The Atramentar noticed a warning rune flicker briefly. He was being scanned by an auspex. Deltrian, surely. Vraal gave the watching tech-priest an acknowledging nod as he stalked further into the room. The spindly machine-creature bowed back in respect. Hateful thing. A curse on the Mechanicum, that such filth was necessary to the Legion’s operation.
Vraal was under no illusions about his presence here. The Exalted was playing its game with care, for to oppose Talos openly might incite full-blooded rebellion. What remained of the 10th would be broken, some following the Exalted, others joining the prophet. For Vraal, the choice was no choice at all. The past or the future. Talos represented the former. What was there in the past but failure and shame?
It would be a relief when the prophet was finally killed. Well did Vraal remember his disappointment when the Exalted’s plan to whore Talos off to the Ruinous Powers failed so completely. The Despoiler had allowed the prophet to escape with no resistance—Abaddon had even failed to kill the two slaves Talos evidently treasured—and 10th Company was burdened with the prophet’s irritating anachronistic meddling once again.
Maddening. Like an unscratchable itch.
No, Vraal was under no illusions at all. Open conflict was out of the question. It would galvanise Talos’ emergent faction. One of the favoured Atramentar could never be used. It would be undeniable proof the Exalted was acting against the prophet. But not wild, unpredictable Vraal. Oh, no. Vraal would be mourned for his “vicious temper” and “choleric humours”, while the Exalted waxed lyrical about how he deeply regretted Vraal’s terrible disruption of the resurrection ritual.
His bitterness left him uncontrollable, the Exalted would say. Vraal’s actions bring shame upon us all. Such disunity…
Yes, Vraal could almost hear his eulogy spoken now. The Exalted had sent him here to die, spending his life for the good of the warband. So be it.
Of course, this new plan to awaken Malcharion had to be put down with tact.
With nuance.
With subtlety.
Vraal’s claws slid from the sheaths on his gauntlets. They sparked and crackled, wreathed in killing lightning.
“Brothers!” he called joyously into the vox. “Everyone in this room is going to die!”
A moment later, he was wading into bolter fire, laughing through the speakers on his tusked helm.
Chunks broke away from his trophy racks, the shattered pieces thrown behind. A tusk from his own helm splintered. His chestplate cracked. His knee guard split, spraying ceramite debris to the ground. A storm of bolter fire hacked and chipped at his Terminator war-plate. This was almost fun.
The three weaklings from First Claw were falling back, presenting unified fire that was doing nothing to suppress the Atramentar’s advance. Vraal heard Deltrian’s mechanical voice bleating over his vox.
“Why would you do this! This is blasphemy! This chamber is consecrated to the Machine-God!”
Ugh. Would that Vraal’s armour had any ranged weapons… He could silence the wailing tech-priest once and for all. As it was, his lightning claws flared as if in response to his anger.
The three Astartes opposing him were backing away, edging towards the still form of Malcharion and unrelenting in their fire. This was irritatingly tactical. Vraal knew killing them was only a secondary concern, no matter how pleasurable it would be. He needed to end Malcharion’s resurrection, once and for all. They stood in the most obvious way of that: simply tearing the Dreadnought’s form apart with his claws.
Ah, well.
Vraal broke into what approximated a ran for an Astartes encumbered by the near-invulnerable shell of Terminator armour. Not making for the defiant Astartes. No, that would be suicide without doing his duty.
“Tech-priest!” Vraal staggered as the withering hail of bolter fire shattered his lower leg plating and interrupted the workings of the servos. “Come! We must talk, you and I!”
His stumbling limping ran had a sickening speed all its own. The reaper-like tech-priest did not leave his control console, even as Vraal slammed his right claw through the sacred machinery. Disappointingly, nothing exploded.
A particularly well-aimed bolt threw his head to the side for a moment. Most likely from Xarl. That bastard was known for being a wicked shot.
But the Astartes held back now. Vraal stood among the control consoles, thudding closer step by step to Deltrian. They wouldn’t risk exploding bolts damaging the machinery. He raked both claws out to the sides, lacerating more blessed Mechanicum technology.
