The winged emblem of the mercenary force was resplendent across the broad grill on the front of the heavy vehicle, and a pair of armoured soldiers stood in its dual turret at the rear, swinging the massive twin-linked heavy bolters left and right. Their faces were all but obscured by their white helmets, and black visors hid their eyes from view.
For twenty-five generations, Perdus Skylla had employed the Skyllan Interdiction, an outside mercenary agency funded by the wealthy mining guild conglomerates. They served as the military force protecting the guilds’ assets in lieu of a Planetary Defence Force, while simultaneously acting as local law enforcement. Better trained and equipped than most Imperial Guard regiments, the hiring of the Skyllan Interdiction Forces had allowed the mining guilds to concentrate on their endeavours without having to draw away any of its skilled workforce to form a PDF.
Still, even with the mercenaries present within the tunnel to help restore order, the flow of humanity was little short of a rout.
One of the long-furred mastiffs let out a long growl, eyes locked on the ceiling. Seeing nothing, its master jerked its chain hard, silencing the beast.
A creature of shadow clung to the ceiling of the corridor, virtually undetectable to the naked eye or the sophisticated targeting matrices built into the helmets of the Skyllan Interdiction Force. It moved like a spider, making its way across the ceiling with slow, purposeful movements. Its lean, black armoured body disappeared for a second, its menacing form turning as insubstantial as smoke, only to reappear within the shadow of a grilled turbine further along the roof.
The creature’s skin was inky black, and elegant runes of alien design were cut into its flesh. The runes glowed with a cold, inner light.
Turning its gaze downwards, it peered malevolently over the sea of humans with eyes that were milky white. It paid particular attention to the armed forces of the Skyllan Interdiction, and its limbs quivered with barely contained bloodlust. The blades running up its forearms hummed in anticipation.
The mastiffs below went into a frenzy of barking as the creature’s scent carried to them, and their handlers struggled to control the powerful beasts. The creature disappeared into shadow once more as eyes scanned the ceilings, straining to pick out what had disturbed the dogs.
The air recycling turbines cut out, abruptly. The few who registered the sudden change in air pressure gazed up at the slowing fans in concern. Without the recycling units, the air in the tunnel would turn to poison within hours, as all the oxygen was used up and replaced with the toxic carbon dioxide exhaled by the masses.
Skyllan Interdiction Forces tapped their helmets as their communications went down, as if jammed by interference.
Then the first of the lights went out.
First, one of the lights faded to darkness, then another. The strip lights began to fail, one after another, in both directions, like a wave. People screamed as darkness engulfed them. The lights were going dark faster than a man could run, and within less than a minute every light in sight was dead.
The darkness was complete, all consuming and as black as the abyssal depths of the oceans below. People clutched at one another in panic, unable even to see a hand waving in front their face, and the crowd surged. Spotlights on the Skyllan armoured vehicle clicked on, and they wove back and forth, piercing the darkness like beacons.
People pushed towards the light sources, like moths being drawn to an open flame, and their panicked faces shone like ghosts in the cold light. They pressed against the armoured vehicle as if it was a talisman, those at the front crushed against its armoured sides by those pushing from behind.
Overhead, the nigh-on invisible figure had reappeared, and the runes carved into its flesh glowed with power. Still hugging the ceiling in defiance of gravity, it slid a curved, double-bladed punch dagger from its sheath. Other blades slid from the back of its hands, jutting forward over its fists like the talons of a great cat, and a low hiss of anticipation passed its lips as it waited for its dark kin to arrive in response to its summons.
It did not have to wait long.
A ball of lightning appeared, hanging in mid-air for a fraction of a second before it exploded outwards, blinding those nearby with the sudden burst of energy and throwing them to the ground. The crackling energy was gone in an instant, and an impenetrable void was left in its wake. It was like an inky black pool of water, though it was vertical and hung in mid-air, a plane of absolute darkness no thicker than a single molecule.
