[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

“I’ve found a Black Legion Rhino. It’s a wreck. This must be what happened to Ulth Squad.”

  “Survivors?” Talos asked.

  “Not even any bodies.” They all heard the regret in his voice. Bodies meant armour, and armour meant salvage.

  “Mass laser fire damage.”

  “Skitarii,” put in Cyrion. The Mechanicus footsoldier elite. It stood to reason—no one else would have laser fire capable of totalling an Astartes transport.

  “You hear that?” Uzas said. “I hear something.”

  “How truly specific,” Cyrion chuckled.

  “I’m getting it, too,” Xarl cut in. “Broken vox, scattered chatter from other frequencies. Other squads.”

  “The Black Legion?” asked Talos.

  “No,” Xarl replied. “I think it’s us.”

  Talos moved through the ruined manufactory as he listened to his squadmates. His red-tinted sight took in the stilled machinery, the idle conveyor belts, the tall roof with its shattered stained glass skylights where once the scene of the Emperor-as-Machine-God, coming to ancient Mars, had filtered the brilliance of the night sky.

  Stars shone down now, illuminating the gargoyle-decorated building with silver silence. Whatever they had made here would never be made here again. The place was a tomb.

  “The vox is unreliable,” Cyrion said. “What a revelation. Everybody, hold positions, I’m going to contact the Warmaster and let him know.”

  “Shut up, fool,” Xarl snapped. “Talos?”

  “Here.”

  “Frequency Scarlet sixteen-one-five. You hear that?”

  It took a few moments for his helm’s vox-link to shift and scan nearby signals. He continued to walk through the silent manufactory, bolter and blade at the ready. Soon enough, voices prickled at the edge of his hearing.

  “I hear it,” he voxed back to the others.

  “What should we do?” Cyrion asked, dead serious now. He’d heard it, too. “That’s Seventh Claw.” There was a pause as he called up data, most likely on his auspex’s data screen. “The armament manufactorum, to the west.”

  Talos idly checked his bolter, whispering praise to the machine-spirit within. The vox on the surface of Crythe was a savage, fickle thing, never reliable, always punctured and scrambled by the Mechanicus’ arcane technology. Since the Legions had made planetfall, squads had grown used to the violated vox and being cut off from one another.

  The fleet orbiting Crythe was blessedly free of the worst of the forge world’s twisted vox-screeching but the squads on the surface were forced to listen to an unending howl of code mangling their signals. Even vox fed through the ships’ systems were still often subject to bizarre ghosting, added voices, and delays of several hours. Many times now, squads had responded to positioning information and orders that were half a day out of date.

  “They’re trying other frequencies to summon reinforcements,” Talos said.

  “That’s my guess,” Cyrion agreed.

  “The Exalted will not be pleased if we abandon our recall orders.” Uzas sounded pleased, his voice low and scratchy. Talos forced the image of himself so battered and bloody, speaking with the same voice, from his mind. Blood for the Blood God, he’d said in the vision… Souls for the Soul Eater… Skulls for the Skull Throne…

  “To hell with the Exalted,” said Xarl.

  “We’re going to Seventh Claw,” Talos said, already blink-clicking a Nostraman rune to open another channel. “Septimus.”

  “Here, master.” The signal was choppy, swamping the serf pilot’s voice in jagged crackles.

  “Scheduled retrieval in fourteen minutes. En route to your position.”

  “Change of plans.”

  “I don’t dare ask why, lord. Just tell me what you need. This isn’t Blackened, there’s only so much I can do in a transporter.”

  “It’s fine. Full burn to my position, combat retrieval protocol, then full burn to coordinates Cyrion is transmitting now.”

  “Lord… Combat retrieval? Is the sector not clear?”

  “It’s clear. But you will be taking First Claw and our Land Raider to an engagement zone west of here.”

  “By your command, lord.” Talos heard Septimus take a breath. The mortal knew the Exalted had demanded First Claw’s recall. “Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I do want to know. May I ask what exactly is going on?”

  “Seventh Claw is pinned down. We are going to break them out.”

