by C. L. Werner
‘Kill them all,’ Captain Uzraal commanded, his meltagun bathing one of the flattened trucks in a disintegrating blast of light. The machine’s fuel detonated under the intense heat, incinerating any rebels that had survived inside.
‘Behind us!’ Cornak’s alarm brought Rhodaan’s attention away from the slaughter at the intersection. Instinctively his eyes went to the first Goliath lying on its side. The truck’s undercarriage was heaving, bulging outwards from some terrible violence unfolding within. He saw a ragged tear appear and swiftly widen.
Instantly the scene was enveloped in a coruscation of green fire. Rhodaan could feel the eerie chill of the warp crawling across his skin even inside his armour. He didn’t need to look towards Cornak to know he was turning his sorcery against whatever menace lurked within the crashed Goliath. On Castellax he’d seen Cornak use this fire against rebel janissaries and ork stragglers, burning the meat off their very bones in the blink of an eye.
This foe was of a different calibre. Loathsome shapes came leaping out from the smashed truck, plunging through the sorcerer’s flame. The green fire washed across their multi-armed bodies, gnawing at their purple-hued carapaces, pitting and scouring the chitinous plates until they resembled rusted iron. But it wasn’t enough to stop them, or even to slow them down. A trio of xenos creatures came charging towards the Space Marines.
‘Genestealers,’ Rhodaan gave name to the creatures. Many centuries ago he’d fought the monstrous creations of the tyranid hive fleets. One lesson he’d taken away from those battles was always to keep the beasts at arm’s length.
‘All fire to the rear,’ Rhodaan commanded across the vox. A burst from his bolt pistol ripped across one of the monsters, cracking its carapace in a spurt of scintillating fluids. Fire from Mahar and Turu raked the injured alien, leaving it sprawled on the ground.
Unlike the xenos Rhodaan had fought before, these genestealers exhibited a startling independence of action. The surviving pair of aliens didn’t remain together but rushed at the Iron Warriors from either flank like the pincers of some murderous claw. One of the creatures fell upon Brother Morak, bearing him to the ground and tearing into him in a frenzied burst of ferocity. A blast of searing energy from Uzraal’s meltagun evaporated the creature’s bulbous skull, but not before the street was littered with Morak’s organs.
The second flanker rushed for Rhodaan. The warsmith’s pistol was knocked from his grasp as the thing smashed him to the ground. Before its claws could start gouging his power armour, he brought his gauntlet cracking against its head. One of Rhodaan’s armoured fingers gouged into the genestealer’s eye, bursting it. The thing reeled back in pain, something else that wasn’t quite in keeping with the tyranid monsters he’d fought before. He was quick to seize upon the creature’s distress, driving his ceramite helm up into its throat. He could feel the genestealer’s neck snap under the impact. With a shove he pitched the beast onto its side. Recovering his bolt pistol, he pumped a few shots into the alien’s twitching body.
Rhodaan looked across the battlefield. The alien he’d dispatched was the last of the genestealers that had been hiding inside the Goliath. It seemed the monsters had been the last layer of the trap the rebels had laid for the Iron Warriors.
‘Captain Uzraal, report.’ Rhodaan turned away from the dead aliens and moved towards the intersection as he listened to Uzraal’s voice across the vox.
‘One casualty,’ Uzraal said. ‘If Brother Morak’s gene-seed was viable, the xenos claws have ruined it now.’
Rhodaan climbed up onto the toppled obelisk, staring down at the wreckage and the rebel bodies strewn about the street. Despite the magnitude of the injuries they’d been dealt by the Iron Warriors, there were variances and deformities to the bodies that made it clear that even before death they’d been an unpleasant sight. There was a horrible suggestiveness about their physiognomy that made Rhodaan wonder about their provenance. It was something beyond mere mutation. Taken in concert with the unexpected behaviour of the genestealers, a suspicion began to take form in his mind.
‘Periphetes,’ Rhodaan called out. He pointed down at one of the more deformed of the bodies, a corpse that had a third arm sprouting from its shoulder. ‘I want a closer look at that carrion. Fetch it for me.’ He dropped down off the obelisk, leaving Periphetes to attend to his task.
