Lorenzo did not argue and instead sheathed his power sword and hung his storm bolter from his belt. The ladder creaked under the weight of his armour but held strong until he had reached the lower level. The sergeant backed up until he had a view of Leon’s position on the upper floor.
‘Your turn,’ Lorenzo said.
‘Negative,’ replied Leon. ‘Eighty rounds remaining. Insufficient for enemy numbers.’
00.55.89
LEON TURNED TO face the oncoming genestealers pouring in a swarm from two corridors. He double-checked his ammunition gauge and held his fire. The genestealers circled rapidly, darting in from the left and the right. Leon felt the first leap upon his left shoulder. Another slashed its claws into his back.
‘The Angel avenges!’ he bellowed, clamping his finger onto the trigger of the assault cannon.
The torrent of shells tore into the ground at Leon’s feet, the barrels of the weapon glowing red-hot. The mechanism jammed and the rounds left in the weapon exploded, shearing off Leon’s right arm.
The resulting detonation engulfed dozens of genestealers and the plascrete beneath them cracked and crumbled. In a huge explosion of dust and rocky shards, the deck collapsed, plunging Leon and the genestealers to a bone-breaking death many metres below.
00.55.98
CALISTARIUS HAD NO time to spare a thought for Leon’s sacrifice. Lorenzo approached the Librarian and took the tissue sample from his belt.
‘Protect this,’ said the sergeant, holding out the device. Calistarius took the sample without comment and turned towards the evacuation point.
‘Go with him,’ he heard Lorenzo say and Claudio appeared by his side.
The two of them picked their way through the rubble-choked passage, Lorenzo close on their heels. Occasionally they turned to fire at the pursuing genestealers, cutting down any that came within sight.
They were barely ten metres from the venting shaft. Calistarius could see the maintenance access hatch they needed to break through to get inside.
‘I’ll watch your back,’ volunteered Claudio, indicating to Calistarius that he should cut through the hatchway.
The Librarian turned towards the square door and plunged his force sword into the locking mechanism. He trembled as he allowed his psychic power to surge along the blade, melting the bolts of the lock. With a clang, the hatch fell free, revealing the dark shaft beyond.
Calistarius felt the broodlord before he heard or saw it. Its presence was suddenly there, just behind the Terminators. The Librarian turned in time to see Lorenzo flung out of the alien’s path, still firing his storm bolter. The veteran crashed through a half-ruined wall and fell out of sight.
Claudio launched himself at the monstrous creature like a wild cat, his claws severing an upraised limb. The broodlord brought its other three clawed hands together, grabbing hold of Claudio’s arms. With sickening twists and wrenches, the genestealer ripped the Terminator’s left arm out of its socket. Claudio’s right arm snapped in several places despite the protection of his armour.
Not content, the broodlord closed its massive jaws on Claudio’s head. A few of its fangs snapped, but some managed to punch through Claudio’s armoured helm. Arching its neck and back, the broodlord pulled off the Space Marine’s head with its jaws, splinters of eye lenses and ceramite showering to the ground amidst the arterial fountain from Claudio’s ravaged body.
Calistarius knew that he should escape. The tissue sample in his belt was more important than the death of a single creature. He was about to turn when the broodlord focussed its alien gaze upon him.
With a shock that stunned his system, the Librarian found his psyche swamped by the malignant power of the brood mind. As it penetrated the psyker’s brain, Calistarius felt a jolt of connection with the amorphous thoughts of the genestealers.
Space and time took on a new perspective, all emotion drained from his soul. He was timeless, endless, immortal. One of countless billions, a mote in a hurricane of minds. Fleeting yet eternally reborn. The broodmind linked him to the other things, sharing his thoughts, his hunger, his instinct to reproduce and grow.
But they were not his thoughts. They were alien. Calistarius could not sense where he ended and the broodmind began. He struggled to resist. He felt a tugging on the edge of his personality, a great psychic beacon that flared in every direction. It was like the Astronomican he used to guide ships through the warp, yet far weaker and far fouler. It was a cancer, now small, much reduced by the deaths the brood had suffered.