Ripples appeared across its surface, as if a pebble had been tossed into its centre, and whining shapes sped from the rent in real space, hurtling up the access corridor at tremendous speed. They screamed overhead, slicing like knives through the darkness. Blades cut through flesh, and hot blood splattered into the faces of hundreds of people, who screamed in terror. Many threw themselves to the ground in fear and were trampled to death by their brothers, sisters and wives in their panic to escape. However, with no lights, and with the tunnel packed from wall to wall with terrified people, there was nowhere to run.
The spotlights atop the armoured Skyllan Interdiction vehicle turned frantically, trying to lock onto the enemies that screamed past them, but they could only hold the speeding shapes in the light for a fraction of a second. A shape dropped from the ceiling, landing lightly atop the vehicle, and the troopers saw a shadowy blur in the rough outline of a humanoid figure perched on the roof of the armoured car before the spotlights were shattered.
The panicked troopers manning the turret-mounted heavy bolters opened fire into the darkness, and muzzle flare lit the area.
A sleek black shape hurtled past, and the mercenaries chased it with high-explosive rounds. They hit nothing but the walls and pillars of the tunnel, ripping away head-sized chunks of rockcrete.
The troopers’ mastiffs had erupted into frantic barking and were fighting at their chains. Their masters turned around on the spot, laslocks held to shoulders as they struggled to sight the enemy. Dark shapes were zooming through the tunnel, but the troopers’ targeting systems were unable to lock onto the targets.
There was a blur of movement and one of the troopers was sliced open from groin to throat. He squeezed the trigger of his weapon as he fell, blasting into the crowd of surging people, cutting several of them down.
People screamed and ran as the sounds of gunfire echoed deafeningly, fighting each other in their desperation to get to safety. The other troopers turned left and right, trying desperately to hold their targets in sight. A shape screamed overhead, and a trooper’s head was severed from its body. The shape was a hundred metres further up the tunnel before the head hit the ground.
Streams of tiny bladed splinters spat out of the darkness towards the mercenaries manning the turret of the armoured vehicle. The razor-sharp shards sliced through their armour and flesh, and blood sprayed out across their pristine white armour.
Their gun silenced, the darkness was once more complete. Screams of terror and pain accompanied the speeding shapes, invisible in the darkness, as they cut through the air. There was a sudden gust of displaced air as another high-speed carriage screamed along the tracks in the middle of the tunnel, the lights from within the automated, servitor-controlled conveyance shining brightly, sending shadows dancing.
Tall-helmeted figures were visible in the flash of light, dragging people kicking and screaming back into the darkness.
A beam of pure darkness stabbed into the high-speed transport, rocking it. The beam tore through the fore-carriage, cutting through the engine block, seats and half a dozen occupants before passing through the roof, leaving a scorched black ring on the ceiling of the tunnel.
Two more searing beams struck it, and the front carriage was knocked off the rails. With the squealing of protesting metal, it slammed into the side-barriers, tearing through them in a shower of sparks. Striking the raised platform at speed, the conveyance tilted up on its nose, and the second and third carriages buckled behind it and rolled onto their sides.
In the wake of the mayhem and silhouetted against the sparks, more black figures advanced through the press of bodies, smashing people to the ground with sharp blows before dragging their semi-conscious bodies back into the darkness.
Mastiffs yelped as they were torn to shreds by concentrated bursts of deadly fire. A blurred shape, little more than a vague, hazy outline, moved like quicksilver through the press of humanity, slicing and cutting, and the last of the Skyllan Indictment Forces were slaughtered without holding any of the enemy in their sights long enough to fire upon them.
A trio of shapes, in tight formation and moving impossibly fast, veered around the wreckage of the ruined rail conveyance, banking over the heads of the terrified masses as they screamed towards the rear of the Catalan-class armoured vehicle. It was peppered with spitting gunfire and detonated as its fuel tanks ruptured, exploding in a blinding fireball that hurled the vehicle across the seething platform.
