A crowd of hooded cultists was waiting for them as the submersible entered the docking pool within the mining station, pushing in as Burias climbed out onto the wharf. Nevertheless, they kept their distance, wary of the immense red-armoured warrior and the potent aura of savagery around him.
The icon bearer snarled as he looked upon the press of humanity, and dropped onto the docking wharf, eyeing the crowd darkly. He allowed the change to come over him and took a menacing step forwards, enjoying the fear that made the people recoil. They did not run, however, and there were shouts and jeers from the masses. It was curious behaviour for mortals, and Burias could not understand it. Lesser beings always reacted to his presence with abject terror, so why did these ones not flee?
As the other Word Bearers emerged from the deep-sea scout/maintenance vehicle, one man pushed to the front of the crowd. His pale face was cowled and thin, and a servo-skull hovered near his shoulder. His eyes gleamed with feverish light.
This man studied the Word Bearers as they disembarked, an expression of outrage upon his face. The anger twisted his features so that he looked barely human at all.
“They have spilt the blood of our brood-fathers!” he bellowed, holding his arms up high. The billowing sleeves of his robe fell back at the movement, exposing pale arms pitted with plugs. Spiralling tattoos covered his flesh, oddly alien embryonic shapes that wrapped around his forearms. An angry roar rose from the gathered crowd that stepped forwards, faces twisting into visages of hatred.
“Someone shut him up,” said Marduk.
Kol Badar stepped towards the man, who stood defiant before him even though the people around him shrunk back from the Coryphaus’s titanic frame.
“You have befouled the inner sanctum of the brood-fathers,” howled the man at Kol Badar as he approached. He came up barely to the Coryphaus’s chest, but held his ground defiantly. “And for that grave insult, you will be punished.”
“Who is going to punish me, little man?” asked Kol Badar. “You?”
The man quivered in rage, and with a scream of hatred hurled himself at Kol Badar’s immense figure, hands outstretched like claws.
Kol Badar wrapped his power talons around the man’s head, and lifted him off his feet, which kicked uselessly a metre off the ground.
The crowd surged forwards, many drawing laspistols and cudgels from their robes, screaming in outrage.
Bemused, Kol Badar clenched his fist and there was an audible wet crunch as the man’s skull was crushed. He hurled the body into the crowd.
There were hundreds of the frenzied cultists, but they were as nothing next to the warriors of the XVII Legion. None of the Word Bearers deigned to expend any of their precious ammunition upon the crowd, and they weighed in with chainswords and fists as the crowd surged in to surround them.
It was as if the crowd was in the grip of some kind of group hysteria, thought Marduk, eliminating all fear, and replacing it with this frenzied hatred. That was exactly what this was, he realised these people were the dupes of the xenos hive mind.
The butchery was over in minutes. Bodies lay sprawled across the floor, many of them maimed and brutalised almost beyond recognition, life fluids smearing the metal flooring with a thick gruel.
Pulling his blood-smeared helmet from his head, Marduk sucked in a deep breath, inhaling the hot, heady scent of death.
“Glory be,” he said, a rapturous smile upon his face.
Gears groaned as the giant lift rose from the shaft, powerful engines hauling it up the immense chain connected to the mining station eight kilometres below. It came to a clanking rest, and steam vented from its engines. The sides of the diamond-shaped lift crashed open, and Sabtec bowed his head as the First Acolyte stepped from within, his armour caked in blood.
The champion lifted his gaze once more, eyes flicking over the blood-drenched warriors marching from within the lift. He raised an eyebrow as he saw that only half of the warriors that had accompanied Marduk returned.
The First Acolyte’s gaze wandered, coming to rest on the corpse of a Legion warrior, lying on its back and with its arms crossed over his chest.
“Namar-sin?” asked Marduk. Sabtec nodded his head.
“Report,” said Kol Badar as he stalked out of the lift.
“Dark eldar,” said Sabtec, “though ones we have not fought before. They were shadow-creatures, here and yet not here. Two brother warriors fell along with Namar-sin.”
“I do not see their bodies,” said Marduk.
“They were… taken, my lord,” said Sabtec.