He realised that far out in the depths of space there were other dark beacons, other broodminds. And something larger. Something that swallowed everything in its path. Something mankind had never seen before. Impossibly distant and impossibly ancient. A shadow in the warp.
The connection broke and Calistarius found himself looking at the broodlord’s face, barely half a metre from him. It was transfixed on a glowing blue blade and Calistarius realised the light in the creature’s eyes were not of life, but simply reflections from the humming power sword.
Lorenzo pulled his sword free from the creature and it slumped to the ground. The sergeant then proceeded to calmly and methodically chop off its remaining three arms, both its legs and, finally, its head.
‘Just to be sure,’ Lorenzo explained. His left arm hung uselessly by his side and he stood with a strange stoop. A warning tone sounded from the sensorium. Another wave of genestealers had been following the Broodlord and was now barely twenty metres away.
Lorenzo turned towards them and awkwardly raised his sword. The Librarian sheathed his own weapon and turned the sergeant to face him, ‘This is victory,’ Calistarius said, holding up the tissue sample.
‘After you,’ said Lorenzo, pointing his sword towards the open exhaust shaft.
The Librarian clambered through the hatchway while Lorenzo opened fire at the approaching aliens.
‘Time to leave, sergeant,’ said Calistarius.
Lorenzo hesitated, gunning down another genestealer. He wanted to stay and fight. He wanted to kill more of the foe. His every instinct told him not to turn away and leave. It felt too much like a retreat. The Angel had given his life for the Blood Angels and Lorenzo could do no less.
With a parting shot, Lorenzo pushed himself into the exhaust duct.
To live and fight again, to remember the sacrifice made this day and six hundred years ago, that was true victory. To survive and allow the memories to live on when so many had not, that was the ultimate triumph.
There was no failure in that.
00.57.17
CRIMSON NIGHT
James Swallow
The sewer's awful stench would have crippled a normal man with stomach-knotting nausea. It was a heady, foul cocktail of repellent, putrid matter, stagnant water and base stinks that signalled ripe decay.
Tarikus rose from his hands and knees where he had slipped into the sluggish embrace of the liquid effluent, and spat out the matter that had choked his mouth. The gobbet impacted the hard-packed bricks of the sewer tunnel wall with a wet slap; something small and chitinous, an insect scavenger he had almost swallowed, skittered away. He glanced backward, in the dimness catching the merest glint of metal from his armour, the paldrons and plates piled perhaps a quarter-league behind him, at the mouth of the access channel.
Tarikus shook off the oily remnants of the muck and came up as far as the tunnel confines would let him. His bulk filled the conduit, the edges of his shoulders clipping the bricks, his head forced down into a cocked angle. Even bent at the knees, it was all the Space Marine could do to fit his mass into the narrow passageway. Had he still been clad in his ceramite armour, he would have been wedged like a bolt shell jammed in a cannon breech after just a handful of paces. In his service to the Golden Throne, Tarikus had lost count of the number of Light-forsaken worlds he had fallen upon in the name of the Emperor, carrying the savagery and the cold fury of the Doom Eagles with him; and if his captain wished it, he would venture o
n and fight naked, with tooth and nail if that were to be the order of the day.
He spat and took a measured breath, concentrating for a moment, casting his hearing forward. Beyond the drips and spatters of falling water, past the slow slopping current of effluent, there were voices: faint sounds that someone without the enhanced senses of the Adeptus Astartes might had missed, murmurs borne to him on breaths of reeking air. The voices were indistinct, ephemeral, but laced with the touch of terror. Tarikus nodded to himself. He was close now.
His knuckles whitened around the grip of his bolt pistol, the solid shape of the gun and the weight of it in his fist familiar and comforting. Bringing it up to sight along the stubby barrel, he pushed forward, the rhythm of his footfalls sending ripples out before him, rings of liquid catching the faint glow of organic biolumes set into the tunnel roof. As Tarikus walked, he strained to catch a sound from his quarry, some random noise that might give away its position and alert him, but he heard nothing, only the pitiable crying of its victims. No matter, the Marine told himself, there can be no other way out of this stinking warren. He's in there.