The three sleek shapes sped through the inferno unscathed and gunned their engines, hurtling once more up the tunnel into the darkness, travelling hundreds of metres in seconds.
The blades of the turbine fans began to spin once more, and the strip lights flickered falteringly before humming back into life. The carnage unleashed in the last twenty minutes was revealed under the cold light of the glow-strips.
Hundreds of bodies were strewn across the floor, blood pooling beneath them where they had fallen. The blackened shell of the Catalan-class vehicle was upside down against a wall, pinning half a dozen charred corpses beneath it. Sparks burst intermittently from the rails, which had buckled and been torn from their housings.
The ruin of the conveyance’s carriages was testament to its speed when it had crashed, for they were wrenched out of shape, and their plasglass windows were shattered ruins. Its curved roof had been half ripped off, and the shattered barrier it had crashed through was twisted beneath it. Bodies, their heads smashed and limbs severed, were spread around the wreck, either crushed when the conveyance rolled off the tracks, or thrown from their seats inside. Blackened holes the size of fists showed where the vehicle had been struck by dark-matter weapons.
There was no sign of any living thing within the tunnel, and not one of the corpses twitched or groaned. Where earlier the tunnel had seethed with life, now it was utterly bereft, and the only sounds were the humming of the strip lights, the reverberations of the recycle units and the odd spark from the ruined tracks.
Of the thousands of people not slain, there was no sign. Nor was there any sign of their attackers. Only the carnage left in their wake was evidence of their having existed at all.
CHAPTER TWO
Staring through the twenty-metre wide observation portal of the bridge, Admiral Rutger Augustine looked out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship Hammer of Righteousness.
She looked like an immense, armoured Imperial cathedral, majestic and of such a scale as to be almost incomprehensible. Six kilometres from stern to prow, hundreds of spires ran along her length, joined together by flying buttresses and archways, and she bristled with the finest weapon systems that the Imperial Navy could boast.
Hundreds of close-range turrets were set across her armoured hull, each the size of four super-heavy battle tanks, and a dozen torpedo tubes, each gaping almost forty metres wide, were inset into her sweeping, massively armoured prow. It was in her broadside batteries, however, that the Hammer of Righteousness’s true power lay.
Running almost the complete length of the battleship, the starboard and port batteries were capable of unleashing an incredible amount of firepower, easily enough to cripple even the largest warship with a single barrage, or lay waste to entire continents if she entered the upper atmosphere of a rebellious planet. Indeed, the resistance of entire planets had crumpled merely at her appearance in their sub-system, fearful of the wrath that she could unleash.
Tens of thousands of indentured workers and servitors slaved within the confined gun decks to load and ready the batteries for firing, and Admiral Augustine was proud to know that his gunnery crew, under the stern guidance of his master gunner and master of ordnance, were amongst the most efficient in all of Battlefleet Tempestus.
He never grew weary of looking out across the Hammer of Righteousness, and he knew in his heart that he never would. Even after all these years of service, the power and scale of the battleship filled him with awe. Set against the sheer scale of space with its untold millions of solar systems, she was tiny and insignificant, but it was her duty to protect Imperial space from all threats, xenos or otherwise.
Constructed in the Adeptus Mechanicus shipyard moons of Gryphonne IV over a period of a thousand years, Hammer of Righteousness had been in commission, defending Imperial space for nigh-on eight thousand years. Admiral Augustine had served on her for almost one hundred and fifteen years, first as a junior officer before moving steadily up through the ranks. He had served on two other ships after fulfilling his commissioned appointments on the Hammer of Righteousness, first as a flag-lieutenant on the Lunar-class cruiser Dauntless. After a tenure of fifteen years he had been promoted to flag-captain of the recommissioned Emperor’s Wrath, which had recently been reassigned to Segmentum Tempestus. Augustine served aboard this Overlord-class battle cruiser – a famed veteran of the Gothic wars – for ten years, before he was reassigned back to the Hammer of Righteousness, the ship where he had began his naval career.