“They were taken,” said Marduk flatly.
Sabtec stood with his head held high, looking resolutely forward.
“Yes, my lord,” he said.
“You allowed two warrior brothers of Lorgar to be taken by eldar slavers?” snarled Kol Badar.
“They were taken while under my command, my lord, yes,” said Sabtec, “and I will accept any punishment that my shame requires.”
“You offer no excuses, Sabtec?” asked Kol Badar.
“None, my lord,” said Sabtec. His voice betrayed no fear. He moved his gaze towards Marduk. “If it would please you, First Acolyte, I shall take my own life for the shame I have brought upon the Host.”
“That will not be necessary, Sabtec,” said Marduk smoothly, “though I am pleased at your devotion to the great cause. I shall have need of loyal warriors in the days to come.”
“The tyranid invasion could begin at any moment,” said Kol Badar. “It might already be under way. We move out, now.”
Marduk was left alone with Kol Badar as the warriors of the Legion made ready to move out once more, their movements crisp and full of purpose.
“This world has claimed many warrior’s lives,” said Kol Badar. “Six Havocs of the 217th, including their champion, Namar-sin; two warriors of the 13th; six of Khalaxis’s 17th, and two of my Anointed, all dead to secure the mind of a single mortal. I hope that it was worth it.”
“It will be,” said the First Acolyte.
“For the glory of Marduk?” sneered Kol Badar.
“For the glory of Lorgar. For the glory of the XVII Legion,” said Marduk, keeping his anger in check, though he felt the powers of Chaos stirring within him, feeding his desire to strike down the insubordinate Coryphaus.
Thoughts of blood filled his mind, and Marduk reached involuntarily for his blade. He saw Kol Badar’s power talons twitch. With all his strength, Marduk pushed the hatred deep inside, where it would fester and grow strong, but where he could control it.
“Lead forth, oh mighty Kol Badar,” said Marduk, his voice thick with sarcasm.
The Word Bearers moved out onto the ice, leaving the guild city, with its subterranean tunnels and claustrophobic chambers behind. They had not seen any further sign of the enemy, either Imperial or eldar. The storms wracking the landscape had not abated. If anything, it seemed that they had increased in intensity, furiously whipping ice and snow across the flows.
“How long?” asked Marduk. He spoke using his inter-vox rather than attempting to roar over the howling winds.
“Ten minutes,” said Kol Badar. “Thirteenth, form a perimeter.”
Under Sabtec’s crisp orders, the warriors of the 13th coterie, both old and new members, moved into position, weapons at the ready. It was probably an unnecessary precaution, for the chance of attack within the next ten minutes was unlikely, but having heard the reports of the dark eldar attacks from Sabtec, Kol Badar was taking no chances. Marduk also knew that it did the warriors good to have a duty, something to occupy them.
“The only certainty in a warrior’s life is death,” was an old adage, though Marduk knew that such a statement was inherently false. For mortals, yes, death came for every soul eventually, but for one of the blessed warriors of Chaos, death was no certainty. Likely, but not certain. One could always be raised to daemonhood, and then one might live for all eternity, a demi-god worshipped in one’s own right.
Something stirre
d within Marduk, and he felt the presence of Chaos writhing within him. He had long become used to the bizarre sensation, and it gave him comfort to know that he was not alone.
“Incoming!” roared Sabtec suddenly, his crusade-era helmet angled skywards.
There came a whistling sound overhead, and the warriors scattered as something large came hurtling down through the gale.
Marduk threw himself to the side as it came smashing down and struck the moon’s surface just metres away, sending snow and chunks of ice flying into the air, and sending warriors of the Legion sprawling. The First Acolyte rolled smoothly, coming up to one knee with his bolt pistol in his hand.
Had it been an explosive shell, he would be dead, but the thing that had struck the ice was no shell, nor was it an orbital strike… at least not one of Imperial origins.
At first, Marduk thought it was an asteroid, but now he saw it was something fleshy, something organic.
