“More hostiles inbound,” shouted Sabtec.
“Where?” snapped Kol Badar.
“Behind us,” replied Namar-sin, and Marduk swore.
“Sabtec, protect the rear. Enfilading fire,” ordered Kol Badar. The warriors of the 13th moved instantly into position, moving with practiced efficiency. All the warrior brothers were in cover, with one line facing north, one west.
“Khalaxis, report,” ordered Marduk.
“One dead, one as good as,” growled the towering champion of the 17th.
The Anointed split, two moving to join the 13th in the rear, the other two standing with Kol Badar at the entrance to the north tunnel.
“Burias,” hissed Marduk as he dropped in alongside Sabtec, watching the rear. He couldn’t see anything moving in the distance, but, respectful of the speed of the enemy, he judged that that did not mean much.
“Yes, my lord?” came the silken response on the vox-net.
“Guard Darioq-Grendh’al.”
Burias was slow to respond, and Marduk read the resistance to his orders in the silence.
“Protect him, icon bearer,” snapped Marduk. “He dies, and you die.”
Burias crouched atop the wreckage of one of the train’s carriages, sniffing the air. He sensed something nearby, but could not locate its whereabouts.
Movement out of the corner of his eye attracted his attention, and he snapped his head towards it, emitting a low growl. Even with his daemon-enhanced witch-sight, he could see nothing.
“Burias,” said Marduk, and the icon bearer hissed in frustration.
“Fine,” he replied, giving the area where he had sensed movement a final glare.
As he dropped down from the carriage to the cracked plascrete platform below, a whip-thin figure crawled forward across the top of the carriage behind him, its form vague as if it dragged the surrounding darkness around it like a shroud.
The icon bearer flicked a glance over his shoulder, and the shape melted into the shadows. In an instant, it was once more invisible, and Burias turned away, jogging towards Magos Darioq.
The stink of Chaos was strong around the magos, who was standing immobile behind the twisted wreckage of what may once have been an Imperial vehicle, oblivious to the preparations going on around him.
“Move there,” snapped Burias, giving the magos a shove. Darioq-Grendh’al walked mechanically forward, each slow step accompanied by the hiss and wheeze of servos.
“Here they come again,” said Kol Badar in his warning growl.
“Kill them, in Lorgar’s name!” roared Marduk.
“Contact from the east,” said Sabtec, his voice calm and measured.
Marduk glanced around the twisted metal he was taking cover behind, and saw a number of lithe figures darting from cover to cover, heading towards them up the tunnel. Even with his advanced vision and the supplementary enhancements provided by his helmet, they were difficult to focus on, for they moved so quickly.
The First Acolyte narrowed his eyes, as he focused on one of the xenos humanoids. For a moment, it was clearly visible as it crouched, the long fingers of one hand splayed out on the floor.
Its slim body was encased in a form-fitting suit of reflective black armour that moulded to its movements: a far cry from the heavy, inflexible plate worn by the Word Bearers. Barbed ridges rose along its forearms and shoulders, and its head was completely encased within a sleek, backwards sweeping helmet. It carried a long, slim weapon of alien design, and elegantly curving blades protruded from the barrel and hand-grip.
Then the alien was moving once again, its movements sharp and precise as it darted into cover. Its speed was almost unnatural; one moment it was perfectly still, utterly balanced and focused, the next it was gone. There was a grace and fluidity to its movements that no human, however enhanced, could ever hope to match.
“Eldar,” spat Marduk.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Solon sat alone in the mess room. His tray vibrated slightly on the metal table from the reverberations of the crawler’s engines, and the mugs hanging against the wall rattled. He still wore his bulky exposure suit, though he had slipped free of its upper half, which hung down behind him. He pushed away his half-eaten meal of bland synth-paste gruel as the door to the mess room was pushed open.
The foreman primaris tapped one of the nicotine sticks from his packet, and lit it with a deft flick of his butane lighter. He nodded to Cholos through the haze of blue-grey smoke as he sat down opposite.
