Iron Warriors - The Omnibus

by Graham McNeill

  ‘It has already been moved,’ she said. ‘It is where it needs to be.’

  ‘And where is that?’ asked Olantor.

  ‘Protecting something very valuable that cannot be allowed to fall into enemy hands.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what that is?’ said Olantor. ‘All along I have known that there is more to the Inquisition’s presence on this star fort than watching for any lingering taint from the daemons who once captured it. Tell me why you are here, and tell me now.’

  At first he thought she was going to refuse, but Sibiya looked down at the plotting table and the scenes of slaughter on the Via Rex.

  ‘Very well, I will tell you,’ she said, ‘but it will be hard for you to hear.’

  Honsou dropped from the back of the Land Raider, sweeping up his bolter and joining the race to the vast gateway of the basilica. Green fire crackled around the mighty fortress’s embrasures and gun ports, rippling like liquid over the statues and gargoyles peering down at him. Lines of electrical discharge streamed over the building, as though its very structure was under attack.

  The enormous gateway barring entry into the basilica was wide open, the few soldiers gathered in the tapering narthex staring in horror at doors that stubbornly refused to close. Bolter shells burst amongst them, and a roaring battle tank with bloodstained sides and a series of flame lances mounted on its upper carapace swept inside, setting alight the wooden panelling on the walls and silken banners hanging from the ceiling.

  Kaarja Salombar leapt nimbly from her skiff, her curved blades cutting a path through the ragged defenders as they scrambled to escape the wrath of the flame tank. Hulking ogres smashed ornamentation from the walls and pulled down columns with their chain grapples.

  Cadaras Grendel and Notha Etassay joined him at the entrance of the basilica.

  ‘Adept Cycerin has done his work well,’ said Etassay, flourishing a bloody sword.

  ‘Damn good job,’ commented Grendel. ‘Else we’d be out here with our necks on the block.’

  ‘Grendel is right,’ said Etassay. ‘Had your pet magos failed…’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ snapped Honsou. ‘And we are inside.’

  ‘Aye, that we are,’ said Grendel. ‘Now what? So where’s this daemon lord then?’

  No sooner were the words out of Grendel’s mouth than a cascade of information flooded Honsou’s visor. Rippling lines of green text, overlaid with schematic diagrams of the basilica’s interior, streamed before his eyes. In an instant, the interior layout of the basilica was laid out before Honsou, as clearly and as indelibly as though he himself had been the architect.

  Immediately, he saw what he was looking for, pulsing like a beating heart.

  The warp core of the Indomitable.

  ‘It’s right below us,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Olantor watched Sibiya’s techs and the adept with the furred robe as they attached cables to the iron box he had last seen in a refrigerated shipping container in the Interrogator’s ship. Vapour slithered over its surface and the few icicles left on its surface were melting in the heat of the cavernous chamber deep in the heart of the Indomitable.

  Leaving token blocking forces in place throughout the compromised star fort, Olantor had followed Interrogator Sibiya’s Saurians down innumerable flights of steps carved into the basilica’s structure to the engineering decks, where they had passed through the treacherously opened door to the colossal fort’s warp core.

  Olantor had never seen anything quite so incredible, and its scale took his breath away. A circular chamber the size of the largest parade ground on Macragge, with a fiery column of crackling, dancing light rising to the ceiling a thousand metres above the floor. Chains and pulleys were attached to a circular gantry surrounding the highest point of the column, hanging to the deck like dark strands of hair. The seething light was sheathed in inscribed plates of thick armoured glass and sheets of bronze, a harnessed thunderstorm of epic proportions.

  Distant shapes swam in the light, twisted outlines that flickered and burned themselves on the retina like fading afterimages of snapshot memories.

  Clawed hands, gaping maws and burning eyes.

  Even beneath the plates of his armour, Olantor could feel the immense, impossible, energies bound within that central column of blinding light. His skin itched and his soul rebelled to see such power bound and shackled to human cause. He tried not to look at the warp core for fear of what he might see.

  ‘How much longer?’ he demanded.

  ‘Not long,’ said Sibiya. ‘Trust me, this isn’t the kind of thing you want to rush. One tiny mistake and it could just as easily turn on us.’