  “Forgive me for asking again, lord. What is pinning them down, that requires First Claw and its Land Raider?”

  “A Titan,” Talos said. “Now hurry.”

  XII

  SEVENTH CLAW

  The street shivered under its tread.

  Dozens of windows facing the avenue shattered in their frames and dust rained from the walls of broken buildings. The thunder of its splay-clawed feet wasn’t even the loudest aspect of its presence. Louder still were the roaring whines of its great joints, great mechanical shrieks that split the air as it walked. And louder yet, the cacophonous bellow of its weaponised arms, burning the air when they sucked in power to fire and illuminating the world around it with the light of blinding dawn as they released their fury.

  Adhemar of Seventh Claw crawled through the rubble of what had, moments before, been a habitadon block. His vision flickered and hissed, all sense lost with the damage taken to his helm. Even his life readouts were scrambled, displaying nothing of use, nothing he could make out. With a curse, he tore the helm from his head, freeing his natural senses. The air was ash-thick and vibrating with the resonant booms of the Titan’s stride. It was still some way down the avenue, bringing its guns to bear once more. Seventeen metres tall, almost as many wide, it hunched in the road, taking up so much of the street that its brutish shoulders made squealing tears in the buildings as it raked them with its bulk.

  The Astartes knew those armoured shoulders shielded several crew members at work around the inner reactor, chanting their irritating prayers to the Emperor in His guise as the Machine-God. The fact he could not slay them, the fact he had nothing which he could even deal damage with, galled him almost beyond apoplexy. He glared at the canine head of the Titan, picturing the three pilots inside, leashed to their control thrones by hardwiring and restraint harnesses.

  How they must be laughing right now…

  Adhemar’s throat and lungs tightened, filtering out the dust in the air as though it were a poison. Ignoring this biological reaction, the Night Lord dragged himself to his feet and ran behind the still-standing wall of a nearby building. The street, which had once been the main thoroughfare of a habitation sector, was a tumbledown wasteland in the wake of the Titan’s anger. One of its weapons, like a gnarled right fist, was a multi-barrelled monstrosity that hurled hundreds of bolt shells a second at its targets below. Every impacting shell chewed a metre-wide hole in the Warhound’s steel and stone surroundings. With thousands of shells fired every minute, Adhemar wasn’t surprised at the level of destruction. He was merely surprised he still drew breath.

  Most of his squad didn’t share that fortune.

  An ugly chime rang out, reminiscent of a cracked bell calling the Imperial faithful to morning prayer. Adhemar’s muscles locked solid as he remained where he was. It was the echolocation pulse of the Titan’s auspex. If he moved, it would know where he was. Hell, if it even sensed the minimal heat of his power armour, it would know… but he was counting on the Titan’s systems being aligned to hunt larger prey.

  Fifty metres down the road, shadowed from the moonlight by two towers that had escaped its opening wrath, it stood on its backwards-jointed legs, wolfish cockpit-head grinding left and right on servos that whined at agonising volume.

  He heard the next attack before he saw it—the grunted cough of a missile launched nearby. From the second level of a ruined building, a streak of howling smoke slashed across the street. Adhemar moved to watch the missile’s course, narrowing his eyes as his Astartes cognition instinctively took
in the details of the warhead’s angle and the certainty of its impact point.

  Denied his vox, he whispered to himself.

  “Mercutian, what are you doing…”

  The missile exploded in a fragmentary starburst against the Titan’s faintly-shimmering void shields, and the Warhound was already responding. The great left fist came up on roaring gears with punishing speed.

  Inferno gun.

  Adhemar was back in cover within a single heartbeat, not because he was in the line of fire, but because to look at the weapon firing would be to invite hours of blindness. Even with his eyes closed and head turned away, the son of Nostramo felt the brightness assault his retinas with jabs of migraine-coloured pain. The massive gun fired with the challenging roar of a feral world predator, blasting searing air in all directions from its heat exchange vanes.

  Adhemar exhaled a lungful of the burning air, feeling it scrape his throat. He knew without looking that the chemical wash of vicious liquid fire had flooded the building, dissolving everything within. The expected crash came moments later, as the building’s structure withered under the superheated force of the assault.

