Iron Warriors - The Omnibus

by Graham McNeill

  Bronn shook his head at such a mongrel mix of killers.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Honsou, approaching from the nearest Hellbore. ‘It’s an ugly looking army.’

  ‘Ugly doesn’t even begin to cover it,’ said Bronn. ‘I can accept a great many things, but to know that we have fallen so far is… galling. We once fought alongside the primarchs, gods of the battlefield, and now we draft sub-par warriors who call themselves Space Marines and unclean species from who knows where in the galaxy to fight our battles.’

  ‘These are cannon fodder,’ said Honsou. ‘And if it makes you feel any better, they’re all going to die.’

  ‘Yet you are going with them into the valley.’

  Honsou shook his head. ‘No, these are just a distraction, something to keep the Ultramarines looking straight ahead while I go beneath them.’

  ‘Hiding in plain sight,’ said Bronn with a slow smile of understanding.

  ‘Just so,’ agreed Honsou.

  Bronn’s hand unconsciously moved towards his pistol as Cadaras Grendel and the creature Honsou called the Newborn approached. Both saw the gesture and their posture changed immediately. Grendel grinned in anticipation of a fight, while the Newborn looked at him curiously, as though trying to decide which limb to remove first. It took an effort of will, but Bronn removed his hand from his weapon.

  Grendel laughed and jerked his thumb in the direction of the Newborn. ‘Very wise, this one would have ripped your head off before that gun could clear its holster.’

  Bronn ignored Grendel, watching as the sinuous forms of the blade dancers climbed into the last Hellbore. Each was a swordmaster of sublime skill that had followed their champion, Notha Etassay, to New Badab in search of enemies worthy of their blades. Bound to Honsou after he had defeated Etassay during the final duel of the Skull Harvest, they were devotees of the Dark Prince and therefore not to be trusted.

  Honsou followed his gaze and said, ‘This is war; and I’ll make use of such weapons or warriors as I have without care or regret.’

  ‘I said the same thing to Dassadra,’ replied Bronn. ‘But I was lying.’

  Honsou shrugged. ‘You still believe in the old ways, Bronn. That’s always been your problem.’

  ‘The old ways were good enough for Lord Perturabo,’ said Bronn.

  ‘And look where that got him,’ said Honsou with sudden anger. ‘Stuck in a dead city on Medrengard, imprisoned by his own bitterness and resentment. If he cared so much about the wrongs done to him, why isn’t he out bringing every Imperial stronghold to ruin? There isn’t one fortress wall left standing that he couldn’t put to rubble in a day.’

  Honsou’s vehemence surprised Bronn. He hadn’t thought the Warsmith cared anything for the Long War or Perturabo’s notable absence from its battles. Had Bronn misjudged him or was this yet another piece of theatre designed to achieve an end that could not yet be seen?

  ‘The ways of our master are not for us to judge,’ he said, though words sounded hollow even to him.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Honsou. ‘They are ours to judge. And one day someone will take Perturabo to task for his lack of action.’

  That made Bronn laugh. ‘Really? And who will that be? You?’

  Honsou’s anger vanished, and Bronn was reminded how unpredictable Honsou could be, as violent as a berserker or as capricious as a pleasure-seeker of the Dark Prince.

  ‘Who knows?’ said Honsou with a broken-toothed grin. ‘Maybe I will one day. Wouldn’t that be delicious? A half-breed mongrel bastard sat atop the Ivory Throne. What I wouldn’t give to see old Forrix’s face if he could have lived to see that!’

  ‘You’re insane,’ said Bronn, as sure of that fact as he was about the composition of Calth’s bedrock.

  ‘You might be right,’ said Honsou, turning away and making his way towards the assault ramp of the Hellbore. ‘But I have a shrine to find and you have a battle to prolong.’

  A group of perhaps forty Iron Warriors marched ahead of Honsou, filing into the Hellbore with unquestioning discipline. Bronn knew a great many of these warriors; they were among the finest killers left to the Legion. All had fought on Terra, and each had sworn personal oaths of moment before the Ivory Throne. A pang of bitter and solemn regret touched Bronn to see such warriors engaged in such an ignoble war.