  Olantor turned away, still trying to come to terms with what Sibiya had told him.

  The Lord of Macragge, Marneus Calgar had lied to them all.

  The daemon lord M’kar still lived.

  Chapter legends proudly told how Marneus Calgar and Terminators from the First Company had boarded the Indomitable and defeated M’kar’s daemonic hordes. Pages were devoted to the battle between Lord Macragge and the upstart daemon, entire tracts describing the poetry of his every blow.

  Varro Tigurius spoke of the righteous wrath by which the Chapter Master had struck the daemon down with the Gauntlets of Ultramar and torn it limb from limb.

  It was all a lie.

  He had not believed Sibiya, had raged at the dishonour she did to Lord Calgar with her baseless accusations. He threatened her life, but upon seeing the star fort’s warp core, he had known she spoke the truth.

  One look into the raging fire of the core was enough to convince Olantor that something ancient and diabolical was chained within its molten depths. Hatred bled from the light and Olantor fought to maintain his composure in the face of the bound creature and the betrayal it represented. The scale of such untruth struck at Olantor’s core, his soul and faith in his Chapter shaken to their very foundations.

  Under Brother Altarion’s directions, Sibiya’s Saurians and the surviving Ultramar Auxilia were forming barricades from overturned engineering benches, emptied barrels of machine ore and stacked crates of spare parts. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something to mount a defence of the warp core.

  A hundred warriors was all they could muster now, a hundred men and women to stand against a rampaging army intent on releasing a daemon lord upon Ultramar. And of those hundred warriors, only two were Ultramarines.

  Admittedly, one was a Dreadnought, but still…

  Their defences were as strong as they could make them, but with the mechanisms of the star fort turned against them, Olantor knew they could hold for moments at best.

  But moments might be all they would need.

  He turned and marched towards where a handful of techs and servitors were buried in the heart of the warp core controls. Pater Monna directed the work of half a dozen specialised Navigator-spliced servitors as they connected wires, welded portions of the plotting table and a host of other components together. Olantor didn’t even try to guess what they might be.

  Pater Monna looked up from his work as Olantor approached.

  ‘You must hurry, Navigator,’ said Olantor.

  ‘I’m not a Navigator,’ said Pater Monna. ‘I just work for the Castanas. My family is bonded to them after the marriage of–’

  Olantor waved his hand to stall Pater Monna’s full family history. He knew it was the man’s means of coping with the stress, but he had no time to indulge his panic.

  ‘How much longer until you are able to trigger a warp jump?’

  Pater Monna shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That is not good enough,’ warned Olantor. ‘Our enemies will be here soon. We cannot let them release the daemon. Do you understand what is at stake?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do. Better than you, probably.’

  ‘Then when will you be ready?’

  ‘A minute? Never?’ shouted Pater Monna, indicating the makeshift tools and mass of tangled wires, diodes and v
alves spilling from the core control panel. ‘It’s hopeless. I can’t work under these conditions.’

  ‘You have to,’ snapped Olantor. ‘These are the conditions we have.’

  ‘But it’s impossible,’ protested Pater Monna. ‘To manually trigger a warp jump without coordinates? It’s madness. And to make a warp jump this close to a planet…’

  ‘I know,’ said Olantor. ‘The gravity well will drag us into its heart.’

  ‘It’ll kill us all,’ said Pater Monna needlessly.

  ‘That’s what I’m counting on.’

  ‘Will it kill… that?’ said Monna, gesturing with a shoulder to the raging monster within the warp core.

  ‘I do not know,’ admitted Olantor. ‘That is what I hope.’

  Honsou took the stairs three at a time. Following the glowing schematic overlaid on his helmet’s visor, he led his Iron Warriors down into the basilica. Gunfire raged around him, las-fire from choke points on the defensive landings and roaring bolter and flamer fire from his own warriors.

  The narrow stairwells were death traps, but they were death traps for the defenders, for they were so hopelessly outnumbered that they could not hope to stem the tide of Iron Warriors. Honsou’s ogres used their chain grapples to tear down the barricades and the Iron Warriors battered their way through the defenders, killing as they went and leaving no survivors in their wake.