How curious. The defilement made the tech-priest weep. He was weeping what looked like oil, running down his skullish silver cheeks in dark tracks. Vraal took in this intriguing fact in the span of half a second. He used the rest of the second to ram the four curved knuckle-blades—each a metre in length—straight through Deltrian’s torso.
“Hnnkhssssssshhhh—” the tech-priest wheezed, cutting off in a blurted babble of static.
“Very wise,” Vraal chuckled, pulling the blades back. The resistance within the adept’s body had felt unpleasant and inhuman. There was little joy in rending apart false machine-life. Deltrian fell back, his black robe clutched closed even as he fell to the marble floor.
A proximity warning rune flickered a moment too late. One of First Claw was on him.
Spinning, claws up to guard, Vraal faced the other Astartes.
Xarl’s bolter kicked at close range, snapping one of Vraal’s claws off in a shower of bolt shell debris. His chainsword howled down a heartbeat later.
“Just… die…” Xarl breathed over the vox. His grinding chainsword blade skidded across the Atramentar’s hulking armour, biting into surface metal without penetrating deeper.
Vraal disengaged with a shrug of his shoulders. His Terminator war-plate boosted his already inhuman strength far beyond standard Astartes armour. And as to the odds of a chainsword piercing it… Well, at least Xarl was keen. It made things all the more amusing.
Vraal raised his right gauntlet—now missing a talon—and caught the chainsword between crackling sword-claws on its second descent. The revving blade immediately started eating its way through the softer joint armour and servo fibres of Vraal’s gauntlets. With a grant of effort, the Atramentar twisted his arm. The claws sparked with a flare of power as they met the trapped chainblade, and severed it with a wrenching snap.
Disarmed, Xarl leapt back, casting his ruined sword hilt aside as it coughed into death, and bringing his bolter to bear again.
He didn’t fire. A warning rune told Vraal why, and he spun to meet the threat of Cyrion and Mercutian behind.
They came at him together, leaping with gladius blades drawn and reversed like plunging daggers in the hands of assassins. Cyrion’s stab clattered aside from the dense war-plate, and Vraal smashed the Astartes aside with a slash of his claw that tore through Cyrion’s armour.
Mercutian’s thrust bit, and bit deep. It was a moment of shocking, sickening intimacy—a wrath-inspiring violation—when the two Astartes met one another’s gaze through their crimson eye lenses. The gladius was a cold, hateful heaviness in Vraal’s stomach, and even as his enhanced physiology coped with the wound by sealing the haemorrhage, he felt it being torn open again with Mercutian yanking the blade upwards.
He’d breached a soft joint in the armour. And this… this was pain…
Vraal hadn’t quite remembered how much it hurt, it had been so long since he’d felt it.
Impacts struck him from behind in a staccato burst. The rhythm was utterly familiar. A bolter on full auto. Xarl was… firing… and he needed to…
Free himself… from the blade…
Vraal lifted his claw. The suit answered slowly, sluggish with the damage it was sustaining. Mercutian kept pulling the blade up, carving through Vraal’s innards even though the blade was blocked from moving too far by the Atramentar’s dense chestplate.
He spat blood into his helm and backhanded Mercutian away. The other Astartes snapped back
like a puppet with its strings tugged too hard, and smashed into the ruined control console.
Mercutian was down. Cyrion was… Ha! His blow to Cyrion had severed the wretch’s arm at the elbow. He was still picking himself up, shouting his hate through the vox as he looked for his bolter.
Xarl. He had to deal with Xarl. Xarl was always the dangerous one.
Blinking blood and sweat from his eyes, Vraal turned to do exactly that. He launched forward, claws powering towards Xarl like seven short lances.
Xarl cursed even as he moved, throwing himself to the side, muscles aflame, faster than he had ever moved in his gene-extended life.
The tips of Vraal’s right claws caught him. Xarl clenched his teeth as the three blades sliced and penetrated his armour. A moment of agony pulsed through his left thigh, and he crashed to the ground on dead legs.
