Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

  Under Kol Badar’s direction, Sabtec’s 13th began advancing up through the hail of fire towards the gantries, while the Anointed laid down a hail of fire that kept the enemy’s heads down. The Land Raiders pivoted on the spot, their lascannons destroying everything they targeted, and their heavy bolters ripping paths across the rock walls as they chased the enemy soldiers.

  Marduk raced up a steel staircase, taking the steps four at a time. A las-blast struck him in the head, scorching his pristine alabaster skull helmet, and he snapped off a shot with his pistol in response, sending a man flying five metres backwards, a crater exploding from his back.

  The enemy officers were shouting their commands, frantically attempting to rally their men and reposition them in the face of the relentless advance of the Word Bearers, but they were panicking, and their orders were not followed. Men crawled backwards, attempting to find any place to hide from the unholy fallen angels of death stalking towards them, firing off hasty shots with lasguns.

  Marduk stomped onto one of the gantries and shot down two men, their blood misting the air. With a kick, he smashed aside a stand of barrels behind which three men were taking cover, and gunned the first two down. The other was torn apart by a concentrated burst of bolter fire from below, and Marduk moved on, his pistol raised before him as he fired more shots into the enemy arranged along the gantry.

  One of the white-armoured soldiers raised a melta-gun, and Marduk threw himself against the wall as the weapon fired. It scorched across his left shoulder pad, and warning symbols appeared within his helmet display. Namar-sin, coming up behind Marduk, hurled his axe, the weapon spinning end over end and slamming into the soldier, cleaving into his face and embedding itself deep in his skull.

  Men screamed in agony as they were engulfed in flame, as Khalaxis’s 17th coterie advanced opposite Marduk, trapping a score of soldiers on the gantry between them. The flamer roared again, and fire consumed half a dozen men, their flesh blistering as it burned. Several fell over the railing, plummeting to the floor where they smouldered and lay still. The survivors were hacked apart as Khalaxis led the charge into their midst, his chainaxe screaming as it tore through bone and tendon. Marduk waded into the terrified soldiers from the other side, clubbing men to the ground and executing them without mercy.

  Less than five minutes after the bastion gates had been breached, the echo of gunfire ceased. The Word Bearers moved among the enemy soldiers, dispatching any who still breathed with swift blows to the head.

  Marduk came across one of the officers, his face awash with blood and his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He looked up at Marduk’s inscrutable skull-faced visage in terror.

  ‘Emperor preserve me,’ he gasped.

  Marduk bent down and gripped the man, his massive hand closing around the soldier’s face.

  ‘The False Emperor as a deity is a lie,’ he growled, squeezing, feeling the soldier’s skull straining. ‘No one will answer your prayers. Where is the commander of this facility?’

  ‘The... the lift,’ gasped the man. ‘Top floor. Emperor save my soul.’

  ‘The Corpse Emperor is not divine, and he does not care about the sanctity of your soul. You will see.’

  Marduk crushed the man’s skull effortlessly, blood bursting from the soldier’s eyes, nose and mouth as he died. Standing up, he wiped his hand clean upon his tabard, and turned to face Kol Badar, down below in the main concourse.

  ‘I grow tired of this world. It is time we ended this,’ said Marduk, his voice booming across the open expanse. ‘Bring forth the Enslaved One, and let us get what we came for.’

  As the first alarms sounded, Guildmaster Pollo was taking a drink of his seventy-five year old vintage amasec. He almost choked on the fiery draught, and his adjutant, Leto, visibly paled. Pollo slammed his glass down onto his table and was up and moving instantly.

  The portal slid open as he approached it, and he stormed out into the adjoining room.

  ‘What in the name of Holy Terra is going on?’ he barked at his personal guard, a group of five soldiers of the mercenary Skyllan Interdiction Force. ‘Captain? This better not be another perimeter glitch.’

  The captain of his guard, a tall, broad-shouldered soldier with a serious face, had his hand to his earpiece, his brow furrowed in concentration.

  ‘No, sir,’ he replied. ‘The automated turrets have identified hostile targets on approach.’

  ‘Hostile targets?’ breathed Leto from behind the guildmaster.