It was like the giant seed-pod of some fleshy fruit, and it had smashed a crater four metres deep and eight metres in diameter. Steam rose from it, and even as he watched, the tip of the roughly spherical shape peeled back, flopping down onto the ice, revealing a shapeless, quivering skin-sac the size of a Dreadnought.
Veins branched across this lump of living flesh, and shapes within strained to be released.
“What in the name of the true gods is that?” asked Burias curiously, stepping carefully towards the pulsating shape.
“Careful, icon bearer,” said Kol Badar.
The skin of the shape bulged and Marduk could make out the shape of a xenos head straining to escape.
“Tyranid,” he hissed, just as the first of the hive creatures burst from its embryonic birth sack. The death of the world has arrived, he thought.
Claws ripped through the film of skin and foul waters empted from within, bio-fluids gushing out. Clouds of fog rose as the warm liquid melted through ice and snow.
Bolters began to fire, tearing gaping rents in the sac that gushed hot liquid. These amniotic fluids were pinkish and thick, like glutinous syrup. Inhuman screams burst from the spore as the bolts ripped through it.
Then the first of the creatures leapt from within, launching itself directly at Burias, four slender, bladed limbs poised to impale him. The blades of its two fore-limbs were the length of swords, and though the creature was smaller than the genestealers they had encountered in the hulk on the ocean floor, the similarities were marked.
Burias swatted the creature aside with the holy icon of the Host, breaking its back, and it slid through the ice and snow, carving a furrow, until it came to a halt at Kol Badar’s feet. It snarled up at the Coryphaus, struggling to stand on its powerful hind legs, which would not respond. It hissed, and tried to stab at Kol Badar, but the Coryphaus planted a bolt in its head that ended its struggles.
Marduk fired, his round screaming less than half a metre past Burias’s head to detonate in the chest of another of the creatures as it scrambled from the crater. The rest of the Host opened fire as more of the creatures leapt from the spore, their weapons ripping the creatures apart, spraying sickly ichor across the snow.
Another mycetic spore screamed from the heavens and smashed into the ground ten metres away, and then another.
“How long?” asked Marduk, his bolt pistol bucking in his hands as he killed another of the leaping tyranid creatures.
“Five minutes,” said Kol Badar.
More of the creatures ripped free from birth-sac as the sides of the spores flopped open, and they launched themselves at the Word Bearers, covering the distance over the snow in powerful leaps.
“Close ranks,” roared Kol Badar, and the Word Bearers formed a tight circle facing outwards, with Darioq-Grendh’al in the centre. Weapons barking, ripping the first of the leaping tyranids out of the air, smashing them backwards as their flesh and chitin was torn apart.
Another spore crashed down nearby, its impact spraying Marduk with snow and ice. One of the warrior brothers sent a missile screaming from the launcher braced against his shoulder into the fleshy pod as its sides flopped heavily to the snow. The missile detonated inside the convulsing birth-sac, lighting it up from within for a moment, and the mass of creatures inside could be seen clearly through the skin of the sac enclosing them. Then the sides of the pod were ripped apart, and the high-pitched screams of the dying tyranids echoed through the gale as they were consumed in flame and shrapnel.
The missile launcher was tossed aside, its ammunition spent, and the warrior drew his bolt pistol and combat knife.
Marduk blasted the head of another creature into pulp and tracked his pistol skywards as one of the xenos creatures leapt high into the air. It descended towards him, sword-bladed arms lancing at him, and he fired. The bolt took the creature in the chest, passing through its chitinous exoskeleton before detonating, creating a head-sized crater of mined flesh. Still it fell towards him, its brain not yet registering that it was dead, its every instinct willing it on to kill.
Marduk swiped it out of the air with his chainsword, ripping the toothed blade through the creature from neck to sternum, but one of its arms stabbed into his chest, biting through his power armour and embedding itself in his fused ribcage.
Slashing with his chainsword, Marduk sheared through the tyranid’s elbow joint and it fell dead at his feet, its forelimb still protruding from his chest. He had no time to remove it, as a wave of the tyranids swarmed out of the storm.