Vraal’s estimation of the situation changed. Deltrian, that spindly machine-freak, was crawling away towards another wall-mounted console. He looked injured. Was that right? Did machine-men suffer injury? Damage, perhaps.
Cyrion was advancing again, one-armed and gripping his gladius, the pain of his wound doubtlessly swallowed whole by his armour’s injection of stimulants and nerve-killers directly into the bloodstream and brain. Mercutian was back up as well, unarmed. His blade had broken in the fall, and he must have expended all of his bolter ammunition. Xarl, ever defiant, had drawn his bolt pistol and was aiming it from where he lay on the ground, unable to stand with his leg half-severed.
That was the moment Vraal realised he was probably going to win.
“Brothers, brothers,” he laughed. “Who dies first?”
“Do your worst,” Xarl barked, opening fire again. Flashing runes blinked across Vraal’s display as the bolts hammered into his head and chestplate. Aiming for the neck joint, Vraal knew. He was still laughing, still advancing, when Xarl’s pistol clicked empty.
But… that sound…
…wwrrrrRRRRRRRRRR
Vraal’s bloody face contorted as he scowled at the rising noise. What the hell?
It was the sound of a Reaper-pattern double-barrelled autocannon powering up. It was followed by the throaty mechanical clunk-clunk-clunk of autoloaders cycling into life.
Vraal turned in time to see it open fire. When it did, the Hall of Remembrance shook with the sheer volume of the weapon’s discharge. Storms ferocious enough to bring down hive towers had done their destructive work with less volume and rage. Servitors too mind-wiped to cover their ears suffered ruptured eardrums.
The helms of First Claw filtered the sounds to tolerable levels, but every one of them had teeth clenched against the noise.
Vraal heard it all, with damning clarity, because it was happening to him.
Six mass-reactive explosive shells—each one capable of killing a Rhino transport on its own—smashed into the Atramentar in the space of three seconds. The first destroyed his chestplate and would have seen him dead in moments through the horrendous blood loss from his mangled insides. He was spared this death as the second shell killed him instantly, exploding against his tusked helm and annihilating his head and right shoulder.
The other four shells impacted and tore the remains to pieces. In three seconds, nothing remained of Vraal of the Atramentar beyond shards of broken armour and the wounds carried by First Claw.
The storm passed.
The thunder faded.
On ancient servos, the massive form of a bronze-edged, blue-armoured Dreadnought stepped forward. It was heavy enough to shake the room. The cannonfire had been nothing compared to its howling servo joints and cacophonous tread.
“L-lord?” Mercutian whispered.
“You’re awake…” Cyrion breathed. “How…”
In a guttural, vox-altered boom, the Dreadnought spoke from speakers wrought into its ornate chassis.
“I heard bolter fire.”
XV
REBORN
The Exalted reclined on its throne, forcing its face into a smile.
“It is a blessing to see you, brother.”
The hulking shape of Malcharion dominated the Covenant’s bridge. Light from the console screens flickered across his body’s dark ceramite hull.
With the ship idle in orbit, the crew, those human enough to care, were free to cast sidelong glances at the incredible sight in their midst. Malcharion stood alone before the commander’s raised central dais. The Dreadnought was tall enough that its sarcophagus was level with the seated figure.
Alongside the walls, every Astartes not engaged in planetary operations had gathered to witness the resurrection—and the first meeting with the Exalted. Talos and Adhemar stood in rapt awe. So did most of the others.
Around the Exalted’s throne stood the Atramentar. All of them, except for Vraal. Seven warriors, the Terminator elite, in an orderly half-ring behind the throne. Malek and Garadon stood closest to the Exalted, as always.
For the longest time, the war machine said nothing. The Exalted watched with its slanted black eyes, raptor-like in his attention to detail. It fancied it could almost hear, under the ever-present hum of the Dreadnought’s back-mounted power generator, the occasional bubbling swish of the amniotic fluid within the sarcophagus as whatever remained of Malcharion’s mortal body twitched.
“You have changed,” the Dreadnought boomed.
The Exalted’s smirk did not fade, indeed it became suddenly more genuine. “As have you, brother.”