  Honsou climbed to the top of the ramp and turned as Grendel and the Newborn went inside. He raised a fist to Bronn and slammed it hard against his breastplate.

  ‘Give me a day,’ said Honsou. ‘Give me a day, and I’ll give you a victory that will make you forget there ever were any “old ways”.’

  Bronn nodded as the assault ramp folded up into the body of the Hellbore, but his heart sank as he heard the lie in the Warsmith’s voice.

  Honsou was leaving them to die.

  NOW

  The pain was getting worse.

  His armour was non-functional, and he could barely move. His strength, once so formidable, was deserting him. Plates that had once protected him from harm were now a burden his weakening body could no longer endure. He remembered being presented with his armour in the columned majesty of the Gallery of Stone, kneeling with thousands of his fellow warriors before the burnished form of the primarch.

  Bronn remembered the unbreakable pride he had felt, the sense of belonging to something greater that had sustained him all through the darkest days of the Great Betrayal. The Long War and the decline of the Legion had shown him there was no such thing as unbreakable. Even the greatest pride could be humbled, even the mightiest fortress could be breached, and even the staunchest faith could be shattered in the face of betrayal.

  How had he failed…?

  The attack of the Bloodborn had been defeated, broken and hurled back by the combined might of the Ultramarines and their mortal armies. The savage warriors of the Mechanicus had fallen upon their dark brothers, fighting with a ferocious hatred born of the knowledge that their foes had once been like them. Yet even as the battle turned in the favour of the Imperial forces, the Black Basilica had joined the fight, and its vast array of guns had wrought fearful carnage upon the defenders, bringing them to the verge of destruction.

  But even that mighty weapon had been lost…

  Pieces of the dark leviathan lay scattered around the cavern, its priceless debris left to rust in the moist atmosphere, for no adepts of the Dark Mechanicus remained alive to gather them. Bronn should have anticipated a stealthy insertion, after all the Raven Guard had always been the masters of the shadow strike and the infiltration of the most heavily defended citadels.

  Bronn remembered fighting alongside Corax and his warriors many years ago, in battles that had been forgotten by that primarch’s sons, but which were still fresh in his mind. For all that the Space Marines of this stagnant Imperium were pale shadows of the great Legions of old, the man who had led his team into the heart of the Black Basilica was a warrior worthy of the title. Professional admiration gave way to pain as he coughed a wad of blood onto his chest.

  With the destruction of the Black Basilica, the fight had gone out of the Bloodborn, and Bronn cursed Honsou for allying what little strength remained to their fragment of the Legion to such dross. Dassadra had slaughtered scores as they fell back over the wall, bloodied and broken against the ceramite and blue lines of the cavern’s defenders.

  A gloomy status quo had fallen between the two armies as Bronn and Dassadra sought to re-establish control over the shattered mortals of the Bloodborn. Threats, promises of plunder and a number of strategic executions had brought order back to the host, and Bronn had drawn up plans for a second assault when yet another disaster had struck.

  With the Bloodborn drawn up in readiness to assault the valley once again, word came of an attack from the rear. Sporadic explosions and gunfire drifted from the tunnel they had fought to clear for the Black Basilica, the rattle of small-arms fire and the heavier blasts of wide-bore guns belonging to battle tanks. It should have been impossible.
Hadn’t the Ultramarines been broken on the surface? But as more contact reports screamed over the vox, it became impossible to deny the reality of the catastrophe.

  A ragtag host of scavenged armoured vehicles, ad-hoc battalions and Ultramarines surged from the tunnel mouth and fell upon the Bloodborn with the fury of berserkers. Bronn knew some form of communication must have passed between these Ultramarines and the defenders of the valley when an answering battle cry went up from the three fortresses.

  Their gates had opened and thousands of blue-armoured soldiers had charged out with squads of Ultramarines at their head. Despite the best efforts of Bronn and Dassadra, the sight of two forces closing on them had shattered the last courage of the Bloodborn and they had scattered into disparate warbands, striking out for their own survival, little realising that by doing so they had doomed themselves.