  Was it his imagination, or had he heard a moment’s cry from the vox of his helm in his hands? Had he heard one of his brother’s death screams?

  Mercutian was undeniably dead. Brave, without a doubt, to think to harm the Titan with one of his last rockets, but the gesture was futile even before he took aim. Picking the god-machine apart once its layered shields were down was one thing. Getting those shields down in the first place was quite another.

  Adhemar hooked his sundered helm onto the magnetic coupling of his belt, and reached for his auxiliary vox within a thigh pouch. The earpiece felt alien; he was so used to the enclosing sensory magnification of his helm.

  He doubted there was anyone still with him, but it was worth the attempt. “Seventh Claw, status report.”

  “Adhemar?”

  “Mercutian?”

  “Aye, brother-sergeant.”

  “How in the infinite hells are you still alive?” It was an effort not to raise his voice with incredulity.

  “You saw me take that missile shot?”

  “And I thought I heard you die.”

  “Not yet, sir. I made a tactical withdrawal. At speed.”

  Adhemar resisted the urge to laugh. “So you ran.”

  “Ran and threw myself from the third storey of that building’s south-facing side. My armour’s a mess and I lost my launcher. Adhemar, we’ve got to get to the Rhino. The plasma gun is—”

  “Not going to take down a Warhound Titan.”

  “You have any better ideas?”

  A grinding chorus of immense gears started up down the avenue again. Adhemar risked another glance around the edge of the wall.

  “Bad news. Do you have visual?”

  “I’m in the adjacent street, sir. I can’t see the beast.”

  “It’s found the Rhino.”

  The Titan had indeed. It hunched, every inch the feral predator, glaring down at Seventh Claw’s troop transport nestled in a narrow alleyway. The collapse of the last building had revealed its dark armoured hull. Rubble from the fallen hab block was scattered across its roof, leaving bursts of gunmetal grey where the blue paint was scraped away.

  “I have an idea,” Adhemar voxed.

  “Adhemar, sir, with respect… we need to get out of here. There’s no honour in this death.”

  “Be silent. If we can get its shields down…”

  “That’s an impossible ‘if’. If we could fly or piss plasma, we’d have the job done, too. None of those things will happen.”

  “Wait. It’s moving.”

  The howl of great gears intensified. Adhemar watched, whispering a prayer to the machine-spirit of his Rhino, the faithful vehicle that had carried him across countless battlefields. He knew its interior as well as he knew his own armour. He could read the tank’s temperament in the grunts of its idling engine, and feel its arrogance in the clank and ding of every gunshot that sparked harmlessly from its hull.

  The Rhino’s name in High Gothic was Carpe Noctum. “Seize the Night”.

  The tank that had carried Seventh Claw since the Legion’s founding on pre-Imperial Terra died an ignoble death, expiring with a twisted, protracted groan of tortured metal. The Warhound Titan stood for half a minute, its splayed right foot-claw grinding the tank into the street. The greatest injustice was that the tank had met its end in such an undignified manner purely to spare the Titan’s ammunition reserves.

  You’ll pay for that, Adhemar swore. You will bleed and scream and die for that.

  The Titan finally raised its foot clear of the wreckage, scraps of bent metal falling from its talon-toes. In its wake, still in the behemoth’s shadow, the crushed hull of Carpe Noctum looked especially pathetic. It was impossible to reconcile the image of miserable ruin with the great-hearted, indomitable tank that had raced him into battle a thousand times and more.

  Seventh Claw was dead. Heart and soul. Even if he and Mercutian somehow survived the next few minutes, they were destined to join one of the other Claws in the ragtag remnants of 10th Company.

  Adhemar watched the lumbering Titan stalk down the avenue, hunkering left and right, coming closer with each pounding tread.

  “Mercutian…”

  “Aye, brother-sergeant.”

  Not brother-sergeant after this. Not a chance. “We need to find Ruhn and Hazjarn. They had melta bombs.”

  The Warhound thundered past.