  ‘Have they been identified?’ asked the guildmaster.

  ‘No, sir, not as yet. Wait,’ he said, raising his hand to forestall any response as he listened to incoming communications. The soldier’s face turned grim. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘What is going on?’ asked Guildmaster Pollo forcefully.

  ‘Sir,’ began the captain, ‘the bastion has been breached.’

  ‘Emperor preserve us,’ said Leto.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ said Pollo.

  ‘No mistake, sir. A heavy firefight is underway on the garage concourse level.’

  The captain swore, tapping at his earpiece as it went dead. The other soldiers of the guildmaster’s guard looked uneasily at each other.

  ‘We must get you out of here, sir,’ the captain said, his face dark. ‘The bastion is compromised.’

  He strode towards the guildmaster and his adjutant, barking orders to his men. They responded instantly, and their lasguns hummed as they powered into life.

  ‘I will not go,’ said the guildmaster hotly. ‘How many men do you have here?’

  ‘Only three demi-legions, sir. The others are all out keeping the peace at the Phorcys starport, or aiding the evacuation efforts.’

  ‘That is still, what, three hundred men?’ asked Pollo.

  ‘It will not be enough, sir,’ said the captain softly.

  Guildmaster Pollo glared at the captain. ‘The Skyllan Interdiction Force is paid damn well to protect this fortress and hold the peace. You are not filling me with the confidence that the guild money is well-spent, captain.’

  ‘My lord,’ said the captain, his expression stoic in the face of the guildmaster’s simmering anger, ‘the enemy below are Astartes.’

  ‘Space Marines?’ breathed Leto. ‘But we… we are loyal subjects of the Emperor. Aren’t we?’

  ‘Of course we are, Leto,’ said Pollo.

  ‘They are rebel Astartes, my lord, and I have lost all contact with the demi-legions. We leave, now,’ he said, brooking no argument.

  Pollo felt a sense of panic stab at him, though he was careful to maintain a calm exterior. He felt the flush of amasec clouding his mind, and he cursed himself for drinking so much. He licked his lips, and nodded to the captain.

  With clipped commands, the soldiers fell in around the guildmaster, and the group marched back into the senior official’s office. The captain was steering Pollo forcefully by the elbow, moving him quickly towards the reinforced door that led to his personal shuttle.

  ‘My records,’ protested the guildmaster.

  ‘I’ll get them, my lord,’ said Leto.

  ‘No,’ snapped the Skyllan guard captain, ‘we leave now.’

  ‘My data-slate, Leto,’ hissed the guildmaster, and his adjutant swept the book-sized piece of arcane technology up off his master’s desk as he was hurried past.

  The captain whispered the requisite prayer to the machine god as he entered the code sequence into the door, and the circular locks slid anticlockwise with a hiss. The soldiers lowered their visors to cover their faces at a nod from their superior. Then the captain leant his weight against the door. It opened with a groan and snow billowed into the office, driven through the portal by the deafening gale outside.

  Guildmaster Pollo covered his face with his arm as the biting chill struck him, and he took an involuntary step backwards.

  Three soldiers moved out onto the landing platform, their lasguns panning left and right. Pointless,
thought Pollo. No enemy could be up here.

  His personal Aquila-class lander was perched some twenty metres away, covered in a thick layer of snow. The guard captain pulled an exquisite pistol of ornate design from his holster, and began guiding Pollo out onto the landing platform.

  The cold was almost unbearable, and ice crystals formed instantly on his eyebrows and lips. His eyes stung from the cold, and even breathing was painful.

  One of his guards, out in front, reached the shuttle and slammed his fist into an activation panel. Instantly, the embarkation ramp began to lower.

  With his head down, Guildmaster Pollo allowed himself to be hurried towards the waiting shuttle, his boots slipping on the ice-slick landing pad. The captain supporting him shouted something, but he couldn’t make it out over the roar of the wind.

  Burias-Drak’shal grinned in feral anticipation as he stared down at the men ten metres below him, battling against the gale as they made their way towards the shuttle.