  Hammer and anvil, both forces of Ultramarines had smashed together, crushing the Bloodborn between them, and they had not been merciful. Yet for all that the battle was lost, the Iron Warriors were not about to lay down their weapons and go quietly into defeat. Knowing that Honsou had left them to die, Bronn had prepared for such a moment and waited until the time was right to vent his last breath of hatred.

  The traitor Warsmith Dantioch had called it the final solution to any siege, and in that at least he had been right.

  A vast array of explosives rigged along the length of the tunnel awaited his trigger signal, and as Bronn saw an Ultramarines sergeant coming for him with murder in his stride, he had known that time had come. With one last look at the fortifications he had fought and bled to build, Bronn mashed the firing trigger and the world ended in fire, falling rock and thunder. He expected to die in the collapse, but he had lived, though it was to be only a brief respite.

  Bronn blinked away afterimages of crackling detonations, strobing flashes of secondary explosions and crackling ammo fires.

  He knew he was dying, but to die for this?

  To be nothing more than… what, a distraction for a mission that had clearly failed?

  That was galling for a warrior of his heritage.

  He felt the earth shake again, and his eyes flicked towards the roof of the cavern. Dust fell in a dry rain, and spalling flakes of glassy stone sounded like sand trickling through an hourglass as it slowly coated the battlefield. Though the cavern’s structure was sound, Bronn wished for the cave to collapse, to bury this moment of infamy beneath millions of tonnes of rock and deny his foes any succour in triumph.

  The ground shook again, but this was no aftershock of his final solution, this was a tremor of something moving beneath the earth. Bronn knew rock well enough to know the difference, and he pressed his palm to the ground, letting it speak to him as it had on countless occasions before. He felt the seismic communication, the echoes and the gnawing bite of melta-bladed cutters as they clove the rock like a pack of subterranean borer-ambulls.

  Beyond the mangled remains of a trio of Basilisk artillery pieces, the earth heaved upwards, and a geyser of spraying stone and mud exploded into the air as something iron and yellow heaved its bulk into the cavern. Bronn instantly recognised the conical snout and flared rock scoops of a Hellbore drilling rig.

  ‘Careful, you idiot…’ he hissed. ‘The soil is always thinner nearer the surface.’

  Whoever was driving the Hellbore was unskilled in the finer points of its operation, handling it like a runaway Land Raider instead of a precision tunnelling device. Sparks flew as its drill cogs tore through a wrecked chassis of a smouldering battle tank. Metal shavings flew like glittering decoy chaff ejected from the defence pod of a Thunderhawk.

  The Hellbore vanished from sight as it lurched past its centre of gravity and crashed down onto its side. An explosion ripped up from the mangled tank as an ammo cache exploded. More than likely, the occupants of the Hellbore were now trapped within. If the Ultramarines didn’t kill them, the lack of oxygen would eventually see them dead.

  Whoever had brought the machine back to Four Valleys Gorge had returned to defeat and death, and Bronn dismissed the tunneller as he heard the voices of Ultramarines, curt orders barked in a battle cant that had not changed in ten thousand years.

  Such a span of time was almost incomprehensible. To Bronn, those days of gods and heroes were a past he had lived in the span of a single lifetime, but these warriors had only half-remembered myths to tell them of such long ago days. They could not remember what was a recent memory for him…

  I was there when the walls of the Imperial Palace fell.

  Bronn turned his head, searching for a weapon to hold as he died. A bolter lay within easy reach, but beyond it he caught sight of Earthbreaker, the weapon that had cast unnumbered fortresses down and raised myriad others to the skies. His gauntlet closed on the T-shaped pommel, and he dragged it over the broken ground with his fingertips. The blade scraped over the black stone brought down from the cavern’s ceiling, high-density igneous rock laid down in volcanic eruptions before men had set foot on this world.

  ‘Fused metamorphic stone from close to the surface,’ he said with a wheezing, frothed breath that told him his lungs had finally collapsed. With only his secondary organ dragging oxygen to his broken body, it was only a matter of time until hypoxia killed him.

  ‘Aurelian’s sons were thorough in their spite,’ he noted, seeing fragments of irradiated flakes mixed in with the rock.

  ‘Yet still they were defeated,’ said a cultured, perfectly enunciated voice above him.

