kneeling before the Solemnus Shrine, his eyes falling once again upon the empty indentations where the Black Sword, the Champion’s laurel-wreathed helm and the lovingly ornamented Armour of Faith should have lain.
Wolfram turned, one armoured hand—every knuckle of the gauntlet embossed with the Templars’ black cross and white skull insignia, a permanent memento mori to the one charged with watching over the souls of the crusaders—closing around the haft of his crozius arcanum. The ancient artefact was both a Chaplain’s badge of office and a potent weapon in its own right. A disrupter generator was concealed within the wooden shaft of the relic, that one simple addition turning the flared blades of the Templar cross that surmounted it into a lethal power axe.
The sound of echoing footfalls on the stone-flagged floor of the cathedral space carried to the Chaplain through the muffling clouds rising from the glowing nuggets of flame-flecked incense smouldering within their braziers. Chaplain Wolfram relaxed his grip on his crozius.
The booming footsteps came closer, the incense smoke parting as a colossal shape, that was neither man nor machine but something of both, something greater than either, stepped into the light of the candles that guttered in the breeze of its advance.
Wolfram noted the battle-damaged banner pole and the deeply etched gothic lettering upon the Dreadnought’s hull and bowed.
“In the name of Him Enthroned on Holy Terra, well met, Brother Jarold,” he said. “And what brings you to this place of sanctuary, still an hour from matins?”
“May the Emperor’s blessings be upon you, Brother-Chaplain,” the machine-tempered voice of the ancient responded.
“You are not slumbering with your brother Dreadnoughts aboard Forgeship Goliath?”
“Now is not the time for rest.”
“But our recent endeavours on Armageddon have cost us dear,” the Chaplain warned. “Rest is what is needed now.”
Legends of the Space Marines Page 12
