Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  A spear thrust came through the inferno, impaling another renegade, Umendi at the other end of it. He hauled the warrior off his feet, roaring to brace himself against the immense weight of a legionary in power armour.

  Nuros hefted a power axe, gave a curt shout and flung it into the dangling renegade’s chest to cease his struggles.

  Fire came in Nuros’ wake, the Pyroclasts amongst his followers unleashing the fury of their namesake and turning the corridor into a roaring conflagration.

  Any ordinary warriors would have baulked when faced with the terrible flames, but Space Marines ceased to be ordinary during the apotheosis brought about by the Emperor’s uncanny science, and the Sons of Horus had ever been the finest of the Legions.

  The renegades fought even as they burned. A Salamander fell, spitting blood from his mouth-grille, a combat knife lodged firmly in his throat. An Iron Hand spun, shield arm severed from his body and left to clang noisily to the deck in his wake as a host of bolter shells riddled his torso. Lumak’s warriors emerged far from unscathed, the deaths spiteful and galling, but the Sons of Horus had the worst of it.

  Lumak drew his Medusan zweihander, appreciating the heft of the weapon before he engaged its disruptor field and severed a renegade’s neck. The struck head had barely hit the ground as he impaled another. On he went, cutting down those who had betrayed his brethren and killed them without honour. Whether the renegades before his sword had been at Isstvan did not matter; the act of righteous and murderous vengeance was justification enough.

  It ended swiftly enough, bloody bodies, gently drifting smoke and the crackle of slowly dwindling fires a lasting memento of the deed.

  ‘To the door,’ breathed Lumak, still drunk on anger as he finished a dying legionary with a curt, downward thrust of his sword. He noticed the others did the same, choosing head and hearts for the killing blow.

  Just a little farther now. The door, then the bridge, and victory. It would be bloody.

  Nuros held one warrior down by his chest, pushing a serrated knife into his unprotected cranium as he knelt over him. He looked up through a snarling draconic mask of aspirated blood.

  ‘Iron brother…’ said Nuros, reaching for his culverin.

  Lumak had turned to urge the rest of his charges on. Only when he looked back to the door to the bridge did he understand the Salamander’s warning.

  The massive door to the bridge had begun to open.

  Pressure seals exhaled in a violent spray of pneumatic gases, filling the corridor with a thick white cloud. Behind it, the door continued to slide apart. It did so by degrees, layers of protective adamantium slowly peeling back in several different directions. The first panel split vertically down the middle, a second behind it diagonally, a third horizontally, until only the impeded archway of the door remained and the hulking figure framed by it.

  A Dreadnought, Contemptor-pattern, stepped through the fog, the eye-slits in its battered silver helm aflame. Sea-green armour shone dully in the light of ebbing fires, a red omnipotent eye emblazoned on its left shoulder guard and breastplate. Chains clanked shrilly against slab-sided greaves as it walked, skulls hooked to their ends.

  ‘Abomination,’ hissed Nuros.

  It lunged, pistons in its arms grinding, and smashed an Iron Hand down into the deck with its power fist. The backswing killed another, embedding a warrior into the wall.

  Corposant drooled off its mechanical fingers, blood fizzing off the energy field as it burned.

  Vox-horns attached to its sarcophagus bellowed, the sound almost bestial. The atonal blaring set Lumak’s teeth on edge and he grimaced.

  The monstrous war machine advanced, its stride fast and thunderous.

  An autocannon chugged into action and Lumak shouted.

  ‘Ware!’

  Breacher shields were raised, but many of the Tenth had lowered them first to revel in their vengeance. A savage spit of flame chased across the deck, stitching high-velocity rounds up the chest of one Iron Hand, who fell, shield in hand, sawn almost in half. A second warrior in black fell, his legs mowed out from under him. Agonised flailing followed, leg stumps spitting blood.

  A stray round caught the promethium flask of one of the Pyroclasts. The explosion immolated the Salamander and two of his brothers, their bodies tossed into the air like wind-thrashed leaves.