The boy that they had found in the abandoned crawler unit moved forward from behind the door, his wide eyes wandering around the room.
“You gonna eat that?” asked Cholos, gesturing to the half-eaten meal.
Solon pushed the tray towards the orderly in response, blowing out another cloud of smoke.
Cholos coughed once and cleared his throat.
“Come on, kid. Get some food into you,” said Cholos, patting his hand on the seat of the vacant chair encouragingly. The boy moved forward warily, and his eyes locked on the food.
Solon stared at the boy, still seeing his son’s dead face. The boy wore an exposure suit that was much too large for him, its hood drawn back away from his head. The sleeves hung well past his hands, and the cuffs of its legs were bunched up around his ankles. As he shuffled forward, trying not to trip, he would have made a comical sight were he not so clearly malnourished.
He’d spoken not a word since they had brought him aboard, except to say his name when questioned: Dios. The boy’s words when they had found him still haunted Solon.
“They were taken,” the boy had said. There were some corpses aboard the crawler, but the vast majority of the people that had been onboard had apparently disappeared into thin air.
“By who?” Solon had asked.
“Ghosts,” the boy had replied, and the words had made Solon’s skin crawl.
“There is no such thing as ghosts,” the Interdiction sergeant, Folches, had said, though there had been little conviction in his voice, and Solon wondered whether he had been trying to convince the boy, or himself.
Solon had to agree with Folches, though. He didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits, but something had taken all those people. Fifteen hundred people do not just disappear.
Since bringing the boy onboard, the child had shadowed every step of Solon’s second, Cholos. Solon was just glad that the boy had not latched onto him. For his part, Cholos seemed to be enjoying the attention, and had even suggested making the boy the crawler crew’s mascot.
“That’s the way,” said Cholos as the boy tucked into Solon’s discarded food with gusto. “Hungry, aren’t you?”
“Find a woman amongst the refugees that has lost her son,” said Solon. “Give the boy to her.”
“Oh, I don’t mind lookin’ after him,” said Cholos.
“We don’t need a pet kid underfoot, Cholos,” said Solon. “Foist him off on one of the refugees. There are plenty of women down below who would take him.”
Cholos glared at Solon for a moment.
“Don’t listen to him, boy,” said Cholos. “He’s nothing but a mean old man.”
The boy, for his part, seemed oblivious to the conversation, focused on the meal before him. With a last lick of the standard issue spoon in his hands, he finished off the meal, smacking his lips loudly.
“Cholos,” began Solon, but his words were interrupted as the room shook violently. The crawler came to a shuddering halt, and warning lights began to flash. The wail of sirens blared from the hallway, and Solon was instantly up and moving.
“What the hell?” asked Cholos, knocking his chair over as he stood.
A second impact rocked the crawler, and mugs fell from their hooks to clatter on the floor. Solon clutched at the door-frame to steady himself.
“Ghosts,” murmured the boy, his eyes wide and fearful.
“Go, go, go!” shouted Folches as the crawler bay doors slid open.
The sergeant dropped to the ice and landed
in a crouch, his laslock rifle humming as its charge powered up.
The storm had, if anything, become fiercer, and punishing winds lashed against the soldiers of the Skyllan Interdiction as they peered into the whitewash of billowing snow.
“Can’t see a damn thing,” muttered one of Folches’s men, the sound crackling through on the sergeant’s micro-bead in his left ear.
“The crawler was hit from the north-east,” said Folches. “Move out, dispersal formation.”
“How can we engage what we can’t damn well see?” asked another of his team, his voice strained. Fear, Folches realised. He rounded on the man, and grabbed him by the shoulder, pulling him close.
“You done?” barked Folches into the man’s face, and the soldier nodded curtly. With a shove, Folches pushed him away, and gestured for two of his men to move around the front of the crawler, and for the other two to proceed around its rear.