  Grendel laughed as he emptied the magazines of his bolter. He discarded the weapon, and continued the slaughter with his viciously-toothed sword, his latest melta gun slung over one shoulder. Notha Etassay eschewed projectile weapons, favouring his twin swords and awesome speed to kill. The warrior moved like liquid, seeming to shift instantly from one place to another in the blink of an eye. Only one touched by the gods could move so quickly.

  Exquisite hangings burned in the fires, and smoke billowed up the stairwells as the Iron Warriors forced their way onto the engineering levels of the Indomitable. Honsou fired his bolter in careful bursts, each pull of the trigger taking down a handful of mortal soldiers.

  Nothing Imperial was getting out of this fortress alive.

  Honsou knelt beside the body of a dead soldier. Shattered ribs poked from his armour where a bolter shell had exploded within his chest, and Honsou dipped the fingers of his silver arm into the wound.

  He watched the ruby droplets fall from his hand and said, ‘Their blood is weak, I can smell the fear in it. They have no substance to them.’

  ‘You don’t need to smell their blood to know that,’ hissed Grendel, lifting his own bloody gauntlets.

  ‘They fight poorly,’ added Etassay, ‘but Honsou is right. Their fear adds a certain… frisson… to the proceedings.’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ snapped Grendel, like an attack dog on a leash. ‘I just want to kill them.’

  ‘Have no fear, dear Grendel,’ said Etassay, sliding up behind him and whispering at his ear. ‘I’ll be sure to leave some for you.’

  Grendel shrugged off the blademaster. ‘How much further?’ he demanded.

  ‘One more level down,’ said Honsou, calling up the star fort’s plans onto his visor. ‘This was the last choke point.’

  ‘Then let’s get this done,’ hissed Grendel, setting off once more.

  This deep in the basilica, the walls were steel and bronze, stencilled with bold warnings of hazards and penalties for failing to observe appropriate safety measures. Imperial eagles and brilliant white ‘U’ symbols adorned every warning, and Honsou sneered at such ostentation.

  Typical of the Ultramarines to think of the safety of mortals.

  ‘That will be your undoing,’ he whispered as he followed Grendel along a wide corridor of hissing pipes, flashing orange lights and blaring sirens. An automated voice warned of intruders and Honsou took no small measure of pride in knowing that this was the only time that alarm had ever been broadcast.

  Up ahead, the tunnel made a sharp dogleg to the left and Honsou stepped in front of Grendel as he moved up to the bend. He glanced round the corner. A wide set of iron stairs led down to the blast-shielded gateway of a chamber lit by a brilliant blue white glow.

  Thanks to Adept Cycerin, the blast shield was locked open, and green sparks dripped from the locking panel at its side. A hastily-erected barricade of sandbags and overturned benches had been thrown up across the gateway, manned by at least twenty soldiers in the blue and gold of the Ultramarines’ vassal soldiers.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said, unable to keep the visceral excitement from his voice.

  A pair of a bipod-mounted autocannon unleashed a blizzard of heavy calibre shells, and a flurry of las-fire erupted from the soldiers’ guns at the sight of him.

  Honsou pressed himself flat. Explosive rounds chewed up the wall, spraying metal shavings and sparking flares over his armour, but doing no damage. Three of Salombar’s corsairs screamed as wild ricochets bounced around the corridor and cut them down. An Iron Warrior dropped to his knees as a rogue shell pulped the side of his helmet. Blood streamed over his shoulder guard, but the warrior got to his feet moments later.

  Honsou grinned, feeling the heady mix of combat-stimms and adrenal shunts pumping his body full of chemicals. The battle-surge was on him, and his body sang with the sweet taste of victory. He felt a rush of the recklessness that had served him well before, and rolled around the corner.

  He leapt straight to the bottom of the stairs, landing right in front of the barricade with a tremendous clang that buckled the metal-grilled floor. His augmetic eye instantly picked out the gunner and loader of the nearest autocannon. Two quick squeezes of his bolter’s trigger blew both of them back, the mass-reactive shells exploding within their armour and disintegrating their torsos.