  He dropped down amongst them and landed in a crouch, rockcrete cracking beneath the impact. A soldier was a step behind and to his left, and he swung around, taking the man in the head with one of his massive, fused talons. The force of the blow slammed the soldier into the rockcrete wall, his skull pulverised, Burias-Drak’shal’s buried talon thirty centimetres into the rock.

  Ripping the talon free, letting the soldier slump to the ground, he spun and lashed out with a backhanded blow that ripped across the throat of another soldier as he turned towards the possessed warrior, lasgun raised.

  The man’s throat was ripped open to the spine, and he spun, blood fountaining from the mortal wound.

  Something hot splashed the back of Guildmaster Pollo’s head, and he stumbled and fell to one knee. As the captain hauled him back to his feet, he reached up and touched a hand to his head. He stared blankly for a second at the fresh blood on his hands, before turning to look back the way he had come.

  A daemonic beast from the deepest pits of hell had dropped down behind them.

  Its bulk was immense, more than three times that of a normal man, and its lips curled back to expose the barbed teeth of the ultimate predator. Two men lay dead at its feet.

  The captain saw the beast just as the guildmaster did, and he shouted a warning, pushing Pollo roughly towards the shuttle as he raised his pistol.

  Another man died before the pistol fired, as the daemon punched a claw up through the soldier’s sternum. The blow lifted the soldier off his feet, and the daemon’s talons emerged from his back. With a dismissive sweep of its arm, the daemon hurled the man off the landing pad, disappearing in the gale to fall the three hundred metres to the base of the bastion.

  The captain’s pistol boomed, but Pollo did not wait to see if he had felled the beast. Terror coursing through him, he half-ran, half-stumbled towards the lowering ramp leading into his shuttle, his heart beating wildly.

  The guard standing by the shuttle had his lagsun raised to his shoulder, and he fired past Pollo twice before running up the ramp to initiate the launch. Pollo heard several more shots as the other remaining guards brought their weapons to bear, and he paused at the foot of the embarkation ramp to look back. He saw his adjutant crawling towards him on all fours, blood splattered across his terrified face.

  Without thinking of his own safety he ran to the young man. As he helped him up to his feet, Pollo looked back through the swirling snow.

  Another man was down, his head ripped from his shoulders, and the captain was backing away from the daemonic beast stalking towards him. His pistol boomed, but the beast swayed its head to the side with preternatural speed, and the shot hissed past its face.

  The captain risked a glance behind him, and his eyes locked onto the guildmaster’s.

  ‘Go!’ shouted the captain, though his voice was lost in the roaring wind.

  ‘Watch out!’ roared Pollo at the same time, for the beast had sprung forwards as soon as the captain had taken his eyes off it.

  Leto scrambled past his master, clambering up the ramp into the interior of the shuttle, but Pollo was locked in place, staring in horror at the daemon as it leapt at the captain of his guard.

  The soldier staggered backwards and pumped three shots into the daemon as it bore down on him. The first shots hit the monster in the chest and the gorget, ricocheting uselessly off its blood-red armour, but the third shot struck it in the cheek, shattering bone.

  It fell with a roar of anger before the captain, and the soldier levelled his pistol at the back of its horned head. Before he could squeeze the trigger, the beast was up and moving, and one of its immense clawed hands closed around the captain’s arm. The pistol boomed, but its aim had been skewed, and the bullet glanced off the beast’s skull.

  The captain screamed in pain and fell to his knees as the bones in his arm were shattered, and the beast loomed over him, its visage twisted in fury. Blood dripped from its wounds, bubbling and hissing as it struck the snow.

  Opening its mouth impossibly wide, it lunged down, its jaws clamping around either side of the captain’s head.

  His eyes wide with terror, Pollo staggered backwards. His movements attracted the attention of the beast, and it swung its burning gaze towards him, the captain’s head still locked in its jaws. It clamped its mouth shut, and the soldier’s head cracked like a nut in vice.

  It dropped its lifeless prey to the ground and leapt towards Pollo, closing the distance with shocking swiftness, bounding towards him on all fours like an ape. Turning, Pollo ran.