‘Why linger over dead flesh, Dread Lord?’ Cornak asked Rhodaan.
‘Because I want to know what manner of enemy stands between us and our objective,’ Rhodaan said. ‘The deluded slaves of the False Emperor I anticipated, but your divinations didn’t warn me to expect xenos,’ he pointed at the carcasses of the genestealers. ‘Forewarned is forearmed. I will not be taken by surprise again. It may be that this mission won’t be the simple affair you told me of back on Castellax.’
‘Divination is an art, not a science,’ Cornak protested. ‘The future is always in motion, always uncertain.’
Rhodaan glared at Cornak. ‘You told me once that you’d had a vision of the moment of your own death. If I learn you have dealt false with me, you will discover just how uncertain even a sorcerer’s future can be.’
The telepathic reverberations of each Inheritor’s death were like a hot iron stabbing into Bakasur’s skull. Singly, the pain was something the magus could suppress through exertion of his powerful will. This was different; the agonising feedback was compounded by the rapidity with which one death followed upon another. Such was the debilitation inflicted by the psychic screams that for nearly an hour it was all Bakasur could do to keep from dashing his brains out against the wall of the crematorium near the base of Mount Rama that he’d adopted as a temporary sanctum.
The loss of hybrids was inconsequential to the Cult of the Cataclysm. Their purpose was to work towards the time of ascension. Death was simply a means to achieve that purpose. Each cultist could envision no greater display of his fervour than to perish for the Great Father.
The Inheritors were different. They were cast in the sacred design of the Great Father, kindred of the holy pure-strains that had descended from the stars with the cult’s primogenitor. They were living representations of the ascension, wondrous and inviolate. Any hurt visited upon them was a cause for lamentation and reprisal.
Reprisal? Bakasur tried to slough the weak human impulse. Concepts of anger and revenge were base, emotional appeals. Primitive, and unworthy of his exalted station. He, whose mind communed directly with the wisdom of the Great Father, had to rise to a clarity of thought that had no place for illogical sentiment. His sight must always be upon the grand scheme, the design laid out by the master. Anything that did not serve to further that plan was to be discarded.
Bakasur stirred from his tortured daze, meeting the anxious stares of his bodyguards and attendants. A large throng of hybrids had gathered in the crematorium, flocking to the magus in his moment of debility. To many of them, he was an extension of the Great Father, the voice and prophet of their faith. Bakasur would have felt shame at such mislaid devotion had his half-alien mind been capable of the sensation.
Instead, the magus gestured to his followers, waving his wormy fingers as though in benediction. Through words and telepathic impulses, he gave them their orders. Those with him in the crematorium would hasten through the Cloisterfells, gathering the cult reserves yet lurking in the tunnels. The time had come to commit them to the battle. They had a part to play, and the scene for their role would be Mount Rama.
His brush with the mind of Cornak had revealed things to Bakasur. When the Iron Warriors arrived on Lubentina, it had been natural for the cult to believe they were the answer to Palatine Yadav’s call for help. The Great Father had been troubled by such development. Regiments of Astra Militarum could have been infected and infiltrated, but the enhanced biology of Space Marines offered no such possibilities. They were threat without profit. That being the case, the magus had thought to eliminate them as quick
ly as possible.
It was there that Bakasur had made a grave error in judgement. He’d grossly underestimated the nature of his enemy. He hadn’t counted upon the fearsome abilities of the Space Marines or believed there could exist such warriors as these. Outnumbered by several orders of magnitude, the Iron Warriors not only survived but triumphed. Now even the sacred Inheritors were falling prey to them.
Yes, Bakasur had failed to appreciate the abilities of the Iron Warriors. Now that he did, that knowledge passed from him into the Great Father. Again, where the magus saw an obstacle the patriarch discerned an opportunity.
The Iron Warriors were as much the enemy of the planetary authorities as the cult itself. They might prove a useful distraction when the cult moved against the Warmason’s Cathedral. From their route of march it was clear the Space Marines were making for Mount Rama, doubtless the cathedral itself.