He had held the rank of admiral for forty-two years, and at the age of one hundred and sixty-two, he was one of the most experienced officers in the fleet. No one knew the nuances and quirks of the ancient battleship like he did, save perhaps for the ship’s long-serving flag-lieutenant, Gideon Cortez. Only two other ships assigned to Battlefleet Tempestus were of comparable size, and they were facing off against the xenos menace in distant sectors of the segmentum. The eastern expanses were his responsibility, and it was here that he had formed his blockade.
He could not see the enemy with the naked eye, for they were still millions of kilometres away, but he knew that they were out there and closing on them inexorably. He could see flashes in the distance. From here, they looked almost incongruous, but he knew that more of the enemy bio-ships were being subjected to concentrated barrages of ordnance.
His fleet was making a good account of itself in this engagement, the most recent of dozens over the last months, having destroyed two dozen hive-ships for no losses. Still, the xenos fleet continued to plough relentlessly on into Imperial space. The losses they had suffered made no discernible impact on the vast tyranid hive-fleet.
Vile bio-organisms that consumed everything in their path, like the locusts of Augustine’s home world but on a galactic scale, the tyranid menace was a very real threat to the Imperium as a whole.
Four years previously a new hive-fleet had been identified, dubbed Hive Fleet Leviathan. It was a fitting name. Already billions had lost their lives to its insatiable hunger.
Admiral Augustine stared balefully out into the darkness. For all his years of service he had proudly defended the reliant worlds of the Imperium from its enemies. Now he was tasked with destroying those same worlds that he had dedicated his life to protect.
By Lord Inquisitor Kryptman’s order a galactic cordon stretching before the encroaching xenos fleet was formed. The band of worlds directly in front of the cordon were evacuated, and many of them utterly destroyed, in order to deny the hive fleet r
aw organic matter. Any world already under tyranid invasion was to suffer Exterminatus – the theory being that the xenos would expend much energy in claiming a world, only to have all living things on the world exterminated. The inquisitor believed that by stalling the hive fleet’s advance, it would eventually turn aside, towards more lucrative killing grounds, and thus save the Imperium from devastation. However, it was a cruel and callous strategy, and not one that sat well with Admiral Augustine, even if it was humanity’s only hope of stalling the hive fleet. Billions of Imperial citizens had already been evacuated, their home worlds destroyed, and hundreds of millions had perished, killed by orbital barrages and virus bombs launched by those sworn to protect them.
He turned away from the observation portal, his movements, like his appearance, crisp and precise. He strode back along the command deck, his expression unreadable. His staff upon the bridge went about their work with practiced efficiency and calm, talking in low voices. Several of them looked up as their admiral passed them by and were greeted with curt nods. Banks of logisticians, hard-wired into the battleship’s logic engines and monitoring a constant flow of technical data, murmured as stylus-fingers traced the mnemo-papers feeding from skull-faced machines. A pair of enginseers were reporting to the flag-lieutenant, Gideon Cortez, and humming cogitator arrays flickered with updates from the fleet, the eyelids of servitors flickering as information was relayed.
Augustine moved to the holo-table positioned within a sunken recess in the floor, stepping down to look upon the position of his fleet. The table was criss-crossed with a grid of glowing green lines, indicating spatial parameters, and scale models of the entire fleet were positioned across its smooth expanse.
He took a moment to study the formations. Most of the fleet, seventy-two vessels of escort class and higher, had formed a bulwark spreading across the system with the Hammer of Righteousness at its centre. The cruiser Valkyrie, accompanied by three squadrons of smaller frigates and destroyers, was out in front, slowing the vanguard of the tyranid fleet to enable the pleasure world of Circe to fully evacuate, formless black spheres being placed on the table to represent the known enemy forces. More of them were being put on the table all the time, placed there by lobotomised servitors hanging like twisted marionettes amid the gently hissing mechanics above the table.
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