  The engines of the Aquila lander were roaring, and for a moment he thought he would make it. He saw Leto at the top of the ramp, frantically urging him on with beckoning waves of his hands, and he scrambled up the ramp into the shuttle.

  A stink akin to rotting meat and the acrid stench of electricity reached his nostrils, and a hand close around the back of his head. With a jerk, he was hurled backwards, skidding down the ramp to fall in a crumpled heap at its base.

  One of his arms was broken, and he cried out as splinters of bone grated against each other. He saw Leto at the top of the ramp quaking before the immense daemon just before the adjutant was ripped in two by the beast.

  Pollo tried to rise to his feet, the muscles and tendons of his back protesting, but he fell in a crumpled heap once more in the blood-splattered snow.

  The daemon turned back towards him and stalked down the ramp, and Pollo scrambled back away from the monster, the heels of his boots slipping in the ice and snow.

  Burias-Drak’shal felt the terror of the Imperial official wash over him like an intoxicating wave, and he relished the sensation. He wanted to kill the man, slowly and excruciatingly, but the rational side of his mind knew that such a thing would anger Marduk, for his order had been clear.

  He grinned as the man scrambled back away from him, a pathetic and futile attempt to escape. With sheer force of will, he pushed Drak’shal back, and his features were once again his own, pristine and unmarred, the bullet wound on his cheek already healed. Blood caked his mouth and chin, and he smiled at the man as he stepped towards him.

  The engines of the shuttle roared behind him and the ramp began to close, and Burias swung his head around, Drak’shal instantly rearing within him once more.

  ‘Let none escape,’ Marduk had ordered.

  Burias-Drak’shal turned and leapt onto the shuttle, his talons biting deep into the reinforced hull. He hauled himself hand over hand onto its top, and bounded across its fuselage until he was positioned above the cockpit.

  The shuttle began to lift just as the pilot registered the shadow looming above him, and Burias-Drak’shal punched his fist through the glass, grabbing the man around his throat. With one swift motion he ripped the man’s throat away.

  The shuttle tilted suddenly to the side, its landing gear scraping against rock as the dying pilot fell across the controls. Burias-Drak’shal bounded across the top of the shuttle as it slid over the edge of the landing pad, its engines sending it
into a death spin.

  He hurled himself across the growing gap and landed in a crouch as the shuttle slammed into the body of the aquila eagle-structure thirty metres below, and erupted into a ball of fire.

  He shook his head as he saw the wounded Imperial commander frantically punching a code into the reinforced door that led back into the building, and bounded after the man.

  The commander was slamming the door when Burias-Drak’shal reached it, and he smashed it open with the palm of his hand.

  The man, all hope of escape lost, collapsed on the floor of the office, staring up fearfully at him.

  ‘Emperor curse you,’ breathed the terrified man.

  ‘Too late for that,’ remarked Burias, slamming the door closed behind him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Like a slowly rolling fortress of steel, the ice crawler moved across the ice flow, unaffected by the gale force winds ripping across the desolate landscape. Temperature gauges read that it was minus forty standard, though with wind chill it was closer to minus seventy. Banks of spotlights lit up the ice directly in front of the colossal vehicle. Fog rose from the moon’s surface and the wind sent eddies of snow and ice particles ripping across the flows, rendering visibility almost non-existent.

  The crawler was immense, over fifty metres long and almost twenty metres high. Its wedge-shaped hull sat upon eight sets of tracks, each more than five metres wide and powered by massive engines.

  High up within the control booth of the crawler, Foreman Primaris Solon Marcabus reclined on his well-worn padded seat, his heavy boots up on the dash. He sucked in a long drag on his lho stick and closed his eyes.

  ‘I’ve decided I don’t much like people,’ Cholos said, from the steering rig. ‘Too much damn trouble. I’ll take transporting ore yields over people any day.’

  Solon grunted in response, exhaling a cloud of smoke. The expansive cargo holds below were filled to the brim with desperate evacuees. Perdus Skylla was being abandoned in the face of imminent xenos invasion, and it had fallen to the crews of the ice crawlers to aid in the evacuation. In return, they would receive double pay for this run. Small comfort, thought Solon, if they didn’t manage to secure a berth off-world.