His men nodded their responses, and the sergeant began moving towards the rear of the hulking behemoth, loping along the length of the crawler with his body low and the butt of his laslock pressed into his shoulder. Behind him, the two soldiers loped through the snow and ice. The other two men, moving in the opposite direction, disappeared instantly into the storm.
Reaching the rear of the ice-crawler, Folches gestured for his men to halt, and risked a glance around the back of the immense vehicle. Smoke was billowing from the engine stacks, and hot oil was spilling out onto the ice. Steam rose from where the oil was pooling.
Crouched low, he signalled for his men to take cover.
One of the soldiers, Leon, dropped to his stomach and began crawling elbow over elbow through one of the deep depressions created by the crawler’s track units, easing himself into position and sighting his long-barrelled lasgun out towards the north-east. The other ducked beneath the undercarriage of the crawler, and squirmed forward to take up a position looking out to the north-east.
Folches leant around the corner of the crawler, peering through the sight of his weapon. The scope rendered the landscape in shades of green, and though it lit up the darkness as if it were day, the fury of the storm was such that he could see no more than twenty metres ahead.
There was nothing to see, just a swirling blanket of snow and ice.
“Julius, you seeing anything out there?” he said into his micro-bead.
“Negative, sir,” came the response.
“Hold position,” he said.
The wind howled around Folches, and he remained motionless, waiting. Minutes dragged by, and the biting cold began to seep through his limbs.
He lifted his head away from his gun sight, and stared out into the blanketing white gale. A shadow of movement ghosted behind the veil of swirling ice.
He dropped his eye to his sight once more, straining to pick up the movement. He saw nothing, and swore under his breath.
“You see that, Leon?” he hissed into his micro-bead.
“Didn’t see anything, sir,” said the soldier.
“Damn it. There’s something out there. Julius, anything?”
There was no response from the other soldiers of his squad, just the relentless roaring of the wind.
“Julius, Marcab, come in,” said Folches, but again just silence answered him.
“Hell,” he swore.
The sergeant felt movement behind him, and he swung around, his heart thumping, bringing his laslock to bear on… nothing.
He was jumping at shadows, and he cursed himself. He forced his racing heart to slow, breathing in slowly.
“Calm yourself, man,” he said to himself as he resumed his position. He’d give anything for a blast of his stim-inhaler around about now, but he had left the black market narcotics back onboard the crawler.
Trying to push the cravings away, Folches took a deep breath, and tried to contact his other soldiers once more.
“Marcab. Julius. Come in,” he whispered hoarsely into his vox-bead. “Where the hell are you?” Again, nothing but silence.
He flashed a glance towards Leon, lying concealed in the crawler tracks. The motionless soldier was face down, and blood was splattered out around his shattered head.
Folches pulled back from the corner of the crawler, and a flurry of projectiles impacted with the metal, centimetres from his face.
Several of the rounds sliced past the corner of the crawler, whistling sharply as they sped through the air.
A strangled grunt carried to Folches’s ear on the wind, and he knew that the last of his squad, Remus, was dead.
Swearing, Folches leant out around the corner of the crawler, presenting the smallest target possible.
Half a dozen figures in glossy black armour were darting through the snow, and he saw larger, shadowy shapes gliding forwards behind them, several metres off the ground.
The sergeant snapped off a quick shot towards the closest of the figures, and ducked back into cover as return fire spat towards him. One of the enemy rounds struck him, slicing a neat cut through his body armour and scoring a wound across his forearm.
The cut was impossibly thin, and at first there was no pain, but then blood began to well and he cried out, clutching a hand to the deep wound.
Leaving a trail of blood drips that hissed and steamed as they struck the snow, the Skyllan Interdiction sergeant staggered away, dragging his laslock with him. He slipped in the hot oil pooling from the damaged engine block, and fell to his knees. Scrabbling through the sinking mire, Folches pushed himself back to his feet, and ran blindly around the corner of the immense ice-crawler, looking fearfully over his shoulder.