  ‘Onwards!’ he shouted, charging the barricade. Lasguns spat bright bolts of energy at him, but they were hastily aimed and only two struck him. One melted a bright spot on his breastplate, the other left a glowing streak on his helmet. Neither was enough to stop him. He slammed into the sandbags, not even bothering to jump them, and barrelled through the flimsy barricade.

  The other autocannon roared in defiance, but it was quickly silenced. Honsou felt others beside him, but didn’t see them. His attention was on the killing around him, his bolter sweeping out to crush the skull of a nearby soldier. His silver fist shattered the ribcage of a second, a snap shot cut a third in half. Etassay danced through the melee, his blades lopping limbs with every graceful stroke. Like Honsou, Grendel bludgeoned his way through the battle, fists and elbows his weapons of choice.

  In moments it was over, and the defenders lay dead, a horrific sliced, battered and torn up collection of meat and bone. Blood coated his fists and slithered around the shimmering metal of his silver arm.

  Honsou stepped over the last bodies and nodded to Grendel as he surged through the gateway into the warp core.

  The mighty chamber was illuminated by a searing column of light bound within curved plates of etched bronze and glass, and no sooner had he laid eyes on it, then he knew he had reached his goal. He could sense the incredible power chained to the beating heart of the Indomitable, the ancient malice filling the air with hate and evil from a bygone age.

  Clustered around the column were the last of the star fort’s defenders, a lone Ultramarines warrior, the battle-scarred Dreadnought that had destroyed Votheer Tark’s battle-engines, and perhaps sixty or so mortal soldiers.

  Positioned behind more makeshift barricades, Honsou wanted to laugh at the futility of their resistance. This was all that stood between him and victory?

  In front of the pitiful remnants of the defenders stood an upright black oblong, a hissing, dripping object that looked like a coffin. Winking lights flashed rapidly at its centre and a host of ribbed cables snaked back to where a slight woman in battle plate the colour of an oil slick held a heavy, rubberised control pad.

  ‘What in the name of the warp is that?’ said Grendel.

  ‘You have them?’
said Olantor.

  ‘Sow the seeds of damnation and I shall reap the souls of the tainted,’ said Sibiya, quoting from a text Olantor didn’t recognise and rapidly blink-clicking the target acquisition lens of her helm.

  One by one, she picked out the warriors she identified as the champions of this host, uploading their biometric data to the Sentinel Array.

  ‘It’s done,’ she said.

  ‘Then release it,’ said Olantor.

  Sibiya nodded, pressing the activation key on the control pad.

  ‘Fear this, for it is your apocalypse,’ she said.

  The lights on the oblong box ceased flashing, and locking bolts around its front panel blew off in a series of percussive booms. It crashed to the grilled floor and a mist of billowing steam spilled from the box. Something moved in the haze and Honsou felt a moment’s trepidation at this last resort of the Imperials.

  A glossy black shape exploded from the steam, a lithe figure with a bone-white mask in the form of a skull. Its glossy black bodysuit was studded with injectors and stimm-shunts, but that was all he saw before it was amongst them.

  It moved faster than even Etassay, its limbs a blur of motion as it charged with a roar of hate that struck to the core of every Iron Warrior with its ferocity. A blade edged in blue fire licked out and skewered Grendel, stabbed home and withdrawn in the time it took to notice.

  Grendel dropped with a grunt of surprise as the monster spun away. Gunshots followed it, but its speed was inhuman, its body seeming to bend and sweep out of the path of every projectile. Its sword swept out, beheading an Iron Warrior and disembowelling one of Honsou’s ogres. It vaulted over the ogre, its red eyes blazing with killing fire.

  ‘Gods of the warp!’ hissed Honsou, unlimbering his black-bladed axe. ‘Eversor!’

  They surrounded the assassin, clubbing and stabbing, but their blows met thin air. Combat-stimms boosted the Eversor’s metabolism to monstrous heights, and its reactions were sharpened to impossible levels. It was a monster spawned in the depths of the

  Assassinorum’s darkest laboratories, a killer, a destroyer and a weapon of ultimate destruction.