  Adhemar froze, back pinned against the wall. A great shadow fell across him as the Titan blocked out the moon. It stood only thirty metres away, pistons hissing and venting air pressure—a beast breathing sighing after a long hunt. Its back was to him now, as it stared down the avenue, seeking targets. Another dull clang rang out as its echolocation auspex sought returning signals of movement or heat. The wolf was sniffing for prey.

  “Repeat, sir.”

  “Ruhn and Hazjarn. They had our melta bombs.”

  “They’re useless with the Titan’s shields up. You know that.”

  “They’re our only chance. We could mine the road ahead of it. Have you got anything better to be doing, or did you come here in midnight clad just to die with the others?”

  “I’ve got Ruhn on my locator, sir. But not Hazjarn. Can you see him?”

  “I can’t see anyone’s signals; my helm is damaged. I saw him fall when the hab block came down on us. I know where to dig, but we’ll need to be fast.”

  “I’ve got no life signs from anyone except you and I,” Mercutian said.

  Not at all surprising Adhemar thought, watching the Titan panning left and right on its torso axis. The sound was like thunder in a valley.

  “It’s facing away. There’s a sixteen second break between its auspex signals. The scanner wave will pass over us within the first second or two. Move only three seconds after the damn thing clangs. Freeze the moment you hear it pulse.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They waited for several heartbeats, until the dull ring chimed once more. More windows facing the street shattered under the reverberation.

  One. Two. Three.

  “Move.”

  The transporter handled with weighty sluggishness compared to Blackened. Although the Thunderhawk variant was marked by a more skeletal mid-frame, it cradled the bulky shape of the squad’s Land Raider in its underside hull claws. The weight counted. Septimus felt it in every bank and turn.

  Septimus brought the flyer lower, streaking over the tips of hab blocks, stabiliser thrusters burning hot. Go too low, and he risked entering the Titan’s weapon range before they knew for sure where it was. Stay too high, and their auspex wouldn’t give an accurate return on where the enemy machine was.

  “I’m getting significant thermal flare at the end of a major avenue just north of here.”

  The voice of his master came over the vox. First Claw waited within their battle tank. “Pull in lo
w, release clamps at the other end of the avenue. If you get killed while causing the distraction, I’ll lose my temper, Septimus.”

  He grinned. “Duly noted, lord.”

  The transporter’s stability engines burned hotter and angrier as they took the vessel’s weight in full, all forward thrust lost as it coasted lower to the ground, between the stunted remains of Titan-killed hab blocks. Engine wash blackened the street below.

  Six hundred metres or more down the avenue, the Titan saw them. The Warhound reared around, back-jointed legs easing it into an awkward reverse turn. Its arms rose in lethal salute.

  “Imperial machine is acquiring target lock,” Septimus voxed. “Twenty… Fifteen… Ten metres above ground.”

  “Ave Dominus Nox,” Cyrion said over the channel.

  “Hunt well, Septimus,” Talos added.

  “Claws detached!”

  Freed of its burden, the Thunderhawk transporter bucked skyward, overcompensating engines roaring.

  Warning runes flashed across his console screens. Target lock. The serf wrenched the guidance sticks to pull the flyer into a vicious roll. From the avenue below, streams of massive-calibre bolt shells sliced through his engine wake. He punched out at two levers either side of his control throne, and the protesting boosters cried out with fresh fury. The amount of thrust he was demanding from the transport was usually reserved for breaking back into orbit after a landing. To use it in atmospheric flight, to use in a cityscape…

  Septimus knew Blackened. He knew the Thunderhawk could’ve taken this and more. He wasn’t so sure about the transport. It juddered and creaked and whined all around him, complaining down to the rivets in its hull.

  Spires flashed by in a dizzying blur. Septimus climbed and brought the flyer into a sharp turn. As he lined up the nose with his target below, acquisition runes glimmered across his main data screen.

  The transport’s missile launchers came alive, pods opening like unfurling flowers.

  “I hope this works.”

  The treads of First Claw’s Land Raider had been in motion before it even hit the ground. They whirred and spun, chewing air, hungry to grind over the street’s surface.