After a hundred more steps, the tunnel suddenly ballooned out into a circular atrium, an open flood chamber fed by a dozen more channels, each of them - unlike this one - blocked by a heavy iron grate. Tarikus scanned them in an eye-blink: not one had been forced open. As he had planned, the foe had been caught in his lair and trapped there. Tarikus hesitated a moment, licking at the sickly air. In the near-absolute darkness down here even his abhuman eyes strained to make out anything more than gross shapes, and his scent senses were fogged with the sewer's fetor. With a hiss of effort, Tarikus leapt from the mouth of the channel and dropped the seven metres to the chamber floor, the wet crash of his landing sending a surge of liquid roiling away. The moans he could hear jumped an octave. He could see people arranged like some grotesque exhibition in the chamber's centre, each in a box-like cage, piled randomly atop one another. A tiny flicker of child-memory blinked through Tarikus's mind: a nest of building blocks, a tottering tower built by small hands towards the sky.
In that second, the foe exploded from beneath the knee-deep fluid, a massive man-form spitting a reeking rain out behind it. Tarikus reacted with impossible speed, the bolt pistol turning to target, barrel winking like a blinded eye. The Marine's finger tightened and rounds screamed from the gun, finding purchase in the creature's chest - impossibly, ineffectually, bursting through it to spark away into the walls.
Tarikus ducked as the heavy head of a massive hammer hummed through the air. A split-second too late, he realised the blow had not been aimed at his skull; the arcing trajectory of the hammer dipped down and caught him squarely on the forearm. The impact knocked the gun from his hand and it vanished into the dark, claimed by the murk with a hollow splash. The foe pressed the attack, emboldened by disarming the Space Marine, looping the hammer around for a crushing stroke. As it strode towards him, the Doom Eagle caught the glitter of a lengthy silver probe emerging from his assailant's other palm. Tarikus let him come on, let himself be pushed back toward the wall. As he retreated, he used his free hand to shrug a metallic tube from a strap on his wrist. Consciously willing his optic nerves to contract, he thumbed a stud at one end of the tube. With the brilliant fury of a supernova, a sputtering blaze of light erupted from the flare rod, filling the chamber with shuddering, actinic colour. The caged ones screamed, their faces caught in a frieze of cold white. Tarikus's eyes were fixed on the enemy before him, the foe revealed at last before the flare's illumination.
It stood a metre or so higher than he, clad in shrouds of rust-pocked armour, the broad feet anchored in the churning pool of effluent, the great mailed fists thrown up to protect its head, and the head itself concealed behind a helmet with dark eyes and the fierce grin of a breath grille. Except for its crimson hue, it was the virtual double of the armour Tarikus had discarded at the tunnel entrance, and staring back at him from its breastplate was the twin-headed eagle of the Imperium of Man.
Brother-Sergeant Tarikus first cast eyes on the planet Merron as the Thunderhawk made a sharp roll to port. The craft turned inbound toward the starport - the barren desert world's only link to the greater galaxy beyond - and Merron's rumpled orange geography presented itself to the Space Marine. He gave it a practiced survey: there was just one large conurbation, toward which they were flying, and the rest of the land as far as Tarikus's eyes could see appeared to be nothing more than a great web-work of ruddy-coloured scars.
'Open-cast mines,' said a voice beside him. 'Merron is rich in iridium.'
'Indeed?' Tarikus said mildly. 'Thank you for telling me, Brother Korica. Having ignored Captain Consultus's briefing this morning, I of course knew nothing of that.' He turned to give Korica a level stare.
The younger Marine blinked. 'Ah, forgive me, sergeant. I had not meant to imply you were ill-informed about our new garrison posting—'
Tarikus waved a dismissive hand. 'You need not prove your eagerness by reciting the captain's words, lad. Sufficient enough that you have committed them to memory.'
'Lord,' Korica said carefully.
The sergeant allowed himself a small smile. 'You are ready for a new world's challenge and that speaks well of you, Korica. That is why you were promoted from novitiate rank to the status of battle-brother with such rapidity… but this is not a place where we will find combat awaiting us. Merron is a way-station garrison, somewhere to re-arm and lick our wounds while we watch the Emperor's mines for him.'