Mobilising the reserves waiting in the Cloisterfells, the cult would besiege the cathedral, accomplishing two tasks in one action. There would be an entire army between the Iron Warriors and their goal, odds even the Space Marines must be hesitant to confront headlong. They would also capture the attention of Trishala and her Sisters inside the cathedral, occupying them with repelling the attackers. And while the Order of the Sombre Vow was occupied with the danger outside, they would be less vigilant towards the menace already inside their walls.
The Warmason’s Cathedral would fall to the Cult of the Cataclysm. Its loss would break the spirit of the Imperials, leave them shattered and broken. A ripe harvest to be gathered into the Great Father’s brood.
Chapter VIII
The bellow of explosions thundered down the battered streets of the psalmists’ quarter. A few frag grenades brought the purple-garbed hybrids stumbling out from their improvised fortification, blood and an inhuman treacle dripping from their battered bodies. Periphetes wasted no time in raking the cultists with his bolter, cutting them down at the knees as they emerged from the ferrocrete blockhouse. The vicious renegade brought his boltgun scything back around as he dropped the last of the survivors, ensuring none of them would crawl off to carry word back to their leaders. The blockhouse itself, the reinforced facade of an air-recycler’s shelter, exploded outwards as Captain Uzraal threw a krak grenade through the vent-like window.
Cornak could feel the mind of the magus focusing on him. It was too cautious to test the sorcerer’s psychic defences and arcane wards, but it wasn’t so timid as to keep away entirely. He had the impression that it was studying them, evaluating them like a magos biologis. It was trying to see how they worked and what use might be made of them.
Such was the impression that had reached Cornak’s consciousness. If that had been the only intelligence he distilled from the hybrid’s psychic presence, he would have felt rage. Though he was a sorcerer, he was foremost a Space Marine, the pinnacle of human perfection. He was no specimen to be ogled by a curious alien.
Yet there was more. A chilling familiarity that slowly stirred his hearts. Cornak had ‘seen’ this being before. He’d witnessed it in that confusion of prophecy shared by the Circle in the warp. He could give it a name, Bakasur, and he could give it a twisted sort of face. He could see it in a place of hellfire and shadow, leering and triumphant. At its feet, one of the Circle lay sprawled in death.
Cornak had seen many deathly visions over the centuries, witnessed the unfolding of prophecies that had taken others of the Circle. Always there’d been the concern that the doom might be his own, but never had the concern grown into a certainty. He was here and Bakasur was here. The temptation was there to try to escape the vision, to leave Lubentina and forget the ambition that had brought him here. Such timidity was for the merely human, the wretches Rhodaan and his warriors disdained as ‘flesh’. A daemon had once told Cornak that those who seek to escape their doom will find it while those who embrace their doom may find they instead have escaped it. The sorcerer had always found that the more enigmatic and vexing a daemon’s words the more truth there was within them.
‘The xenos are persistent,’ Rhodaan’s voice crackled across the vox. Cornak shifted his awareness from the psychic shadow of Bakasur to the forbidding presence of the warsmith. Rhodaan was looking across the demolished blockhouse and the hybrids Periphetes had slaughtered.
Captain Uzraal kicked one of the dead cultists. ‘Half human but all fool if they think they can stop us with such pathetic opposition.’
‘Uzraal, auspex,’ Rhodaan told him.
The Iron Warriors captain consulted the device. The only exhibition of annoyance he didn’t quite suppress was the surly way he returned it to its holster when he’d relayed the details.
Cornak advanced towards the two officers, the butt of his staff tapping against the scarred street. ‘They don’t think to stop us, only delay us.’
‘More visions, brother?’ Uzraal grumbled. His wasn’t the most complex mentality among the Iron Warriors of the Third Grand Company. His distrust of Cornak’s powers was something he didn’t bother to conceal. The sorcerer rather suspected it was loyalty more than capability that had caused Rhodaan to elevate Uzraal to his position.
‘One doesn’t need sorcery to make that determination,’ Rhodaan said. ‘The rebels haven’t made a serious effort against us since we killed the genestealers.’ He turned towards Cornak. ‘The question is why they are only content with these half measures. These creatures don’t shun a fight and seem to have absorbed some of the ferocity of the genestealers in their tainted blood. You say they want only to delay us. Why?’