  The Iron Hands and their ever-diminishing allies fell back, retreating as far as the broken auto-palisades. Breacher shields took the worst of the autocannon fire but the Dreadnought’s main threat lay in its bulk and the strength of its power fist. It tore a section of auto-palisade from the deck and used it to cut an Iron Hand in half across the midriff.

  ‘Kill it!’ bellowed Lumak, and the roar of bolters struck up.

  The heavy rounds rebounded off the Dreadnought’s formidable armour, barely denting it.

  Lumak waded in with his sword, ducking a swipe of the crackling power fist that scored a heat burn across his brow and claimed the head of Velig, who had followed behind his captain. Lumak cut a deep groove with the zweihander but failed to penetrate the Dreadnought’s armoured hide. It battered him aside with its sheer bulk and he cried out in defiance.

  Nuros leapt to his brother’s defence, power axe crashing against a leg piston and severing it. The Dreadnought staggered, venting oil and gas from the wound, abruptly crippled but still dangerous. A wild swipe of its power fist caught Nuros a glancing blow that sent him sprawling across the deck, and his power axe clattering away into darkness.

  Two Iron Hands rushed the Contemptor, breacher shields locked together like a battering ram. The clash of metal against metal resounded, resonant at close quarters, and the Dreadnought rocked back a fraction. Lumak lunged, bleeding from his side but ignoring the pain, and drove his sword lance-like into an eye-slit, where it lodged fast.

  Sustained bolter salvoes did the rest, pummelling the Dreadnought until its upper-to-lower mass ratio reached a tipping point and it fell hard, a mythic giant struck down by a sling stone.

  Nuros and the Drakes fell upon it with flamers and artisan blades, concentrating on joints and cables, exploiting any crack in the Dreadnought’s protective aegis. It thrashed, burning within the amniotic residue of its sarcophagus, a plaintive yet rancorous wail emitting from its vox-horns as it died.

  Lumak wrenched his blade free as other Iron Hands and Salamanders hacked the monster apart in its death throes, venting relief and anger. Viscous matter sprayed up from the sarcophagus as it cracked apart against a hail of blows, the shrivelled creature within reduced to ruin. In the aftermath, the warriors from two sundered Legions gazed up from their sudden frenzy and saw the door to the bridge agape…

  …as a second Dreadnought stomped across the threshold to take the place of the first. More heavily armoured than its predecessor, it clashed together twin power fists, releasing a cascade of sparks and crackling energy from the competing disruptor fields.

  Its vox-emitters bellowed a challenge.

  ‘Lupercal!’

  Lumak sagged in his armour. Scattered, badly beaten, with several of their brothers dead, the Iron Tenth and their allies would not win this fight.

  He raised his sword anyway.

  The Dreadnought advanced, slowly at first but accelerating into an unstoppable charge.

  Lumak had been too bullish. His confidence or his shame had brought about this end. He resolved to meet it as his brothers of the Avernii had met theirs. Bloodily.

  He roared. ‘Gor-gon! Gor-gon!’

  And kept on screaming as his iron brothers took up the chant. He charged, zweihander aimed at his enemy, a knight without his horse, a madman ready to sell his life for a glorious death.

  ‘Lupercal!’ The vox-emitters blared so loudly and violently it distorted the feed.

  ‘Gor-gon!’ answered the Tenth, as the scattered but grimly determined Drakes took up th
e name of their primarch.

  Lumak raised his sword aloft, a final salute.

  Nuros was by his side, and shouted his last oath.

  ‘I name it Traitorbane. I name it Fury and Vengeance and Vindicator,­ for the glory of Vulkan, for the Gorgon!’

  The Dreadnought’s eyes burned with the promise of retribution for its fallen comrade. Drakes and Iron Hands ran on with abandon, howling the names of their primarchs and singing death songs.

  Only a few metres separated them all.

  A low detonation shook the corridor. Warriors stumbled. It presaged a ceiling collapse. Adamantium plating and other less identifiable debris spilled from the deck above. Something had bored through. It thrust the two battling sides apart. The smell of burnt metal filled the corridor, carried on an outpouring of sealant dust. A figure descending through that grimy cloud struck a swift blow that arrested the Dreadnought’s forward momentum and caved in its helmet.