The machine made a noise akin to a grunt of acknowledgement. It sounded like a tank shifting gears.
“You are uglier than I remember.” Another gear-change grunt, this one closer to a chuckle. “I would not have believed it possible.”
“I see your decades of inactivity while the rest of us waged our father’s war have not dimmed your… humour.”
“Do not bore me back into slumber with your dour nature, Vandred.”
“I am the Exalted now. You would do well to heed that, Malcharion. Time has changed many things.”
“Not everything. Hear me, Vandred. I have awoken. Torn from a century of nightmares, each one a memory of our greatest failure. The Soul Hunter tells me that war calls once more. You will tell me of this war. Now.”
The Exalted’s lips curled. The Soul Hunter. Sickening. “As you wish.”
The battlefield had several names. None of them quite carried the weight of true import. This was to be the decisive conflict, the moment of truth.
Located in the highest reaches of the northern hemisphere’s mountain range, it was the bastion of Mechanicus strength above the equator.
To the invaders, grudgingly impressed by the curving rock formations and the fortress-factories built into them, it was the Omnissiah’s Claw. A theatrical name, but apt: the mountains resembled steel fingers reaching for the heavens, as if the fortresses could tear the invader vessels from orbit.
To the cold cogitators and tactical logic engines of the Mechanicus defenders, it was simply Site 017-017.
Seventeen-Seventeen, the main foundry of the Legio Maledictis, heart and soul of Crythe Prime’s Adeptus Titanicus forces.
And void-shielded so densely that orbital bombardment was utterly beyond hope. Ironically, such a defence was pointless, Abaddon had made it clear to his captains and commanders that Seventeen-Seventeen was to be captured, not destroyed. Such a base would be able to repair, outfit and construct Titans to serve in his coming crusade. At the very least, huge quantities of materiel and resources could be plundered from the fortress-factories here.
Time, however, was growing short. Astropaths across the fleet told of whispers within the warp. The Imperium’s response to the invasion would arrive within weeks.
The Blood Angels. The Marines Errant. Countless regiments of the Imperial Guard. Abaddon had ventured far from his haven within the warp anomaly known as the Eye of Tenor, where the Imperium could never follow. While he had chosen a fine target in Crythe and hit the world with the decisive power of this hastily-assem
bled fleet, victory must now come quickly or be abandoned altogether. Already the month of war had been drawn out too long and ground taken at too high a cost. The Mechanicus and their accursed champions in the Legio Maledictis were defiant, indefatigable foes.
If astropathic premonitions were accurate, the Imperium’s battlefleets en route would present unbreakable might. Here, the forces of the Throne sensed their chance to bring the Despoiler to justice. Navigators and other psychically-sensitive souls among the Chaos fleet told of a great wave of pressure rolling from the warp, like the thunderheads of a coming storm. Every warrior within the Warmaster’s armies knew this for what it was. A convergence of warp routes, the way a fleet of ships would drive waves of water before their prows. Invisible currents within the Sea of Souls lashed at the Crythe Cluster as countless Imperial vessels burned their engines hot to defend the forge world and avenge the worlds already fallen.
It all came down to Seventeen-Seventeen.
Crythe Prime had to be taken.
The endgame had begun.
The Night Lords of 10th Company’s remnants were tasked with making up part of the spearhead in the initial assaults. Alongside them would be their kin from the Hunter’s Premonition.
With masses of traitorous Imperial Guard now siding with the Warmaster, along with the penal legions harvested from Solace, the Night Lords of Hunter’s Premonition and the Covenant of Blood had a handful of foundries and fortress-factories marked as objectives.
The Black Legion, far outnumbering the Night Lords contingent, was assigned to larger numbers of similar factorum objectives. Talos no longer detected any obvious signs of the Warmaster seeking to bleed the VIII Legion ahead of his own troops.
Necessity stole any such favouritism.
First Claw’s arming chamber was a hive of activity.
Serfs and servitors attached armour into place, machining it closed and sealed. Septimus was one of them, checking the joint seals of Talos’ armour, ignored by the Astartes as they spoke.
[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter Page 25