Cornak was careful in his answer. ‘They think we’ve come to aid the Imperials,’ he said. ‘The xenos are trying to get at the flesh hiding inside the cathedral. That is where they have concentrated their strength.’
‘The xenos are right to worry,’ Rhodaan declared. He looked away, lifting his horned head and peering between the burned-out buildings lining the street, staring up at Mount Rama and the Warmason’s Cathedral. ‘They’ve put themselves in my way. They will find that a costly mistake.’
Lieutenant Manat watched the desolate streets around the base of Mount Rama from the turret of his Leman Russ. It was an eerie, almost surreal scene to see these avenues that had once been packed with pilgrims and acolytes now utterly deserted. The sensation was even more pronounced when he considered the combat raging elsewhere in Tharsis. Fierce fighting along the Netjali overlooking the scholarium that had seen an entire division of infantry and a brigade of armour committed against the enemy. A gun battle that was entering its fourth day among the hab-stacks of the Illuminators’ Guild. Riots at the spaceport that pitted thousands of desperate pilgrims against the defence forces.
Here at the mouth of the Redeemer’s Road the only conflict was in keeping the refugees away from the barricades. It was an inglorious assignment, even cruel in its way, but Manat had impressed on his men the importance of their duty. Too many refugees were already on the slopes of Mount Rama, more than could possibly take shelter in the Warmason’s Cathedral. Preventing more from swarming up the mountain increased the chances of survival for the ones already there. Even for the ones who weren’t, if they would only see reason and seek safety elsewhere. After hours of trying to get them to disperse, Manat had stopped trying to reason with the frightened mob. It was enough that they respected the guns of the local militia and didn’t try to force the issue by rushing the barricades.
The whine of a hatch door opening drew Manat’s attention from the refugees and the streets. He looked down to see his vox-operator Ganak motioning to him.
‘Lieutenant, we have an alert from the Adepta Sororitas,’ he said, handing the headset up to his commander.
The Battle Sisters had observers posted around the top of the cathedral, affording them a bird’s-eye view of the districts around Mount Rama. Manat had heard them vox reports to various militia units and to Colonel Hafiz’s headquarters in the Sovereign
Spire, relaying the enemy movements they spotted.
Now what the Sisters had seen was of much more immediate concern to Manat and his men. Concentrations of enemy vehicles had been seen moving towards the base of Mount Rama, rushing straight towards the barricades.
Manat hurriedly barked orders to his men. Ganak issued a last appeal to the refugees to disperse across the tank’s vox-casters, refraining from telling them about the approaching enemy lest the information send them into complete panic. The Leman Russ’ turret slowly rotated around, the battle cannon aiming towards the deserted streets. The gunners manning the heavy bolters of the two Taurox assault vehicles at the barricade elevated their weapons to direct their fire against more distant targets. The few dozen infantry took position along the top of the barricade.
As Manat listened to the Sororitas observers describe the enemy forces moving against not only his position, but all of the approaches to Mount Rama, he felt a chill rush through him. Knowing what was coming wouldn’t make it any easier to face.
From the direction of the Chastened Road, Manat heard the crack of gunfire. A moment later he heard shots sound from near the barricade across the Pilgrims’ Path. Then from the darkened buildings facing his own position, a motley array of ordnance opened up. Las-beams sizzled against the barricade, bullets clattered from the armaplas plating of the Leman Russ and the armour of the Taurox.
The hasty, imprecise gunfire inflicted no casualties among Manat’s men, serving only to harass them and force their heads down. Among the refugees the effect was more direct. They rushed at the barricade, screaming in terror. While Manat’s men tried to force them back, the rebels threw the next phase of their attack against the local militia.
The darkened streets disgorged an array of crudely armoured trucks and tracked labour-crawlers, each machine crewed by fanatics and armed with lasguns and stubbers. From the ruined buildings, a horde of purple-clad cultists charged towards the barricade. The aggression of the rebels accomplished something Manat’s entreaties couldn’t. With the cultists rushing towards them, the refugees scattered, fleeing in every direction.