  Barely visible in the shadows and the still falling wreckage, the figure stood before the war machine, dwarfed by it and yet somehow also greater in stature.

  Vox-horns declared the Dreadnought’s anger and pain.

  It staggered, mortally wounded, arms flailing until a second blow swept off its leg, splitting it all the way along the piston joint. Swinging two-handed, the glint of half-light briefly limning a hammer’s head, the figure split apart the sarcophagus.

  Silence followed, disturbed only by the crackle of shorting wires and the slow plink of cooling metal. The Dreadnought’s struggles ceased.

  A last rearguard of Sons of Horus emerged from the bridge, rushing into the carnage, prepared to sell their lives dearly. Three figures, smaller than the first, dropped from the gaping hole in the ceiling and despatched the charging legionaries swiftly and dispassionately.

  After it was done, they lowered their weapons and stood at the threshold of the bridge, awaiting their leader.

  One held aloft his gauntleted hand. He balled his fist and it ignited, a fiery torch to light the way.

  A giant stood within its glow in scalloped armour of a draconic aspect, the snarling faces wrought into the greaves flickering in the red aura cast by the flames. A heavy cloak of scale hung from his shoulders, and he gripped his hammer in one armoured hand.

  Nuros and the surviving Drakes fell to their knees.

  Vulkan strode to the threshold of the bridge and then stepped aside.

  ‘The honour is yours,’ he said in a chasmal voice.

  Lumak regarded him, belatedly lowering his sword and then sheathing it across his back. He reached out a hand to Nuros, hauling the Salamander to his feet.

  ‘Up, Drake,’ he hissed. ‘We have a ship to claim for Meduson.’

  Nuros arose, unsteady at first and humbled when he saw Vulkan and his retinue bow their heads before the true conquerors of the Horus Triumphant.

  ‘I am not worthy of this,’ Nuros breathed, as he and Lumak led the others to their victory, and nodded in fierce pride to his lord as he passed.

  ‘They are all dead,’ said Lumak with quiet solemnity.

  The entire bridge crew had been slain. Even the servitors had not been spared. They knelt in a long row before the oculus, slumped forwards or off to one side, a dark wound in each of their backs where a blade had been thrust through the spine and into the heart. A bloody stain spread beneath them, still wet.

  ‘Such fanatical devotion,’ said Nuros as he stepped onto the raised command dais. The others spread out around the bridge, weapons raised, but nothing lived to threaten them here anymore.

  ‘Can any of us here claim any different?’ Lumak replied, though the sight of so many killed in this way turned his blood.

  ‘Not this, iron brother,’ Nuros said softly, noting the sigil a helmsman had tried to daub in his own blood before he had died. It resembled the eye of Horus. ‘Never like this.’

  Vulkan entered the bridge last of all, behind his retinue. Removing his dragon helm, he looked darkly at the scene before him.

  ‘Our former brothers-in-arms have fallen far…’

  He stooped by a female in an officer’s garb, a flag lieutenant judging by her trappings. She had rolled onto her back in death and stared upwards into the rafters of the bridge as if looking into an unseen abyss, her eyes possessed of some final madness.

  Vulkan gently closed them, and rose slowly to his feet.

  ‘This ship should be razed to scrap.’

  ‘It is my Warleader’s will that it be taken, lord primarch,’ said Lumak with all due deference.

  ‘Meduson will do what he will,’ Vulkan replied, his retinue looking on sternly at the Iron Tenth as they came to his side. ‘But it does not mean he is right. Raze the ship – no good can come of its continued existence.’

  Lumak had been about to reply when Vulkan slammed the pommel of his hammer into the ground. The resonant clang preceded the sudden rush of matter displacement as the primarch and his warriors vanished in a storm of crackling light and eldritch thunder. A circle of smoke and a few diminishing motes of psychic corposant lingered in their wake. Nuros touched his fingers to the scorched ring of the teleportation burn and closed his eyes.

  Lumak knew a farewell when he saw it.

  ‘He has gone…’ said the Salamander, head bowed, scarcely louder than a whisper.

  ‘He may yet return, Nuros,’ said Lumak, resting a hand upon his friend’s shoulder.