'But if that were so, why not use the Imperial Guard to protect it? Are not we more valuable elsewhere?' There was a hint of wounded pride in the youth's voice.
'Mere men? Ha! Iridium attracts the greed of weaker souls like a candle does moths. We could not expert mere men to stand sentinel over it, nor expect them to repel any of the warp-cursed traitors who prey on the Imperium's riches.'
The Thunderhawk rumbled through a pocket of turbulence and Tarikus gave a curt shake of his head. 'No, only the Adeptus Astartes can truly place duty before base desire.' The disappointment on Korica's face was clear as day, and Tarikus waved him away. 'Fear not, lad. If the Corrupted return to this world as they have in the past, we'll be in the fray soon enough.'
The younger Marine looked downcast and Tarikus watched him for a moment. So raw, so untried, he thought, was I ever the same as he? He had not exaggerated when he praised Korica for his swift rise to full status as a Doom Eagle, but still Tarikus regretted that such a promotion had been necessary. On the ice planetoid Kript his company had met an overwhelming force of rotsouled Traitor Marines and lost fully a quarter of their number. Although the enemy had been routed, the blood cost they exacted was paid back with new men, new brothers advanced from the scout squads. Under Tarikus's direct command, Korica, and with him Brother Mykilus and Brother Petius, were among many newly fledged Doom Eagles. Tarikus gave himself a moment to remember his fallen comrades; they had met death at last on Kript's airless plains, and gone to Him willingly with the blood of the impure on their hands. The sergeant had personally recovered a relic from the field of battle, the shattered blade of a chainsword that was now a memorial to one of his brothers. When his time came, Tarikus hoped that the Emperor would grant him so perfect an ending.
They rode out across the blasted ferrocrete plain of the port in a line of Rhinos, bikes and speeders, carrying at the head the metallic banner of their standard. From his vantage point at the hatch of his squad's transport, at the rear of the procession, Tarikus nodded at the clean dispersal and formation of the vehicles. Before him, the full might of the entire third company was spread, a glittering steel parade of tactical, assault and terminator squads - a suitable first impression for the Doom Eagles to make on their inaugural posting to Merron.
His gaze wandered to a force of vessels clustered at the southern quadrant of the airfield. They too were Thunderhawk transports, but wine-dark in colour where Doom Eagle craft were gunmetal silver. Their brooding livery lo
oked like old, dried blood beneath the light of Merron's red sun. On their tail-planes they sported a disc-shaped sigil, a serrated circular blade kissed with a single crimson tear. The ships belonged to the Flesh Tearers, one of the smallest but most savage Chapters in the Adeptus Astartes.
Tarikus let his helmet optics bring them closer. Dozens of Marines were trooping aboard the Flesh Tearer craft while helots and workers, probably Merron locals, were busily loading cargo pods. As he watched, one of them slipped and dropped a case, the labourer's face a sudden mask of fear. A Marine walked to him and gestured roughly, the worker nodding frantically, thankful his mistake had not cost him his life. Tarikus looked away and dropped back into the Rhino.
'…nothing but carrion eaters,' Korica was saying to Mykilus. The other young Marine glanced up at the sergeant with a questioning gaze.
'Have you ever served with them, sir?' He jerked a thumb in the direction of the ships. 'There are rumours—'
'You're not a child, Brother Mykilus. Your time to give credence to fantasy tales is long gone,' Tarikus snapped.
'You deny the reports that they eat the flesh of the dead?' Korica pressed. 'Like the Blood Angels that spawned them, the Flesh Tearers feast on corpses—'
Tarikus took a heavy step forward and the rest of Korica's words died in his throat. 'What tales you may have heard are of little consequence, lad. Soon the Flesh Tearers will be gone and we will assume their garrison here. In the meantime, I expect you to contain your half-truths and speculations - clear?'
'Clear,' Korica repeated. 'I meant no disrespect.'
Tarikus was about to add something more, but without warning the Rhino suddenly lurched to the right, the forward quarter of the vehicle dipping sharply. Loose items flew across the cabin and only the sergeant's quick reflexes kept him upright. The Rhino skidded to a shuddering halt with a heavy iron clang.
Warhammer 40,000 - Anthology 13 Page 10