  A foot stamped down on Earthbreaker’s haft, snapping the weapon in two. Anger engulfed Bronn, and he rolled onto his back, ignoring the shooting spikes of searing pain that engulfed his chest, yet left his body below untouched. He looked up at a broad-shouldered warrior in the azure battle plate of the Ultramarines. A golden eagle glittered at his chest and star-bleached emerald trim lined the notched edges of his shoulder guards.

  ‘Things might have been different had the Iron Warriors been with them,’ hissed Bronn, clutching the broken handle of Earthbreaker to his chest. The warrior shook his head and removed his laurel-wreathed helm, revealing a face of classic patrician proportions, symmetrical and with high cheekbones, a strong chin and close-cropped blond hair that framed eyes of milky blue. Every inch an Ultramarine.

  ‘You are defeated here,’ said the warrior, sliding a fresh magazine into his pistol. ‘I do not think the outcome then would have been much different had a wretch like you been there.’

  ‘You are wrong, whelp, iron is forever,’ said Bronn, letting his head loll to one side. ‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron.’

  ‘What is that?’ asked the warrior, his voice dripping with contempt. ‘A prayer?’

  ‘It is the Unbreakable Litany,’ said Bronn, his strength fading. ‘And may it forever be so.’

  Through the dancing flames of defeat, Bronn saw a darting figure slip through the wreckage of the Basilisks crushed by the Hellbore, a half-glimpsed shadow with a limb that threw the firelight queerly from its mercurial surface. Though it should have been impossible, Bronn thought he saw a pale blue glow of an augmetic eye through the sheeting dust and ash.

  Your mission is complete, the eye seemed to say. But mine goes on…

  ‘Why did you come here?’ demanded the Ultramarine. ‘You must have know you could not defeat the true sons of Guilliman.’

  ‘Why did we come here?’ smiled Bronn, shaking his head as a weight lifted from his broken body. ‘Better you don’t know.’

  He loosened his grip on the iron will that held his life anchored to his flesh, staring up at the Ultramarines warrior with a last breath of defiance.

  ‘You think you have won a victory here?’ he said.

  ‘I know we have,’ said the warrior. ‘Your force is destroyed, and Calth is ours again. All across Ultramar, your master’s armies are being pushed from our worlds. Yes, I would say this is a victory.’


  ‘The years have not been kind to the Ultramarines,’ said Bronn. ‘Once they were the Battle Kings of Macragge, but you are just poor shadows of those giants.’

  The warrior levelled his pistol at Bronn.

  ‘I should leave you to suffer your pain, but it insults me to let you sully this world with your life a moment longer.’

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Bronn. ‘Tell me the name of the man who is going to kill me.’

  The warrior considered his request for a moment before nodding.

  ‘I am Learchus Abantes, sergeant of the Ultramarines Fourth Company.’

  Bronn smiled. ‘The Fourth, yes. Of course it would be one of you.’

  Learchus pulled the trigger, and Bronn died knowing yet more blood would be spilled before the Iron Warriors were done with Calth.

  THE BEAST OF CALTH

  Blood dripped from the tip of the blade as it hovered in front of Kellan’s eye. He’d watched its lethally-sharp edge cut his comrades up, helpless to stop their mutilation and murder. The beast had killed them all. Joelle, their flinty-eyed sergeant, had fallen first, her belly opened in grotesque mockery of the births she had once presided over in her pre-Defence Auxilia days. Dour-hearted Aquillen had been next, the blade opening him from groin to sternum.

  Young Telion, named for the venerable scout of the Chapter, had cried for his mother as the knife removed his leg with the speed of a laser-amputator. He’d bled out after a few minutes, weeping and begging her to take away the pain. Karysta had given the beast nothing: no screams, no pleading cries for mercy. She’d heard the scare stories too, and known the beast had no mercy in him. She wasn’t about to waste her breath on futile words.

  Then the beast had turned on him, gladius in hand. Proportioned for an Adeptus Astartes warrior, it was enormous to a mortal: a hewing broadsword with a blade that could cut deep into the toughest war plate. It had sliced through the layered mesh and kevlar of their Defence Auxilia uniforms like paper.