  Nuros looked up from his momentary reverie and smiled, though his eyes betrayed the pain of rejection he felt.

  ‘I think not, Lumak.’

  Twenty-Two

  Vulkan leaves, the alliance ended

  Vulkan stepped off the dais, tendrils of ghostly warp matter still clinging to his armour.

  Warding sigils had been carved into the dark metal clanging under his feet and those of the Draaksward. A shiver of unease passed through him as he crossed the threshold of the dais, descending the steps into the Iron Heart’s teleportarium pit, and he gripped the talisman hung around his neck.

  ‘Father…’ said Zytos, and quickly came to the primarch’s side.

  ‘It’s nothing, Barek,’ Vulkan replied. ‘An echo, no more than that.’

  He had felt something though, a presence and the malevolent regard of an unclean thing.

  ‘Do you smell that?’ he asked, looking up at the servitors and enginseers toiling heedlessly in the dimly lit shadows.

  Zytos shook his head. ‘I smell ozone, the scent of hot metal…’

  Both were common during matter translation.

  Vulkan’s eyes narrowed as if searching the chamber for something just beyond his sight.

  ‘Not that,’ he said. ‘I smell… decay. Corruption.’

  Zytos shared a concerned glance with Gargo and Abidemi, who joined them at the foot of the steps.

  ‘We should be away from here,’ Vulkan told them, his voice thick.

  ‘Vulcanis awaits us in the launch bay and should be ready to depart,’ said Gargo.

  Vulkan nodded. He looked to Abidemi.

  ‘Atok, go on ahead and ensure there are no delays.’

  Abidemi gave a curt nod himself and hurried to do his primarch’s­ bidding.

  As the others left the teleportarium in his wake, the foulness Vulkan had detected began to fade as did the atonal droning from the arcane mechanism of the dais.

  A servitor barred the entry door to the launch bay. Abidemi stood in front of it, his back to Zytos, Gargo and Vulkan as they approached.

  An empty scabbard hung from Abidemi’s belt, and he held a dragon-toothed blade in his hand.

  ‘Step aside,’ he growled, advancing on the servitor. He raised Draukoros, about to cut the creature down.

  ‘Hold, brother,’ called Zytos, moving ahead of the others. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘It refuses us entry
to the launch bay.’

  Zytos turned his gaze on it. ‘Speak, creature, why can we not pass?’

  As Vulkan reached them, the servitor knelt and its jaws distended to reveal the iris of a hololithic projector embedded into its mouth.

  ‘I think we are about to have our answer, Barek.’

  Mechanisms implanted in the servitor’s body clicked and whirred with sudden activation. An image stuttered to life, spilling from its mouth in a grainy cone of grey light.

  ‘Vulkan…’

  Meduson stood before them, speaking from the bridge of the Iron Heart. In the background, just hinted at by the expanse of the oculus, the battle had begun anew.

  ‘I am sorry I cannot bid you farewell in person,’ he said, ‘but the Sons of Horus are regathering their forces and we must strike at them before they are ready to re-engage. The way is open and you have my leave to depart. It has been an honour, lord primarch.’

  ‘His leave?’ muttered Zytos, low enough so that only his comrades could hear him. He bit back his anger behind a barricade of teeth.

  Vulkan did not react to the mild impertinence, but instead was gracious.

  ‘The honour is mine, Warleader Meduson. You have saved us more than once, and have my profound gratitude for your service.’

  ‘Perhaps I will meet you again at Terra,’ Meduson replied, cutting off the feed.

  The projection went dark, the servitor rising and standing aside having completed its allotted task.

  ‘Perhaps…’ said Vulkan to the shadows.

  The door to the launch bay parted.

  ‘He kept us here for that?’ asked Zytos.

  Distant thunder tolled across the deck as the Iron Heart’s guns spoke.

  ‘Battle comes,’ said Vulkan. ‘Let us be away from here.’

  ‘It sits ill to flee from a fight,’ said Abidemi, faultlessly honest.

  Vulkan put a hand on his shoulder, looking him in the eye.

  ‘None here feel any different, my son, but our path does not end on the Iron Heart and we must follow it again.’

  ‘To where then, father?’ asked Gargo.