A thin, wickedly barbed blade entered his guts, sliding easily through his armour and flesh and halting him in his footsteps. His laslock dropped from his hands, and he stared up into the face of his killer. Nothing could be seen behind the cruelly slanted eyes of the blank helmet, and all Folches saw was his own face reflected back at him.
The figure was a good head taller than him, though it was inhumanly thin, and it cocked its head to the side, leaning into him as it twisted the blade embedded in his stomach, as if savouring every moment of the kill. Blood gushed from the wound as it opened up, and steam rose from the heat of his innards.
A hand, fingers like the black legs of a spider, clamped around Folches’s neck, and he was pushed up against the crawler. The blade slid from his gut and was held poised in front of the sergeant’s eyes, blood dripping from its elegantly curving tip.
The figure pressed almost intimately close to the dying sergeant, as if it wanted to experience every last dying sensation of the soldier. Then it pushed the blade into Folches’s side, sliding it slowly up between his ribs to pierce the lungs.
Blood foamed up in the soldier’s mouth as his lungs began to fill, and he gasped for breath as he slowly drowned on his own blood. The black fingers remained clasped around his neck almost lovingly until his heartbeat fluttered and stopped.
Then the black figure released its grip, and the sergeant slid to the ground.
Solon ran towards the control cabin of the ice-crawler, barging workers out of his way. The sirens in the claustrophobically narrow hallways were deafening, and he winced and clamped his hands over his ears as he ran past one of the blaring klaxons.
A burly orderly, his overalls covered in oil, ran into Solon as he rounded a corner, knocking him back into the wall.
“Sorry, boss,” said the man, helping him back to his feet, and Solon pushed past him.
He vaulted a steel banister, landed on the gantry below and ran on, turning to the right towards the control cabin. His boots rang out sharply as he climbed a short flight of stairs, and slammed the door to the control cabin open.
“What in the hell—” he began, but his words of reproach to the relief driver died in his throat.
A fist-sized hole had burned through the side window of the cabin and driven through the drive-mechanics on the wall opposite, leaving a smoking hole that dripped with molten metal. The driver was slumped back
in his seat, half his head missing, the devastating blast having clearly passed through him when it had struck.
Solon gagged at the stink of burnt flesh, but moved into the cabin, trying not to look at the corpse, and failing. There was no blood. Whatever had struck him had cauterised the wound completely, forming a blackened crust. The blast had hit him in the temple, and everything in front of the line drawn between his ears was missing, down to his mouth, which was drawn in an almost comical expression of shock.
Tearing his gaze away from the corpse, Solon moved to the control console. It was dead, no lights flickering along the length of its panel at all, and he swore. He flicked a few switches, muttering an entreaty to the Omnissiah, but nothing happened. He balled his hand into a fist and stuck the console.
“Come on, damn you,” he swore.
Red warning lights flickered, the needles of the dials wavering back and forth, and Solon let out a surprised laugh of success.
His small victory was short-lived. A beam of solid darkness punched through the side of the control cabin, destroying the console in a shower of sparks. Cables and wires were fused by the lance strike and flames exploded outwards with immense force, shattering the already ruptured plasglass windows of the cabin and hurling Solon backwards through the cabin door.
Thrown backwards down the stairs leading to the cabin, the flesh of his face and arms blistering from the heat, Solon hit the deck hard. Frantically, he fought to rip his thermal undershirt off, for the synthetic material was melting onto his skin. Shaking the smoking, skintight shirt loose, he hurled it away from him, and began to stagger back.
The crawler, the closest thing he had to a home since he had been expelled from Sholto guild eighteen years ago, was beyond redemption. It was dead, and the vultures were circling outside to descend on its carcass.
He had to get away.
Rounding a corner, he almost ran headlong into Cholos, with the frightened boy Dios in tow.
“Solon,” began his second, his face panicked.
[Word Bearers 02] - Dark Disciple Page 13