Shouting a warning, Marduk held his fire until the tyranids were closer. The creatures from several of the spore-pods must have banded together, for this brood numbered perhaps thirty individual aliens. However, they did not move as individuals; they moved as one single living organism, with synchronicity that could never have been matched by even the best drilled veteran coterie of the Legion.
Without any obvious form of communication, the swarm of aliens turned as one, angling towards the Word Bearers, their movements precise and almost robotic. Marduk saw that these were a different subspecies from the leaping aliens, though they were similar.
More hunched, these ones scuttled forwards bearing what might have been projectile weapons in their fore-limbs, though in truth the weapons were merely extensions of their limbs, fused to them, as much a part of the creature as the rest of their vile bodies.
Bolters and heavy weapons roared, ripping the first of the creatures apart in bloody explosions, but they continued scuttling forwards, oblivious or uncaring of their fallen. Their bio-weapons pulsed, the fleshy projectile tubes contracting sharply with peristalsis. Marduk felt something splatter across his left arm plates, and hissed in pain.
Looking down, he saw a mass of fleshy grubs boring through his ceramite vambrace and into his flesh, and he swatted frantically at them, trying to dislodge them. He squashed dozens of them as they scrabbled for purchase on his armour, but several of them were already too deep for him to easily remove, burrowing into the muscle of his forearm, squirming within his body as they feasted on his flesh.
Focusing his mind, he pushed away the pain and discomfort, and killed two of the tyranids with his pistol. He saw one of the 13th coterie fall to the ground, screaming in agony as a mass of writhing flesh-worms burrowed through his helmet, clogging his respirator and boring through the lenses covering his eyes, gnawing their way through his skull and into his brain.
A flamer roared, bathing the tyranid brood in burning promethium, and they screamed in inhuman torment as their bodies were consumed. Bolters tore through the survivors, but still more clambered over the bodies of the dead to fire their living ammunition into the tight circle of Word Bearers. More snow was kicked up as another spore slammed down into the ice.
Marduk ducked his head as a stream of beetles was spat towards him. Several wriggling bugs struck his right shoulder pad, painted black in mourning for Jarulek, but he squashed the voracious feeder creatures before they could bury themselves in his armour and flesh.
A second putrid stream of
voracious organisms spat past Marduk to engulf Darioq-Grendh’al. An orb of energy appeared around the corrupted magos, and the coruscating electricity of the potent conversion field fried the tiny creatures.
The magos turned heavily towards its attacker as the flickering energy field disappeared, and Marduk sensed anger surge through the daemon inhabiting the ex-priest’s flesh. Darioq-Grendh’al planted his feet, bracing himself as the two servo-arms over his back stabbed forwards, their forms blurring as they were altered by the power of the warp. Metal re-formed and a pair of fleshy tentacles joined with the servo-arms, forming a cable, part organic and part mineral, pulsing with energy.
A pair of incandescent beams roared from the reformed servo-arms, and the power of Chaos screamed in Marduk’s ears.
The beams struck the tyranids, and half a dozen of them were engulfed in an inferno, hissing and writhing as their flesh mutated. Tentacles tipped with chitinous barbs burst from within the tyranids, ripping through their flesh and thrashing out through eye-sockets and mouths, turning the xenos beings inside out. Within moments, all that remained of the tyranids struck by Darioq-Grendh’al’s fire was a thrashing mass of tentacles.
“Impressive,” said Marduk with a smile as Darioq-Grendh’al’s servo-arms moulded back to their usual form.
“Two minutes,” shouted Kol Badar as yet another spore-pod slammed down, crushing a handful of tyranids beneath its impact. This pod was much larger than the others, and powerful forms larger even than an Astartes warrior struggled to free themselves from within it.
“To the north-west, move!” roared Kol Badar as a trio of giant tyranid beasts ripped free of the skin of the large spore-pod and reared up to their full height—easily twice that of a normal man—and another brood of smaller creatures swarmed from the howling winds, angling towards the Word Bearers. More pods slammed down from the heavens.
“Move, Grendh’al,” said Marduk, impelling the creature with his voice of command, and though the daemon resisted him, its will was overpowered, and it reluctantly turned to do as it was bid.
[Word Bearers 02] - Dark Disciple Page 23
